What is Your Favorite Love Song?
Good Morning Friends,
I can hear the catchy background music going through my head now… Sooner or later love is gonna get you. Sooner or later love is gonna win... certainly this is a sign that it will not be long before we are caught up in the commercialism of Valentine’s Day. It is an unintended consequence of the day that has been set aside to honor the patron saint of lovers…the martyr who chose to marry couples in Christian ceremonies defying the orders of Emperor Claudius. Before St. Valentine pagans were picking names at random to match couples. That process has changed somewhat but at the cost of St. Valentine losing his head. I would imagine that St. Valentine would be surprised as to how the customs have changed and in some ways how they have remained the same.
Claudius might also be surprised how his efforts to have a big army by curtailing marriages eventually turned out. So today we look at the nature of love and particularly how we sing about it. What is Your Favorite Love Song?
Scripture: By day the Lord commands his steadfast love, and at night his song is with me, a prayer to the God of my life.
Psalm 42:8 (NRSV)
How beautiful you are, my love, how very beautiful! Your eyes are doves behind your veil. Your hair is like a flock of goats, moving down the slopes of Gilead. Your teeth are like a flock of shorn ewes that have come up from the washing, all of which bear twins, and not one among them is bereaved. Your lips are like a crimson thread, and your mouth is lovely. Your cheeks are like halves of a pomegranate behind your veil. Your neck is like the tower of David, built in courses; on it hang a thousand bucklers, all of them shields of warriors. Your two breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle, that feed among the lilies. Until the day breathes and the shadows flee, I will hasten to the mountain of myrrh and the hill of frankincense. You are altogether beautiful, my love; there is no flaw in you. Come with me from Lebanon, my bride; come with me from Lebanon. Depart from the peak of Amana, from the peak of Senir and Hermon, from the dens of lions, from the mountains of leopards.
Song of Solomon 4:1-8 (NRSV)
You must understand this, that in the last days distressing times will come. For people will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, inhuman, implacable, slanderers, profligates, brutes, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, holding to the outward form of godliness but denying its power. Avoid them! For among them are those who make their way into households and captivate silly women, overwhelmed by their sins and swayed by all kinds of desires, who are always being instructed and can never arrive at a knowledge of the truth.
2 Timothy 3:1-7 (NRSV)
And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.
1 Corinthians 13:13 (NRSV)
Message: I am dating myself but I grew up on some great love songs. Roberta Flack’s First Time Ever I Saw Your Face and Al Green’s Let’s Stay Together. What hits a lyrical nerve with you? Is it Percy Sledge’s, When A Man Loves A Woman, or maybe You Are The Sunshine Of My Life by Stevie Wonder. Maybe it is My Girl by the Temptations. Ever since I first heard it, I liked Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s Ain’t No Mountain High Enough. But then some songs point to the problem of narcissism and the inability of people to love. Songs like Carly Simon’s You’re So Vain point to this growing epidemic of people loving to listen to themselves and never to others…so sure of their point of view that it is the only one they ever see. The Bible has its love songs too. The greatest would be the Song of Songs. You don’t hear too many messages on the Song of Solomon, and most people don’t know what to make of this earthy, poetic book. To add to the confusion it goes by three names: you’ll see it as Song of Solomon, Song of Songs and Canticles. Some find it embarrassing, and wonder how it ever got included in our Bible. Yet it is there because physical love is a great and Godly thing that can be spiritual. Unfortunately theologians have flattened the Song of Songs into an allegory describing God and Israel or Christ and the church–treating the romantic text as some elaborate code. The Bible treats intimacy as a normal, positive, spiritual and vital part of life. Like all gifts from God, physical love can be enjoyed or abused…it can be an act of forced will or a submission of one’s own will to the Lord’s. It can be celebrated in marriage or misused. Song of Songs shows us how mature, enduring love is expressed. The context of Song of Songs is marriage as a sacrament. The author describes love in ways we describe salvation. So married love is a covenantal relationship that follows the pattern of divine love–meaning that love is a foretaste of Heaven. Not much room for narcissism here…And that is something to sing about.
Pray we realize that the Song of Songs is a sacred story of a love redeemed, a love that seeks the restoration of the image of God in us. Pray we have the courage to make lasting choices. Pray that our marriages are built on the rock of love and not the shifting sands of fleeting emotions. Pray we celebrate the idea of Christian love. Pray we appreciate the art of living with others. Pray we learn self-discipline, self-denial as we learn to love others. Pray we never lose the capacity to love others. Pray we realize that narcissism is not just a social disease but a spiritual one as well. Pray we realize that no nation has ever survived the established, successful and affluent rule of narcissism. Pray we realize that the only remedy is to love God and others.
Blessings,
John Lawson
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