by Lee Cheek, Lay Preacher
Genesis 24: 34-38, 42-49, 58-67;
Canticle: The Song of My Beloved (Song of Solomon 2:8-13)
Listen to the music here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1L69774G10Q
Romans 7:15-25a; Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30
“Arise, My Love, my fair one, and come away. O my dove, that dwelleth in the clefts of the rock, in the covert of a steep place, let me see thy countenance. Let me hear thy voice, for sweet is thy voice and thy countenance is comely.”
You know, I just couldn’t believe it when Francie and I settled on July 3d as the date when I would preach and be commissioned as a Lay Preacher in the Diocese of Western Massachusetts. I looked at the assigned readings for this morning and thought, “Good Lord, what a dense bunch of stories!”
As I was pondering this, Francie noted that we had a choice of Psalm 45 or the canticle from the Song of Solomon. I recognized some of the words from a piece which John has sung on most of his recitals and which he sang, entirely appropriately, at our niece’s Christian marriage ceremony last summer. Without a second thought, I opted for hearing John sing it again because I thought you would enjoy it.
Little did I know how over these past three weeks the depth of beauty in Richard Hundley’s setting would open my eyes and my heart to the deep, profound message of these words.
I think Mr. Hundley captures quite perfectly the spacious, unhurried sweetness of the way Love communicates to us in the worst of our times—when we are dwelling in fear, resentment, or inadequacy. Or when we are covered over by the depth of our despair. Or when we are anxiously perched on the precipice of a too busy life.
“Arise, My Love, my fair one, and come away. O my dove, that dwelleth in the clefts of the rock, in the covert of a steep place, let me see thy countenance. Let me hear thy voice, for sweet is thy voice and thy countenance is comely.”
The actual author and dating of The Song are unknown and perhaps this is just as well because the words have been able to bear many interpretations over the centuries. Yet its soft gesture of a gently extended hand and the graceful tone of its invitation have remained the same. When the heart hears it, lives are changed. Even the world is changed as we saw last week in the foundational story of our faith.
“Abraham! Dear Abraham! Step away from what the unmerciful god of violence wants you to do. Let me see your face and hear the sweetness of your heart that does not want to kill an innocent child, your son.”
Spacious, unhurried sweetness. And Isaac, the precious son, was unbound, the blood of a ram was spilled instead, and the arc of human history began to bend away from the injustice of human sacrifice.[1]
Today’s reading from the 24th chapter of Genesis is a telescoped compression of the story of Abraham’s servant who has been sent on a journey to find a wife for the now 40 year old Isaac.
I hope you will afford yourself the delight of reading the entire chapter, because in addition to enjoying the stretched out pacing of its repetitions and the richness of its detail, you will see that it is really the trusted servant who has a bead on who the True God of Love’s next matriarch should be.
On his quest, the servant stops at a well near the city of Nahor and feverishly prays to God that he will meet a girl with an outsized sense of hospitality who will offer to draw water for him and his ten camels. Before he even stops speaking, Love has quietly responded as a very fair young girl, Rebekah, comes out of the city and approaches the well to fill her water jar.
Though the text indicates she quickly lowers her jar for him to drink and that she quickly fills the trough for the camels, the story has a spacious sense of being deliberately drawn out as the servant gazes at her in silence.
“Arise, My Lord, from your anguish, and drink from the well. I will draw also for your camels, until they have finished drinking.”
Some of the verses that have been left out of today’s excerpt are about Rebekah’s brother Laban and they tell another story. His hospitality is extended only after he sees the jewelry that the traveler has given Rebekah. Negotiations follow and by the time Rebekah leaves with the servant, the contrast between a world of extraordinary generosity and the world of envious greed is clearly drawn.
And that brings us to Paul’s dense rhetoric in today’s excerpt from his letter to the Romans. These verses are essentially about the temptations of turning a divine warning about the consequences of envy back into a system of religious violence that the warning was designed to prevent in the first place.[2]
As Francie said last week, it was important to Paul, in anticipation of his visit to the Roman Church, that they understand what he now understood about love and mercy. When reading Paul’s letters, it is helpful for us to keep in mind how he came to his new understanding of love.
Some years earlier, Paul was on the road to Damascus was breathing threats and murder to Jews who were following the Way of the rabbi who caused so much trouble by eating and drinking with sinful tax collectors and other outcasts.
That rabbi—the one who had been scapegoated and lynched by a coalition of powers in Jerusalem—became alive to Paul right there on that road to Damascus. Unhurriedly and sweetly, Love Himself invited Paul into a recognition of his own loveliness and into the world of love that Paul had tragically lost hope of ever knowing.
“Paul! Paul! my fair one, my Love. Arise, and come away with me. Come out of the dark place of your blindness and let me see your beautiful face. Let me free your lovely voice to sing the song of the Real World of Love where no one is beyond loving.”
Paul began to see and understand what Jesus had been saying all along, especially as lined out in the verses we read from today’s gospel:
“You can’t make lovers of people by punishing them when they fail to love—you just have to love and forgive them as I do. If you continue to follow the trends of the marketplace about who is good and who is bad, who to include and who to exclude, who is worth loving and who is not, you will tire yourself out and end up in the same old stagnant place of un-Love you were desperately trying to avoid.”
Sadly, we all know firsthand that the voices (which include our own!) in the vicious, snarky world of tit-for-tat, me-first, blame-the-other-guy, and violence-as-usual—these voices are exceedingly compelling, much louder, and much more convincing, than the sweet, unhurried voice of Love.
That is why it is so terribly important for us to help one another by telling stories about how Love’s voice has broken through and how lives are changed by its invitation. So I want to tell you one more story, a very recent one of how Love’s Song can be heard even when it seems impossible.
About two weeks ago I was drawn to a story and accompanying video which appeared on the front page of the New York Times website because I recognized the name of mental health expert Marsha Linehan, whose treatment for severely suicidal people is used worldwide.[3]
She was at the Institute for Living in Hartford on June 23d to address friends, family, and doctors and for the first time to tell her personal story in public.
In 1961, Dr. Linehan had been hospitalized at the Institute as an extremely disturbed and suicidal teenager. In 1963, after 26 months of agonizing treatment, she was discharged with little hope of survival. In 1967, after two more suicide attempts and another hospitalization, she found a room in a Y.M.C.A. in Chicago and often visited a chapel in the Cenacle Sisters Retreat Center nearby.
In a video interview for the Times, she describes her complete and total despair one evening as she sat outside the door to the chapel. Knowing that no one could help her, she entered the chapel and knelt down.
When she looked up at the crucifix above the altar, suddenly everything went gold. The crucifix began to shimmer gold. Then the room was shimmering gold when, she says, “I had the unbelievable experience of God Loving Me!” She jumped up and ran out. When she got to her room she said out loud, “I love Myself!”
And the minute she said that out loud, she knew she had been transformed.
Of course, after that, her life, like Paul’s or Abraham’s, was not without challenges and trials, but the trajectory had bent in another direction and she knew she would never cross the line again to being, in her own word, crazy.
Can you imagine being so loved when all the voices of the world, including your own, are saying you are undeserving, unworthy? Yet, incredibly, the stories keep coming to tell us that Love, in its unhurried sweetness never gives up on us and never fails to see what we thought was impossibly lost or corrupted.
“Arise, My Love, my fair one, and come away. O my dove, that dwelleth in the clefts of the rock, in the covert of a steep place, let me see thy countenance. Let me hear thy voice, for sweet is thy voice and thy countenance is comely.”
3 comments:
Yes. Imagine the power of acceptance rather than rejection. Lovely words. Also congratulations, Lee, on your recent ordination.
What beautiful and moving words. I'm so glad that I got to read them and that my Dad shared them with me. Lovely job and congratulations on your ordination.
Love,
Margaret Critz
Juts to clarify here Lee was commissioned as a lay preacher and not ordained. She is still a proud member of that largest and most important ministry "the laity."
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