The Myth of Christian Obligations

 Let me start with a short list of our privileges before dealing with obligations. Some of the privileges are:

·        We are adopted by God into his family

·        We are given God's favor without having to earn it.

·        The Holy Spirit is always with us and mediates us to God.

·        We are freed from sin and fear of death and so can move onto perfection in this life.

·        We receive the renewing and sustaining grace of God through the sacraments of baptism and Holy Communion

·        We enjoy the fellowship of other Christians for the sustainment and improvement of our moral character and ability to do godly works.

There are many more. There is an old saying that that with great privileges come great responsibilities. The saying has been variously attributed to Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and others. But in fact, it was Voltaire who first wrote it, and the exact quote is a little different: “With great power comes great responsibility.” Maybe Jesus should get the credit, though, for he said in Luke 12.48, “To those whom much is given, much is required.”

With this in mind, are we who follow Christ encumbered by certain obligations? That is, once we have confessed Christ as risen Lord of our lives, are there certain requirements we must carry out if we are to be counted as Jesus’ disciples and granted eternal company with God and other saints? 

I submit that the answer is both yes and no. So bear with me and let me confuse the issue as only a seminary graduate can.

That there are such things as commandments of Christ is explicitly stated by Paul in Galatians 6.2: “Bear one another’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.” As a former Pharisee, Paul did not use the word “law” lightly. He meant it was a requirement. Jesus himself spoke of a new covenant and new commandments. The longest description of judgment day in the New Testament is given in Matthew 25, where Jesus explains that the ones who thought themselves Christ-followers are rejected because,

“… I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, 43 I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.”

So, we can’t much deny that authority and a commanding voice that we should not ignore undergird a disciple’s life. And then we come to Luke 17.7-10, in which Jesus is teaching his disciples:    

7“Who among you would say to your slave who has just come in from plowing or tending sheep in the field, ‘Come here at once and take your place at the table’? 8 Would you not rather say to him, ‘Prepare supper for me, put on your apron and serve me while I eat and drink; later you may eat and drink’? 9 Do you thank the slave for doing what was commanded? 10 So you also, when you have done all that you were ordered to do, say, ‘We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done!’ ”

 This passage does not present “Jesus meek and mild.” This is a pretty tough Jesus speaking. This is not a Lord who would say, “I’m okay, you’re okay, can’t we all just get along?” He is speaking to his disciples and his words are direct. Does Jesus really consider us no better than his worthless slaves?

In fact, we should take Jesus’ words as great assurance, not threat. Here’s why.

Jesus risks comparing God to a taskmaster to drive home some basic truths about our relationship with God. We tend to think that if we behave a certain way, live a good, Christian life, that we deserve some reward from God. But that’s not true. There are benefits to living the Christian life, but they are not rewards. We have no right to expect rewards. To do so rejects grace as the basis of Christian living and replaces it with a bartering relationship. But grace is freely given and cannot be earned. We can’t earn “more grace” by living rightly.

We do not live together righteously as God requires. The disciples begged Jesus for more faith because they realized they couldn’t meet even the basic requirements from their own strength or merit. What Jesus points out is that kingdom living is God’s gift through faith but is also an act of the will by Christian disciples. God has already given us the faith we need. Jesus lays out the basic commands of the kingdom: don’t lead others astray; rebuke, repent, forgive, love God and neighbor. Living together as God commands rests on these things. And when we have done that, Jesus says, we have merely done the bare minimum, so don’t get all puffed up about it and expect God will reward us specially. After all, as Paul explains, we should understand that if we think we are meeting the standard of saving ourselves through what we do, then we don’t understand how high the standard really is. It is too high for human beings to meet.

Therefore, to imagine ourselves as slaves to Christ, as repugnant as that metaphor is, really is good news. We are not in a market economy with God. We don’t have to barter with God for grace. We cannot earn God’s grace. Grace is not a bonus check. God’s grace is always before us. It is through grace we are called to be God’s family, it is through grace we can be God’s family, and it is through grace that we will move on to Christian perfection together.

But it gets better, for Jesus did not think we were his slaves in the first place. He used that illustration, I think, to make us understand how spiritually empty our relationship with God would be if we were mere task performers, burdened with strict requirements of obedience. Elsewhere, Jesus states plainly he does not think of you and me as slaves, but as friends. Here is what Jesus told his disciples in John 15, shortly before he was crucified:

15 I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. … 17 I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.

What then shall we make of what Paul called the law of Christ? I would like to suggest that we should think of Christ’s commandments as liberating opportunities rather than mere commands. We should understand missions, ministries and services in Christ’s name as the means of freedom far greater than mere obligations.

The great myth or misconception about Christian obligations is that they are obligations. Jesus is not recruiting puppets, he seeks soul mates. We do not have a contract with God, we have a covenant sealed with his Son’s own blood. With that great privilege comes not great obligations, but the ability to live liberated from all that separates us from what God created us to be. As Paul wrote to the Galatians, “For freedom Christ has set us free.” We are liberated from the dictatorship of a personal autonomy unshaped by godliness or divine virtue. In contrast, wrote John Wesley, we are made alive as people who are washed and sanctified, “as well as justified, in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.’ [1]

You are really changed [Wesley wrote]; you are not only accounted as righteous but actually made righteous. The inward power of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made you really, actually free from the power of sin and death. This is liberty, true gospel liberty, experienced by every believer: Not freedom from the law of God, or the works of God, but from the law of sin and the works of the devil. See that you stand fast in this real, not imaginary liberty, wherewith Christ has made you free. And take heed not to be entangled again in the yoke of that vile bondage to sin, from which you are now clean escaped.

For freedom Christ has set us free: free to love, free to live in joy and peace and patience. Free to be generous in all we have, free to be gentle with even those who offend us, free to control ourselves to live in ways to please God.

We enjoy privileges of receiving and liberty of giving. Privileges of receiving are the work of the Holy Spirit. Liberties of giving are what we do in return. We have the privilege of gathering for worship, for singing, for studying the Scriptures together. We can do most of these things privately as well. Wesley called them acts of piety. In these acts the Holy Spirit is the principal actor spiritually renew and restore us.

And we also have the freedom to carry out acts of mercy, done both on our own and in cooperation with other disciples. These are what we do to bring the good news by word or deed to one another and to those whom God seeks to bring into his family.

It matters to Jesus and it should matter to us how we think of him and our relationship to him, so here is why we can be assured we are friends of Jesus serving in love rather than slaves of God obeying in fear:

   Slaves try to do as little as they can to get by. Friends look for ways to help one another.

   Slaves try to avoid the master. Friends seek one another’s company.

   Slaves wait to be told. Friends volunteer.

   Slaves want to escape. Friends want to draw closer.

   Slaves serve the master out of fear. Friends serve one another out of love.

   Love is the key.

We are free to relate to one another the same way that God relates to us: in grace and mercy and love – especially love.

God is love, and any community following God must be love, also.

4 Love is patient, love is kind [says Paul]. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. 8 Love never fails. (1 Cor 13:4-8)

I used to think it was a tossup whether the greatest privilege God gives us is to receive his love or to be empowered ourselves to love divinely. And then I realized there is no real difference because God both loves us and loves others through us.

The work that Christ does today he does with our arms. When we embrace the outcasted, the scorned and unloved, we hold them with Jesus’ arms. When we bear our neighbors’ troubles, we uplift them with Jesus’ hands. When we give food to the hungry, it is by Christ they are fed. When we welcome a stranger, we clasp his hand with the hand of Christ. When we carry clothes to the naked it is Jesus’ fingers which button their shirts. We heal the sick with Jesus’ hands and we visit the dying to embrace them to Christ’s own breast.

In Christ we accept our flaws and imperfections not because we condone them in ourselves, but because Jesus accepts us despite them. Therefore, we can boast in our shortcomings because Christ’s love is perfected through them.

There is no greater privilege, nor any greater freedom, nor any greater joy to be found in this life.

---

[1] “A Blow at the Root,” http://ucmpage.org/articles/wesley_blow_at_root.html, slightly paraphrased

We are saved by works and nothing else

 James 2:14-24

   14 What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? 15If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, 16and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill’, and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? 17So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead. 18 But someone will say, ‘You have faith and I have works.’ Show me your faith without works, and I by my works will show you my faith. 

   19 You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder. 20Do you want to be shown, you senseless person, that faith without works is barren? 21Was not our ancestor Abraham justified by works when he offered his son Isaac on the altar? 22You see that faith was active along with his works, and faith was brought to completion by the works. 23Thus the scripture was fulfilled that says, ‘Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness’, and he was called the friend of God. 24You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone.

This is one of the most vexing passages in the New Testament. Martin Luther, who insisted that salvation is by faith and nothing but, said that he wished the whole book of James could be deleted from the New Testament.

Since Luther’s day at least, different flavors of Protestants have been arguing about the relationship between faith and works. Are we saved merely because of what we confess or are deeds of Christian service also necessary?  

Nothing is truer, I think, than the claim that we are saved by works. It runs through the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. Though I try not to be hardline dogmatic, I do not see how anyone, based on Scripture, can deny not only that we are saved by works, but we are saved exclusively by works. 

I had this discussion once with an ordained Baptist minister who was, as you might imagine, somewhat resistant to the idea of salvation by works, right up until I said to him, “The question is not whether we are saved by works. The Bible argues conclusively that we are. The question is, ‘whose works?’”

I could almost see the light bulb illuminate over his head. We are saved by works, but not our own works. We are saved by the works of God in Christ Jesus, and by Christ’s works alone. 

I hope that this makes it easier to grasp what James is talking about. James is not trying to show that our faith in God and our works of Christian discipleship are two different things. James is trying to show that our faith includes works, else it is not faith at all. Faith is not something merely spoken or affirmed, it is also that which is lived and done. “Saving faith,” said John Wesley, “is not just believing beliefs. One may affirm the truth of one, twenty or a hundred different creeds and yet have no saving faith at all.” 

James quotes Genesis 15.6, “Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.” James points out that we have no idea what Abraham believed apart from what Abraham did resulting from his belief. We know that Abraham believed God because he did what God told him to do.

What we do reveals what we believe. And that is why James says that faith without works is dead faith, because faith and works are not independent entities. We can no more say that faith and works are separate than we could claim we can spend one side of a dollar bill without spending the other side.

So we are saved by the works of God in Christ Jesus. We cannot earn salvation by our own works alone because the guilt and stain of human sin is too deeply rooted in us to do that. It is true, as James says, that faith without works is dead faith, but our works that do not spring from our faith are equally lifeless. Paul argues in Galatians that doing deeds ungrounded in faith in Christ is fruitless. 

Jesus said, “Apart from me you can do nothing.” What is our faith? It is that in Christ, God was reconciling the world unto himself and that in the life, death and resurrection of Christ everything has been done that is needed to bring us into eternal company with God. We do good works in gratitude and loyalty to the One who has redeemed us, not to earn salvation but to rejoice in it. 

Christ is both redeemer and judge of the world. Matthew 25 is one of Jesus’ discourses on his judgment. There is not a word in there that anyone is justified before Christ because of membership in one denomination rather than another, or by mode of baptism, or by being able recite the Apostles Creed. 

Jesus says that the basis by which he judges us is what we do as his disciples. “For I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat,” he said, “and I was thirsty, and you gave me something to drink. For when you did it to the least of my brothers and sisters, you did it also to me.” Those are the disciples whom Jesus calls righteous, bringing them to eternal life. 

But the ones who tell him, We ignored your brothers and sisters when they were hungry or naked or sick, and so never gave them aid, Jesus calls cursed and does not permit into eternal life with him. 

And that should fill us with dread because the consequences of complacency are severe. If I may slightly paraphrase John the Baptist, it won’t do any good to tell Jesus, “But we are church members” because God can make church members out of rusty beer cans lying along the road. 

“But my heart is in the right place,” someone might protest. That is a leading way we deceive ourselves. The Bible says that our hearts are almost never in the right place but are “deceitful above all things” (Jeremiah 17.9). 

We are to live integrated lives of faith. Faith is:

• affirming the truth about God based on reason and evidence. “Blind faith” is not a biblical concept at all. Blind faith is not even faith; it is wishful thinking at best. The resurrection of Christ was a supernatural event, but none of the reasons to believe in Christ's resurrection are supernatural reasons. They just require logical thinking. 
• but faith is more than making reasonable conclusions or knowing the truth. As James says, even demons know the truth about God. 
• faith is also commitment to God based on trust in God. 
• trust in God is founded on God’s love for us in Jesus Christ, whose resurrection proves that God will keep his promises. 
• faith, then, is love before it is anything else. Faith transcends merely knowing the truth to become living the truth in love.

Divine love is vertical and horizontal. Love comes to us from God and from us to God in return. This gift from God enables us to accept the saving grace God offers. It is personal and specific for each one of us. 

Divine love is also horizontal, intended to spread through us outward to others. And so Jesus said that everything God wants is simply this: Love God and love others. Paul said it was even simpler than that, “The commandments,” he said, “are summed up in one command, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself. ... Love is the fulfillment of the Law” of God (Romans 13:9).

The vertical and the horizontal together make the cross. Jesus on the cross was God’s love for humankind come down to earth in Jesus, and also God’s love for humankind outward through Jesus to all people. 

Maybe that is what Jesus meant when he said his disciples must take up their cross and follow him. Actual crucifixion was a very real possibility for Christ-followers back then, but perhaps Jesus also meant that we are to embody the love of God coming down from God to go through us to the world. Jesus said the greatest commandment is to love God and love neighbor – reaching up to heaven and out to everyone in the world. 

So what do we do with the love of God? How do we live lives of Christian integrity? Methodist author Robert Kohler wrote, “The kind of work that God usually calls you to do is the kind of work that you need most to do and that the world most needs to have done.” If you jump out of bed every morning so eager to go to work that you skip breakfast, but your work is writing ads for casinos in Tunica, it’s safe to say that you are not living your vocation. If you are a doctor in a leper colony but are personally miserable, chances are that you are not living your vocation. 

Your vocation is not necessarily what takes the most time in your daily lives. It is what gives the rest of your life focus and meaning and may change over time. “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet” (Frederick Buechner). God calls each Christian to use his or her gifts in the world. One test of identifying your vocation is to discern whether it satisfies your hunger to be about the work of Christ in the world. But if someone doesn’t have a hunger to be about the work of Christ in the world, then their chances of discovering their vocation are slim. 

How to discern one’s vocation? John Wesley said that effective and genuine discipleship is lived according to three general rules. The Reader’s Digest version is simple:

1. Do no harm and do not sin.

2. Do positive good in the world.

3. Love and worship God.

I want to talk a little about the second rule, doing positive good. Wesley put it this way:

By doing good ... of every possible sort, and, as far as possible, to everyone.

To their bodies, by giving food to the hungry, by clothing the naked, by visiting or helping them that are sick or in prison.

To their souls, by instructing, reproving, or exhorting all; trampling underfoot the false belief that "we are not to do good unless our hearts be free to it.”

By doing good, especially to them that are of the household of faith or groaning to be. 

Let me emphasize one of Wesley’s points: It is false that we don’t need to be active in ministry unless we think our hearts are in the right place, or unless we think we are called to it or unless we feel like it. 

We don’t do ministry because our hearts are in the right place. We do ministry to put our hearts in the right place. 

We don’t do ministry because we think we are called to it but to better discern the calling God gives us.

We don’t do ministry because we feel like it but precisely because we usually don’t feel like it. 

We do ministry because Christ commands it and we have decided to follow Jesus including when we don’t know where he is leading. 

We do ministry because Jesus promised unpleasant consequences if we don’t and eternal life if we do. 

We do ministry because it is the only way to affix ourselves to what is of ultimate value and eternal significance.

We do ministry because we are profoundly thankful to Christ for redeeming us from ways of sin and death and promising to lift us to the heavenly places. 

 We do ministry because we love God and therefore, we love those whom God loves. 

We do ministry because while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. That proves God’s love for us. In the name of Jesus Christ, you are forgiven!

We do ministry because we are Christians. It is what Christians do.

The psalmist wrote,

If the LORD delights in our way, he makes our steps firm; though we stumble, we will not fall, for the LORD upholds us with his hand. (Ps. 37.23-24).

If we believe that then we will act like it.

Was Odysseus a real person? Why, of course!

 This video documentary from PBS is about a Greek amateur historian, Makis Metaxas, who claims "he found the bones of Odysseus, the hero of Homer’s epic poem, the Odyssey. But the discovery is soon embroiled in controversy, and Makis embarks on his own odyssey to convince the world he is right."

(There is only one episode; it is not a series.)

Here is the link to the PBS page for it: https://www.pbs.org/video/odysseus-returns-1fpjod/

Reforming Work - a Reflection for Labor Day

Genesis 2:15

The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.

Colossians 3:23-24

Whatever your task, put yourselves into it, as done for the Lord and not for your masters, 24 since you know that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward; you serve the Lord Christ.

Today is Labor Day, when Americans pause and reflect on the meaning of work and honor working people. Let us acknowledge that that many people who are looking for employment, perhaps within our own families. Let us keep them in our prayers and send them job leads if we find any. And those of us who are working or, in retirement, enjoying the fruits of labor past, let us be thankful for it and be willing to help others now. 

On Labor Day we acknowledge the importance of work. We spend more time working or perhaps looking for work than anything else we do. It would pay, therefore, to take a look at what Christian faith can tell us about work and its place in our lives. 

I remember when people used to utter the words, “Protestant work ethic” as a shorthand way of talking about certain habits of work that were seen as the foundation upon which America’s material prosperity was built. The Protestant work ethic was a philosophy born from the Protestant Reformation of the early 1500s. Until then the labor or ordinary people was thought to lack either divine sanction or divine opportunity. Instead, what ordinary working people did was seen as necessary but spiritually deficient. Ordinary people were thought incapable of attaining anything better than a "secondary grade of piety." The "perfect form of the Christian life" was "holy and permanently separate from the common customary life of man." devoted "to the service of God alone."  

Reformation theology turned that around. The Protestant reformers insisted that the ordinary occupations of men and women should be understood as honoring God just as well as the monastic or priestly life. One’s “calling” in life came to be understood as any honorable occupation that a person understood was willed by God for him or her, so anyone, not just clergy, could be called by God to a lifetime of Christian service in different ways.

This Protestant work ethic says we are to be honest, hardworking, reliable, sober, mindful of the future, appropriate in our relationships and successful. We add that those things enable a Christian to give glory to God.

In Ephesians 4:28, Paul said that people should work with their own hands at what is good, in order that to have something to share with one who has need. Honorable work is honest work, honestly performed. The Protestant work ethic extends past that simple rule, though. There is an object to work for Christian people: to build up the Kingdom of God for the greater benefit of all the people of God. In the final analysis, all our labor is to be for the glory of God by the way it enables us to be about the ongoing work of Christ in the world.

I think we must not separate the dignity of work from human dignity. I read recently that in Japan almost no one ever gets fired from a job. We probably might say that is because the work ethic and skill levels among Japanese workers are so strong there. But that is not the reason. The reason hardly anyone ever gets fired is because by law terminated employees must be given very substantial separation payments and benefits. But if an employee simply quits, there is no such requirement. 

So a common practice in Japan is for nonperforming workers to be assigned extremely menial, unimportant duties that, the company hopes, will so dispirit the worker that he will finally quit in despair rather than go nuts. 

If you think that can never happen here, think again. In New York City it is so difficult to fire certain kinds of city employees that the ones identified for termination wind up being reassigned to completely empty offices or even utility closets, devoid of any responsibilities at all, while continuing to collect full salary and benefits, which cost the city $22 million one year recently. 

This is not what God intended from the beginning. In the beginning, God gave Adam work to do in the Garden. This means that Adam in his vocation was a partner with God in accomplishing God's intentions for the created order. It’s true that things went sour later. Indeed, the first murder recorded in the Bible, when Cain killed his brother Abel, was in part over the way Cain perceived the nature of Abel’s work and vocation. 

Paul wrote in Colossians 3, “Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for mortals, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ.”

Paul points toward a unity in our lives that brings even our jobs under the lordship of Christ. In other words, he is describing striving for a restoration of our work to the kind that Adam enjoyed. We are not to spend our lives idly, but in divine vocation. And even though there is an earthly imperative to pay bills and hopefully enjoy life without financial worry, we also are called to remember what Jesus said: we cannot serve both God and money. 

But we can serve God by making money while remembering that no earthly treasure lasts and that Jesus also told us, “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth,” where it can be lost, corrupted or stolen. “Store up for yourselves treasures in heaven,” for God's care never ends. Where our treasure is, that’s where our hearts follow. 

Jesus is talking about more than money. He means the whole of life and what we do with our time. And that is the necessity of seeking a divine vocation because there is a difference between a job and a vocation. A job is what we do to earn a living. A vocation is what gives our lives meaning and purpose. A job is always related, usually closely, to worldly affairs. A vocation transcends the world even though it is carried out in the world.

For truly fortunate persons their job and their vocation can be united or closely related. When I was a candidate in ministry, I decided to ask a number of serving pastors what was the single most important thing about pastoral service to each of them. I asked twelve pastors independently, over a period of a few months and all twelve gave me exactly the same answer: “I know that I am doing with my life what God wants me to do with it.” 

That is precisely how I feel, too. I consider myself profoundly blessed to have my vocation and my work united into a singularity. I never awake in the morning wondering what my life is about. 

I am not saying, by the way, that I do this job well or effectively. It is to say that in my heart I know I have found that place that Methodist author Robert Robert Kohler wrote about: “There are different kinds of voices calling you to different kinds of work, and the problem is to find out which” voice is the call of God rather than the voice of self-interest, cultural values or something else. 

One’s vocation is the life-work that a man or woman is called to by God. It is always a call to ministry of some kind. One’s vocation may or may not be the way that you make your living. I have known some persons who thought their income-producing job was merely a crutch that propped up their true mission in life, their vocation. 

Kohler wrote, “The kind of work that God usually calls you to do is the kinds of work that you need most to do and that the world most needs to have done.” Your vocation is not necessarily what takes the most time in your daily lives. It is what gives the rest of your life focus and meaning. Frederick Buechner wrote, “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” God calls each Christian to use his or her gifts in the world. One test of identifying your calling is to discern whether it satisfies your hunger to be about the work of Christ in the world. If someone doesn’t have a hunger to be about the work of Christ in the world, then their chances of discovering their true vocation are slim. Yet unless persons discern their vocation, they waste their time, money and in fact their very lives.

In 1967, Martin Luther King preached on, “The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life,” in which he said, 

… we must discover what we are called to do. And once we discover it we should set out to do it with all of the strength and all of the power that we have in our systems. And after we’ve discovered what God called us to do, after we’ve discovered our life’s work, we should set out to do that work so well that the living, the dead, or the unborn couldn’t do it any better. Now this does not mean that everybody will do the so-called big, recognized things of life. Very few people will rise to the heights of genius in the arts and the sciences; very few collectively will rise to certain professions. … But we must see the dignity of all labor. 

Perhaps some of you feel that your work is a calling, enabling you to honor and serve God in ways you wouldn’t be able to do otherwise. If so, be glad! Christian faith sanctifies every honorable occupation. There isn’t any difference between the secular and the sacred, not really. Jesus was a preacher for three years but a carpenter for at least twenty. That sanctifies work. All of life is God’s, so let us strive to make sure that all we do glorifies God.

Here is Dr. King's complete sermon:

The voice of my beloved!

What do the following words have in common?

• Unforgettable
• Crazy
• Truly
• Always
• Enchanted
• Amazed

They are all the titles of love songs. Here are the lyrics to two of the biggest-hit love songs ever recorded:

When no one else can understand me,
When everything I do is wrong,
You give me hope and consolation
You give me strength to carry on.
And you're always there to lend a hand
In everything I do. (Do you recognize it yet?)
That's the wonder,
The wonder of you.

Name that artist? Elvis, of course, a 1970 hit about the blessings good spouses bring to one another. Here’s the other love song:

Oh yeah, I’ll tell you something,
I think you’ll understand.
When I’ll say that something
I want to hold your hand,
I want to hold your hand,
I want to hold your hand.
Oh please, say to me
You’ll let me be your man
And please, say to me
You’ll let me hold your hand.
Now let me hold your hand,
I want to hold your hand.

The Beatles, naturally, the name of the song being pretty obvious.

What has happened to the love song? I like rock and roll as much as anybody, but let’s face facts: love songs these days are pretty crummy: ka-thumpa, ka-thumpa, ka-thumpa; oh baby, oh baby, oh baby, love me, love me, love me, ka-thumpa, ka-thumpa, ka-thumpa.

Here’s a love song, too:

8 The voice of my beloved! Look, he comes, leaping upon the mountains, bounding over the hills. 

9 My beloved is like a gazelle or a young stag. Look, there he stands behind our wall, gazing in at the windows, looking through the lattice. 

10 My beloved speaks and says to me: “Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away; 
11 for now the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. 12 The flowers appear on the earth; the time of singing has come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land.

13 The fig tree puts forth its figs, and the vines are in blossom; they give forth fragrance. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away." 

Song of Solomon 2.8-13 

 Now, that’s a love song! The Song of Solomon, often called the Song of Songs, is an unabashed love song. There are two principal speakers. The main one is a dark-skinned woman, probably African. The other is her lover, a man apparently of Israel. At places the book is fairly explicit about the erotic passion they feel for one another. 

This is not a book of piety. It is probably more fitting for the book to be set to the blues than high-church music. Like the blues, the Song of Songs is about personal, individual struggles, the joys and sorrows of love, and the confounding chasm that exists between reality and fantasy. In both this ancient Jewish song and the American blues, the voice is first person singular voice and the subject matter is deeply, intensely personal.

Song of Songs is one of two books of the Jewish Scriptures that does not talk about God, does not even mention God. The other book is Esther. Esther’s religious significance is much more apparent than the Song. Esther refers to rituals of fasting and prayer and to the celebration of the Feast of Purim.

But the Song of Songs is patently secular. Besides not mentioning God, the book also does not mention any of Israel’s sacred traditions, no covenants, no mention of any of God’s saving acts in the history of the children of Israel. 

The only religious content of the book might be its setting of the scene, the backdrop of the narrative, which features garden settings that may call to mind the story of the Garden of Eden. But that’s a stretch. 

Song of Solomon is the only book in the Bible in which a female voice predominates. In fact, this book features the only unmediated female voice in all of Scripture. Elsewhere, women’s perspectives are filtered through presumably male narrators; Ruth, for example is about two women but is told in the third person. But in the Song of Songs, fifty six verses are directly spoken by the woman, only thirty six by her lover. The book may even have been written by a woman, even though a tradition gives credit to King Solomon. Solomon had seven hundred wives and concubines so the tradition arose that he must have been a great lover – or at least a tired one! 

The ancient Jews were often uncomfortable with this book. What can you make of Holy Scripture that begins, “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth – for your love is more delightful than wine” (v. 1.2)? The Jews did not finally decide which books were definitely Scripture until after the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans. The Song of Songs, Esther, and Ruth were the only books to be strongly debated for inclusion. They were included because they were already held to be sacred, inspired writings. 

The rabbis decided that if Song of Songs was a sacred book, it must have a sacred meaning. They concluded it was an allegory of God's love for his people, Israel. Early Christian scholars were also embarrassed by the frank sexuality of the Song and argued that it could not possibly be talking about erotic love. Some wrote that the Song was really an allegory of Christ’s love for the Church. Later, Christian consensus was that the Song concerned God's love for the Virgin Mary. Medieval monks went to extraordinary lengths to explain away the obvious sensuality of the verses. Bernard of Clairvaux recommended that monks and priests not be allowed to study the book while they were still young and prone to inflamed passions. How about that - he gave a book of the Bible an R rating!

Today, interpreters tend to see the book as an anthology of love poetry that captures the joys and sufferings of intimate relationships and of sensual love. Song of Songs tells a story familiar to any viewer of made-for-TV movies: a woman’s desire to love and be loved by a man who is strongly attracted to her but from whom she has not yet gained a definite commitment. And so her dilemma is whether to continue to love him or not. 

The drama appears to center around their passion, but in the end, it is not about sex. It is about the power and politics of human love. The lovers’ humanity, not their passion, captures our attention. We are drawn first to contemplate the fact that we all need to be loved, then the Song makes us ponder where does erotic love fit into what love is really all about, especially in a modern culture that seems to think love is nothing but sex.

So while the book is talking about exactly what it seems to be talking about, does it have a deeper layer? Do the book’s verses of passion have a sacred subtext? 

Passion has a burning intensity, whether romantic passion is involved or not. Yet while love and passion easily go together, passion itself is not love. “I love to play golf,” one might say, and play eighteen holes every day. But there is no love there, only passion, for golf cannot love back. 

Love, to be love, is capable of being returned by the other. But even love can be frightening. Love requires commitment. And love and commitment and indeed, passion, are at the center of the story of men and women serving God. 

The Bible is full of stories of people who play hide and seek with God’s calling. Their faith falters, their obedience is short lived, their worship wanes, and their commitment must be tested and reestablished again and again. The stories of Elijah withdrawing to a lonely cave, Jeremiah refusing to preach, Jonah sailing away to Tarshish, and Peter worshiping then denying Jesus are stories of men who resisted God’s total claim upon them. In the Song of Songs we see that relationships of love and passion must be nurtured, safeguarded, and cherished.

And so it is with loving God. Intimacy with God and with each other costs us our time and our energies and more. A willingness to be present, to remain, to be accountable, to see things through, to come out from hiding are necessary to nurture relationships, both with one another and with God. 

The language of love matters, too. The Song of Songs uses the language and imagery of an agricultural culture to evoke passion and desire. The lovers compare one another to graceful animals and speak of their love as partaking of sweet fruit. Comparisons to stags, gazelles, and apple trees sound strange to people who live with manicured lawns in crowded neighborhoods and who know of deer only from petting zoos. How much stranger must the Song of Songs seem to big-city folk whose apartment buildings complexes have no lawns, and who take the subway to work. 

And yet, everyone recognizes the seductiveness of the Song of Songs when they hear it. Even though much of the speech in the Song book is lost on our modern ears, we do hear it as a language of intimacy and longing. 

So do not scoff at the Jews and Christians of long ago who saw the Song as an allegory of God’s love for his people. The intensity of God’s desire for his people to love him and one another righteously is inadequately described by human language. Even the Song of Songs, evoking the most primal elements of desire and passion, is not really adequate to the task. Yet the Song is not the only Scripture to use such language of love and romance and abundance. The Jewish prophets sometimes did also. 

Speaking through Hosea, the Lord promised his people, 

19 I will betroth you to me forever; I will betroth you in righteousness and justice, in love and compassion. 20 I will betroth you in faithfulness, and you will acknowledge the LORD. 21 "In that day I will respond," declares the LORD   "I will respond to the skies, and they will respond to the earth;

23 I will plant her for myself in the land; I will show my love to the one I called 'Not my loved one.' I will say to those called 'Not my people,' 'You are my people'; and they will say, 'You are my God.'" (Hosea 2:19-22, 23)

You see, God knows of the inconstancy of the way we love and commit. He knows of our need for passionate love, so he beckons us to divine romance. For romance is full of joy, not only duty; not only passion, but compassion. Just as lovers in the rush of their first attraction to one another, the divine romance makes every day a holiday and every meal a banquet. Somewhere along the way, the love of God for us and our loving of God in return is supposed to make us feel tingly all over, at least once in a while. 

And so the voice of God is in this book, telling us in ways our hearts want to hear: 

Arise, my love, and come away. For the winter is past and the sound of the doves is heard in the land. The time of singing has come. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.