The Song of Songs is a series of poems between lovers, expressing their desire for one another and their commitment to be together when others want to keep them apart. There are male and female voices in the poems. What is remarkable about this poetry which comes from an ancient patriarchal context is that the female voice speaks more often than the male voice. The female is presented as the ‘owner’ of her sexuality—not her family or her society. Listen to what she says when her brothers try to discount her sexuality and wall her off from her lover: “We have a little sister, and she has no breasts. What shall we do for our sister on the day when is spoken for? If she is a wall, we will build upon her a battlement of silver; but if she is a door, we will enclose her with boards of cedar.”

This is how she responds: “I was a wall, and my breasts were like towers; then I was in his eyes as one who brings peace.”

As best as we can tell the lovers are being kept apart by family and society because they come from ‘different sides of the tracks.’ There is an indication that they may have been from a different race or ethnicity, or possibly from different socio economic statuses. Listen to what the woman says in chapter one: “I am black and beautiful, O daughters of Jerusalem, like the tents of Kedar, like the curtains of Solomon. Do not gaze at me because I am dark, because the sun has gazed on me. My mother’s sons were angry with me; they made me keeper of the vineyards, but my own vineyard I have not kept!”

These poems celebrate the passion, playfulness, and determination of lovers to be together regardless of race or class or family. There is no mention of marriage or procreation in the book—their sexuality is celebrated simply for what it is. While this book describes longing and desire between male and female lovers, it is book that has spoken powerfully to LGBT people precisely because it affirms the goodness of human sexuality outside of the confines of marriage and procreation. It is a sacred text for us because it celebrates ‘socially transgressive love.’

Christopher King wrote a wonderful essay on the Song of Songs in my book Take Back the Word. This is what he has to say about its power as scripture for LGBT people: “The Song of Songs sets this eros (love) as our ideal—a passionate love that prefers the outsider, that is entranced by sexual difference, that answers the call of beauty without vacillation and that honors the authority of its own strength. Knowing this, queer folk have every reason to take up the Song of Songs with confidence that it affirms our own ways of loving, desiring and bonding sexually with others.”

If the church ever needed to embrace a sacred text with regard to its attitudes about human sexuality, it needs to embrace the Song of Songs—The Most Sublime Song. We are afraid to talk about sex and sexuality in our private lives as Christians, much less in church. We get squeamish, giggly, or indignant when sex and God are mentioned in the same sentence. And it is precisely this kind of ‘ostrich in the sand’ approach that has allowed the Religious Right and fundamentalist to perpetuate stereo types about LGBT people, women and people of color. They say we are ‘over-sexed,’ ‘we want their children,’ ‘we are incapable of controlling our sexual urges--which they think are somehow different from their own.’

Like the brothers in the Song of Songs, they want to control, wall off, enclose everybody’s sexuality because they are afraid of their own. In the words of the Song they want human sexuality to be a “garden locked, a fountain sealed” (4:12), but we say with the woman in the Song, “Awake, O north wind, and come, O south wind! Blow upon my garden that its fragrance may be wafted abroad.” (4:16)

In the debates about what the Bible does or does not say about homosexuality it is often pointed out that Jesus never said anything about homosexuality. That is true. What Jesus was about for his whole life and ministry was to free people from living their lives based on a set of rules and codes that were created to keep people separated, to keep people in their place. There were elaborate purity codes in Jesus’ day that legislated who you could and could not have in your home or have to dinner. These codes excluded people based on their profession, or their physical ability, or sexuality, by calling them unclean. The whole society was separated into ‘clean’ and ‘unclean’ based on these exclusionary codes.

The bulk of Jesus’ ministry was to teach by his words and actions another way of creating community and relating to God. Instead of purity codes determining a person’s worth as a human being, a spiritual being, Jesus said our compassion is what must guide us as we relate to one another.

Marcus Borg, in his book Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time claims that for Jesus compassion, not holiness [or purity], is the dominant quality of God and is therefore to be the dominant quality of the community that mirrors God. Jesus spoke of purity as on the inside and not on the outside. We heard it in our gospel lesson for today: “There is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.” This was a radical statement by Jesus for his day. To say that purity is a matter of the heart, not a matter of externals—one’s race, one’s class, one’s sexual orientation or gender identity—was a direct affront to a purity system that kept everyone in their place based on externals.

Song of Songs. The Most Sublime Song. This sacred book of the Bible not only gives us language to celebrate our sexuality, it gives us language to celebrate our spirituality too. During the middle ages a monk by the name of Bernard of Clairvaux preached a series of 86 sermons on the Song of Songs in which he encouraged men and women in the monasteries to use the language of the Song to express their relationship to God—especially to describe the ecstasy of union with God they experienced in prayer. In the middle ages, at Bernard’s direction, men and women used the language of human sexuality to express their spirituality.

In MCC’s Strategic Plan that was adopted at our General Conference in Calgary we state:
As God’s liberated people, we boldly . . .

Reclaim our Holy Identity.

At MCC, we believe that even in our humanness, we are holy. We are liberated from other people’s definitions of who we are. We are made both body and spirit. We believe that our sexuality is a holy gift from God so we no longer distance our bodies from our experience with God. We are a people who proudly participate in the communion of body and spirit.

We will be leaders in the world about the union of spirituality and sexuality by articulating our message and spreading it effectively.

I have been a member of this denomination for almost 20 years and we have always claimed that there is a connection between our sexuality and our spirituality. We believe that God has called us, this denomination, Queer people (and that includes LGBT, intersexed, questioning and our allies) to take the lead on the holy integration of sexuality and spirituality.
Integrating one’s sexuality and one’s spirituality means that there has been a split between the two over the course of Christian history. That somehow the body and human sexuality are ‘bad’ ‘worldly’ ‘sinful’ and that only spirituality is good. That somehow our spirits are the only thing God cares about.
Nothing could be further from the truth. God took the form of human flesh. Our bodies, our humanity, and yes that includes who we are as sexual beings, are the source of God’s ongoing revelation. To integrate our sexuality and our spirituality is to heal the body spirit split and to claim with the lovers of the Song of Songs that indeed this union, this healing is The Most Sublime Song we could ever sing.

Peace,
Mona