Song of Songs 2:16-17 & 8:11-14
There’s a theory about the nature of the universe that says you can explain everything as a series of processes and relationships. While on the surface everything looks separate and individual, dig a bit deeper and you’ll discover it’s all like a vast web of intertwined strings. Relationships are the core of our reality, according to this view of things anyway. That’s one of the reasons why I think the Song of Songs is helpful when exploring the issues of climate change and our environmental crisis. When you get to the root of this problem you’ll find relationships in various states and conditions. This whole Song is about relationships: between two people who have fallen deeply in love, between them and their family and friends, between them and the society around them, between them and nature around them. It is all about relationships. And the more you read and learn about climate change, the more you realise that fundamentally it is a problem caused by a bad relationship, an abusive relationship, you might say, between human beings and the natural world. The Song of Songs offers us a healthy alternative, a better way of being in relationship. So far we’ve discovered that we need to love each separate thing in our world, because you can’t easily destroy that which you love. Then we discovered last week that if we can see the beauty of our world, we will protect it and nurture it and discover that beauty will save the world. Today, I’d like us to consider the theme of justice. Is our relationship with God’s creation a just one, or might we find ourselves up on charges for abuse?
In the Song of Songs, the central role belongs to the woman. She often speaks first, she initiates much of the action, she is praised for her beauty and wisdom: she is what we might call a strong independent woman. She is not afraid of her sexuality and her physical desires. A remarkable woman. And an interesting thing happens in the Song: the woman and the landscape tend to blend into one character. She is spoken of as a garden watered by fountains and streams, linking her to the Garden of Eden and to the original mother Eve. And in our reading this morning, she taunts the great King Solomon: he has thousands of vineyards but he’ll never have hers; she’s not all that attracted to the great Solomon! The woman and the land are not separate: she is of the world, connected. So how the man treats the woman in this Song is an image of a healthy relationship with the natural world. The man behaves in a praiseworthy manner: he respects her dignity, he honours her boundaries, he lavishes his love on her, he works hard to win her favour, and he does not seek to dominate her. That is a just relationship, justice in action you might call it. But how about humanity generally? How are we at such things? Look at the statistics of our own culture and ask the question: what experience do women have of men’s attention? And soon you’ll see that it isn’t like the Song of Songs for many women. The opposite is true: degrading comments, unwelcome advances, threats and acts of violence, disrespecting of choice, ignoring of boundaries, and so on. Injustice towards women in our culture is a deep problem we have yet to come to terms with. So too with how we treat our beautiful world. We abuse its resources. We take without thinking of the consequence. Not unlike how we treat people, is it? Injustice in our human relationships is not separate from injustice in our relationship with the natural world. The Song puts on display a better way of being: love other humans in holy and just ways, and love God’s world in holy and just ways. A challenge for us all, I think.
One of the great sources of injustice, in my opinion, is the ownership of land. Drop a pin in a history textbook and sooner or later you’ll come across one group of humans making a claim on a piece of land that used to be the home of another. Standing on British soil, we have a lot to answer for in this context. My ancestors thought that they could plant a Union Jack on a piece of land and claim that they own it. And worse still, they treated precious human beings in the same way, taking them by force and enslaving them. That story is repeated throughout history, humans thinking they have the right to own land at the exclusion of all others. I always remember hearing, as a child, the lines from the Disney movie ‘Pocahontas’ in a song called ‘Colours of the Wind’: You think you own whatever land you land on, The Earth is just a dead thing you can claim, But I know every rock and tree and creature, Has a life, has a spirit, has a name. To say a human can own land is a lie we have believed for centuries, a lie that often allows great injustices to go without punishment or rebuke. The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it, reminds the Psalmist. But the woman in the Song of Songs isn’t afraid to offer her critique. We’ve already heard that King Solomon isn’t welcome in her vineyard because he has thousands of other options to browse through. Our noble women didn’t want to be another notch on his bed post. But maybe her critique is also more down to earth and less metaphorical. Maybe she rejected the idea of any person holding so much land for their own enrichment. Maybe she is an early justice warrior. When we begin to think we can own a person, or when we think we can own land, we are sliding down a slippery slope of injustice. And we’ve seen where that takes us as human beings. It leads us to extract minerals from the earth without thought of the consequence. It leads us to remove resources from one people group and take them away to our already rich nations. And this should make us ask all sorts of hard questions of ourselves, questions about our technology and where it comes from, our clothes and how much we paid for them, our food and the distance it travelled to get to us, and so on. Justice is uncomfortable when it poses questions, but it is insistent, just like the woman in our Song.
One of the most beautiful sayings in the Song of Songs is this one: My beloved is mine and I am his. This speaks of an intimate relationship where the couple belong to each other, like a wonderful circle that has no beginning and no end. Let me introduce you to Martin Buber.
Buber was a German existentialist philosopher, theologian and Jewish mystic. One of his most famous books is titled ‘I and Thou. In the book, he says that so often we have relationships that are ‘I-It’. So, for example, ‘I love my mobile phone’. I love oranges. I love my cleaner. The I-It relationship is when we turn the other person or thing into an object with no value other than what it gives us. We see it in some romantic relationships, when one person is interested in another because they find them attractive or because they have lots of money. Once they have exploited that person and got what they want, they move on. There is no true connection, no actual love. But there is a better way. It is what Buber called the I-Thou relationship. I-Thou means that every person we meet is treated with the dignity of being a complete person in their own right, lovable and worthy of respect and honour regardless of what they can do for me. You’ll see how this relates to the Song of Songs. The two lovers show us a wonderful I-Thou relationship. They love each other as they are; they respect each other’s boundaries; they honour the beauty of the other without seeking to devour it or make it their own. My beloved is mine, but I am also theirs. A circle of love where no one owns the other, no one seeks to turn the other into a way of simply getting what they want. A just I and Thou, just being the important word there as in ‘justice.’ That’s a lovely image for human relationships, isn’t it? So why can’t we do that with God’s creation too? Why do we still think of the world around us as an ‘it’ to be used for our benefit? Do we ask animals if they are happy to be factory farmed on a massive scale and then eaten? Do we stop to consider the creatures who live in the land we want to dig up for oil? Do we grieve the loss of life we cause because we want to fly abroad in our airplanes? Do we ponder the consequences of man-made droughts on the poorest people of the earth? Maybe we need to discover a just I-Thou relationship with God’s creation. We can do better, and it starts with each of us in our individual relationships with humans and with the natural world.
I truly believe that if we hope to change our ways as human beings, we need more than just guilt-inducing statistics or miracle technologies. To restore and nurture this beautiful world God has created, we will need to learn better ways of being in relationship: with each other and with our natural world. And a core part of that good relationship is justice. The Song of Songs shows us the way. And we’ll need one more thing too: you! So I’d like to leave you with a question to ponder that leads to other questions: how ‘just’ is your relationship with God’s creation? Are there things you need to change: the places you invest your money, the kinds of products you buy, the way you take care of your rubbish, the kinds of foods you eat, and so on? Can you use your voice to make a difference? Can you help our church here to achieve our eco-goals? What can you and I do to be in a good and just relationship with God’s creation? This week may we all discover the call to justice ringing in our ears. May it unsettle us but also empower us to fight for change. May all our relationships, human and otherwise, be I and Thou relationships, generous and loving and life-giving. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
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