Thursday, April 16,
2020
My lover said to me, “Rise up, my darling! Come away with me, my fair one! Look, the winter is past, and the rains are over and gone. The flowers are springing up, the season of singing birds has come, and the cooing of turtledoves fills the air. The fig trees are forming young fruit, and the fragrant grapevines are blossoming.
The Young Man
Rise up, my darling! Come away with me, my fair one!” My dove is hiding behind the rocks, behind an outcrop on the cliff. Let me see your face; let me hear your voice. For your voice is pleasant, and your face is lovely.
Young Women of Jerusalem
Catch all the foxes, those little foxes, before they ruin the vineyard of love, for the grapevines are blossoming! Song of Solomon 2:10-15
There
are a lot of interpretations for The Song. There is relatively modern thought that it is
just straightforward poetry about love.
Solomon was not only wise he was a brilliant composer of artistic
bent. Some see the Shulamite version
where Solomon is so captured by the princess of Ethiopia, he attempts to win
her heart by whisking her away to Jerusalem, and dazzling her with his
accomplishments, but she is in love with another. And there is also the metaphor for God as the
Bridegroom, with Israel as His bride. Of
course many New Testament era scholars also accept this for the church as the
Bride of Christ. I’m not taking issue
with any of this thinking.
This
morning I’m seeing in Solomon’s verse the hidden bride, the
church behind the rocks, with her lovelier side of beauty nearly altogether
unseen by the rest of the world. In
recent years the gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach is growing because
the bride, Christ’s church, looks bedraggled and haggard with all her knock-down,
drag-out brawling over doctrines, and who is fit to do whatever. The little foxes of selfishness and hedonism
are taking bites out of the bride and knocking a good bit of luster off the
wedding pictures.
I’ve
never been a wedding planner, or coordinator, but I’ve been close enough to
weddings for a long time to know there’s a lot of holding-it-together
that happens on the big day. There are
wardrobe failures, missing people and forgotten essentials to be found. And if you throw-in melt downs from flower
girls, or a ring-bearing 4-year-old boy who would rather be doing anything than
wearing shiny shoes that hurt and a tuxedo (whatever that might be)…it’s a
wonder you ever get to the I do’s.
Drama
is a very real part of life; I think we all know
that. But the church is not a place for
the kind of drama with which we’ve all become familiar – that kind of drama,
caused by selfish control issues, rigid religiosity, and tradition-bound
gate-keepers who couldn’t recognize a new wineskin if it jumped out from their
musty closet and screamed, use me before it’s too late, or that new wine will
spill all over your carpeted faith.
The Bride has been fighting again is
how Chuck Swindoll so picturesquely characterized the lack of love we see in a
bride, the church, which fails in her lover’s request to Rise up, my
darling, come away with me…. Instead,
the bride now hears (and fears) the same voice heard so long ago in that
beautiful garden, when forbidden fruit was sweeter than obedience: Where are you, my darling? What have you done?
For You Today
The
response of one who is loved is, rightly, to love. And so, it is not up for debate what the
church needs to do as the object of God’s love.
What the church needs to do is rise up like the “darling”
she was created to be and bring that beautiful face of loving service out from
behind the rocks.
You
chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!
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