000 Allen FMT (i-xxii) - The Presbyterian Leader

180 Proper 17 [22]/Year B
The incident in today’s text takes place in the spring, a season that listeners
associate with fertility. The woman is dark skinned (Song 1:5) and
is apparently at her house. Her beloved comes to her with such intense
desire that he leaps over mountains like a gazelle or a young stag—powerful,
swift, agile animals. Outside her window he invites her into an intensification
of experience by calling to her (2:8–10a).
The invitation uses evocative imagery that suggests generativity,
growth, and security. The dormancy of winter is past. The rainy season is
over—a season providing the water resources necessary for growth in a
semiarid land but complicating transportation and sometimes creating
danger (e.g., flash flooding). Singing is associated with sweet moments in
life (though the same word in Hebrew, zamir, could be rendered “pruning”
and thus could suggest that these moments are preparing for intimacy
in the same way that pruning prepares plants for greater foliation).
The turtledove appears in spring and, in ancient literature, sometimes
represents endearment. The blooming of the fig tree and the vineyards
reinforces an atmosphere of fruitfulness (2:10b–13). The associations
evoked by this text suggest dimensions of the tone and meaning of the sexual
experience.
People encounter sexuality in North America today in multiple ways:
as a commodity for sale or voyeurism, a dirty little secret, nothing more
than hormones, raw physicality, explosive, the content of fantasies, a
means to conceive, an occasion for tension; as perversion, addiction,
temptation; as part of controversy regarding exercise of free speech; as
source of frustration, disappointment, occasion for the practice of premarital
purity, source of confusion with respect to one’s own identity (e.g.,
gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, asexual, and questioning); as well as
source of confusion regarding how to respond to others whose sexuality
is different from one’s own. The appearance of the Song of Songs in the
lectionary gives the preacher an excellent entrée into a sermon that helps
the congregation think theologically about such matters.
The New Testament does not refer explicitly to the Song of Songs.
Deuteronomy 4:1–2, 6–9* (Paired)
Many scholars think that an early version of Deuteronomy was part of
Josiah’s reform in the sixth century BCE (2 Kings 22:1–23:27; 2 Chr.
34:1–35:37) but that the Deuteronomic tradition was later redacted to
account for the exile and times afterward (e.g., Deut. 4:26–29; 28:49–57,