L. William Countryman Good Shepherd Berkeley

15th SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST (Proper 17)

September 1, 2024

Proper 16: Song of Solomon 2:8-13; Psalm 45:1-2, 7-10; James 1:17-27; Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

Arise, my love, my fair one, 

and come away;

for now the winter is past, 

the rain is over and gone.

The flowers appear on the earth;

the time of singing has come,

and the voice of the turtledove 

is heard in our land.

Well, actually that was all a few months ago. The turtledoves in our backyard haven’t been cooing much lately. But that’s okay. It’s always a good time to return to spring in our imaginations. It takes us back to the most basic of human joys: new life, love, the beauty of the world around us. . . 

The Song of Solomon, in fact, is so sensual that more than one grave and serious person has questioned what it’s doing in the Bible at all. And the answer is: It gives us a key–maybe the best of all keys–to understanding our relationship with God. It may not be the most obvious key. Probably, like our neighbors, we’re apt to think of religion largely in terms of rites, doctrines, and rules. But the Song of Solomon tells us that those are just the skeleton of faith, not its heart, its vital organs. At the heart of Christian faith is a God who loves beauty and the created world and all its inhabitants—even, strangely enough, us, despite all our waywardness and uncertainties and (to be honest) unworthiness. The story is about love, really—about God’s love, which, like all love, is always hoping, sooner or later, for some love in response. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away. . . ” (Or, more loosely translated: “Let’s just go be by ourselves for a while.”)

But the generosity of God’s love is so broad and inclusive that God doesn’t ask us to love God alone—but to love other people as well. That’s that’s what we heard from the Letter of James this morning: “Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights.” We don’t have to invent love or force ourselves to love. We have a gift for it. God has built it into our humanity. James writes, “In fulfillment of his own purpose, [God] gave us birth by the word of truth, so that we would become a kind of first fruits of his creatures.” We were created from the start for the sake of love—God’s love for us and our love for one another, which shares in God’s own love.

James is telling us that what we truly believe becomes clear in the way we treat one another, within the church and beyond it. James wants us to think about how we can all grow in love so that our lives reflect the divine love that called us together in the first place. “True religion and undefiled” is a matter of reaching out and welcoming others. It’s how the springtime of our love affair with God shows itself in our ongoing lives.

And, in our reading from Mark’s Gospel this morning, we found Jesus insisting on the same point. The Pharisees and scribes were recognized as the really serious religious people of Jesus’ day. And they’ve noticed that Jesus isn’t really very concerned about religious details—for example, whether his disciples wash their hands before eating. I’m guessing that Jesus himself did wash his hands, since they don’t criticize his own practice. But they’re surprised that Jesus doesn’t seem to care whether his followers are meticulous about the details of religious practice. 

What Jesus does cares about is that they are learning to practice love of their neighbor. The evil that we should fear and avoid is not the violation of rules, but a failure to grasp what is really central—love of God and neighbor. Jesus says, “It is what comes out of a person that defiles.” Such things as “theft, murder, envy, slander, pride, folly.” These things separate us from the people around us and from the God who loves us all alike. And the only antidote for them is the love of God, for ever searching us out, calling to us, inviting us into a life of love—with God and with one another.

Loving one another can be a tall order, of course. Neighbors aren’t always particularly lovable. So what is God really asking of us? I don’t think God is just asking us to be ‘nice’ and to pretend that everyone else is ‘nice,’ too. But I do think God is asking us to keep some open space for one another in our lives and in our relationship with God. We can learn to think of all sorts of people as being more like us than different. We can slow down when we pass judgement. We can understand that, at the deepest level, we are more like one another than we often allow ourselves to imagine. 

The point is not to pretend that every one is exactly the same. That would be stupid, in fact. But we are all in the same spot—learning to live with each other—however well or ill we are dealing with it. If we can begin to practice, with one another, some of the love that God in Christ has extended to us, we may find that there is hope for us all.