Come Away - Song of Songs 2:8-13, Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

The youth ministry expert Mark Yaconelli tells the story of visiting a Presbyterian session to help them with their youth group. Yaconelli began by asking each member why they were part of the church. The answers were typical—family, community, faith. One man echoed the general sentiment by saying that he brought his family to church so that his kids would learn some good morals, to which Yaconelli replied, “have you considered scouting. 

I’ve always appreciated that story, because it boldly hits at one of the greatest errors of our faith. Church, and the life of discipleship are not about becoming a moral person, a good citizen, a contributing member of society. The Boy Scouts or Ethical Society can provide those. Our call, instead, is to be in love.

Perhaps this is why the Bible includes, among its many books and genres, a love story full of the desire and excitement of two people who long to be together. Our selection for this Sunday give us only a tiny hint of the Song of Songs, but even here, as we listen to one of the most extensive female voices in all of scripture, we get a taste of the passionate longing of any love worth having. And though I want to avoid taming this scripture through allegorization, I think that in the desire of these lovers we find a pointing to the Love behind all loves.

To be a great Christian is to be a great lover. That has been true of the saints, and many of them fumbled through the failed exploits of merely human love before they discovered the higher passion of offering themselves to God. St. Frances was a romancer of women before he proclaimed that he would be a troubadour, a poet of love, for the sake of Christ. St. Theresa was a wild youth whose “passionate, ideal nature,” as George Eliot put it, “demanded an epic life.” She had such a life, not through traditional romance, but in intense, ecstatic prayer. Each of these saints reflected that longing heart, that another romantic, Saint Augustine, said is “restless until it rests in [God].”

Israel’s relationship with God is described in the terms of a longing love. God and the people were said to be involved in a marriage, one that included a covenant of belonging. Covenants are important for love to be sustained, that is why we have the sacrament of marriage, but the risk is that they will become a mere external identity. If we are not careful, a marriage can turn from relationship to routine. When that happens, the concern turns toward maintaining an identity rather than generously seeking the fullness of the beloved.

This is what is at issue with the Pharisees. They had become so focused on the routines of their identity as God’s people that they had lost the relationship that God was seeking. As the prophets had repeatedly warned, God cares little for the externals of sacrifice, the keeping of Sabbath, the giving of tithes, and so on if they are not rooted in an act of love. God wants hearts and it is from the heart that love comes. If we do not tend that love, then it is all too easy for the heart to become a source of the ugliest sides of human nature.

The answer to this challenge is not a religion focused on the externals of morality, of being an upright and decent person. We shouldn’t be part of a church as an identity marker; a dour routine by which we demonstrate that we are among the good people. True faith is about the cultivation of the heart—a drawing forth of love. As Yaconelli told that gathering of Presbyterians: “Christian faith is about following Jesus; its about falling in love with God. It’s about becoming so transparent to the Spirit of God that you are no longer sure which actions are your own and which ones are God’s.” That is the language of a lover.

So how do we become lovers of God? We could begin by listening to that call to the beloved in the Song of Songs: “come away.” Love requires time, it requires space, it takes stepping away from the normal rhythms of the world so that all noise fades except for the voice of the beloved. This is why one of the fundamental practices of Christian life has always been regular and deliberate times of solitude—extended times when we free ourselves from all voices except for God’s.

When I offer couples pre-marital counseling, the best advice I can give them is that they need to find daily time to sit and be together in unhurried conversation. The pastor John Mark Comer echoes that, adding that he and his wife have a household discipline of a having weekly date, and a quarterly weekend away. It is that time—daily, weekly, yearly—that builds and sustains their love. And it is no different in our relationship with God. Daily we need time for unhurried conversation, weekly we need longer periods for the cultivation of our love, and at regular intervals over the year, we need retreats where we can be alone with God. It is through this coming away with God that love will grow and be sustained; it is through that love that we will be able to live into the dynamic offering of ourselves through God for the sake of the world.

Our world is full of moral pronouncements, people ready to police the borders of identity, ready to pounce on anyone who doesn’t conform to the markers of the “good people” in which they include themselves. In answer, we don’t need our own pronouncements and condemnations. Instead, what the world needs is lovers, people who have let go of their hearts and let them be transformed by the God who is Love above all. It is from that transformation that real justice will come, it is from hearts on fire that true peace will flow. Our work is to make our hearts and lives available for the cultivation of that longing. It should be our object above all others to set aside the time and space for loving God. The world is waiting for us to answer the call to “come away.”