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Mhm. I'm generally pretty slow to pick up trends in pop culture. Here are some things that I've never done. I've never downloaded an app. I've never facebookt, I've never tweeted, I've never snap

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chatted. I haven't heard of 95% of the bands that play at south by southwest as each year goes by in Austin. I feel less and less cool . Actually. I've never felt very cool here.

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My 16 year old daughter, Grace thinks I'm kind of a dinosaur. But having a teenage daughter does give me some advantages when it comes to pop culture . I've started to read the books and watched the

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movies that she likes, even if I read them or watch them five years after she does, she was the person responsible for my harry potter obsession. She got me to read The Hunger Games, a

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series that I read in one intense week over this past summer. Another book that I noticed my daughter reading a few years ago was the giver. She loved it and she encouraged me to read it also

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. So I did what any parent would do. I waited for the movie actually, I waited for the movie to come out on Showtime. Yeah. Now the giver offers a dystopian vision of the future

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. It's a future that is free of war and crime and poverty. A government of elders has created a perfectly ordered society with none of the violence that has infected the history of the human race. No

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one goes without food or shelter. A tightly secured border ensures that no one can leave and no one undesirable can get in. Each person contributes something unique to their community, based upon a role that is

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given to each person. Upon graduation from high school . Now, society functions smoothly, mainly because the base passions of the human race, things like greed , possessiveness and the will to violence have all been

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eliminated every morning. Each person in this perfect society takes a drug that suppresses the emotions that give rise to violence. These drugs smother impulses and strong feelings . There are strict rules about physical contact between people

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, only members of a family unit. And that is the term that is used in this society may touch one another well, because any touching can lead well, you know, where touching can lead.

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This is a society without music and without literature, things like that, the elders of this society have determined can lead to passion and eventually to violence in this society, even the word love has been eliminated

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. There is one exception in this society. A person who is called the giver who is charged with archiving and remembering the histories of society's past. Now . The movie portrays an elderly giver. It's Jeff

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Bridges. If you're curious who is passing on these histories to a new giver and as this old man gives memories to a young man named Jonas. He shares the stories and the music and the power of

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a mysterious force known as love. As Jonas learns he becomes more and more curious about the societies that have flourished long ago. one day he returns home and asks his father, Dad, do you love

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me? His dad responds by saying this, that word is an anachronism. Do you mean that I take pride in your achievements? Well, so much for a warm family moment. Eventually Jonas decides to

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stop taking this daily drug regimen and he encourages one of his friends, Fiona to stop taking hers as well. One afternoon they spent running around their hometown , violating several laws of society. They slide down

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an embankment, they run away from their jobs and they eventually find a secluded place and it is there that they kiss for the first time there. In this kiss, they begin to see the world differently

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. They begin to realize that they cannot live in the perfect world that their elders have created and they want to change it. It all begins, you see with a kiss. The song of Solomon also

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begins with a kiss. Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, proclaims the first verse okay, this semester we're going to be hearing a series of sermons on biblical wisdom. Perhaps the most

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beautifully written piece of wisdom literature in all of scripture is the song. Yet it is a book that rarely gets preached these days and it has often been ignored in the reformed tradition, particularly despite his massive

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commentaries on most other books of the bible, Calvin hardly wrote a word in the song In the institutes and I checked this out. There are only three elliptical and rather shadowy references to the song and it's

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almost as if Calvin behaves as if the song did not exist in scripture. I guess all of this is understandable well because the song makes us blush, maybe Calvin didn't like the blush very much. Mm

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This avoidance of the song was not always the case in Judaism and ancient rabbinical tradition considered the song to be the holy of holies in the hebrew bible in medieval monasteries. No book received greater attention than the

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song. Bernard of Cuervo preached 86 sermons on the song and only made it about halfway through the book . Bernard felt that in these juicy pages lay the treasure of Christian faith. The song was critical because

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it captured the love of christ for the church. This has been the most common way of interpreting the song throughout the church's history. The male lover is christ, The female lover is the church. Here's

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how Bernard interprets the book's opening kiss. This verse expresses the ardent longing for the coming of christ in the flesh, for Bernard and for many others in the history of the church, the song captures the

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passionate drama that is christ's incarnation. God does not come in the flesh out of some sense of obligation . God does not come simply in order to repair the damage that sin has wrought in the world.

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No God comes in the flesh out of the depths of God's love, A passionate love that leaves us yearning for God. The incarnation of Jesus is one long passionate love affair with humanity and when we are

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touched by this one who comes in the flesh, our hearts are kindled with the flame of God's love in the beginning and in the end, God is love. A love that issues force in beautiful song

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. From a very early stage. You see the church has interpreted the song allegorically. The song according to this wisdom is not primarily about human love. Even the protestant reformers who were generally resistant to allegory

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tended to interpret the song along these lines. Everybody part of the song mentions refers to something other than the human body. According to this wisdom Luther is very interesting in this regard. He's otherwise very skeptical

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of allegory, but in his commentary on the song , he says this when the song mentions legs, it means the church. Whenever it mentions breasts, it means doctrine. I guess that makes talking kind

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of interesting when it mentions eyes, it means teachers and leaders. When it mentions lips, it really means the word of God. Now there is much wisdom in allegory. First of all, it causes

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us to glimpse old things in a fresh perspective. The love of God is passionate as passionate as lovers who discover each other for the first time. As intoxicating as the beauty of our lover fully alive.

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But there is also something a bit odd about allegory , especially for Protestants. It can cause us to ignore the plane sense of the text. If the song is really about the love of God for the

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Church or about the love of God for Israel then isn't it just a little bit odd that the song never mentions God. Check it out. The word God is not in there. There are other ways

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of interpreting the song, of course, 1/2 that might make us blush a bit more namely that the song is about human love, erotic love. CN yes, sexual love. This is the most great

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forward reading of the text, but it is the one the church has often failed to embrace. It is as if we have failed to see what was immediately before our eyes. A poem that exuberantly And

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quite imaginatively expresses the power of the erotic between two lovers. When we recognize that this song is also about, well, what it expresses so plainly. Then several things emerge for us. First of all

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, it's striking to compare the voices of the lovers . In this poem, we encounter a dialogue between a woman and a man, but here, unlike so many other dialogues in scripture, it is the

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woman who speaks at far greater length. She speaks unreservedly unrestrained, id lee, and quite frankly about the beauty of her lover. She speaks openly about what gives her pleasure and her desire for her partner

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. This is all the more striking given the time in which this piece was written here in the midst of an intensely patriarchal world, is perhaps the one place in all of the bible where a woman speaks

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at great length without being interrupted by a man. Thanks be to God. Another thing that I notice is that most of the time that the lovers are singing each other's praises, they are not present to

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one another. They dream of each other, they long for each other. They know the taste of each other's kisses, but for most of the song , they are physically absent from one another. This

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is not a song of instant erotic gratification. A rose is sustained in part because of physical distance and yes, even restraint. This, I think is a different message than we get in the US today

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in our sexually saturated culture. When it comes to sex. American culture has come to accept as true that more is better that now is always preferable to later and that restraint is well for prudes, how

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different in this culture does this song sound today? Maybe that's why it's so beautiful and maybe that's why so much of what gets called erotic in our time is quite ugly. By comparison. The song is

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also characterized by a lingering attention. The lovers of this song know each other. They know the curves and crevices of each other's bodies and they sing odes of joy. They pay attention to one another.

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Sexual love between these lovers is not a means to an end, whether procreation or pleasure rather their love is simply for the sake of their beloved. These lovers pay such close attention to each other because they

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have reserved themselves for one another. These lovers know that erotic love is vulnerable and that they can't open themselves in this way to anybody else. And finally , these lovers sense erotic love is a blessing in

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contrast to american culture, where sex has become compulsive or something that is used to sell products in the grocery checkout aisle. The lovers of this song see the beauty of God's blessing of the body amid the

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blessing of creation or as the woman of the song delights. Let us go out early to the vineyards and see whether the vines have budded, whether the great blossoms have opened and the pomegranates are in bloom

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. There I will give you my love, the man drinks, give forth fragrance and over our doors are all choice fruits new as well as old which I have laid up for you. Oh my beloved

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, Can you hear the beauty of creation in these lines? These words really are good news in our time. Clearly, the song celebrates erotic love and when we love with passion, like the characters in

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the movie, the giver, we do begin to see the world differently. But as we sing this chorus of human love, it would also be a mistake to forget the church's long tradition of allegory.

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In the end, I don't think we have to choose between one interpretation or the other. It's neither all about God's love or all about human arrows. Rather it's about both loves because the heart of our

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faith is divine love that comes in the flesh. As the gospel reading for today recalls, it is about one who comes in love so that we too might love one another, jesus says, this is

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my commandment that you love one another as I have loved you. This is the kind of love that brims with passion. Whenever we love with the passion of Solomon's song, we participate in the passion that

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gives us our life in jesus christ, a passion that began long before we arrived here, long before we first fell in love, and which will continue long after our beloved has to say goodbye to us

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. And for this passion, we give thanks to