Speaker 1: I mean, you can be seated.
Speaker 1: Well, good morning.
Speaker 1: Yes, the song of songs.
Speaker 1: Who's ready?
Speaker 1: Whoo, let's talk about sex.
Speaker 1: Baby, I did not do that at the first gathering, they would not have.
Speaker 1: Probably Years ago I was at a bookstore.
Speaker 1: We actually, sonya and I and Pastor Paul, were at a bookstore near Harvard and there was a Commentary in the song of songs.
Speaker 1: I'm like that would be wild to do a series on the song of songs.
Speaker 1: This is a book of erotic love poetry, so I'm like I got to do it one day, and today is the day.
Speaker 1: I've already told a number of people about this and they, the responses have been typically mostly what are you thinking?
Speaker 1: And Trust me, I haven't.
Speaker 1: I have also thought the same thing of myself.
Speaker 1: What are you thinking, brailey?
Speaker 1: But here's why I want to talk about it, because it's in the Bible.
Speaker 1: It's wild.
Speaker 1: I mean this book again.
Speaker 1: It's.
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna pull out a punch.
Speaker 1: We're all adults, more or less, in this room.
Speaker 1: We can handle it.
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna be over the top.
Speaker 1: I promise I won't make it weird.
Speaker 1: But listen, we are surrounded by movies and songs and conversation that coffee shops are way more gratuitous than this kind of stuff, and so we might as well talk about it in church.
Speaker 1: That's what I think and also it's in the Bible, like what we should.
Speaker 1: What do we make of this?
Speaker 1: How do we read this kind of book?
Speaker 1: I got an email from.
Speaker 1: I sent an email out earlier this week about this and I got an email back from one of our longtime memories whom I just loved dearly and she's like I never knew this book was even in there.
Speaker 1: What do we make of this book?
Speaker 1: We're gonna find out.
Speaker 1: So if this is a good idea, it was my idea, it was a bad idea, it was Sonia's idea.
Speaker 1: Write that down, please.
Speaker 1: But yeah, the song of songs, and the song of songs is Wedged in between the book of Ecclesiastes, this book of wisdom that we think Solomon wrote, or something like that, and it's wedged in between that book and the book of Isaiah, this great prophet, this great Jewish prophet.
Speaker 1: And wedged in between there is this book of poetry called the song of song to the song of Solomon, and the open, as you heard Jamie read.
Speaker 1: By the way, the book opens.
Speaker 1: You know, you heard her read it.
Speaker 1: Well, I only had her read the first four verses, because the fifth verse, if you look in your Bible, the NRSV.
Speaker 1: It's a woman speaking and she says let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.
Speaker 1: And then she goes on and verse five says I am black and beautiful, which I was pretty awesome.
Speaker 1: I'm like Jamie, do you want to read that?
Speaker 1: Anyway, there's some other stuff in there that was kind of so.
Speaker 1: We just cut to the first four verses.
Speaker 1: But the book opens with a let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.
Speaker 1: It does not open with an abstract praise of love or some kind of a scientific you know, treat us on love.
Speaker 1: Nor does it open with a three-point sermon on here's what love is.
Speaker 1: No, it opens in this way Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.
Speaker 1: This demand for kisses, and maybe even a little bit more, if you heard what Jamie read, it's this burst of emotion and desire of let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth for your wine or for your love, rather, is better than wine.
Speaker 1: It's awesome because human beings, I would argue, are beings of desire.
Speaker 1: So the great saint august and the great thinker, in the early part of the church he said that human beings are beings of desire, which means we're not so much simply rational beings or logistical beings.
Speaker 1: We don't always get convinced by more data or more information.
Speaker 1: Those things are not bad, but it's because at our core, we're beings of desire.
Speaker 1: We have longings, we have hopes, we experience emotions, and these things are all a part of what it means to be a human being.
Speaker 1: So I was in Texas for about a week just.
Speaker 1: I got back a couple of days ago and when we were down, there was this beautiful time with my family.
Speaker 1: It was my family.
Speaker 1: The six of us drove down there with our dog, and then my parents were down there, and my sister and her Kids and my brother and his wife and their kids, and it was just this wonderful time to be together and we loved every minute of it, as we normally do.
Speaker 1: And one of my daughters who will remain nameless, but I have her permission to share this she just loves these times of being with family, this tribal community, family sense.
Speaker 1: We're only together a few times a year, if even that, maybe just once, and so whenever we come home it's maybe you experience too.
Speaker 1: We always experience like the post christmas, I don't know doldrums or darkness or depression or something like that, the funks, uh, if you're afraid of the word depression, that's the funks.
Speaker 1: We call it the funks and that's what happened the minute we got back.
Speaker 1: We're unpacking and there's my daughter and it happened a few times already but I come out of the bedroom unpacking my suitcase and there she is at the table just crying Because she missed her family so deeply.
Speaker 1: It was such a great experience and she was just moved to tears because she missed her grandparents and her aunts and uncles and and her cousins.
Speaker 1: And so I did the only thing a good father could do I sat down next to her and I pulled out my spreadsheets and I gave her these mathematical equations about why you're going to be okay and these scientific proofs.
Speaker 1: This is not the end of the world.
Speaker 1: Stop crying, it's rationally.
Speaker 1: You know I'm kidding.
Speaker 1: I didn't do that.
Speaker 1: Some of you were like that might be a good idea, ryan.
Speaker 1: No, I just sat next to her and I held her as she cried and she cried and the emotions kind of overwhelmed her, because this is what it means to be a human.
Speaker 1: Now my other daughter, who will remain nameless, turned to me and said well, I'm crying on the inside.
Speaker 1: She's a savage, that one, but that's what it means to be a human.
Speaker 1: It's to experience all these emotions and all that comes with it the highs and the lows, the joy and the pain, the ecstasy and the sadness and disappointment.
Speaker 1: These are all God-given aspects of what it means to be a human being, and they're oftentimes mysterious, they're hard to understand, they're complex, they're difficult to know.
Speaker 1: We're beings full of emotion and longing and desire, and even love, and this is a book about love.
Speaker 1: I love, no pun intended, how Shakespeare writes about love.
Speaker 1: In his 116th sonnet he writes this Let me not, to the marriage of true minds, admit impediments, because love is not love which alters when an alteration finds.
Speaker 1: In other words, love is not the kind of thing that can be changed with alterations here or there.
Speaker 1: Love is stronger and more enduring than things that change over time around it, and love doesn't bend with the remover to remove, so it's not easily bent towards things that are around it.
Speaker 1: It's not shaped by its context.
Speaker 1: Love is a strong and even fierce thing.
Speaker 1: Oh no, shakespeare writes.
Speaker 1: It is an ever-fixed mark that looks on tempest and is never shaken.
Speaker 1: Tempest are storms.
Speaker 1: Love is so strong and fierce and wild and even untamed.
Speaker 1: I would say that it looks into the face of the storm and is not shaken, doesn't fear.
Speaker 1: Then he writes this it is the star to every wandering bark.
Speaker 1: That means like ships that are out at sea and guiding themselves by the night stars.
Speaker 1: This is what love is like it's a star that guides ships that are out at sea, although it says, whose worth is unknown, although his height can be taken.
Speaker 1: So, stars, you can measure where the stars are or where they are in the sky, but you don't really know the worth of the star.
Speaker 1: Same with love.
Speaker 1: Same with love it's worth is unknown, although its height can be taken.
Speaker 1: Then Shakespeare goes on to say this about love Love is not times full.
Speaker 1: I love that.
Speaker 1: The title of my sermon, by the way, is loves, not times full, meaning love is not beholden to time.
Speaker 1: Love is not a time is not master love.
Speaker 1: Love is this untamed thing that cannot be even sort of subjugated to time, even though rosy lips and cheeks, within his bending sickles compass, come Meaning.
Speaker 1: This is even as we age, through our rosy lips and our cheeks.
Speaker 1: As we get older, those things tend to fade away and they come under the sickle of time's compass.
Speaker 1: Love is not that way at all.
Speaker 1: Love endures even beyond age, even throughout the decades and centuries and our lives.
Speaker 1: Love is not the kind of thing that bends to sickles compass.
Speaker 1: Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks.
Speaker 1: It doesn't change over time.
Speaker 1: It endures, but it bears it out, even to the edge of doom or death, you might say.
Speaker 1: And then Shakespeare says this in this moment of honesty If this be error, if I'm wrong, and upon me it's proved, I never writ, nor no man has ever loved.
Speaker 1: Love is this incredibly wild and complex, untamed, mysterious deal.
Speaker 1: And the song of songs opens Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, this most unscientific, concrete and untethered opening, I would say, in all of the Bible, and I love it.
Speaker 1: This is, of course, the song of songs.
Speaker 1: It's the song of all songs.
Speaker 1: What the title means?
Speaker 1: It's of all the songs.
Speaker 1: It is the song above all the songs.
Speaker 1: Rabbi, the great Rabbi Akiva, called it the holiest of the holy writings.
Speaker 1: This is what he says.
Speaker 1: It is.
Speaker 1: All.
Speaker 1: The world is not worth the day on which the song of songs was given to the people of Israel.
Speaker 1: He loved this book, for all the writings are holy, but the song of songs is the holy of holies.
Speaker 1: How about that for some to talk about?
Speaker 1: Then the great Origen, who wrote in the 200s.
Speaker 1: Origen says this about the song Blessed is he or she who enters the holy places, but even more blessed is the one who enters the holy of holies.
Speaker 1: Likewise, he's talking about the temple there.
Speaker 1: Likewise, blessed is the one who knows holy songs and sings them, but much more blessed is the one who sings the song Songs.
Speaker 1: I would encourage you to read this book along with us.
Speaker 1: We're going to do a few weeks on this book.
Speaker 1: It's actually quite short.
Speaker 1: It's only eight chapters long.
Speaker 1: I think we'll examine the whole book in each sermon.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to do an exegetical dive into one verse or three verses.
Speaker 1: It's just not really possible to do that.
Speaker 1: The whole book.
Speaker 1: I'd read it in one sitting.
Speaker 1: In fact I was driving down the road their day listening to it.
Speaker 1: On the Bible app, which you can do, it's great.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to read it to you and I was a few moments.
Speaker 1: I was blushing in the car alone.
Speaker 1: I was like, oh man, this is, this is saucy.
Speaker 1: But here's how the book was meant to be read or listened to.
Speaker 1: It was an or it was from the oral tradition, they would read it out loud, and even today the Jewish people read it at weddings.
Speaker 1: They celebrate it uh, uh, passover and the Sabbath by reading this book of poetry found in the Old Testament, and it's best read.
Speaker 1: A lot of scholars believe out loud or listen to out loud.
Speaker 1: So I encourage you to do that as we go along.
Speaker 1: But here's the elephant in the room.
Speaker 1: I was always told when you're younger, when I was younger, if there's an elephant in the room you better name it.
Speaker 1: So we're going to name it.
Speaker 1: Here's the elephant in the room.
Speaker 1: This book, the song of songs that I remind you is in the Bible, is so explicit, it's so erotic that young Jewish boys weren't allowed to read it until they were much older.
Speaker 1: Think of some pictures of some Jewish boys who figured.
Speaker 1: Hence the warning.
Speaker 1: I promise I won't make it weird.
Speaker 1: But yeah, this is the elephant in the room.
Speaker 1: It was so explicit and so erotic, this erotic love for you.
Speaker 1: A lot of scholars didn't even want it in the cannon, like we shouldn't have this in the Bible because it's just too, you know.
Speaker 1: But thankfully, you know, wiser minds ruled out and they in fact did include it in the cannon.
Speaker 1: So it raises the question for us, the cannon.
Speaker 1: By the way, cannon means like the, the, the, the, the, the set of scriptures that we hold as sort of like, given to us by God.
Speaker 1: So the cannon of scripture is what you have in your pubic.
Speaker 1: Well, here's the question what do we make of this book?
Speaker 1: And if you've never read it, read it and, you know, do with what you will.
Speaker 1: But what do we make of this book?
Speaker 1: How should we read it?
Speaker 1: What does this say about the human experience?
Speaker 1: Today's epiphany I'm not sure if you know it, actually yesterday was epiphany, but it's the epiphany holiday.
Speaker 1: Epiphany is the end of the Christmas-tide celebration, so there really are 12 days of Christmas, and then yesterday was the end of it.
Speaker 1: Epiphany is the day we celebrate the Magi coming to discover the Christ child in the well.
Speaker 1: He probably wasn't in the manger when the Magi showed up, but when they come later, there he is.
Speaker 1: And it's also a celebration of the fact that God, the ethereal, the eternal, the ephemeral, the ineffable, becomes a human.
Speaker 1: Like the unknown, inexplicable, god becomes a human being.
Speaker 1: It's wild and mysterious, and so we celebrate that.
Speaker 1: And I thought it'd be kind of fun to talk about this book, because it really does explain a bit what it's like to be a human, and this is a God who's become a human and affirmed the humanness of our world.
Speaker 1: So sometimes we think about these things that are human as like, kind of like, oh, that's sort of despicable or tainted, and no doubt the world has actually taken things that were good and holy and made them sort of taint them like romantic love.
Speaker 1: But romantic love is a gift from God that should be treasured and talked about and at will and freely in our lives.
Speaker 1: There's nothing wrong with it.
Speaker 1: Sometimes we even use the words that go that's dirty or that's filthy or whatever the case might be, and I get it, but really in its purest form.
Speaker 1: This is a gift from God to be a human, and we should know what it means to be a human, and so this book explores that and how should we read it?
Speaker 1: Many people in the ancient world read it as a literal story.
Speaker 1: So there's, if you read it, there's two predominant voices in the book.
Speaker 1: There's a male voice and a female voice.
Speaker 1: In fact, the female voice is the more prominent one, the more active voice, so some folks think that a woman, at least in part, was helping write the book, but it's two voices going back and forth and they talk about themselves and their longing for the other, their desire for the other person, and it's marked by their absence and presence.
Speaker 1: There's also a third set of voices, or like cacophony of voices, that kind of chime in every now and again, but it's most of these two voices.
Speaker 1: So should we read it as a literal book of two people who are in love?
Speaker 1: And what does it mean to be in love?
Speaker 1: That's one way to read it, as a literal story of love poems from two people.
Speaker 1: Or over the course of history the Jewish people began to read it as an allegory, a poem of love from God to humans well, in this case to Israel, which for us is a tad weird because we're like erotic love poetry from God to Israel.
Speaker 1: That's kind of strange, or even to us, you know.
Speaker 1: But in the ancient world it was not as weird as it sounds today.
Speaker 1: In the ancient world and antiquity there were lots of poems and even sort of love poems between the gods and gods and humans.
Speaker 1: That was sort of the context in which we get the Israel story.
Speaker 1: So if Israel did in fact write or use this book as an allegory like between God and humans.
Speaker 1: That was kind of normal.
Speaker 1: And as you read it that way, it might, to your modern sensibilities, be a bit weird.
Speaker 1: That's fine, and if you're a strong masculine dude and it makes you uncomfortable, that's you're in good company.
Speaker 1: That's how they maybe have read it.
Speaker 1: So how did God intend for us to read it?
Speaker 1: I don't really know.
Speaker 1: It's a difficult book to read, but I want to explore it at least a little bit.
Speaker 1: And as you read it, there's really not a trace of a coherent plot, even Like, where is this book going?
Speaker 1: It sort of ebbs and flows and we don't really even know who the author is.
Speaker 1: In fact it says the song of songs that were Solomon's.
Speaker 1: I think I have that verse.
Speaker 1: One there we go, or we call it in your Bible might say the song of Solomon, but no one really knows if it was in fact Solomon who wrote it or if it's a book written like on behalf of Solomon or in the wisdom tradition of Solomon, which is normal to do in the book, or in the ancient world.
Speaker 1: You would say this is a book of poems that are in honor of Solomon.
Speaker 1: That kind of thing.
Speaker 1: No one knows.
Speaker 1: It doesn't really matter Either who wrote the book exactly, but it really is a book that talks about loving and desires and longing, absence and presence.
Speaker 1: It's a picture of a relationship between, in this case, a man and a woman, and all the joy that comes along with that and the struggle that comes along with that sometimes.
Speaker 1: The complexity of love.
Speaker 1: I mean, come on, love is a complex deal.
Speaker 1: Are you with me?
Speaker 1: And all the folks who've ever been in love or wanted to be in love said amen, love is a complex deal.
Speaker 1: I will never forget the first time I fell in love.
Speaker 1: I'll never forget.
Speaker 1: I was in the first grade, tolgate Elementary in Aurora, colorado.
Speaker 1: Her name was Avalina McDonald and I'll never forget how that day, I knew because I chased her around the soccer field and I just felt something different.
Speaker 1: You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: Like, this is different.
Speaker 1: I'm chasing her, unlike I chased my friend Tommy over there.
Speaker 1: This is different.
Speaker 1: I think I love this girl.
Speaker 1: So I went home and did the only thing any young man in first grade who was gonna be a former or future preacher would do I wrote her a love letter Isn't that normal?
Speaker 1: And I sat down and I spent hours and maybe it was only minutes, but I wrote this long letter, pouring out my heart and my soul to this girl who I barely knew, and I had chased her on the field that day.
Speaker 1: I wanted her to know how much I loved her, how much I just longed to be with her.
Speaker 1: But I made the mistake of putting this note on the counter by the phone in the house and my mom found it and she's like Ryan, what is this?
Speaker 1: I was like you don't even understand me.
Speaker 1: You don't get me.
Speaker 1: I'm in love.
Speaker 1: You don't know what love is.
Speaker 1: How could you know?
Speaker 1: You're an old lady, I know what love is.
Speaker 1: How dare you tell me what love is?
Speaker 1: She never let me give it to this girl.
Speaker 1: Probably a good thing, but I'll never forget that Love is complex.
Speaker 1: Are you with me?
Speaker 1: It's a complex, mysterious, vast, huge deal, and to fall in love is a strange thing.
Speaker 1: Fact is love between the man and woman.
Speaker 1: In this book it almost has a life of its own.
Speaker 1: There's several times the woman's voice says hey, do not awake or arouse love before it's ready.
Speaker 1: I think here it is in the scripture.
Speaker 1: So it's actually three different places.
Speaker 1: I said I'll go ahead for me, sarah, we lose it.
Speaker 1: Don't stir up or awaken or arouse love until it's ready.
Speaker 1: It's like love, whatever it is, it's so beautiful and so good that we can't mess it up.
Speaker 1: It's this beautiful, sacred, holy, mysterious thing and we just can't goof it up.
Speaker 1: It's hard for us to fathom today because we get a lot of mileage out of this word love, this old English word that we use for everything.
Speaker 1: Love, I mean.
Speaker 1: In the same breath, I will tell someone I love them, that I say also I love those new shoes I got for Christmas that I can wear at the gym, and I love that new pair of pants I got.
Speaker 1: And I also love you.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna love my wife and I also love chipotle burritos.
Speaker 1: Are you with me?
Speaker 1: Now?
Speaker 1: Of course, I love my wife more than burritos.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's different, right, but imagine if I was having a date with my wife while eating a burrito.
Speaker 1: Man, that wouldn't, that would be, that would be something.
Speaker 1: Anyway, there you know, we just get a.
Speaker 1: This word has lost its meaning for many, many obvious reasons.
Speaker 1: We use this word for everything, but in the Hebrew, the language this song of songs has written in, they use at least three different words for the word love.
Speaker 1: I'm going to teach them to you this morning, the one.
Speaker 1: I'll give them to you one at a time.
Speaker 1: The words are raya, ahava, and do so.
Speaker 1: The first one is raya.
Speaker 1: Now, raya is a friendly kind of love.
Speaker 1: It's a friendship companionship.
Speaker 1: You might have what you call like a kindred spirit, a best friend, so when you'd stay up late at night talking about anything with over the phone or in person, you might go to the movies with this person.
Speaker 1: This is a raya kind of love.
Speaker 1: Everyone say raya, raya.
Speaker 1: It's a friendship kind of love.
Speaker 1: It's expressed in this book, the song of songs.
Speaker 1: So here, for example, it says this in the song of songs You're beautiful from head to toe, my dear raya.
Speaker 1: Beautiful beyond compare, absolutely flawless.
Speaker 1: Now, ladies, get yourself a friend that talks to you the way that this writer does, am I right?
Speaker 1: You come walking out for your date with the girls.
Speaker 1: The girls are not going to be like, hey, how do I look?
Speaker 1: Oh, girl, you are beautiful from head to toe, my dear.
Speaker 1: Look, my dear look.
Speaker 1: Beautiful beyond compare.
Speaker 1: You were absolutely flawless, girl, sleigh, queen, how do I do?
Speaker 1: And fellas, my brothers?
Speaker 1: We also could use some friends like this.
Speaker 1: It sounds different.
Speaker 1: Yeah, man, how do I look?
Speaker 1: You look good, let's go.
Speaker 1: All right, let's go.
Speaker 1: It's a friendly kind of love.
Speaker 1: Are you with me?
Speaker 1: The second kind of love is this ah-ha-ha.
Speaker 1: Everyone say ah-ha-ha.
Speaker 1: Here's how you spell it in the English or in transliteration Ah-ha-ha is a deeper, more committed will, a love of the will.
Speaker 1: So it's bigger and beyond fleeting romantic feelings.
Speaker 1: It's actually broader than temporary physical urges that we might experience early on in a relationship or as someone passes by.
Speaker 1: It's a decision to join your life with another person.
Speaker 1: It's an emotion that leads to commitment.
Speaker 1: Are you with me?
Speaker 1: So when Katie and I first started hanging out, we met in 1998 when we were married.
Speaker 1: It'll be 24 years this upcoming fall.
Speaker 1: So 23 and a couple months is how long we've been married and we were friends.
Speaker 1: We had the raya for a whole year before anything else.
Speaker 1: We were friends for about a year.
Speaker 1: That summer we met in the fall.
Speaker 1: Later.
Speaker 1: That summer I came to visit her.
Speaker 1: I flew out here to Minnesota to visit her family and there was like no pressure because it was just friendly.
Speaker 1: We were friends, we were raya, no problem.
Speaker 1: So I met her mom and dad, and not as the boyfriend but as just a friend.
Speaker 1: Then I came back a week or two later because I wanted to come back again, which should have been a sign In fact I had run out of money.
Speaker 1: So I took a Greyhound bus out to Minnesota.
Speaker 1: That's love.
Speaker 1: You ever been in the Greyhound bus?
Speaker 1: My gosh, I will never do that again.
Speaker 1: I should have known that was really love.
Speaker 1: I Greyhound busted and that was before the days of cell phones or anything.
Speaker 1: I couldn't watch.
Speaker 1: I was on a bus with my CD player and my big booklet of CDs.
Speaker 1: Someone stole my pillow.
Speaker 1: It was a bad week, anyway, but I had to.
Speaker 1: I had to know, and I think she did to it.
Speaker 1: Dude, did we have the ah-ha-ha, or was it just right, or were we just friends?
Speaker 1: What was it?
Speaker 1: Well, I remember praying not long after that.
Speaker 1: I remember praying and asking God what should I do?
Speaker 1: And I remember God.
Speaker 1: I felt like you know, maybe God has spoken to me only a few times in my life.
Speaker 1: I just knew clearly it was God.
Speaker 1: It wasn't out loud, it was like just a feeling or thought I had.
Speaker 1: It was like deep in my soul and I felt like God said to me Ryan, what if you couldn't have her?
Speaker 1: Like what if you couldn't marry her or just kind of have her?
Speaker 1: What if you?
Speaker 1: What if she didn't like you?
Speaker 1: Or what if she moved away suddenly?
Speaker 1: Or what if somehow she was just gone?
Speaker 1: And I had this visceral reaction to that.
Speaker 1: I was like like I felt like my breath I'm not kidding, I thought this my chest got tight and my breath was kind of like, and then I felt like God said see how much you really do like her.
Speaker 1: Ah yeah, ah-ha-va.
Speaker 1: Ah-ha-va is deep longing for the other person, like your thoughts circle around them all the time.
Speaker 1: Your mind and your will, your emotions are sort of bent towards that person.
Speaker 1: It's this deep ache in your heart when you're around them or thinking of them, and you can't think of anything else.
Speaker 1: So in chapter eight, verse seven, it says this the writer many waters cannot quench ah-ha-va, rivers cannot wash it away.
Speaker 1: If one were to give all their wealth of his house for ah-ha-va, it'd be utterly scorned.
Speaker 1: You can't buy ah-ha-va with all the wealth you have in your house.
Speaker 1: It's not attainable that way.
Speaker 1: It's something entirely different.
Speaker 1: So you have raya, this friendship.
Speaker 1: You have ah-ha-va, this deep, committed, passionate love.
Speaker 1: That sort of your will is bent towards them.
Speaker 1: And then you have the third kind of love dode.
Speaker 1: Everyone say dode.
Speaker 1: Dode, literally translated, means to corouse or to rock or to fondle.
Speaker 1: I think you get the idea.
Speaker 1: In fact this was the most PG image we could find of this word.
Speaker 1: Let your imagination.
Speaker 1: Well, maybe not.
Speaker 1: Anyhow, dode means to corouse or to fondle or to rock.
Speaker 1: In fact in the Proverbs it says this about dode Go ahead for me, sarah.
Speaker 1: It says come, let us drink deeply of dode until the morning.
Speaker 1: Or in the Song of Songs, verse one, you already heard that.
Speaker 1: Chapter one, verse two you heard this already, jamie.
Speaker 1: You read it.
Speaker 1: Oh, go ahead, there we go.
Speaker 1: May he kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for your dode is better than wine.
Speaker 1: See, dode is this physical, sexual, erotic element of this relationship between this man and this woman.
Speaker 1: It's where we get the word eros from in the Greek, or the word in English, it is the word erotic.
Speaker 1: So it's this physical, tangible expression of love.
Speaker 1: So it might be helpful to think about these kinds of love as maybe a flame.
Speaker 1: So you have the raya flame, and raya is this friendly, compassionate, companionate, friendship, a deep friendship.
Speaker 1: Maybe you consider yourself soulmates or best friends.
Speaker 1: You talk until the wee hours of the morning.
Speaker 1: And then maybe you have the second kind of love, which is the ahavah love, which is this committed kind of love where you stand up in front of your friends and family and declare out loud your intentions for each other and you got to candle and make some vows and share rings, but your whole life revolves around that person.
Speaker 1: It endures forever because you're so committed.
Speaker 1: That's the ahavah love.
Speaker 1: And then you have this dode love.
Speaker 1: Dode is, of course, this sensual, this physical element of the love.
Speaker 1: It's this flame, this dode, that we sometimes experience.
Speaker 1: And in this story of the song, of songs, you have this man and this woman experiencing all three of these at one time.
Speaker 1: And these three flames combine as one, as one flame, one huge flame, and it's as though when they experience this one big flame, it's just much bigger and brighter and warmer than each individual flame by themselves.
Speaker 1: Somehow, when they're combined together, they make something bigger and stronger than if they're alone.
Speaker 1: Jesus, later on in the New Testament, talks about this idea of entire beings coming together, with all of themselves becoming, you know, into one sort of.
Speaker 1: He says it this way, says the two will become one flesh.
Speaker 1: One flesh is much bigger and broader and deeper than just a physical act.
Speaker 1: Are you with me?
Speaker 1: It's much deeper than that.
Speaker 1: It's entire beings coming together.
Speaker 1: It's emotions and hearts and wills and minds and experiences and life stories.
Speaker 1: It's a mingling of the whole person, a mingling of the souls, the spirit and the physical.
Speaker 1: It's all this.
Speaker 1: The physical act is a picture of a deeper spiritual reality.
Speaker 1: It's never just a physical thing.
Speaker 1: Most things aren't.
Speaker 1: Jesus teaches us that sex is a deeply spiritual act that involves the whole part of ourselves.
Speaker 1: It's a beautiful and powerful thing meant to endure forever, never to be by itself, because this thing, when all three are combined, creates something much bigger and broader and more beautiful than just each individual flame.
Speaker 1: What's your real hot up in here?
Speaker 1: And when these three flames combine, this is what we experienced in the song of songs.
Speaker 1: This big flame, this expression of love, this deepest visceral expression of love in the human beings, in the story of these two humans.
Speaker 1: And one flame is never as big or as bright or as hot as all three.
Speaker 1: Think about all the ways we goof this up.
Speaker 1: See, an extramarital affair or just a physical affair, is people trying to chase down the dode flame by itself, trying to warm themselves by just the dode flame alone.
Speaker 1: There's no friendship, there's no commitment, there's no lifelong I'm going to hold on to you, come hell or high water.
Speaker 1: There's none of that.
Speaker 1: It's just simply just this physical dode flame and it just can't keep you warm.
Speaker 1: But people keep going back to it again and again and again and again, thinking it will keep them warm and it just can't.
Speaker 1: Whether it's an extramarital affair or people that have one night stands or just engage in kind of frivolous physical activities, it's not enough to keep you warm.
Speaker 1: How could it?
Speaker 1: It can't.
Speaker 1: Or think about people that maybe you know or that have been married for a long time and they live in the same house, they occupy the same spaces, but there's no friendship.
Speaker 1: That flame died a long time ago and they pass by each other as other ships passing in the night.
Speaker 1: There's no sexual physical intimacy, none of that.
Speaker 1: It's just simply this commitment to stay together and there's nothing else.
Speaker 1: And the other flames have flickered out.
Speaker 1: How could any one of these ever keep us as warm as all three?
Speaker 1: And, by the way, this has nothing to do with age.
Speaker 1: I know lots of older couples, I mean at first glance.
Speaker 1: You read songs like oh, those are just like 20 year olds who have just got married and they're just living their best lives.
Speaker 1: Now we know those people back in their 80s or 90s and they've lived their whole lives together and they have these deep experiences, the highs and the lows, and they still hold hands or they still hug or kiss or whatever, and they've got this great commitment, love, and they've got this friendship.
Speaker 1: That's deep and mysterious.
Speaker 1: Man, that is incredible.
Speaker 1: Like that's what I want.
Speaker 1: I want to grow old with Katie.
Speaker 1: I'd be 90 years old, in the back porch and doing whatever.
Speaker 1: It's not about age.
Speaker 1: We can all have this thing at any age with a significant other.
Speaker 1: See, our culture really has no idea what true sexuality relieving is.
Speaker 1: How could they?
Speaker 1: Many of us are chasing down single flames in and of themselves and by themselves, and there's no way it can ever satisfy us.
Speaker 1: And the culture doesn't know how to teach us how to do it, because they don't know, they don't get it.
Speaker 1: Love is this deeply profound, mysterious, vast, big thing that involves all of you, every part of you.
Speaker 1: You're a physical body.
Speaker 1: No doubt you can touch your own, you know, you can see that.
Speaker 1: That's clear.
Speaker 1: But you're also a spiritual body.
Speaker 1: You have a spirit, you have a soul.
Speaker 1: You have all these things going on inside of you, and real love is a connecting of all those parts, a mingling of all these things together.
Speaker 1: It's the raya, it's the ahavah and it's the dode in many cases.
Speaker 1: And this is what it means to be a human to experience all of these things, even the big flame.
Speaker 1: These aren't bad things.
Speaker 1: What it means a gift from God.
Speaker 1: Today, on this day, may you know that God, the divine, ethereal being, became a human.
Speaker 1: Being a human is a good thing.
Speaker 1: In fact, when God created humans, he called them good.
Speaker 1: Our experiences as humans are good experiences.
Speaker 1: Of course, they can deviate and go off the track and become something other than what was holy and sacred and intended for that, and love is one of those things.
Speaker 1: We have all kinds of false views and understandings of what love really is, but this is real romantic love.
Speaker 1: I also think about 1 John 3.16, where it says this is how we know what love is that Jesus came down and died for us and so go into the same for each other, and so real love will take that as well giving up your life for somebody else and for others.
Speaker 1: So, central Lutheran church.
Speaker 1: May you honor the way that God has created you.
Speaker 1: May you know you are a profound mystery of emotions and wills and longings and desires.
Speaker 1: That's how God made you.
Speaker 1: You're a mysterious being.
Speaker 1: May you also know that love is a sacred gift.
Speaker 1: It's sacred.
Speaker 1: It's to be protected and cared for, not to be treated whimsically or given out willy-nilly.
Speaker 1: It's a sacred thing.
Speaker 1: It's a fire, it's a flame.
Speaker 1: Love is profoundly spiritual.
Speaker 1: May we experience it as such, and may each of us here discover love.
Speaker 1: May we find the big flame, amen.