Jack Hardaway
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Love stories.
They are everywhere.
The drama, the allure, the drive, the passion, the fear, the betrayals, the longing, the grief.
We are both drawn to them and repelled by them.
The sappy sentimentalism, the longing for the ending of loneliness, the bitter disappointments, endless soap operas stretching across the time line of history, love stories are simply awful, and simply the best thing ever, all at once.
When I asked Susan’s father for his blessing to ask Susan to marry me, he said, “I know you love each other, I just don’t see how you’re going to eat.”
Soon after that I asked Susan to marry me and she said “Maybe. Get off your knees you corn ball.”
That is part of our love story.
It wasn’t until years later that I realized I don’t remember her ever saying yes. The best maybe ever. I’ll be your maybe.
We hear excerpts today from the love story of Isaac and Rebekah.
The whole story has the feel of inevitable tidal forces drawing them together.
Every step in the journey has the weight of divine purpose coming about through normal daily events.
Their love story changes the world, the family, and the people in whom God blesses the nations and all creation, in whom God became flesh.
God’s love is inevitable.
Love is unavoidable, irresistible, and inescapable.
To walk in faith is to trust in this one single fact: inevitable tidal forces are drawing us together.
Rather than the psalm we have a few verses from the Song of Songs that are paired with the love story of Rebekah and Isaac.
We heard part of this reading last week at the wedding here at Grace of Samantha Colman, and Kevin Thompson.
I have love stories on the brain.
The Song of Songs is only eight chapters long, but it has more commentaries written on it than any other book of the Bible, except for Genesis and the Psalms. I only have three commentaries on it.
Love poems, sensual, erotic, and lush as Eden in full bloom.
As Jesus is both fully God and human, these love poems are both about the intimacy of a man and a woman, and about the intimacy of faith, God as our lover.
Two things at once, fully and overwhelmingly.
Love stories, love poems.
God as lover, whom we adore, and who in turn adores every detail of our being.
It is the language of intimacy.
It is the language of demanding, unrelenting exclusivity and trust without shame.
The return of intimacy in world of distraction and indifference and abuse.
An invasion, violating our boundaries.
We are beheld, we are seen, we are naked, and we are loved without restraint.
The mystics wrote of God being ravishing.
It can be a bit much.
So we run, and we are pursued.
The whole story has the feel of inevitable tidal forces drawing us together.
Every step in the journey has the weight of divine purpose coming about through normal daily events.
These are words of resurrection, calling us forth from the grave of our deadliness, “Arise my love, my fair one, and come away; for now the winter is past, the rain is over and gone.”
Love stories.
That is what we live.
That is what we share.
God is like that.
Calling us to arise.
Love, with reckless abandon, without shame, hoping beyond reason.
Love.