All Good Things around Us.

The painful human tradition around Song of Songs is that it is an allegory about God and the church. To quote a character of Jack Nicholson’s, “We cannot seem to handle the truth,” especially the one of this book that exposes the depth of human love and human sexuality. Most of us have absorbed and internalized negative ideas about bodies, about sex, and about our physical selves, and we are unable to separate those feelings from what we think about God. That can be said to be evil’s temptation with regard to our physical selves. If we can be made to believe that God is interested only in our souls, we will either ignore our bodies to their detriment or think that what we do with them doesn’t matter.

One could say, if God didn’t want us to have bodies, God wouldn’t have given them to us. If our physical selves didn’t matter, then God would not have sent the Son, in the flesh, so that we might know more fully God’s love. Jesus wouldn’t matter because we would have nothing to gain from knowing God’s body was hungry, tired, or bruised. Furthermore, if God had no interest in our bodies, then we would be able to do God’s work with just our minds. The ‘Song of Songs’ deserves our attention being the deep, erotic hymn to human love that it is. This hymn of hymns keeps us from ghettoising our sexual selves, keeps our bodies at the forefront among our gifts from God, and reminds us of women’s voices in Scripture and in the world, and serves as a resistor to temptations from the forces that oppose God.

Talking of songs, one of my favourite songs, “All Good Gifts,” from the musical Godspell, is a paraphrase of James 1: 17, another of our readings this week. It goes: “Every good gift, every perfect gift, comes from above.” Songwriter Stephen Schwartz goes on to call us to gratitude, “so thank the Lord for all his love.” But James actually calls us to live our gratitude. Responding to the wonderful gift of our lives, provides an opportunity to live into God’s purpose by being “doers of the word, and not merely hearers.” Jesus often loses patience with the scribes and Pharisees, primarily when they aren’t living the Law that they want to preserve. We all run this risk when we try to hold onto the gifts we have been given or when we are quick to speak and slow to act. When we show to others the adage, “do as I say, not as I do.”

All of the good gifts we have been given are gifted to us to fulfil God’s purpose in the world, to bring God’s realm into being, to share God’s love with the world. One of the difficulties with practicing generosity is that we really enjoy being appreciated. We want to be thanked, for people to notice that we have been generous. Too often, it becomes an opportunity to congratulate ourselves for our contributions. But again James reminds us, “Every generous act of giving . . . is from above.”  In other words, while we’re applauding our latest big gift, we’re missing the fact that it’s not we who give, but God who gives through us. None of this wealth was ever really ours to begin with, because “the earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it.”

When we are generous, it’s God at work in us— not something to applaud in ourselves, but rather yet another thing for which to be grateful. This reality that we are not faithful under our own power, but God’s, plays out further when we contemplate again being “doers of the word, not merely hearers.” I think hearing without acting is a way of hindering God’s work, keeping God from fulfilling God’s plans. When we are doers of the word, we are conduits for God’s grace on the move in the world, pathways of generous love. We do not “do” in order to be noticed or to earn the favour of God or neighbour, but rather to incarnate God’s word yet again in a world that needs, nay cries out for some good news.