Our Whole Lives
a sermon given by the Rev. Roger Paine
on Sunday, April 2, 2006
at The First Parish in Lincoln
“Set me as a seal upon your heart.”
– Song of Solomon 8:6
READINGS:
1. Our first reading is poem by Cynthia Rylant called “God Wrote a Book.” It’s from a collection of poems entitled “God Went to Beauty School.” We have this book in our church library. Here, then, is:
God Wrote a Book
No, not that one.
Everybody thinks He
wrote that one,
but He didn’t.
He’s a better writer
than that.
Those guys just
went on and on
and did they
bother to edit?
No.
But wouldn’t you know,
you mention a name
and you’re in.
So they said,
“I didn’t write it,
God wrote it.”
A sure way
to get out of revising.
But God wrote
His own book.
He wrote it for
one little boy.
Just one.
He read it to the boy
at bedtime
because the boy couldn’t sleep.
So God read him a book.
The boy grew up. He became a writer.
Which one?
Not telling.
2. Our second reading is from The Song of Solomon, which is a collection of 25 love poems, some of which were sung at weddings as far back as four centuries before the birth of Jesus. You’ll find The Song of Solomon sandwiched in between Ecclesiastes and Isaiah in the Hebrew bible. I’m going to read just two verses from it – perhaps the most famous ones – from chapter 8, verses 6 and 7:
Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm;
for love is strong as death,
passion as fierce as the grave.
Its flashes are flashes of fire,
a raging flame.
Many waters cannot quench love,
neither can floods drown it.
If one were to offer all the wealth of his house
in exchange for love,
[the offer] would be utterly scorned.
In some churches, after reading from the bible, the reader ends by saying, “The word of the Lord.”
It gives the reading some weight, but most of the readers know that God didn’t actually write the bible.
As Cynthia Rylant points out in her lovely poem, “God Wrote a Book,” God is a better writer than that.
And God is not so sure where the people who did write the bible got some of their ideas.
There are sixty-six books in the bible,
all written by people who were not all that different from you and me,
which means that they got some things right – and they got some things wrong.
Just like we all do.
There is a lot of real wisdom in the bible.
The idea that God loves us no matter what – that’s one of the things they got right.
The idea that the earth and every living thing is sacred – they got that right, too.
Some people still get hung up because one of the writers said that God created everything in six days,
and we all know the science books say it took a lot longer,
but if you just think of one bible day as equal to about a million years,
sort of like human years and dog years,
then you’ll have both the science and the religion of the story.
The science is about how it happened and the religion is about what it means.
And the real point of the bible story is that the earth, the animals, the birds, and all of us are sacred.
God made it all, and it took a long time to make – but it wouldn’t take long to ruin it.
So God expects us to take good care of the earth and all living things – and of each other.
Here’s another thing the people who wrote the bible got right:
the bible tells us, over and over again, to reach out and help people who are down on their luck –
people who don’t have food, who don’t have a place to live,
people who can’t afford to see a doctor when they get sick.
The bible also says that we all make mistakes, sometimes really big ones – they got that right!
All through the bible, people make mistakes – because it’s only human: we all do –
which means that we all need to forgive, and to be forgiven, from time to time.
They definitely got that right.
But they also got some things wrong.
One of the writers, a man named Paul, wrote that there is only one way to get to heaven,
that if you don’t believe exactly what he believed, God will stop loving you;
God is still trying to figure out where Paul got that idea,
but God knows it didn’t come from him – or her.
Which is why God sometimes thinks that he or she should just write his own book.
I should stop here to explain that God is a lot of things.
God knows all about shape-shifting, and loves to show up in many different forms,
so God can be a girl, a guy, an eagle, a tree, a flower, a fly on the wall, a porcupine.
There is a little bit of God in every thing that God made,
and that is something else the people who wrote the bible got right.
But something else they got wrong was how God feels about two people falling in love with each other.
More than anything else, God wants us to love each other, not to hurt each other.
So in the eyes of God, true love is always good.
But two or three of the people who wrote the bible want us to think
that it’s not okay for men to fall in love with other men, or women with other women,
which has caused a lot of heartache.
Once again, God knows that idea didn’t come from him – or her.
I think God wishes that the people who wrote the bible weren’t so hung up about sex.
It’s hard to find good role models in the bible for a healthy romantic relationship.
Abraham and Sarah might be it.
But Mary, the mother of Jesus? The writers tell us that she was a virgin.
What kind of message does that send?
Is there something wrong with a married couple making love?
Mary and Joseph were husband and wife – and we know that Jesus had at least five brothers and sisters.
It sounds like Joseph and Mary were a happy couple – why don’t we hear more about that?
We also don’t know whether Jesus himself ever had a love life.
He was a young man – but was he ever in love?
That unanswered question has helped make The Da Vinci Code a best-seller,
because imagining the possibility of a love affair between Jesus and Mary Magdalene
makes Jesus seem much more real to a lot of people.
Of course, it’s not just the people who wrote the bible who are hung up about sex.
So are a lot of us.
As most of you know, being a parent changes everything.
A few years ago, Rolling Stone magazine published a survey on the attitudes of baby boomer parents.
“The gist of it was that the people who had gone through the sexual revolution
did everything,
regretted nothing,
and wanted their children to do none of it.”*
In the parent study group that Barbara O’Neil and I just finished leading,
we talked about the messages that our children get from the popular culture –
the images on magazine covers, on television, and on the Internet,
the raw lyrics of hit song.
You can’t help but wonder and worry: how is all of that affecting our kids?
I believe that our kids are often much stronger – and wiser – than we may realize they are.
Last Thursday morning, in the parent study group,
Barbara said that one night she walked into the television room at home
when her daughters were watching a show with a lot of casual sex in it.
One of the girls looked up and said,
“Don’t worry, Mom, we know life isn’t really like this – but we like the show anyway.”
Last Thursday night, over dinner with a dozen ninth graders in my Minister’s Class,
I asked them: how much influence do you think the media has on what you actually do?
Their answer was: not much.
Some of them have watched a tv show called “The O.C.” a few times, and one of the girls said:
“If you watch that show, you’d think that every kid in high school was having sex all the time.”
The kids know it’s just a tv show.
But then one of the girls said:
“There is a lot of pressure on girls not to be prudes –
but if a girl does take a chance and go a little farther with a boy,
the next day it’s all over the school.”
That girl gets labeled as – I won’t use the word the kids use – she gets branded as loose.
So I asked the boys:
“If you and a girlfriend were to share an intimate and private moment,
why would you tell anybody? Is there no sense of honor, or at least respect for her?”
One of the boys, quite bravely I thought, said, “Actually, there isn’t much.”
He explained that the relationships at their age are not really serious – you aren’t getting married –
so it’s all new and everyone is just trying things out,
and you talk about it with your friends because everyone is curious.
The kids that night went on to tell me that everyone knows the physical stuff already.
What they need is a safe and honest place to talk about the emotional side of relationships –
about the pressures they all feel, and about what a healthy relationship looks like.
I think the least we can do, as a church, is give them such a place.
Our Youth Programs Committee has been talking this all year long.
They have looked at a curriculum called Our Whole Lives
which was designed and written in a rare collaboration
between The United Church of Christ and the Unitarian Universalist Association.
Its purpose is to create a safe and honest place for kids to talk about sexuality,
and the Youth Programs Committee hopes to offer it to our eighth graders starting in the fall.
You have to go through a weekend-long intensive training to teach it,
and both Chris Blagg and his, Stacey Keane Blagg, have taken the training –
you saw them up here last Sunday talking about what this church means to them.
They are all set to teach, and if the parents of next year’s eighth graders agree, we’ll begin this fall.
This is something many of our sister churches have been doing for years – with great success.
It’s as close as we’re going to get to what it would be like if God were to write a book
and read it to our middle school kids –
because it will help them know how to love and be loved when they get older.
Let us hold to the words of Antoine de St.-Exupéry we read to begin this service:
Let us bring up our children.
Let us build memories in our children,
lest they allow treasures to be lost because they have not been given the keys.
We live not by things, but by the meanings of things.
It is needful to transmit the passwords from generation to generation.
So that our kids will know what it means to say to someone you love:
“Set me as a seal upon your heart.”
Amen.
___________________
* From a column by Ellen Goodman, The Boston Globe