a sermon preached on the Song of Songs 2:8-13
F
or our reading from the Hebrew scriptures this evening, we’ve just heard a passage from the Song of Solomon, the Song of Songs. If you weren’t expecting it, it is an odd thing to heard read aloud in worship, this little bit of an exchange of love songs between a man and a woman. It is the one time in the three year cycle of Sunday readings that we read from the Song of Songs, and we heard read a fairly tame bit from what can otherwise be a fairly steamy book.
If you’ve not ever read it through, you should. What you will discover is basically eight chapters of poetic material; largely the back and forth between the lover and the beloved during the opening phase of their romance. And it does heat up…
few weeks back, I read a message that was sent out by a small company that has both American and Canadian employees, wishing everyone a good vacation, and then adding in brackets, “or a good ‘holiday’ to the Canadian.” I thought about that bracketed phrase on and off during my own holiday weeks, being a bit struck by the realization that Canadians still do use the word ‘holidays’ with at least some frequency… though I suspect that “summer vacation” will eventually creep in as the more common term.