Sermon by the Rev. Caela Simmons Wood
First Congregational UCC of Manhattan, KS
Song of Songs 2:8-13
June 21, 2026
We are officially in the thick of the summer holiday season. Have you ever noticed how many holidays are packed into such a short period of time here in the U.S.? Mothers’ Day, Memorial Day, Flag Day, Fathers’ Day, Juneteenth, Independence Day….did I miss any? That’s a lot of holidays for a two month period! Sometimes it feels like it’s hard to settle into any kind of routine during this time of year. The whole town feels different with many of our college students gone. Younger students are out of school and working summer jobs or splashing in the pool in their bright Little Apple Day Camp t-shrits. People of all ages are heading off to visit family in far-flung places or going on road trips, cruises, adventures.
By the time we get to Labor Day in a few months, we’ll be ready to settle back into a groove. But, for now, many of us are decidedly out of our regular routines. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
After all, the Bible is full of stories about stepping off the beaten path, exploring, learning, growing. There is very little in our Bible that encourages us to just wiggle ourselves down into a well-worn groove in the record, staying put forever. Even the rhythm of time God establishes in the first chapter of Genesis has a built in break from our regular routines.
If you think about a vinyl record, Sabbath is a bit like the ungrooved surface between each track. The record needle settles down into the groove and brings music to our ears. When the engraving goes away, the sound ends, and we’re left with a space between songs. The record is still turning, the needle is still doing its thing, but the break in the music causes us to sit up and take notice. Something is about to change.
This break in the audio action makes an album more engaging. The brief pause gives us a moment to shift our attention, prepare for what’s next, listen with fresh ears. Holidays and sabbath do the same, don’t they? A small shift in the routine keeps things fresh, helps us move through our lives with greater intention, causes us to notice things we might have missed otherwise.
There is a line in today’s reading from the Song of Songs that makes for an excellent “break between tracks” mantra to hold onto: “Arise, my love, and come away.”
It is an invitation as lovely as anything else in scripture. “Arise, my love, and come away.” Pause, lift yourself up and out of that groove, turn towards new possibilities. Try something new. Shift your routine just slightly. Move with intention, rather than just riding those well-worn grooves of your life without a thought.
In the context of the Song of Songs, these words are spoken from one romantic partner to another. And since the Church has historically been so antsy about discussing bodies, romantic love, and sex it turns out the Song of Songs doesn’t come up very often in our lectionaries. The Revised Common Lectionary only schedules this beautiful book twice and the newer Narrative Lectionary somehow managed to avoid it entirely.
Which is really too bad because Christianity has been used in so many harmful ways to instill shame around human sexuality. If we had all grown up hearing the poetic words from this book more often, we might have been better-prepared to combat unhelpful ideas like abstinence-only sex education.
What we have in the Song of Songs, instead, is an entire book of beautiful poetry devoted to the joys and delights of two people who are not shy about explicitly detailing their love for each other. They are not afraid to talk about their bodies or the joys that can be found in honoring and inhabiting our bodies fully.
The whole book is a dialogue between two young lovers. God is not mentioned, which has sometimes puzzled theologians. Because of this, there is a long history in the Church of allegorizing the Song - saying it’s about God’s love for us, rather than about two young people’s intense romantic love for one another. While I don’t think it’s appropriate to pretend-away-the-sexuality in this book, I do think we can use that face-value-romantic love as a jumping off point for exploring all kinds of love that humans share...romantic love, love between friends and families, our love for our pets, nature, art, place. Our love - in all its varied forms - often grows out of a connection to God….just as our connection to God grows when we experience love - all kinds of love, not just romantic - here on earth.
In the passage we read today, the young lovers urge one another to pause, make space for joy, beauty, pleasure, love in their daily lives. They invite their beloved to come away to a place where they can enjoy each other and rest fully in the wondrous gift of love.
Now this - this! - is something so many of us need to hear. This invitation to come away to a holy place to make space for giving and receiving love. Not just romantic love, but love of all kinds.
When I think about all kinds of love, I often reflect that some of the purest love I’ve been gifted with in my life has come from animals. Sometimes when I’m busy or distracted or in a rush or stressed out, my dog Sweetpea comes to me and bonks me. She wants to play with her favorite rope toy. Or she just wants a few scratches and a cuddle. “Arise, and come away!” her eyes say to me. I can try to put her off for a while, but she usually wins. And when I do finally “arise and come away,” I receive the good gifts of love. I feel tension seep away when I put my hand on her belly and feel her breathing. And I laugh like a kid while we play tug-the-rope.
“Arise, and come away,” she says. Take a moment to just be. Take a moment to love. Take a moment to remember you are loved. And the invitation is good. Because when we accept the invitation to bask in love - in all its many forms - we remember that holiness is all around us.
So often we fool ourselves into thinking holiness is reserved for “sacred spaces” like church sanctuaries or deathbeds or the Grand Canyon. Those places can be holy, certainly. But holiness can be found in many other places, too...an everyday moment, a little ritual. Can you think of a time this past week that felt holy to you? We’ll pause for just a moment to give you space to ponder that silently.
(pause)
“Arise, and come away,” Love beckons. “Get out of the groove you’ve settled down into. Come and see the beauty, the joy, the holiness in digging in the dirt, Facetime with a grandchild, chopping vegetables for dinner, turning towards someone you love and connecting through touch.”
The word holy seems to have its origins in wholeness and health. When we accept Christ’s invitation to seek holiness each day, we are really accepting an invitation to move towards wholeness and health. And not just for ourselves as individuals! Just think about what our community would be like if every single day we listened to that invitation to “Arise, and come away.” If we each allowed ourselves to seek even 3 or 4 moments of connection with Love, beauty, joy, vulnerability the way these young lovers do in the Song of Songs. Imagine how our hearts would grow. Imagine how the gift of God’s love would overflow out of each of us to the world around us, creating more wholeness and health for all creation.
The invitation is there, my friends. “Arise, and come away.” Walk into the open arms of Love and be willing to receive the good gifts of the Spirit. There’s no expectation that we do it perfectly. Even if we just open ourselves to receiving God’s love in a holy moment ONCE each day - just one time! - we will discover that we yearn for more and more of it.
You’ve heard it said that “practice makes perfect” and this is rarely true. But “practice makes progress,” and the more we open ourselves to holy love, wholeness, and health - the more naturally it will overflow into the world around us, creating a chain-reaction of healing in a world that desperately needs it.
It doesn’t have to be anything big. It can be something small, like this:
A spiritual teacher of mine told me that when she was a little girl, her mom ironed shirts for 8 kids every day. “Arise, my love, and come away,” those shirts said to her each day...and while I doubt that she experienced that chore as a time of delight and joy, nevertheless, she found a way to seek holiness in that mundane task. Each day as she ironed, she prayed for each of her 8 children by name. She pressed God’s love into each shirt as she prepared it for each one of her beloveds.
And she was often frustrated that she was rushing, running behind, hurrying to complete the task. And so her children would breeze through, waiting for each shirt to come off the board before school. And when they put them on, they were still warm. Still warm with love. Still warm with care. And I can see those kids putting those shirts on, day after day, wrapping their mother’s prayers around them like a fierce cloak of love. Their mother’s love, which flowed from God’s love - a gift given freely for the taking.
“Arise, my love, and come away.” And off they went into the world, wrapped up in love, sent out from holiness to holiness to do love and be loved as beloved children of God.
“Arise, my love, and come away.”
The invitation still calls.
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