Let Him Kiss Me with the Kisses of His Mouth

Today marks Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent.

For the next six weeks, we are invited by the church calendar to prepare for the commemoration of the crucifixion on Good Friday and the resurrection on Easter Sunday through reflection, repentance, and a season of fresh turning towards God.

Traditionally, we begin Ash Wednesday with an imposition of ashes on our foreheads and the benediction: “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.” Many also dedicate the season to the practices of prayer, fasting, and generosity.

When we think about the themes of Lent, perhaps our first thought is not of Song of Songs, which is a beautiful love poem between a bride and her bridegroom filled with romantic and sometimes even sexual imagery.

(Yet, I find myself thinking about the odd juxtaposition this year of St. Valentine’s Day on Ash Wednesday — perhaps the Western calendar is trying to tell us that the two are not as far away as we might think!)

Historically, readers of faith have interpreted this text as more than a love poem, but as an invitation to a living relationship with a lovesick God.

One Jewish rabbi goes so far as to proclaim that the Song of Songs is the new Holy of Holies, following the destruction of the Jewish Temple. According to scholar Ellen Davis, this means that for ancient Jews “the Song of Songs was worthy to replace the Temple as a means of access to God” (Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs, p. 240).

Christian pastor Eugene Peterson (author of The Message) similarly encourages us that the Song of Songs can help us to remember that salvation is meant to be a living, dynamic relationship rather than a historic event. He argues that Song of Songs was read by Jewish people at Passover (which overlaps with Christian Easter in its significance and celebration) “to protect against the danger” of observing “only the ritual and not the reality” of salvation (Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work, p. 29).

In other words, the Song of Songs can give us language to pray to help us live in a dynamic love affair with God!

So, for the next six weeks, I’d love to invite us to use verses from Song of Songs to reflect on our love for God and invite the great Lover to woo us again into a more wholehearted devotion for Him.

Or, if we find ourselves this Lenten season distant from God’s love, disconnected, or even with a wounded heart, and if the idea of a passionate love affair with a God we can’t see or touch feels like a distant memory or even a hopeless dream, I’d love to invite us to sneak some of these phrases into our prayer life and see what God can do with them.

Perhaps God could even use this season and this wild song to "re-wild” our hearts, to call us back to a “first love” again, in the language of Jesus in Revelation.

Isn’t that what Lent is about anyway? Isn’t it an invitation to turn — to refresh — and reset our hearts on the central love letter of the Christian faith — the cross of Christ? What is the cross if not a demonstration of God’s wholehearted love for us, and what is our prayer life if not a loving response to God’s self-giving act?

Even fasting (whether you choose to engage in it during Lent or not) can be a way to essentially say “I’m going to say no to a lesser love for a season to make more room for love for God in my life.”

Song of Songs opens with this line:

For some, this language might seem shocking. Even 16th-century Saint Teresa of Avila acknowledges a sense of shock — “What words are these that a worm speaks them to its creator!” (Meditations on the Song of Songs 1:10). We might have more modern reservations, but the sentiment is the same — how can we pray this?!

Yet, she also acknowledges that when one truly falls in love with God, “the soul that is enkindled with a love that makes it mad desires nothing else than to say these words” (1:10).

Perhaps we might also find ourselves strangely drawn to the idea of moving past clinical and cold words in our prayer life, into words filled with a genuine, relational longing. Maybe we can remember moments in our history with God where our relationship with Him felt living, dynamic, and altogether like the best relationship of our lives, and the words we used in prayer demonstrated a similar relational familiarity.

How are the words in your conversation with God these days? Do they demonstrate a cold and clinical acquaintanceship, or do they demonstrate a sense of loving closeness with a Friend?

What the Bride is essentially saying in these lines is “Come and love me! Come and demonstrate your love in a real way!”

In a way, I think this is similar to what Paul prays for the Ephesian church. He prays:

God’s love is limitless, and Paul invites us to pray in the spirit of Song of Songs 1:2 — “Come and kiss me with the kisses of your mouth! Come and show me more of Your love! I haven’t even scratched the surface!”

I’d love to invite us this morning to have the courage to pray these words.

I recognize the boldness of this — essentially asking us to ask God to prove his love for us — especially for those who find themselves today more disappointed with God than drawn towards Him. Maybe we even find ourselves afraid — perhaps we feel God has let us down in some way, and inviting Him to demonstrate His love for us feels like a recipe to invite another disappointment.

Yet, this is what Lent invites us to do. The season of Lent invites us to refresh and reset our love, and to invite God to once again romance our hearts with the message of the cross of Christ. Ultimately, God’s love letter is Jesus and we get to invite him to woo us again this season.

So, I’d love to invite us to pray today:

• Begin by taking some deep breaths in and out. Perhaps as you breathe in pray the words from a few verses down in Song of Songs: “Draw me,” and as you breathe out pray: “after You” (1:4).

• Once you feel settled, begin to name with honesty: how is your love for God today? Does the flame in your heart feel cold and dim or even put out entirely? Begin in the spirit of Ash Wednesday by simply repenting and acknowledging any ways that you may have let the flame in your heart grow dim and cold.

• Then, simply invite God to come and love you. I’d invite us to pray in the spirit of Song of Songs 1:2 — with boldness and confidence that God really does love us, and really does want to show us His love.

• Is there any way that you can put this prayer into practice for the next 6 weeks — either by fasting something to challenge God to fill a space in your life with his love or by adding a new rhythm of prayer?

Amen!