From Prudes to Lovers: Recovering the Church’s Bridal Heart

This profound exploration of Song of Songs invites us to reconsider our relationship with God through the lens of divine intimacy. We are challenged to move beyond our cultural discomfort with sexuality and recognize that God designed physical love to point us back to Himself. The sermon introduces us to an ancient understanding of baptism as a nuptial bath, a preparation for intimate communion with our divine lover. Drawing connections between the passionate language of Song of Songs and familiar psalms like Psalm 63, we discover that our spiritual vocabulary has always included the language of longing, desire, and satisfaction. The central spiritual principle is transformative: when we take God's gifts and refuse to let them point back to Him, they become idols that consume us, and we lose the ability to see God through those very gifts. This applies to money, food, and especially sexuality. Both secular culture and conservative Christianity have failed to allow sex to properly direct our hearts toward God, resulting in spiritual anemia and practical dysfunction. The beloved in Song of Songs models for us the proper posture of a divine lover: simultaneously aware of our darkness and confident in our loveliness, actively seeking intimacy with God, and finding in the Eucharist the ultimate kiss that is better than wine.