Song of Songs 8:6-7: Put me like a seal over your heart, like a seal on your arm. For love is as strong as death, jealousy is as severe as Sheol; its flashes are flashes of fire, the very flame of the LORD. Many waters cannot quench love, nor will rivers overflow it; if a man were to give all the riches of his house for love, it would be utterly despised.

Let us pray.

Lord Jesus, in Your relentless love, You wear our names on Your heart, and raise Your right arm in our defense. We pray that You would pour that same fierce love into our hearts by Your Spirit, so that we might love you and one another with the unquenchable love that is strong as death. Amen.

You each hold a candle. Everything that needs to be said about your wedding and your marriage is summed up in that fact: You each hold a candle. In fact, nearly everything that needs to be said about everything is summed up in that fact: You each hold a candle at your wedding, and in that we glimpse the origin and destiny of all things.

God is eternal Light, and Light was His first creature. During creation week He placed the sun, moon, and stars as lights in heaven and Adam and Eve as lights on earth. After rescuing His bride from the darkness of Egypt, He led them by a pillar of light to Sinai, the nuptial mountain. He sent His Son as the world’s Light, called us to be children of light, set His people on a golden lampstand to shine into the darkness, and He will bring creation into the eternal day, where there is no sun or moon because God is the city’s glory and the Lamb is its lamp, the eternal day of light that is also a wedding day.

You each hold a candle at your wedding, and that points also to the character and source of your love for one another. Love, Solomon says, is a flame. You love one another, and that love is a fiery passion within each one of you. Fire is a fitting symbol of love because it is hot, because it is uncontrollable, because it consumes us, because, consuming, it transfigures everything it touches into fuel to keep itself burning. It is a fitting symbol of love above all for another reason: Tie two sticks together, and they remain two. Fire, however, joins with fire to become fire. You each hold a candle, two flames, but today the flames of your love are united, and the two shall become one fire.

Already in Eden, erotic passion is a flame. As his name indicates, Adam comes from earth. The name “Adam” derives from the Hebrew “adamah,” which means earth. As “Adam,” the first man is a man of dust and dirt and ashes. By the end of the creation account, though, Moses uses another word for Adam, the Hebrew word “ish,” a pun on the Hebrew word for fire, “esh.” The first man is of the earth earthy, but he becomes a man of flame. That transformation from dust to fire occurs when Yahweh presents Adam’s bride to him. There is an additional pun. In Hebrew, the word for woman is “ishshah,” also a pun on the word for “fire.” Eve is created as fire, and when Adam the earth man sees her, he becomes ish, enflamed. Adam, the man of earth, begins to burn with Pentecostal fire when he sees his bride. Adam and Eve thus burn as a single flame – ish and ishshah unite in one esh of love.

Solomon alludes to that primordial event when he says that love is a flame. But Solomon says something more. The flame of love that overcomes death, the love that is as strong as Sheol and cannot be quenched by many waters, that is the “very flame of Yah,” the consuming fire that is the God of Israel. Your love for one another is a fire, but it is not just your fire. At the end of an erotic poem, at the climax of a song that sings the beauty of the human body and the delights of sex, in the theme verses of a poem that speaks of kisses and wine and apples and sweet honey and scarlet lips and glittering jewels and shapely breasts – in that context, Solomon includes the one and only explicit reference to the God of Israel. You both burn with love for one another, but Solomon tells you that this love, if it is true love, springs out from a source deeper than your own souls. It is a human flash of the flame of God.

Let us muse on this one more step: Adam is ignited by the presence of Eve, and the fire of his love turns to song. The first human words in history were a love poem: “This is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman – ishshah – because she was taken out of man – ish.” Enflamed, Adam turns poet, and sings. So too does Solomon: Burning with the flame of Yah, the love as strong as death and jealous as the grave, Solomon sings not just a Song, but the superlative Song, the Song of all songs, the song of a new Adam in the presence of his new Eve.

Song too symbolizes the character of love. Solid objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time. Sounds can. Melodies twine and intertwine and untwine in polyphonic embrace, melody chases melody in fugal pursuit, notes overlap and penetrate one another in the same sonic space to form a chord. Your love is a duet: Matt’s love does not silence Josie’s, nor Josie’s Matt’s. Your voices, your songs, unite, and the two shall be one song. Fire and music: This is your love, because fire is visual music and music is audible flame.

We have been talking in pictures and poetry, but that is not a diversion from the day-to-day realities of your life together. Nothing is more practical than a picture. Nothing is more realistic than poetry. You aspire to have a long and fruitful marriage. You want your home to be warm and bright. You want your children to carry on the flame. You want your home to be a light to your neighbors, a hearth of refuge for the weary. You want your joyful love to burn as strongly decades from now as it does today.

Yet you live in a world of death, a world where floods of disappointment snuff out dreams. You live in a world where fires don’t just keep going, where love grows cold. Left to your own resources, you cannot sustain the flame of love that brought you here today. You can’t keep those candles burning forever. Left to yourselves, your love is not unquenchable. Your love will only endure until death if it is nourished by the flame of Yah. That is the fire that must be fueled and nourished for your marriage to shine with glory. The flame of your love will burn only as it is supplied by the oil of the Spirit; the song of your love will continue only as it is a variation on the Song of the Father and the Son, the Song that is Spirit.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Let us pray

Father, in the beginning You sang the world into existence through Your Word and the Breath of Your Spirit. Fill Matt and Josie with Your Spirit, that their lives may be united in a single song, harmony on Your eternal music. Through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with You and with the Holy Spirit, ever one God, unto ages of ages. Amen.