Let the Plain Word of God Take Place

Let the Plain Word of God Take Place March 26, 2017

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I’m not much inclined, in all my spare time, to the reading of sermons, being not very holy at all, although I do occasionally listen to the odd exposition when I get the chance. But there is one sermon which is worthy of being read, all the way through, even on the Internet in very small print. I ran into it a long time ago and in the very middle discovered my life verse, no wait, quote.

John Wesley is preaching on the subject of (although he would absolutely not put it like this) whether or not animals go to heaven. The sermon is called The General Deliverance and his text is from Romans 8 and when you have time, you should sit down and just read it comfortably with your cat or whatever, sitting on your keyboard.

In the very middle there is a beautiful line which has become my battling cry, and how I try out all new pens the way Annie Dillard’s mother used to scroll out ‘Terwilliger Bunts One.’

John Wesley proclaims, there in the middle of a sermon of all places,

“Away with vulgar prejudices and let the plain word of God take place.”

When I first mouthed the words over, so long ago, I was quite shocked, and immediately began to consider the burdensome difficulty of ‘the plain word of God.’ I had just heard an interview with a preacher I admire very much, breezily dismissing the idea that animals ‘go to heaven.’ Indeed, the idea seemed completely absurd to him and so he just shook his head and laughingly said no.

Now, of course, a serious Christian needs to stop and consider all his terms. What does he mean, exactly, by heaven? Is he taking about the place where the soul goes, having been rent asunder in death from the body? Or is he taking about the New Heavens and the New Earth, that gloriously remade kingdom where the body and the soul will once again dwell together in unity? We aren’t always very careful about what we mean, and we sometimes throw words around, like Heaven, without properly considering what we are trying to say.

And then there are the disparate considerations of what happen to the individual when he looks into the eyes of a dog, or a cat, or a pair of less than usually sharp witted baby jackals. For many of us, when we look into the eyes of a dog there is a spark of true understanding and recognition, and it’s impossible to fathom that that other creature might not have a soul, even as I myself has a soul. But when someone like John MacArthur looks into the eyes of a puppy, he is not so moved. These people describe themselves as ‘not a dog person’ or ‘not a cat person.’ And they are forever divided from the rest of humanity but just not getting it.

In other words, when you come to the Plain Meaning of Scripture, you have all kinds of problems. Fights break out and people don’t agree.

But that’s why I like the construction of the whole line. ‘Away with vulgar prejudices,’ says Mr. Wesley. You have to stop for a minute and consider all the junk you’re bringing with you to the scriptural text. There is no way to see the plain meaning of anything if you have cruddied up your heart with a lot of unconsidered assumptions and habits of mind which deaden your ears and blind your eyes. The human person, much like Henri Le Chat Noir, can’t really see and hear and understand. We go around from prejudice to prejudice, exchanging one for another. One of the reasons the Bible is So hard is because when most of us are reading it, we have 1. No idea what it is really about and 2. How incredibly blind and foolish we are as the words are going by us.

And, indeed, the blindness and deafness, though we can’t help it, is vulgarity itself. The kinds of stuff that we load up and plunk down on God’s own self revelation can be sometimes just clueless, but often is downright evil. Ugly. Wrong headed. To strip it away and try to look honestly at what God is really and truly saying is painful, occasionally too awful to fathom. And so most of us don’t do it, preferring the comfort of our muffled, dim, prejudicial vulgarity.

That’s why the other part of the line, ‘Let the plain word of God Take Place,’ is so wonderful. It is possible, by prayer and supplication, to come at the text with a deep seated helplessness that lets all the prejudices be stripped away. The words of the Bible aren’t just words that you read and try to understand and then live by, the way you read 7 Habits of Highly Defective People (that’s probably not what it’s really called). Because it’s God, and not JK Rowling, the words themselves have power. Not power that you harness when you unlock the secret of numeracy in the Bible. Not power that you appropriate to yourself by speaking words of life and faith. Not power that you can wield over other people by shouting them all more loudly. None of that. The power resides in God whose word is strong enough to Take Place, who can establish what he is saying both eternally for all creation, but also in the muffled shadows of your own bad thinking.

I’m sure you’ve experienced this. You go along believing something that seems reasonable, like that if you just do this one thing God will surely love you. And then suddenly you come across those splayed open carcasses, of animals no less, in Genesis. (Talk about not being able get to the plain meaning. What on earth is going on here?) Abraham is asleep, having apparently given up waiting for God to do anything. And then finally a torch and a fire pot go through the carcasses. You read on to the next verse and consider strongly the idea that there are lots of other books you could be enduring. But then later the author of Hebrews says that God, in order that Abraham might know the surety and the hope of the promise, ‘swore by himself.’ That’s what the fire pot was. God was taking an oath with himself, to love Abraham forever, regardless of what Abraham did, on the basis of the son that Abraham would have, which son would be the ancestor of the Son who would save us all, who would be able to restore this groaning, futile, frustrated creation to beauty and peace.

When you put it like that (as the preacher at Good Shepherd did last week) it is very plain. And so strong that it shatters the anxious bargaining that comprises so much of the Christian’s life in prayer. ‘I’m sorry God, I swear I will never do that again. Just give me one more chance.’ As if I can swear to God and have it establish anything. My fluffy dog sits there looking at me and wondering what kind of dumb vulgar thing I’m thinking now.

Read the whole sermon, and then have another go at the Bible. Don’t be vulgar and prejudiced. Let the plain Word of God take place.


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