Crippled and Crying
Dear Friends,
I go for surgery at the start of this month.
My hip, not my heart, so nothing that serious (I hope!) – but a date with the doc that’s been coming for long enough: for over 14 years in fact. Since Saturday 23rd May 2009 to be exact.
That’s when the damage was done. A rather different ‘nine in the morning’ moment, one week short of Pentecost that year.
I remember the moment, the day, the occasion so well. It was the third day of the Church of Scotland’s annual General Assembly, and the Saturday evening had been set aside to hear a case: a ‘Complaint and Dissent’ brought against the Presbytery of Aberdeen by a dozen faithful leaders from a range of Church of Scotland fellowships here in Aberdeen.
You don’t need me to tell you what the case was all about! It was a ‘high noon’ moment in the Church of Scotland’s history: a moment of crisis and choice, when the Church was obliged to take sides. Would pragmatism or principle be the essence of the Church’s life? Would Scripture, or society, dictate the Church’s stance?
Everyone knew how much was really riding on the outcome of that case (and the subsequent years have shown indeed just how sadly damaging would be the fallout from that night). I certainly did. I’d been one of a sizeable group of concerned commissioners who’d met to pray beforehand and to ponder together who might be best placed to argue the case for a thoroughly biblical approach to the issue at hand. I’d drawn the metaphorical ‘short straw’ and was appointed to speak.
A not inconsiderable weight of solemn responsibility, and a strange, oppressive sense of deep foreboding, lay heavy on my heart as I trekked my way that morning up from Princes Street towards the fine, ‘twin-towered’ entrance to the Church’s Assembly Hall. Up along the footpath, with the landmark National Galleries off to my right and then the famous ‘Playfair Steps’ as the last big climb on up the Mound to the Hall.
A beggar was there at the foot of the steps, seated, bedraggled, with a bowl at his feet to receive whatever spare coinage the passersby might have: no bad place to be, of course, on the morning of a General Assembly Saturday. I was making to bend and speak with him as well as give him money, when my leading left foot must have landed on a piece of pigeon poo and slipped suddenly forwards. The ‘physics’ of that moment was all skewed – the combination of my body weight being shifted down and forwards to engage the man, and my left leg suddenly shifted out in front of me, resulted in my knee being hugely hyper-extended. A sudden, sharp and searing pain. The hamstrings shot to bits (not a technical description, you’ll understand), and the sciatic nerve (it seemed) being suddenly top-and-bottom torn: a pain in my leg, at my ankle and hip, equivalent to that which you get when the dentist hits the nerve.
I landed in the beggar’s bowl. His meagre morning takings thrown aside. And myself unable to move. In agony. And embarrassed. Silver and gold .. well, the beggar, poor man, had none now. And instead, he’d got a lame man in his begging bowl. It felt in that moment like a sacrilegious parody of Acts chapter 3. And it felt, as well, in that self-same instant, like an all-out attempt on the part of the powers of darkness to ‘take me out’. I hope you’re clear that the work of the gospel is very much a battle; and the spiritual conflict involved is always so desperately real and intense. That real: ‘take-you-out’ real (in the hating not dating sense of the phrase).
A kind man helped me up and virtually carried me over the road to the Hall: I made it back that evening to the sitting of the Church as a court, and I argued the cause, as best I could, of adherence to God’s own Word. I might have won the argument (any number of people assured me of that – “In terms of logic, reason and Scripture the debate was overwhelmingly won by those who sought to be faithful to the Scriptures ..” declared one observer); but we lost the case.
It was dark when we came out of the Hall: a dark, dark night. And I’ve limped ever since.
Indeed, when I hobbled to the front to preach the next day, I told the congregation how it was that I’d been sorely crippled. And how it was that now the Church herself was drastically and permanently crippled. Sometimes preachers, pastors, prophets – sometimes in the providence of God, they get to be a visual aid themselves, an unmistakable, in-your-face portrayal of a vital, sombre message from the Lord.
Crippled. That’s what that painful departure from the truth of God has done: it crippled the Church.
Not a day’s gone by in the last 14 years but I’m all too aware of the grievous, sore, debilitating impact of decisions which were made that night. The story of Acts 3 haunts me day by day. What happened on that Saturday back in 2009 – that’s not how the story is meant to run; it’s the converse of the story, the story re-told in the absence of grace and with the presence instead of sin. Because the sin of disobedience throws everything into reverse: sin incurs the dreadful, painful process of an ‘uncreating’ work.
Disintegration and darkness, instead of order and light.
A void where once there was fulness. Think of the empty pews that there are in so many old churches today. Think of the empty buildings, for that matter – countless buildings, each one in days now past a place where the praises of Christ were preached and sung and proclaimed, but now devoid of any such praise, a soul-less shrine in which the vacuous, empty pointlessness of life is drowned in drink and noisy promiscuity.
And instead of a beggar being raised and restored to rejoice once again in His God, the herald of God (that’s what the church is called to be) now left hamstrung and hurt and reduced as a cripple, unable to move, far less help. That moment back then at the foot of the Playfair Steps was a painful, prophetic portrayal of what, that very evening, was at stake: what happens when you don’t play fair, when you don’t play by the Maker’s rules, and when you choose to pooh-pooh His word.
Sin is ever like that, throwing into reverse the good and always gracious work of God. Disdain the Word of God: distort the truth of God: despise the will of God: dismiss the Son of God: and then with glib, irreverent brashness dare somehow to presume upon the grace of God – such sin brings ‘uncreation’, the undoing and dismantling of the good and gentle labours of the great Creator God.
It’s crippling. We’ve seen that in the churches. And we’ve seen that in the nation too. Laura Kuenssberg’s series may have centred on the southern seat of government, but its title is applicable and pertinent up here. ‘State of Chaos.’ Well, yes, of course. Sin has that ‘uncreating’ consequence on all of life: it dis-integrates, returning us back to that disordered state of chaos and darkness and void.
The sin of disobedience is crippling, through and through. And I’ve lived with the lameness for years. A permanent reminder (if I ever needed one) of the parlous state of gospel work in a land which was once the land of the Book; and a constant reminder as well of the pain there must be in the heart of the Lord Himself when the favour He’s shown to His church in this land has been brazenly binned and betrayed.
Must I live with that limp for the rest of my days? Must we as His people now live with that limp for the rest of our days? No longer those majestic, Isaianic eagles, soaring high on the wind of the Spirit: but simply now lame ducks, paddling around in the murky, muddied puddles of a Christ-less pagan world? Is that what our future will be? No more a life lived out in the ‘promised land’ of Pentecost and grace, but the ‘discipline’ experience of an ‘exile’ in the Babylon which Scotland had become?
Those were the sobering questions bombarding my heart in the wake of that pain-filled day. I cried my eyes out, the pain was so real and intense.
And then I remembered Jacob. How he, too, had presumed to wrestle with God. How he, too, had been crippled. And how he, with his hip now painfully wrenched, had simply laid hold of the Lord and pleaded with Him – “I will not let you go unless You bless me.” It was a pivotal moment in that man’s life. The moment at last, after long, long years of self-sufficient confidence, when his only recourse was to cling to the Lord and beg Him for His blessing.
No longer Jacob, but Israel. A changed man, embarking on a changed and challenging future, and doing so with a limp which left him leaning on the Lord. “The sun rose above him as he passed Peniel. And he was limping because of his hip.” There was a measure of comfort in the cameo thus described. The sun rose above him. The night was not where the story would end: the sun rose above him – bright, warm, hopeful. A new day dawned. A different day: a difficult and demanding day. But a new day all the same. A day that was full of promise; and a life that was marked by his limping. Crippled, for sure, but crying in pain to his God, and clinging like never before to the Lord who alone could deliver the blessing he’d all his life sought.
I remembered Jabez, too, of course. A man whose story began with pain, a man, indeed, whose life was wholly ‘branded’ with pain from the start. And a man who, like Jacob of old, had clung to the Lord, resolved in his gospel-shaped perspective that gain, not pain, would be the word writ largest on the contours of his life. And he, too, cried out to God in his pain and sought from the Lord His blessing: “Oh that You would bless me and enlarge my territory ..”
So, crippled, yes, we might indeed well be: but that must surely prompt in us a crying to the Lord. An earnest, urgent, pain-fueled crying to the Lord, begging Him for blessing in the Babylon to which we’d now been brought. Jacob and Jabez: I was joining the queue!
And always I came back to that great pentecostal narrative which climaxed in the drama of Acts 3. A man who’d been crippled (he’d been lame from birth) being put on his feet again. The paradigmatic miracle, as it were, displaying from the outset what the impact of the good news of God’s grace in Jesus Christ most truly is. And the same significant miracle later on, repeated (just in case we missed the point) – repeated as the high point in the first great missionary journey to the Gentile world. In Lystra. A man who was lame – lame from birth again. And enabled at last to walk. His crutches discarded. His future restored. A striking picture of God’s gospel grace. The lame will walk.
Back to where I started, then. I go for surgery at the start of the month. Tempting as it is to do so, I mustn’t use the phrase, ‘replacement theology’, since that refers to something rather specific – and significantly different! But perhaps a hip replacement does have a certain parallel in the gracious gospel dealings of our God with cripples who have clung to Him and cried out for His blessing in their pain.
For there has indeed been ‘surgery’ which most of us have known these past 10 years or so. Don’t you think so? Leaving the denomination was ‘surgery’, for sure: a ‘replacement’ sort of surgery in many ways – with the Lord, the master Surgeon, Himself intent on addressing the limp, and gently, graciously, and always with exquisite care, putting a pained and crippled people on their feet again as they clung to Him and cried to Him for blessing.
Who knows but this is not another kind portrayal by our gracious God of what He’s pleased to do? His mercy and His kindness know no bounds!
“Then will the eyes of the blind be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped. Then will the lame leap like a deer, and the mute tongue shout for joy. Water will gush forth in the wilderness and streams in the desert” (Is.35.5f). Please God it may be so! Please God we may yet find the lame and limping leaping like a deer! Please God we may yet see those waters in the wilderness! Please God we may yet know those streams of living water, the Spirit of the living God, once more poured out across the dry and thirsty desert of our land!
Your servant in Christ Jesus our Lord
Jeremy Middleton