A Sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on June 2, 2024 by Revd Richard Carter
Reading for address: Mark 2: 23 – 3: 6
I wonder how many of you remember the character of Nurse Ratched from the film classic One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Milos Forman’s multi-Oscar-winning 1975 adaptation of the Ken Kesey novel. If you have seen the film, Nurse Ratched will be hard to forget. I haven’t seen it for years but can still remember it so vividly. Mac played by Jack Nicholson gets himself admitted to a state mental institution wrongly assuming it will be a soft alternative to going to prison. Jack Nicholson’s Mac is an extraordinary character who dominates the screen, his maverick character threatening the order and stability of the establishment. He is like a crazy messiah from the other sides of the walls who challenges all the rules and under his influence it feels like the patients are going take over and liberate the asylum. But Nurse Ratched is the icy, white-clad matron, played by Louise Fletcher, who rules over the male psychiatric patients. Ratched is reserved and controlled, and the patients know she has the power to make recommendations about drugs or possible electro-convulsive shock therapy. Fletcher’s steely calm and complete inflexibility makes her placid calmness terrifying, she seems to reflect the embodiment of institutional intransigence. She enforces rules that seem to infantilise, administers medication that sedates, and a regime which right down to its banal therapy sessions, music, and her voice over the public address system, denies the patients themselves any rights to decide for themselves – it’s about control; chilling, dictatorial, clinical control, that cancels out any spark of human spontaneity. The mental ward is like a prison, or an oppressive school: a dysfunctional institution and Nurse Ratched is its inhuman face. In the most traumatic scene, nurse Ratched publicly humiliates the fragile Billy threatening to tell his mother how he has behaved. It’s like watching a piece of traumatic psychological bullying. In movie history, Nurse Ratched is up there among the top ten villains and yet the terrifying thing is she is actually just carrying out the rules. Her inhumanity is not based on conscious cruelty but her self-righteousness, her total inflexibility, her intransigent belief that the rules must be applied no matter what and the belief that she is unquestionably right.
I wonder if in your life you have ever come up against a culture of intransigence. An authority that will not listen, or will not change, or will not recognise the suffering that it is causing. It is the most frustrating feeling in the world when one’s own deep sense of what you know to be right comes up against a brick wall of an institutional self-righteousness. Such frustration is vividly portrayed in the films of Ken Loach, where his characters are often victims of poverty and injustice who simply can’t get those in authority to hear their voice. And the more they don’t listen, the more frustrated the victims become, and the more the victims are condemned for their protestations. You don’t have to look to fiction to witness this scenario, there are examples all around us. The Post Office refusing to listen to the postmasters falsely accused of theft, the medical establishment refusing for years to listen to those given infected blood, Grenfell Tower and those who live in sub-standard housing where the housing authorities took financial shortcuts with flammable cladding and failed fire regulations for Kensington’s poorest. Or the Windrush Scandal, where the rights of those who were invited to come and work for this country were denied legal status, refused benefits, and even deported. I wonder how many years it will be before there is a public enquiry into the way we are at present treating migrants and their incarceration and deportation without trial. There is a common thread in these stories. In each of these situations there is a huge power imbalance and there is a complete refusal, often over many years, for those in authority to listen to the voice of the victim – rather it is the victims who are cast as perpetrators of their own problems, as trouble-makers.
Perhaps you think that today’s Gospel is far removed from the scandals and injustices of our time, but look again. As Jesus and his disciples walk through the cornfields, his disciples pluck heads of grain and the religious authorities, in this case the Pharisees, are onto it instantly. They see it as a sign of unlawfulness, breaking the rules of the Sabbath. Jesus by implication is disruptive, dangerous, rebellious; he is refusing to submit to their rules. Jesus’ answer to them cleverly reveals how even King David was not confined by the letter and he concludes: ‘The Sabbath was made for humankind and not humankind for the Sabbath.’ The authorities must be riled by what they will see as blatant defiance of their control and still more angered by his next words: ‘So the son of man is Lord even of the Sabbath.’ How dare he imply that he has the right to defy their authority. Who does he think he is and how can they allow such a dangerous precedent in public? What begins as a seemingly insignificant incident of disciples plucking a few grains of corn now intensifies. For in the synagogue there is a man with a withered hand and those in authority are watching Jesus to see what he will do, for to them the preservation of rule and control is more important than human compassion or need. And again Jesus publicly defies them. He is angered and grieved by their hardness of heart. And he confronts them directly: ‘Is it lawful to do good or to harm on the Sabbath, to save life or to kill?’ You may think this is a small dispute, but this dispute is at the very heart of what will lead to Christ’s death. The one who hears the cry of the poor and the oppressed is seen as the threat and the danger. The Saviour is condemned for he threatens their authority and control. The Pharisees went out and immediately conspired with the Herodians against Jesus on how to destroy him.
Last weekend when the pilgrims from St Martin-in-the-Fields arrived at Canterbury Cathedral after four days of walking, we were welcomed by David Monteith, Dean of Canterbury Cathedral. In the cloisters beside the grave of Dick Sheppard who was both Vicar of St Martin’s and later also Dean of Canterbury he reminded us all of Dick Sheppard’s words when he famously called St Martin’s, ‘The Church with the ever-open door.’ David Monteith talked about the need to continue to be those who open doors. He said that the problem is that so often institutions want not to open doors but to close doors. To preserve authority and control rather than let people in and out. The church itself closes doors. Religion used as some colonial means of control to make others believe what they are told to believe. How different from Jesus, the Good Shepherd, who leads the sheep both in and out of the sheepfold. There is freedom in Christ, an opening up rather than a closing down. They listen for his voice, he knows each of his flock by name. He raises up rather than diminishes.
At the end of the pilgrimage I spoke to one of our International Group pilgrims. A pilgrim who arrived in this country aged 9 and is now 29 and is still seeking asylum and experiencing homeless. ‘What did you like most about this pilgrimage?’ I asked him. ‘All my life,’ he said, ‘I have been searching for freedom. In these last four days I found it. Freedom to find space and leave behind my fears, freedom to be equal and not pushed down by what people think of me, freedom to be safe with others, to talk with everyone from all different places – freedom to be kind to one another, freedom in the way we were welcomed, freedom to belong.’ I used his words in the final service for they speak, I think, to everyone. Everyone who feels trapped by feelings of not being good enough or accepted. I glimpsed in his longing for freedom, years of exclusion, lonely and adrift in a foreign land. Yet beneath all this suffering a goodness, an integrity, a quick insightful intelligence which can discern the real and the truthful – the longing to be accepted and belong even as he searches for the way out, as though preparing for rejection before it happens. Humanity with the beauty of a fawn ready to bolt.
Isaiah describes the suffering servant as a bruised reed. And yet this is the one who will set us all free. This is the one who unmasks God – the Word made flesh – the one discovered in the tenderness of humanity the open heart, the open door.
It is in community, companionship and reciprocity – equal before God – that we find human freedom: the ability to speak out and open doors of trust and let others in and ourselves out. When we learn to walk together we glimpse the wells within each other. The places of fear and darkness and pain and failures, but also the human spirit within; the springs of hope, the humanity that is our living water, deep within. We are all God’s children. We are not defined by the bruising. We cannot be silenced. And as we enter into dialogue with, we discover within each other the wellspring of life. Being With is not just the name of a course, it is the way that Christ is teaching us to live, it is the mystery of the incarnation. Nazareth is not just a name of a town, it is a place of spiritual care and formation. Our International Group is not just feeding the homeless, it is a community of inclusion and trust. The music of our choirs and orchestras can heal and raise the heart, food and hospitality can feed the soul. Talks, lectures, listening groups, conversations and even sermons can open the mind and expand the heart. Last week we were not just on a sponsored walk to Canterbury we were walking together equal before God. ‘Time is how you spend your love,’ as the poet Nick Laird writes. St Martin-in-the-Fields is not just another venue on the edge of Trafalgar Square, it is the church of the open door where we can come home and learn of the love of God.
Today as we hold our Annual Meeting at St Martin-in-the-Fields, let us celebrate the things that really make us the church with the open door allowing those who want to, to come in and the Spirit of God out. A church where we are with God and with one another in all diversity, able to see the face of Christ even in those very different from ourselves. A church not seeking power or control but prepared to live generously, compassionately and bravely in the world. In a time of national poverty, fear and increasing focus on popularism and individual self-interest, now is the time to live for others. It is when we stand in humility with open doors and hands that we witnesses to a love and life greater than ourselves and our withered lives find healing. It is here, down here, in the public square of our struggles that the new song of God’s redeeming healing love begins. We are not called out of the world but into the world, into the hidden places of darkness, anonymity, rejection, lostness to find the ineffable sacredness of every human face and the beauty of every human life. When we have the courage to open doors, what we discover beneath the wounds and the defences, is the longing for love. What we discover is Christ. And that our faith is our freedom, our community, our being with, our place of eternal belonging, a home for all. As we read through our annual report let us celebrate that vision and the home at its heart.
