Party-Crashers

Jesus said, “Man does not live by bread alone,” but he said it to the devil, not to the hungry multitudes whom He fed. 
    That’s a quote from the subject of my current research, the twentieth century American poet Vassar Miller.  Now obscure – though I realize that working on something, or someone, obscure is not unusual in Oxford – she was a nominee for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1961 – that’s serious critical recognition.  Regulars at St Mary’s may have noticed her poetry popping in my sermons from time to time and amongst the non-biblical readings in Christmas and Good Friday services in the past few years.  That’s my fault but one I’m happy to own – Miller deserves to be rediscovered.  Those words of hers I’ve just read out come from an essay on the poet’s vocation published in the 1960s which I read a few weeks ago.  I just haven’t been able to get those words out of my mind as I started to prepare this sermon.  

Odd, you might think.  The biblical allusions are not to our Gospel for today, but rather to the temptation of Christ in the wilderness – which we will rediscover when the First Sunday of Lent rolls around in March.  Neither have we heard this morning one of the variant accounts of the story of Jesus feeding the ‘hungry multitudes’ of 4000 or 5000 (with or without women and children).    

Jesus said, “Man does not live by bread alone,” but he said it to the devil, not to the hungry multitudes whom He fed.

And yet.  This year in the three-year Sunday lectionary is the year of St Mark’s gospel.  But because Mark is relatively short, we get a lot of John’s Gospel.  We’ve spent the past four or five Sundays (we took a break two weeks ago for our patronal festival) marching our way through Chapter 6 of John’s Gospel.  John 6 is the great Eucharistic discourse of Jesus, in which he says, many, many times, that he is the Bread of Life.  Jesus’ self-identification as the Bread of Life which must be eaten to have fullness of life, well, his disciples haven’t a clue as usual about what to make of it.  Some of them leave being his disciples over it.  The religious leaders – the guys who are the official shepherds of the people – they are appalled and scandalized by Jesus’ presumption.  In John 6, Jesus is steadily progressing to the tipping point with the bishops and clergy who will come to see him as someone who not only needs to be sidelined and silenced but destroyed.  
    I realize that many of my fellow Christians will disagree with me about this, but I for one, am glad to leave the sometimes, somewhat, esoteric Jesus in John and return to the earthiness of Mark’s Jesus today.  And what earthiness.  We’ve got poo in our Gospel today.  Yes, poo:  ‘there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile’.  And we would have had loos too if the compilers of the lectionary hadn’t cut verses 18-19:  ‘Do you not  see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile, since it enters, not the heart but the stomach, and goes out into the sewer’.  Jesus isn’t prissy but maybe the lectionary compilers were.  

And note, we’ve still got conflict over food and eating.  Emerging out of weeks of Jesus scandalously speaking of himself as the Bread of Life who must be eaten, this morning our gospel reading from Mark is also about eating food and is hemmed about by more talk about food and access to food.  Today’s reading is surrounded on either side by Jesus’ feeding of the 5000 in Mark 6.  Then, Jesus does it all again in Mark 8 with the feeding of the 4000.  And despite all this abundance being brought out of scarcity right under their very noses, the disciples remain, just like us, as perplexed as ever about who Jesus is and what his Work means.
Jesus said, “Man does not live by bread alone,” but he said it to the devil, not to the hungry multitudes whom He fed.

In today’s gospel, we have Jesus in yet another run-in with the religious leaders who are attempting to control access to food by insisting on compliance with a complex set of purity rituals.  It is easy to pick on the Pharisees, but it is worth remembering that they were serious, devout people.  You might say they were the High Church party of the first century and we know there is nothing wrong with being High Church.  But over the centuries, the traditions had grown and expanded and become burdensome and onerous – the very opposite of their intention.  The laudable attempt to obey the law had deteriorated into legalism.  Legalism isn’t about obedience to the law, it is about the manipulation of the law – whether that’s the Bible, doctrine, the liturgy, the creeds.  Legalism is about control of God and neighbour – not about the love of God and neighbour.  The religious leaders of Jesus’ time have become access-deniers, key holders, gatekeepers, border police, fence builders.

Vassar Miller, who I started the sermon with knew all about fence builders, key holders, gatekeepers, and access-deniers.  Born in 1924, Vassar lived her life with severe cerebral palsy which impacted both her speech and mobility.  She became a disability rights activist before we really had the term, at a national and state level.  Vassar was also an active member of an Episcopal Church in her hometown of Houston.  These past months, I’ve been working through the thousands of digital pictures I took of her unpublished papers when I was in Houston two years ago.  In the 1980s, Vassar was the chair of the parish’s ‘Barrier Free Committee’, set up to improve access her parish church.  The parish seemed willing to engage but in a couple of painfully articulate, truth-speaking, devastating letters to parish officers and the Vestry (the PCC) she relates how she was told off for leaving her mobility scooter in the church porch and it took years of effort on her part to convince this self-identifying progressive parish it needed a ramp to facilitate access, not only to the building, but for Holy Communion.  Like Jesus in our gospel this morning, she tells it like it is to her religious leaders.  Like Jesus in our gospel this morning, irony is one of her gifts:  she speculates to the church leaders if the ‘Barrier Free Committee’ should be renamed the ‘Gate-Crashers Committee’.  Or better yet, the ‘Party-Crashers Committee’ for, she writes ‘what is more of a party than the celebration of the Holy Eucharist?’   

The struggle over the barriers we construct is an age-old theme in our life as the Body of Christ.  ‘Inclusion’ is something we talk a lot at St Mary’s and genuinely try to live out.  I’d be the last person to say that working for the full inclusion of women and LGBT+ people in the life of the Church is not important.  We are, I hope, an affirming Christian community in both regards.  But another set of challenges facing St Mary’s is the ambition to remove physical barriers to this church by transforming the Radcliffe Square entrance into ‘step free’ access – and that has brought conflict and cost.  Progressive parish though we are, there are other challenges such as the step up to the chancel and difficult High Street doors for anyone with mobility challenges.  There is some ‘party-crashing’ to be done.  

As we see from our Gospel this morning, and from Vassar Miller’s story, ‘access’ to God’s House, ‘access’ to Christ’s Supper, to the ‘party of the Eucharist’, requires some gate crashers and party-crashers, to help us to remove the barriers we construct – though it brings conflict and cost.  But this is part of the Work of Christ that the whole Church needs to do.  

Jesus said, “Man does not live by bread alone,” but he said it to the devil, not to the hungry multitudes whom He fed.