By Rt Revd Bishop Jonathan Meyrick

[Bible readings: 2 Thessalonians 1: 1–4 & 11–12 and Luke 19: 1–10]

From the culmination of that gospel reading, Jesus said, “The Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost”.

Can I start by saying just how glad I am to be with you this morning, and how glad I will be to be with you over the months to come. Although my ministry has taken me across the world and to four other dioceses in the southern province of the Church of England, it began in this diocese. I was curate of Bicester from 1976 to 1978. I was then the Bishop’s Chaplain in Oxford for the next three years, and from ‘84 to ‘90 I was team vicar in south Buckinghamshire, Actually, across all the years of my ministry, it is still just the case that I have spent longer serving in this diocese than in any other diocese. Four and a half years ago, my wife Rebecca and I came back to the very northern tip of Oxfordshire, just under an hour’s drive from here, when traffic is good. I have a very clear memory of the extent to which the bishop I was chaplain to in those later years of the 1970s, crossing over into the beginning of the 1980s, whose name was Patrick Roger, of a very clear memory of the extent to which he got enthused and excited by the vision that was being presented to him, which was the vision that lay at the roots of this church. I remember it very clearly, Patrick saying to me, this is perhaps the most exciting thing to happen in the course of my ministry here in the Diocese of Oxford. A church for the centre of Milton Keynes, which would take seriously the call to be a centre for Christian ministry and worship and presence, to be ecumenical as far as possible, and to be open to the civic life of this emerging town, as it was then, city as it is now.

It felt very good, therefore, to be asked earlier this year by Bishop Stephen, and then again by Bishop Dave, to accompany you all as a kind of pastoral guide as you resettle into your sense of calling following the recent Visitation. I hope that Founding Vision remains at your heart, and I’m delighted to be part of the process that helps to re-establish and rethink that through. I’m hoping to be here on Sunday mornings roughly every 4 to 6 weeks, through this process, and George and I have worked out a number of those Sundays through till at least the middle of next year. And doubtless we’ll do the second half of next year a little later on. There may be other things that emerge as well, but there will at least be those. I’m also sitting in with the steering group, as it seeks to follow through the process of filling out the recommendations in that visitation.

It feels also very fitting to me to start the Sunday part of this pastoral accompaniment as we rejoice together in All Saints-Tide. Because All Saints is not simply a sweeping together of all those famous and largely distant heroic figures of the church’s history, great as they were. The Simon Peters, the Matthew, Mark, Luke and Johns, the Marys, the Clares, the Catherines.  Plus all the ones whose names we don’t know, the millions and millions and millions of people who over these centuries have sought to follow Jesus into the love of God and who have sought to bring others with them. No, all that’s part of what All Saints Tide is about. But it’s not chiefly what All Saints-Tide is about. Chiefly, All Saints is about you and me and everybody else today who seeks to follow the way to God through Jesus. Just think how Paul starts most of his letters. Not quite all of them, but most of them. He starts in this kind of way. I write in the name of God to the saints at Colossae, Thessalonica, Philippi, Ephesus, Rome, Corinth, etc.. To the saints gathered in these places. Because the saints are each and every single one of those people who seek to be part of that church, that congregation, that gathering, that group of people who want to be followers of the way of Jesus Christ into the heart and into the love of God. That is all of us, every single one. We are saints.

And I think that’s why the gospel passage that we heard just now, although it’s not the classic gospel for All Saints Day, is actually extremely fitting and could become so. Zacchaeus is very definitely not a heroic saint-like figure in the eyes of his local contemporaries. When Jesus says “for this one too, is a son of Abraham”, which is what he says immediately before saying, “the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost”. He says it because all those people around who are grumbling about the fact that Jesus has gone to Zacchaeus’ house to have dinner. They’re grumbling because in their eyes, Zacchaeus has ceased to be a son of Abraham. The reality was that for the people of Jesus’s day, an awful lot of people were excluded from the sense of being those who belonged, those who were children of Abraham, those who were good Jews, those who were followers of the Lord. Anybody who did anything that put them outside that circle was effectively banished, chucked out of the community. And for them Zacchaeus was not a child of Abraham.  The tax collectors, and Zacchaeus was not just a tax collector, he was one of the chief tax collectors. Tax collectors were in 20th century World War terms, collaborators, those who sided with the enemy, those who betrayed their compatriots by seeking to assist and serve those who had invaded them. And in the middle of the 20th century, across France, Italy, Holland, Poland and many other countries, so many people in the wake of the Second World War were driven out of their home societies as collaborators.  And it’s quite difficult to find fault with that. But we need to remember that that’s what it felt like as a tax collector in Jesus day. That made you a collaborator and drove you out of the community of the children of Abraham.

In this story, it’s worth noting, I think, that Jesus takes the initiative. You might think, actually, Zacchaeus has taken the initiative by climbing up that sycamore tree. But if you remember, the way Luke tells the story very carefully says, Zacchaeus climbed that tree because he was curious to see Jesus. It wasn’t that he had decided at that point that he was going to change his way of life, that he was going to become a follower of Jesus. No, he just wanted to see him. And he was too small to do so any other way than by climbing that tree. The initiative is the one that comes from Jesus who says, “Zacchaeus, come down because I’m going to have supper in your house tonight”. That’s Jesus taking the initiative. Zacchaeus responds to it swiftly, instantly, willingly, and generously. “Lord, I give to anybody. I have cheated back what I have taken and do so fourfold over”. So Zacchaeus responds, but it is Jesus who takes the initiative. And so it is, over and over again. God takes the initiative with us. Jesus takes the initiative to call us into his fellowship. And the Son of Man came, he says, to seek out and to save the lost. So the kingdom of saints is first and foremost a gathering of those who were lost, excluded, victimized. Those who have been sought out and saved.

About 24 years ago, I came across a book in the United States which had fairly recently been written and published. Which I still often find myself turning to. It’s called Jayber Crow, and it’s written by a man called Wendell Berry, who is from the southern states of America. He’s a poet. He’s a philosopher. He’s a novelist. He’s an essayist. He’s a man of very great wisdom and stature, I think. In this book, which he calls Jayber Crow. I think it is no coincidence that Jayber Crow’s initials are, J. C. On the front page of the book, it says,

“Jayber Crow
A novel
The Life Story of Jayber Crow, Barber,
of the Port William Membership,
as written by himself”

So it’s a work of fiction, but it’s written as an autobiography. And there are huge overtones of the incarnation of Jesus Christ running through it. Not obviously. And you have to look for them and see them, but they are there. This book was given to me by a friend of mine, and as I read it, it came to me more and more forcefully that this was what Wendell Berry was doing. He was presenting what incarnation might have looked like in the middle of the 20th century in rural Kentucky in the United States.

There are lots of bits of Jesus’s story that, of course, are not there, but there are many things that are.

Jayber Crow grows up as an orphan, losing his parents at a very, very young age, brought up by an uncle and aunt, and he loses the uncle and aunt when he’s still a young boy, about seven, eight, nine, that kind of age. And he then goes off to an orphanage. And through his years in the orphanage, he begins to wonder if he’s got a vocation to the church’s ministry. But by the time he leaves school and the orphanage, he decides that he hasn’t, and he goes off to the nearby big city, one of the big towns in Kentucky. And there he finds his calling as a hairdresser, a barber. He just falls into it, but it becomes what dominates his life. And having learnt this skill, he then, in the course of a huge hurricane, thunderstorm, tornado, something of that nature, a really major cataclysmic weather event, he hears a calling to go back to the tiny rural community where he had grown up. And that’s, as it were, his vocation. And he goes back and does that and settles into the life of the place and becomes an indispensable part of a huge number of people’s finding themselves and finding salvation.

In the course of it, he becomes the verger and the sexton at the tiny little village church. Unusually for a community in the States, there is only one church in the village. It’s probably Baptist, or Presbyterian, or Congregational, or perhaps Methodist, one of those Protestant denominations. But it’s the single church for the whole community. And, Jayber Crow settles first as its gravedigger and then becomes the verger of the church as well, and in the course of the chapter describing that he has this to say, which I found when I first read it and still feel to be immensely powerful.

“One day when I went up there to work, sleepiness overcame me, and I lay down on the floor behind the back pew to take a nap. Waking or sleeping, I couldn’t tell which. I saw all the people gathered there who had ever been there. I saw them as I had seen them from the back pew where I sat with Uncle Othie, who would not come in any farther, while Aunt Cordie sang in the choir, and I saw them as I had seen them from the back pew. On the Sunday before, I saw them in all the times past and to come, all somehow there in their own time and in all time and in no time. The cheerfully working and singing women. The men quiet or reluctant or shy. The weary, the troubled in spirit. The sick, the lame, the desperate, the dying, the little children tucked into the pews beside their elders, the young married couples full of visions. The old men with their dreams. The parents proud of their children. The grandparents with tears in their eyes. The pairs of young lovers attentive only to each other on the edge of the world, the grieving widows and widowers. The mothers and fathers of children newly dead.  The proud, the humble, the attentive, the distracted. Acted. I saw them all. I saw the creases crisscrossed on the backs of the men’s necks. Their work thickened hands. The Sunday dresses faded with washing. They were just there. They said nothing. And I said nothing. I seemed to love them all with a love that was mine merely because it included me. When I came to myself again, my face was wet with tears.”

It’s a vision. It always seems to me not just of the kingdom and of those who are its saints, but of that kingdom’s commitment to our communities, to the places where we’re set and where we belong. The church needs to be at the heart of our communities. That’s what this church seeks to be and has always done so.  As we go through these next months, combined as they are and will be with the search for a replacement for Ernesto. Giving, as they do, such a splendid opportunity for reaffirming our vision, our sense of what we are and who we are. As we rejoice in that, and I hope we will be able to do so, I pray that God may give us the grace to embrace it and to make it real here at Christ the Cornerstone.

Amen.