Worship and Sacrifice

A Sermon in a service of Commemoration for Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II for Richmond Borough Council, at St Mary's Twickenham

We gather here today at the end of an extraordinary week. So many words have been said, so many pictures taken, so many comments posted, so many hours spent queuing and waiting for a glimpse of the coffin. 

Our reading this evening from the epistle to the Hebrews gives us this advice; “Remember your leaders... Consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith.” I want to take that advice this evening and offer a few brief reflections on the life of Her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth, to discern what we learned from her example as we seek to consider the “outcome of her way of life and imitate her faith.”

The first thing we might usefully learn from her is her understanding of leadership as service. She held the highest office in the land and yet she understood that calling not primarily to privilege, to wealth, or power over others, but to service. 

We have often heard this week those words that she uttered on her 21st birthday, before she became Queen, when she said, “my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.” It was uttered with such a youthful voice, not knowing what that promise would mean, yet it was a promise we now recognise that she kept to the full.

Perhaps the idea of leadership as service is very familiar to us, but we shouldn't underestimate how radical and distinct this is from what we find in so many other moral and political frameworks. And it is of course a deeply Christian understanding of Leadership. Jesus the Son of God told his followers that “I am among you as one who serves.” At one moment he takes his disciples aside and utters these revolutionary words: “You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

As a result, this is deeply inscribed in our own political vocabulary. We call the leader of our government the Prime Minister, we call Heads of Government departments Ministers of State, because of course the word ‘minister’ simply means servant – from the Latin word ministrare - "to act as a servant, to serve others.”

Of course, Roman or Chinese emperors did not see their calling as to serve their people at all - they had the power of life and death over them and they exercised it fairly ruthlessly. They saw themselves not the servants over the people but as rulers over them, somehow distinct from the rules that ordinary people have to follow, above the law that governed ordinary mortals. 

Of course there are many examples of supposedly Christian monarchs who have abused their power but that is their betrayal of their Christianity not an expression of it. There are good Monarchs and not so good Monarchs. We are blessed to have had lived most of our lives under the reign of a good Monarch who understood the nature of leadership as a calling to serve those under her care. 

Perhaps one of the main lessons we take from the life of Her late Majesty is to remind ourselves and to reinforce our sense that, ss someone once said, Leadership is not so much about being in charge, as taking care of those in our charge. If we are called to leadership in politics, in business, in a family or in the Church, leadership is primarily a calling to serve those under our care; it is a calling not so much to rule over them but to care them, to devote ourselves to their good above our own.

The second thing we might learn from Her Majesty is the value of Duty. Again, this is a word we've heard often this week. The BBC obituary to the Queen started with this sentence: “The long reign of Queen Elizabeth II was marked by her strong sense of duty and her determination to dedicate her life to her throne and to her people.” King Charles, in his speech to parliament, pledged himself to faithfully follow the Queen’s “example of selfless duty.”

However, in an individualistic age that is often more concerned with rights than responsibilities, the idea of Duty has perhaps become a rather tarnished and dull word for us. Young men or women going off to fight or to work hard at home during the First or Second World wars would often speak of the importance of “doing their duty”. Those brought up in the Scouts movement in the past will know all about this with its call to ‘do my duty to the Queen and other people’. However these days it sounds a bit quaint. We don't tend to think of Duty as a very exciting or important thing. To describe something as ‘dutiful’ conveys the idea of it being boring and predictable. I sometimes go into schools to ask young people what they want to do with their lives. “To do my duty” is not an answer I get very often – although perhaps a century or so ago that might have been different.

Duty is all about keeping the promises and commitments that we make in life, even when they are personally inconvenient for us. It's about our ability to rely upon each other and to trust our fellow citizens to do what they say they will do. I'm sure there were days when the Queen woke up to face yet another round of civic engagements, papers to sign, Prime Ministers to meet and wished in her heart of hearts that she was just an ordinary citizen like the rest of us. Yet she always spoke of a sense of duty to this calling and even felt it was one of those commitments, like marriage or to family, that is intended to remain in place until death - there was no retirement from being Queen.

A sense of duty is vital for our common life together. The philosopher David Selbourne has written a great deal about Duty – he describes it as the fundamental principle of the civic order. For a society to function well, we need to have a sense that we have obligations, not just to ourselves but to each other and to our common life. A society where no one feels they have any sense of duty to anyone else, or to fulfil their role within civic life, to play their own part in making a society function well and in a humane way, is likely to be a dysfunctional and fractured society.

Perhaps her death is a reminder to us of calling to be faithful to the commitments we make as best we can, to our families, our marriages, our workplaces, our communities. Keeping promises is not always easy and of course, relationships, families, jobs don't always work out straightforwardly but a sense of duty and faithfulness can at times help us keep going through those periods of difficulty rather than giving up at the first sign of trouble. The Queen’s example is a powerful sign for us as to the importance and centrality of duty to our common life.

Perhaps the last thing that the Queen's life points us to is our need for a sense of permanence. For most of us, she is the only Queen we have ever known. She has been a steady regular presence in our lives - always there for Christmas broadcasts, Trooping the Colour, FA Cup Finals, her face on every bank note we’ve spent or stamp we've ever bought. As the Archbishop of Canterbury said early this week, her death has taken away something stable and steady in our lives and so we feel a little less secure than we did before.

Perhaps underneath much of our behaviour of the past week lies this longing for permanence. A very public death like this reveals our own death, our frailty and mortality. It makes us face the passage of time and makes us long for stability, perhaps even for eternity.

Even the desire for a photo, the seas of mobile phones stretched out to try to get a photo of the coffin as it went past, is a desire for something permanent – a sure record that ‘I was there’, to capture the experience for ever, so much so that we can hardly experience the moment itself. 

The fast-changing pace of our social and political life, the cultural shifts that make our world seem so different from that of the Queen’s generation have perhaps bred in us a deeply-felt and often unspoken and unrecognised desire for something longer-lasting, something that can be relied on. 

Yet she was of course only a sign or symbol of permanence. She may have lived longer than any other British monarch, yet she would have been the first to admit that she is one of a long line of monarchs – part of an institution that speaks of a much longer permanence. The fact that at the very moment she died, Charles became King, tells of a seamless strand of constitutional monarchy that outlasts any particular individual who occupies the throne. Yet the monarchy itself has always only ever been a sign of an even greater permanence – the faithfulness of God, the one the Psalmist described as “our dwelling place throughout all generations, who brought forth the whole world before the mountains were born - God from everlasting to everlasting.” (Ps 90)

Our reading reminded us that Jesus Christ is “the same yesterday today and forever.” The Queen’s own personal faith was well known. It was sense of the deep abiding faithfulness of God, the God of Jesus Christ who is Lord of heaven and earth, if time and eternity, that gave her the strength to be faithful to her promises. 

Only when our lives are rooted in something constant and more permanent than the brief life span of a tweet or Instagram post or even the longer, but still in the light of eternity, fleeting span of our own lifetimes, can we find the security and steadiness to remain faithful to our promises, to do our duty to each other and to find peace both now and at the last. 

And so today we give thanks for the life of Her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth - for all she taught us about leadership as service, about the importance of duty, and our need to be rooted in something, someone eternal - a sense of permanence which we find in faith and trust in the God who made us and loves us – the God that she knew and served. And for that today we can be thankful.

AMEN