Sermon at Parish Mass Trinity 13 2022
Following the death of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II
Lamentations 3.22-26,31-33
2 Corinthians 4.16-5.4
John 6.35-40
In speaking to people these last few days I have found that we have been struggling to put into words what we are feeling. The death of our beloved Queen has left a sense of national bereavement – not the same as the loss of someone we know personally, but it is deeply and keenly felt nonetheless.
I think that is something to do with the Queen’s representative role, that she has embodied and personified the Nation and the Commonwealth. That she has been, in her person, a force that has drawn into unity the diverse and rich communities in which we share.
She has embodied continuity and stability, in a rapidly changing world. In her Christmas messages, and at times of crisis, she has always found the right words, simply but profoundly put, to reassure, encourage and inspire. At national events her presence has elevated and united her people. And now that rock, who for most of us has simply always been there, has been taken from us. It is a great loss, unlike any we have known before.
But the Queen, of course, was also a person of profound Christian faith. She saw her role as one of service, following Christ, who taught his disciples that those who want to be great among them must be the servants of all. Her faith in Christ, as her Saviour and her Lord, illuminated her whole life to the end. And that faith, which we share with her, is the unchanging rock upon which she placed her hopes, and which is our sure anchor and hope also. In this time of change and loss, she would remind us that our faith is in Jesus Christ, who is the same yesterday, today, and for ever.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus says, “This is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day.”
In John’s Gospel, the word “all” has a weighty and universal significance. The opening of John tells us that Jesus is the eternal Word of the Father, the Word made flesh, and that “all things came into being through him”. Later in John, Jesus says, “When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all [things or people] to myself”.
This is how we are to hear the words of Jesus, that he will lose nothing of all that the Father has given him. The work of salvation accomplished by Christ is universal, cosmic, in its scope. Nothing is excluded. All means all.
In our modern Western mindset we are used to the idea of the autonomous individual, the self-sufficient “self”, and subconsciously we can conceive of the idea of salvation in those terms. Just me, by myself, or you, by yourself, snatched out of this wicked world and carried safe to heaven in the end. Salvation, in that thinking, is something individual, disconnected, atomized.
But that is a very impoverished version of the vision that scripture gives us. The Bible tells us that Christ is the Saviour of the world, that his work of redemption is cosmic, integrated, and whole. All means all, and all things gathered together. Ephesians chapter one tells us that the will of God is “to gather up all things in Christ, things in heaven and things on earth”.
Human beings are not created for isolation, but for community and communion. “It is not good that the man should be alone”, as God says in Genesis. And we are not saved as isolated individuals, but as a holy people. Destined for the communion for which we were made, communion with God who is himself supremely community and communion beyond our understanding, the Blessed and Holy Trinity.
Human beings do not exist in isolation, but belong to societies, communities, neighbourhoods, and nations. And within those communities, although we experience many failures, we feel instinctively that we must seek and strive for all that builds up and unites. Sharing in communities by nature, we yearn for the supreme gift of communion, the blessed diversity in unity that ultimately we can only receive by grace.
Indeed, the Bible tells us that not only individuals are saved, but also nations. At the end of the Book of Revelation, we see the vision of the New Jerusalem coming down from God, and are told that “the nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it… people will bring into it the glory and honour of the nations.”
Kings, those representative people who embody and personify a nation, will bring their glory into God's New Jerusalem. Peoples and nations will bring their glory and honour. What are the glory and honour of the nations? Everything that is good and right and noble and true. All the achievements down the ages of human culture and art and thought and science. Everything that God’s creative Spirit has inspired and brought about through human endeavour will be gathered in.
The role that the Queen has had, a person of profound Christian faith, representing and personifying the nation, has its fulfilment now in that vision, as she journeys into the New Jerusalem.
As we gather for the Eucharist, we reflect that all paths of Christian discipleship are nourished and patterned by the mystery we celebrate. The Queen’s particular vocation, of being a person who embodied unity, was a fruit of her Christian faith and her Eucharistic life. For when Christians share the bread that is Christ and drink his blood, we all share in God’s work of re-assembling and raising to life a divided and broken humanity. Though we are many, we are one body, because we all share in one bread. And as we celebrate the Eucharist we look to that final vision of all things gathered in, the glory and honour of the nations, of humanity united in God at last, with angels and archangels and the whole company of heaven.
The Queen’s role has now passed to her son, King Charles. And although he has only been King for three days, he has stepped with unbroken continuity into that representative role that stretches back through the history of this nation, and of so many others. He, too, has spoken movingly of his Christian faith. We may be encouraged that the same faith, that kept the Queen firm in her dedication to the end, lives in him too. And we pray for him, that the rich gifts of God’s empowering Spirit will be poured out on him, now, and in the years ahead.
