On Friday morning I was at the Britannia Royal Naval College and led prayers at the pass-out parade for 16 midshipman or junior officers who had taken part in the Accelerated Officer’s Programme for the Royal Naval Reserve. For the past 8 weeks these 16 young people from all walks of life have been running, exercising, swimming, solving problems, doing navigation exercises on the moors, fighting fires, doing drill, polishing shoes, ironing their uniform and getting very little sleep. Quite exhausting even to think about. Throughout that time, what they were really gaining and improving were skills of leadership. On Thursday night, for the team of divisional officers who had led them through this course it looked as if the pass-out parade was unlikely to take place, because of the news that had broken that afternoon, the death of He Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Who herself was a seasoned and expert leader of her people as Queen of the United Kingdom and its territories and Head of the Commonwealth. In the wake of Partygate, everyone is nervous of gatherings that can be misconstrued. Thankfully, good sense prevailed, and we were able to remember and give thanks for the Queen’s leadership, and commission 16 new young leaders with their careers ahead of them in the same ceremony. 

Our readings this morning are very much about what we can expect of a good leader, and about what, if we see ourselves as leaders, other people will rightly demand from us. These readings give us some fresh perspectives to help us work out what was so special about the Queen, when already, if you have been following the news, it seems that journalists are falling over themselves to repeat what other journalists have already said about her. So sit back and let’s think about the Queen in some fresh, scriptural ways. If you think about leaders in the Old Testament you are not going to get far without thinking about Moses. He was a hesitant and reluctant leader at first, but his confidence, authority and his skill as a leader grew as he led the people of Israelite from slavery in Egypt, and through the long years in the wilderness. Moses has a lot to teach us. Firstly he is a leader under God. In our reading this morning God issues him orders. Moses is not making stuff up, he is daily in the presence of God, and he is listening and obedient to God. Our Psalm this morning, possibly the most hopeful psalm of all describes what it is to look to God, and to listen to God 

‘I lift up my eyes toward the mountains;

whence shall help come to me?

My help is from the LORD,

who made heaven and earth.

 Queen Elizabeth too was a person who took time and care to listen to God through her prayer, her churchgoing and her reading of the Bible. She had a deep faith which was an obedient faith, she was prepared and anxious to do what God wanted her to do, which was to care for the nations and the people that she’d been made responsible for. 

But leaders, though obedient, are not ‘yes’ men. Moses was there in the space between God and his people. He was there to face God and seek from God good things for the people he had with him. He was also there to face the people and tell them what God required of them. Moses was a go-between, an intercessor, and sometimes that meant that his prayer argued with God and persuaded God to stay his hand and change his mind. Sometimes it meant that Moses burned with indignation and fury that the people, his people didn’t do what God commanded. What we have is a picture of a person whose prayer is complicated and vivid, and I’m sure that this was true of the Queen’s prayer too, that it was full of entreaty to God, full of arguments with God, full of love of her people and full of righteous irritation and even anger when people didn’t do the right thing or wasted the opportunities they’d been given.

Often a leader is the one to say ‘Remember…’ and then to tell again the stories that bind a people together. Moses goes so far as to remind God of the story, the big story, that God has been the saviour and leader of his people, bringing them out of being servants and slaves. The Queen has for so much of her life been the embodiment of our national story, as a young girl with her sister Margaret growing up in wartime, as a young woman falling in love with a handsome and gallant naval officer, as a young mum and yet the Queen, as a busy professional woman, interested in every detail of the lives and experience of others, as a loving grandmother, as an older woman struggling with failing health and mobility, as a widow bereft of the husband who had been her rock and support at every turn. Queen Elizabeth was the embodiment of change and modernism, while holding on to what was precious  about the past, but never slavishly, never for its own sake.

Let’s leave Moses now and turn to St Paul for some other perspectives on leadership. First is the power of honesty and humility. St Paul never glosses over the fact that he is the least of all the Apostles, for he has been the enemy of Christian faith, and is only a spokesman for it now because he met the living and Risen lord of the road to Damascus. He has no worth in his own assessment of himself. But God has seen Paul’s value to the spreading of the Gospel, and has gone out of his way to change him and recruit him. The Queen’s story has been a very different one. She has been a devoted member of the Church of England throughout her life. But she shared with St Paul a sense that this was all God’s gift, and not something she deserved. As a result she had a duty to serve her people wisely and well, so she might be a welcome gift to them too. St Paul’s story is a story about the power of welcome. That God in Christ welcomed him, even though he was a terrible sinner. God knew, that to be welcomed, to be listened to, to be loved can change people for good, and the Queen did this all the time. She welcomed, she listened, she made people feel different about themselves, and that was an important way in which, as a constitutional monarch, with little constitutional power, she could influence and change people and their actions. 

Let’s let Jesus have the last word about leadership, as is appropriate. He too is thinking about welcome in our gospel reading today. He is being attacked by leaders for welcoming the wrong sort of people, the tax-collectors and sinners and eating with them. To counter this criticism he tells two parables, the parable of the lost sheep and the parable of the lost coin. These are, to our ears, humble domestic stories, but they wouldn’t have been to those who heard him speak. Shepherds were often used as a metaphor for kings. The prophet Nathan once told King David about a rich man who took away a poor man’s lamb, his prized possession, wanting it for his own. When David, horrified, said that the rich man must be punished, Nathan said to him ‘you are the man’. Care of sheep was like care of people, care of the nation, the shepherd was like the king. The woman who lost her coin was missing a piece of her treasured headdress, made of coins, which marked her wealth and her independence. She could easily have let it go, but she doesn’t. Every piece of her dowry that she wears on her forehead means a lot to her. And here’s a final lesson of leadership, that everyone matters. They can’t be let go of and forgotten. No one should be lost, and not looked after. The Queen throughout her reign embodied that concern that no one should be lost, no-one should go unlistened to, or unloved. 

May she rest in peace now. She has led us wisely and well, and we can only thank God for her. Amen

Fr. Tom Pyke