Sermon for the Special Commemorative Service for HLM the Queen,

Sunday 18th September

I begin my sermon tonight with words from the reading ‘I beheld a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues’ From late on Thursday night until Friday morning my wife and I joined the queue to pass by Her late Majesty’s coffin as it lay in state in Westminster hall. A queue is really to ordinary a word to describe that river of people making its way, painfully slowly at times, from Southwark Park along the river bank then over Lambeth Bridge to Westminster. It was, just like the crowd described in the Book of Revelation, ‘multitude which no man could number’ though actually we all had a number printed on a coloured wristband, so someone was trying to keep track of how many of us there were. We were ‘of all nations’ - it wasn’t just people from the UK, or from the Commonwealth who had come to show their respects, but people from across the world, bound together as friends, or as families, or as workplace colleagues or as military veterans. This multitude, chatty at first, tired later, solidly determined as it crossed Lambeth Bridge as the sun came up, had a shared thought and purpose, to gaze for the last time at the Queen that they had known as the British Head of State and leader of the Commonwealth for as long as most of them had been alive.

I like the word ‘gaze’ and I chose it with care for this sermon. My spiritual director, who teaches me to pray, always begins our time together with a ‘warm-up’ session. Once together we have sorted out the things that distract us in prayer, like bad posture, cramped muscles and shallow breathing, my spiritual director always asks me to become aware of the ‘loving gaze’ of God at me. God’s gaze is more than a glance which is momentary, or a look which is focused on something. God’s gaze holds us, and it takes in everything about us and around us, it doesn’t analyse or judge, it rests with us, and delights in us. Of course there are things that we don’t want God to see about us, and of course he does see those things, but it really doesn’t matter. It used to be thought that seeing happened because the eye sent out a beam of light to the thing it saw, illuminating it. Of course today we know it is the other way round, that the eye gathers light reflected from the thing it sees, but God’s loving gaze obeys the old rules and it creates a relationship with us, and holds and embraces us in that relationship. We’ve often sung a line in a Charles Wesley hymn that uses the same word picture ‘Thine eye diffused a quickening ray/I woke the dungeon flam’d in light.’ God’s gaze is not at all passive. It takes the initiative.

In a way I think that is what the late Queen was good at too. People came from across the world, at any excuse it seemed, to gaze at the Queen. When I was a teenager we camped out for two nights on the village green so we could welcome the Queen to Llandaff during her Silver Jubilee, so I joined the club early. But the Queen has made it her business to see and to understand her people. To meet them and to speak to them and to know who they are, and what they do, and what inspires, and what concerns them. To meet the Queen was to be held, if only for a short time, in her total attention, her undistracted gaze. There was real love for her people, and you had only to look at her face to see the notice she was taking of people and the affection that she held for these people, even though they were part of a population of 66 million souls, and many more if you include the fourteen countries where the British monarch is still head of state. We gazed at Her Late Majesty with love, but she gazed back at us with love too. 

And as we passed her body on Friday morning,  lying in state with the crown, the orb and the sceptre resting upon it - all symbols of the Queen’s majesty, but equally symbols of her duty towards us - you couldn’t avoid realising that the love she has been held in all the long years since 1952 is matched and more than matched by the love she has had for her people. I visited the new mosque in Mellish St this week for Friday prayers (I often do when I feel their prayer touches ours, when there is something to mourn together, like an act of terror; or when there is something to rejoice over, together. On Friday I wanted to celebrate with the people there the difference that the Queen made personally to relations with Muslims in the UK. She was the first British monarch to visit a mosque. She listened to and valued Muslim thoughts about religion and prayer, though she was a staunch Christian and Supreme governor of the Church of England. Again, that loving, undistracted gaze, her full attention.

Our reading tonight is about gazing too, gazing on the glory of God, now revealed after all the danger of the conflict with Satan and his allies. It’s worth remembering that Her Late Majesty chose this reading for this service, presumably because it resonated with her own faith, and her experience of serving God. Now the battle is over and it is time for the faithful to gaze upon God and to give him their full attention. And everyone, from the angels around the throne, and the elders and the people fall on their faces and worship God saying ‘Amen. Blessing, and glory, and wisdom, and thanksgiving, and honour, and power and might, be unto our God for ever and ever. Amen’ Our primary focus is properly towards God. Jesus directs our worship towards God where it properly belongs. This will be true of the state funeral tomorrow; its worship will be properly directed to God. ‘Why do you call me good?’ Jesus asks ‘One there is who is good’ That one is God the Father. The Queen knew how important it was that she was loved, but she would never have wanted to be worshipped. All worship belongs properly to God. But while the primary focus of tonight’s reading is on God, the secondary focus is on those who serve him. Those who have come through the great tribulation, who have washed their robes in the blood of the lamb, who are before the throne of God and serve him day and night in his temple. The persistence of their faith, their faithfulness towards God is to be wondered at and celebrated. Our late queen is one of their number, she now takes her place before God’s throne and her wish to be with him is granted. She has served him as his humble handmaiden in this life, she now continues her service of him in the glory of heaven. Amen