Queen Elizabeth II

In her poem ‘The Minister’, the American-British poet Anne Stevenson offers a powerful meditation on the role of the preacher. The occasion that provokes the poet to write is a funeral. The poem begins with the words ‘We’re going to need the minister’.

It sounds like a curious response for those who might be overwhelmed by the pain of grief - what good is a minister? The poet notes that the minister is not going to be much help with digging the grave. The minister isn’t going to ‘wipe his nose and his eyes’, sharing in our grief. The minister will not even offer much practical help like ‘baking cakes’ or ‘taking care of the kids’:

No, she says, we’ll get the minister to come
and take care of the words.

We gather today to honour the memory of Queen Elizabeth II, an extraordinary reign of over seventy years. Those years have marked a period of significant change in British society. Her reign began with the rationing and austerity of the period which followed the Second World War.

It saw the emergence of the Welfare State and the expansion of the NHS. It was a reign which saw radical social changes, economic turbulence, a plebiscite to join the Common Market and then another one to leave it, conflicts in the Falklands, Iraq and Afghanistan.

During her reign, the United Kingdom sought to renegotiate its relationship with former colonies, and the nations within the United Kingdom sought to renegotiate the relationships between themselves. But for good or ill, with all the changes which she saw in the course of her reign, she represented a sense of permanence and continuity, a sense of connection with the past, which enabled us to address the challenges of the present, and to look forward to the future.

This was not a vocation she chose, but it is a vocation which she fulfilled with unstinting devotion to the end of her life. For many of us, she embodied a commitment to the common good, with a sense of duty, and an abiding faith in Jesus Christ.

And now she is gone, and this has provoked an extraordinary action. People in their thousands coming here to light candles, say a prayer, sign the book of condolence. Queues in London that go on for miles and miles. As we prepare for the state funeral tomorrow, we wrestle with the words to express what this might mean. I guess the last few days have provoked in many of us a range of unexpected and surprising emotions. Each of us has had to negotiate, at some point, the experience of unacknowledged grief.

Of course, one of the experiences of clergy is often offering a eulogy at a funeral or a memorial service about someone that they have never met. And for me, that is no different today. The Queen is someone that I never met. There may be some here who did meet her, and yet for all of us, there was some sense of a connection, some sense in which she formed part of the fabric of our lives -  the coins in a pocket, the stamp on an envelope, Christmas broadcasts, the front page of your passport, ‘Her Britannic Majesty…’, she formed part of our daily lives in a mundane way that we kind of took for granted and rarely acknowledged. It was unspoken, mostly left unsaid, just there.

But suddenly she is no longer there. And that sense of absence is just one aspect of what grief is like. And whether we are an ardent monarchist or a diehard republican, we are all touched by the experience of grief. And when we grieve, we find ourselves, sometimes helplessly, occasionally tongue-tied, trying to find the words to bring comfort and consolation, to make sense of it all.

Of course, we live in a society which would rather not speak of death. We would rather sweep it under the carpet. We are puzzled by the paraphernalia of grief – black arm-bands, mourning bands, weepers – articles of clothing which speak of a bygone era, perhaps when people knew how to grieve.  And yet in the course of the last two years of the pandemic, we have been challenged to think again about our mortality, our finitude, and what this might mean and how this might shape our lives – How shall we live? How shall we die?

The Church’s liturgy, the language of this Requiem eucharist, offers us a language, a way of speaking, a vocabulary, that begins and ends with a profound theological conviction about the reality of death, and the promise of the resurrection.

At the heart of this liturgy, at the heart of the eucharist, we remember the meal which Jesus shared with his disciples on the night he was betrayed. The story of the cross and passion takes seriously the deadliness of death, and the precariousness of our existence. It is a story which does not draw a veil over the grief of Mary the mother of Jesus. The gospel writers know what it means to be overwhelmed by grief. They know the tears that would fill an ocean.

But we also see in those same narratives the first signs of a new creation – in the disorientation and sometimes the confusion of their witness to the promise of the resurrection. This is why St Paul writes to the Corinthians, ‘we do not lose heart’. Paul writes with passionate intensity of his hope in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. For Paul, death is not the last word. He believes that nothing will ever overpower the life and the love which come from God. Paul sees, in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the promise of a new creation. And all of this is an outworking of God’s love for his creation.

Across the churches of these islands this morning, clergy will be struggling to find the words to articulate a complex range of emotions as we mourn the passing of the Queen.  In her poem, Ann Stevenson admits that sometimes the minister will struggle to know how to ‘take care’ of the words. But thankfully St Paul knew. In his letter to the Romans, Paul says: ‘I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.’

This is the gift of eternal life, of which St John speaks in our gospel reading. This is the gift which lies at the heart of this eucharist, the mystery that our lives our hidden with Christ in God. This is the hope which lies at the heart of our faith, and at the heart of the faith of her late majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second.

Now to the one who is able to keep you from falling, and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy, to the only God our Saviour, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, power, and authority, before all ages, now and forever. Amen.