Sermon for Evensong on 18th September 2022 at All Saints, Penarth

Ezra 1; John 7:14-36 (see https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=530015559)

During the last 10 days I think we’ve all thought quite a lot about our late Queen. Our thoughts are probably going to multiply and come together in quite a lot of emotion as we watch the funeral tomorrow. I don’t think many of us are completely immune from being moved, in one way or another.

When I was in my 20s, actually I was inclined towards being a republican. That is, until my Dad was awarded the OBE. My Mum, my brother and I accompanied Dad to Buckingham Palace. We drove through the big gates. A Scottish regiment wearing their kilts and equipped with little mirrors on natty canes were inspecting under the bonnet of all the cars to make sure that none of us was bringing in a bomb.

When the two Jocks who were going to inspect my brother’s car appeared, one of them suddenly put his mirror under the other one’s kilt – and turned to us with a reassuring smile, ‘There’s nothing to worry about under there!’ That set the tone for the whole thing. Proper, but warm and friendly.

But the most amazing thing was this. There were about 50 people receiving awards and we were sitting in a big room about half the size of the nave here at All Saints. We were sitting no more than 10 paces away from where the Queen was standing with an equerry holding a tray with all the medals in. We could hear everything they said.

The various people who had won medals were sent one by one across the room from the door to where the Queen was by another equerry, who called out each person’s name as they strode across the carpet. The amazing thing was that she knew exactly what each person had done.

She spent a good couple of minutes talking to my Dad, and it was plain that she had actually done serious homework, because she didn’t have any notes and no one prompted her in any way, but she knew what each of those 50 or so people had done, in some detail.

As you can imagine, afterwards, my Dad was walking tall. And that was especially wonderful, because he was actually quite a sick man at the time, and indeed he was dead within 18 months. Dad felt that his life’s work had been recognised.

There is no doubt that he was a happier and more fulfilled man as a result of his encounter with our late Queen. I saw the magic of the monarchy at work and I felt that it was good magic. I stopped being a republican.

Now we are in a difficult time. Not only do we have the sadness of the Queen’s funeral to contend with, but there is a lot out there for us to worry about. We don’t know whether we’re going to be able to afford to heat our homes or have enough left to buy anything to eat this winter.

We know that there are lots of signs of climate change, so even if we did manage to reopen sources of natural gas it might not be the right thing to do in the medium and long-term.

There’s a horrible war going on in Europe, not that far away from us. Russian aeroplanes – giant Tupolev Bears – come and see whether they can fly really close to our shores in order to test whether the RAF is ready to see them off.

There’s a terrible civil war in Syria and a similar outbreak in the Yemen. There is famine in Afghanistan, and terrible floods in Pakistan.

Literally millions of people have lost their homes or are fleeing because their homes are no longer safe as a result of these wars.

I think that this all adds up and makes us feel afraid. Things aren’t safe. We don’t know what’s around the corner. We are very much afraid that it is not nice, whatever it is. We can only imagine what it must feel like if you are one of those refugees, who is desperately trying to reach a safe place in northern Europe.

Against that background the Royal family, and especially our late Queen, have stood out as powerful symbols of continuity and stability. In a very real sense they have been symbols of safety. So long as the Queen was there, so long as the flag over Buckingham Palace was flying, we could feel that our lives were not at risk, even despite the shady dealings of dodgy politicians in the various countries of the world – and perhaps even in our country. After all, we have had four prime ministers, almost in as many years, but the monarch’s – the Queen’s – reassuring presence has been constant.

I think that people are reaching out for something or someone to believe in and trust. The Queen earned that trust. She worked so hard, right up until the last few days of her life. We never knew what her views were in any detail, but she seemed to rise above the petty considerations of day-to-day politics. And she was patently a good person. She was a wonderful example of somebody who had a strong Christian belief; and that Christian belief led her to want to care for people, to make them safe.

Well that’s a quick tour d’horizon of what’s happening now; but tonight our Bible readings invite us to take a much longer historical perspective. Our first lesson is the story of the Persian king Cyrus, about 500 years before the time of Jesus, suddenly making a proclamation that the Jews, who had been marched off and enslaved in Babylon, when the Babylonians conquered Judah and Jerusalem, those Jews, they could go free, go back to Judah and rebuild the Temple.

You remember Psalm 137 – ‘By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept’: no? Well, perhaps anyway you remember the Boney M version. The Babylonians had defeated the Israelites and destroyed the temple, King David’s Temple, and they’d carted the Israelites off to Babylon. Then the King of Persia, Cyrus, came along and defeated the Babylonians. And then he did this seemingly extraordinarily generous thing. Even though the Israelites were reasonably formidable fighters, possibly even future enemies; nevertheless, they could go free and go back to the country.

Cyrus even gave them substantial funds and materials with which to rebuild their city and their Temple. It was such a striking thing for Cyrus to do, and so apparently generous and altruistic, that there is even a verse or two in Isaiah to the effect that the Jews began to think that Cyrus could possibly be the Messiah, the anointed one of God, who would save his chosen people – would make them safe. (See Isaiah 44:28 and 45:1)

In fact there were a few false starts and it took a while before it was possible to rebuild the temple; during that time the Israelites fell out with the indigenous population around Jerusalem, the Samaritans.

But then what do you make of the people who couldn’t work out what Jesus was, in our other lesson? I don’t know about you, but when somebody gives a lecture or pops up as an expert on the TV, I always slyly look them up on Wikipedia in my phone to see what their qualifications are. Are they somebody whom I can trust? Can I believe what they say? Are they likely to know what they are talking about? Especially in this time of social media when there is this constant stream of verbiage on Twitter and Facebook, whom should we believe?

Even though it was 2000 years ago, I can really understand what the Jews and Jesus’ supporters were saying to each other or about each other. What was Jesus? Some of his followers knew that he was a carpenter from Nazareth, so not the Chief Rabbi, not someone like Gamaliel, for instance.

Was he just a homespun but sincere preacher, standing at Speakers’ Corner, but without any particular theological or philosophical scholarship or expertise? Or was he something else entirely? If Isaiah had thought that he recognised King Cyrus as the Messiah, what about Jesus? He was teaching in the temple, doing something which traditionally you needed quite a lot of qualifications to do properly – and he hadn’t even passed his GCSE.

But just like us today, the people around Jesus really wanted somebody to believe in. They were of course concerned that it should be the right person, it should really be the Messiah: and frankly what Jesus said wasn’t particularly illuminating.

His followers said, ‘We know where this chap is from. But when the Messiah comes, we will not know where he has come from.’ They seemed to think that the Messiah would be somebody completely new and unexpected. Jesus didn’t really fit the profile. But Jesus made it more complicated. He said, ‘It’s not me that you should be looking at, but you should realise who sent me.’

How were they supposed to know? We have the same problem. You know, some people are very fortunate and they have experiences in their lives which they can refer to as what they call conversion experiences. John Wesley very famously, walking down Aldersgate Street in the City of London, going to a Bible study, (apparently somewhat unwillingly), felt his ‘heart strangely warmed’ and afterwards he said that at that point he really knew that his Saviour cared for him.

We don’t know how, and we don’t know really what it felt like, except in the very simplest terms. But it was very real for him, and he went on and became one of the greatest evangelists that this world has ever seen.

But many of us would say that we were sincere Christians, that we were followers of Jesus, even though we haven’t had one of those conversion experiences. But even so, life seems to make better sense to us, we have a feeling that we are, in a very real sense, safe, because of our belief and trust in Jesus.

Jesus is our saviour, the one who keeps us safe. And he has been doing that for 2000 years. 2000. I wouldn’t want to take anything away from the great worth of our late Queen’s 70 years of service, but I do think that, just as Cyrus wasn’t the Messiah, so our Queen wasn’t actually divine. But she did an awful lot to point us towards, to put us in mind of, the divine. For that we can be really thankful. May she rest in peace, and rise in glory.