A Sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on September 11, 2022 by Revd Dr Sam Wells
In Honour of Queen Elizabeth II
At 9.15 on the morning of 21 October 1966, a colliery spoil tip on a mountain slope above the Welsh village of Aberfan, near Merthyr Tydfil, catastrophically collapsed. It suddenly slid downhill as a slurry, engulfing the local junior school, killing 116 children and 28 adults.
The event occupies an episode in the third series of the Netflix drama, The Crown. The episode portrays Queen Elizabeth’s uncertainty how to respond to the disaster. Urged to visit by the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, she initially states, ‘The Crown doesn’t do disaster sites; we do hospitals.’ She thinks her presence would be a distraction amid the chaos of rescue, anger and grief. A few days later, as the disaster saturates the conscience of the nation, she sends the Duke of Edinburgh to attend the funerals of the children. When he returns, and tries to tell her what it was like, he breaks down, and his sobs drown out his attempts to describe it. His uncharacteristic emotion pierces the shroud of protocol. Thereafter it’s a question not of whether the Queen should go, but when. Eventually, eight days after the tragedy, she goes herself, shares the sufferings of the people, shakes hands, walks through the rubble, and feels in her soul the reality of what had taken place there. Later, we’re told, when her private secretary was asked whether the Queen had any regrets over her reign, she replied, ‘Aberfan.’
Thirty-one years later, the Queen was at Balmoral when she received news of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. The tidal wave of public emotion contrasted painfully with the Queen’s concern for protocol and her desire to protect Diana’s two sons, then aged 12 and 15. Eventually, again after a week’s uncomfortable delay, the Queen came to London, expressed her grief in a broadcast, and joined in the nation’s public mourning at the funeral the following day.
These two events seem to me hugely significant. Significant because they are perhaps the only occasions in 70 years when the Queen and her advisers misjudged the role the public wanted and needed her to play. But significant even more because of what they demonstrate about what that role actually was. In Cape Town in 1947 on her 21st birthday she said these momentous words: ‘I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service, and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.’
To make such an extraordinary vow at such a young age, having believed until the age of 12 that there was no serious likelihood of her inheriting the throne, established one unwavering conviction: that no one, no elderly royal, no conscientious civil servant, no politician, demagogue or soldier, understood better than her what this nation and the commonwealth meant and what loyalty to them required. Like a priest standing at the altar for the people before God, the Queen held the aspirations, commitments and responsibilities of nation and Commonwealth in her heart and mind, and they were safe there for 70 years.
This is the capacity to hold a representative role, which the Queen knew and embodied better than almost anyone ever has. But this is precisely the paradox highlighted by the tragedy of Aberfan and the death of Diana. On both occasions, in entirely different contexts, the nation felt the sureties of life come loose and the vulnerability of existence all too evident. Here’s the dilemma: if the Queen dived into the melee of feeling and grief, and was herself overcome by sadness and pain, what stable, secure lynchpin was left – what constant, unchanging bastion was still there? But by contrast if the Queen remained distant, safe, unchanging, in what way was she truly embodying the experience of her people, as she had as a young woman when visiting bombed buildings in the war or slipping out into the crowds on VE Day?
The more we’ve been aware of our weakness, as human beings, as a society, as a nation, as a world, the more we’ve taken strength from the Queen’s constancy and abiding grace. Which of us did not feel the jerk of a tear when, on April 5, 2020, she broadcast these stirring words: ‘While we have faced challenges before, this one is different. This time we join with all nations across the globe in a common endeavour, using the great advances of science and our instinctive compassion to heal. We will succeed – and that success will belong to every one of us. We should take comfort that while we may have more still to endure, better days will return: we will be with our friends again; we will be with our families again; we will meet again.’ Several times during the pandemic, but especially in those first few weeks, I reflected that if the Queen were to die of covid, it might stretch the resilience of the nation beyond breaking point.
In a more complex way, the whole Commonwealth has drawn from the Queen a remarkable sense of historical continuity, cultural unity in diversity and a common ethos. This is especially notable when we hear the Queen’s use of the word ‘imperial’ in her 21st birthday broadcast, and realise how successfully she has bridged from the time of her childhood, when the Empire was a source of pride to Britain, through the time of independence of former colonies earlier in her reign, through to now with our constant reckoning with the less savoury dimensions and legacies of the colonial project; somehow the Queen kept pace with and sometimes anticipated of the public mood, for example with her annual Commonwealth Day interfaith service at Westminster Abbey. This ability is epitomised in the entry into the Commonwealth of countries like Cameroon, Gabon and Mozambique with which Britain had no prior imperial connections.
And yet, for all the Queen’s stability, continuity and security, she’s been perfectly comfortable showing her human side, most evidently in her love of horses. The image of the Queen in a headscarf beside a horse is almost as familiar as the image of her in a crown and swathed in velvet. When I was about 15, I went to the Badminton Horse Trials and she walked right past me having clearly walked most of the three-day-event course; no security guard was in sight. She owned 30 corgis in the course of her life, and no picture of the Royal Family was complete without them.
When the Queen talked about her faith, which she did every Christmas and at other times, she described a remarkably simple, uncomplicated devotion to Jesus, commitment to walk in his steps of neighbour-service, selflessness and sacrifice, and humble admiration for those great and small who embodied his way of peace. She was an astonishing evangelist for a vision of God’s kingdom, for which Christ laid down his life, that was expressed in kindness, gentleness and justice, and had a place for everybody.
Perhaps most notable of all, given how ubiquitous was her image on stamps, coins, and cereal boxes, how many thousands of times she stood up as everyone around her sang the National Anthem, and how many palaces and domains she owned, was her ability to deflect attention from herself, such that, while she felt like a member of everybody’s family, almost nobody really knew her. The fabulous portrayals of her with James Bond in 2012 and Paddington Bear just three months ago on her Platinum Jubilee gave the public a look inside her domestic life and sense of humour that felt genuinely intimate and almost revelatory.
The significance of all these dimensions of her life and reign is this. There’s perhaps no person in the last century who has more explicitly exhibited the characteristics of all three persons of the Trinity. For the sovereign to represent the majesty of God the Father is perhaps not a surprise. The combination of grandeur and gentleness, generativity and grace is among the most obvious things we’d look for in a constitutional monarch. But add to that the sacrifice and selflessness of Jesus, the passion and the path of peace, the incarnate showing-up myriad times to open a school or celebrate a refurbished High Commission or mark a cup final or open a Commonwealth Heads of Government summit. And add to that again the dynamism of the Holy Spirit, the celebration of both the communication of the gospel and the concrete acts of mercy that populate God’s kingdom.
Once the mists have cleared and the tributes fallen silent, what we can see is that this woman, this ubiquitous yet still mysterious woman, showed us the workings of God the Holy Trinity and thus opened to us the door of heaven. In her struggles after Aberfan and following the death of Diana we glimpse something of the struggles of God in the face of suffering and pain. It’s not just that she outlasted all her contemporaries or that she made the monarchy coherent in a democratic age: it’s that she elevated our ordinary existence to the threshold of God’s essence, and made each one of us aspire to dwell with her there.
For 70 years Queen Elizabeth was at the heart of nation and Commonwealth. Now she’s at the heart of God. We’ll meet again.
