A Queen and A Poor Sinner: Sermon Preached in St Peter’s, Poulshot, Sunday 11th September 2022 (The Period of Mourning for the Death of Queen Elizabeth II)

“every one which seeth the Son, and believeth on him, may have everlasting life”

Readings – 2 Corinthians 4:16–5:4; John 6:35–40

As I prepared to preach a sermon as we mourn a long-lived monarch of deep Christian faith, the story of another royal death 106 years ago pushed its way into my mind. It is about the funeral of Emperor Franz Joseph von Habsburg, who was as deeply faithful a Christian as Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II; he also sat on his throne for almost as long as she did on hers.

Franz-Joseph reigned for 68 years after assuming the throne as a result of the great Europe-wide popular uprisings of 1848, and died in the middle of the First World War. On one level his life story seems impossibly remote – even his surname invokes the medieval world; yet it was recent enough to encompass democratic elections, trade unions, worldwide telecommunications, and the sort of horrific artillery barrages we have seen recapitulated on the flats fields of Ukraine this year. Indeed, it was recent enough that it is possible to watch a few minutes of film footage from his funeral procession through the streets of Vienna on YouTube.

The procession was appropriately full of pomp and circumstance. Beautifully attired dignitaries and a detachment of elegant hussars on white steeds escorted a casket draped in the black and gold of the Habsburg family which had ruled vast territories for six hundred years.

When the procession arrived at the Imperial Crypt, a great iron door barred the way to the family mausoleum. On the other side stood the Cardinal Archbishop of Vienna waiting.

The officer leading the casket stood at the door, knocked, and cried “Open!”

“Who goes there?” responded the Cardinal from behind the iron doors.

The officer replied: “We bear the remains of his Imperial and Apostolic Majesty, Franz Joseph the First, by the grace of God Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary, Defender of the faith…” continuing with all the Emperor’s thirty-seven titles.

“We know him not!”, the Cardinal replied abruptly.

The officer once more knocked the vast iron door, and again the Cardinal replied – “Who goes there?”

The officer this time used a shorter title for the deceased Emperor.

The Cardinal replied again, “We know him not!”

The officer then knocked for the third time. The Cardinal replied for the third time, “Who goes there?”

This time the officer’s answer was different: “We bear the body of Franz Joseph, our brother, a sinner – like us all.”

“This man we recognise”, replied the Cardinal finally, and the huge iron doors swung open to admit the body of an Emperor.

*  *  *  *  *

Much is being said about Elizabeth the Queen, but beyond the odd reference to how important her faith was to her, little is being said about Elizabeth the Christian. Still less is said about the content of the faith she held so firmly, the Catholic faith as the Church of England has received it. It is perhaps not the best content to keep viewers glued until the advertising break or to generate clicks. But as St Paul writes in this morning’s Epistle, we should not look for the things which are visible and temporal, but for the things which go unseen yet are eternal.

Indeed, viewed from the perspective of her Christian faith we see a different side of Elizabeth. Elizabeth the Queen was born to assume the throne; Elizabeth the Christian was confirmed into a Church that at the time too often neglected and dismissed the spiritual gifts of lay people, and especially lay women like her. When we celebrate the life of Elizabeth the Christian, then far from doing something elitist, we undermine the idea that holiness is the preserve of priests and prelates. Indeed, we undermine the idea that living a holy life is inaccessible to any of us, for we allow ourselves to see that, through the grace of God and the power of the Holy Spirit, a rich woman can indeed pass through the eye of a needle.

Perhaps her most important contribution as a Christian came in the last decade of her long life when she sought to make peace with her enemies, indeed, made peace publicly with a senior commander of the organisation who had murdered her favourite cousin in cold blood – granting of the gifts of the Holy Spirit is prayed for each of us at our Confirmations, and the building of peace is perhaps the greatest of those gifts.

Her achievements were real. But the Christian faith teaches that no matter what we have achieved or have failed to achieve, we are all equal before God. We are all sinners, undeserving of any reward from God, but absolutely loved by God as His children.

We trust that God will raise Elizabeth to eternal life and raise us to eternal life not because she or we have passed some sort of cosmic exam of godly living, but because God the Son, Jesus Christ, gave his life on the Cross on the first Good Friday as a ransom for the world. God will not raise us to eternal life as a reward for good behaviour but because He keeps his promises.

As I shall say in a few minutes when I pray that God will feed us with his body and blood in sacramental bread and wine, Christ made on the Cross, “a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world.” A sufficient sacrifice for the sins of Elizabeth and Franz Joseph, and for the sins of you and I.

In this morning’s Gospel reading, Jesus says, “him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.” Note that this is not qualified in any way. It is not qualified by how often we fail to live up to the Christian commitments we profess to live by. After we receive Holy Communion, we will pray together that God will accept us “not weighing our merits, but pardoning our offences”. And certainly Christ’s acceptance of us is not qualified by our supposed standing in the world. No monarch in a palace who squeezes through the eye of a needle to the love of God will be turned away, nor will any spiritual doorman bar the people of council estates or shanty towns from His love. Nobody is excluded – not the genderfluid Generation Z kid with their rainbow flag tattoo or the grumpy old retired colonel harrumphing about the state of the world over his copy of the Salisbury Review.

Jesus says in this morning’s Gospel reading that “every one which seeth the Son … may have everlasting life”. He says that the Father’s will is that the Son will lose nothing of that which he has been given – not Elizabeth or Franz-Joseph, not people in Poulshot or people in Soweto – but rather that all who believe on the name of the Lord shall be saved.

Jesus, the bread of life, feeds us with His very self in bread and wine, not as a prize but to nourish and sustain us as we travel to eternal bliss through a world that is sometimes frightening, and often dark.

For rich and for poor, the things that make us groan, to use the term St Paul uses in this morning’s Epistle, are illness and infirmity, distress and breakdown in our families, and the loss of those whom we love most. Elizabeth certainly had her share of those traumas. The sacrament of Holy Communion nourished her through those pains until she was, as St Paul puts it, “clothed upon with our house which is from heaven”. May it also nourish us through our pains and groans.

And so we mourn the death and celebrate the life of our Queen and our Christian sister. According to the promises of Jesus Christ, this sceptred monarch and poor sinner now feasts around the great throne of heaven in that eternal Communion of all faithful souls, rich and poor, of which our Eucharist this morning gives us just a glimpse through a dark mirror – and even through that dark mirror shows us that the eternity that awaits us is so wonderful as to make the groans of life bearable.

And now to the Father who made us for Love, to the Son who paid the price of Love, the Holy Spirit who breathes perfect Love, be ascribed all glory and majesty, dominion and power, as is most justly due, world without end. Amen.