Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot
Readings – Joshua 1: 1–9; Romans 13: 1–10
“For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God.”
The Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria was the high-water mark of British imperialist triumphalism. Seventeen carriages, let by Victoria’s open-air affair, processed from Buckingham Palace through to St Paul’s Cathedral for a service of thanksgiving. Eleven colonial prime ministers and the representatives of more than a dozen overseas monarchies were present, from as far away as Iran, Japan, and Thailand. But the spirit of the day was incarnated by the partying throngs on the streets, enjoying a celebratory special Bank Holiday at a time when workers’ rights were much fewer than they are today. Edward Elgar’s wonderful Cockaigne Overture is perhaps that day’s most enduring legacy, with its rambunctious major-key crescendos capturing the boisterous fun of Cockney celebrations.
The “pomp of yesterday” – an escort of Indian Cavalry passes Parliament during the Diamond Jubilee festivities of Queen Victoria, 22 June 1897.
One cultural figure we might have expected to join in the mood of artistic imperialist triumphalism was the chief propagandist of Empire, Rudyard Kipling. Yet he only wrote towards the end of the festivities, and even then solely in the form of a poetic commentary on them, sounding a warning note that was particularly surprising from a man only marginally religious.
“God of our fathers, known of old,
Lord of our far-flung battle line,
Beneath whose awful hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine —
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!
[…]
Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!”
All of our blessings as individuals, as nations, as the human race, flow only from God. All of us forget this from time to time. Certainly the policy-makers of Victorian imperialism at their worst often forgot in whose name they held that dominion over palm and pine, forgetting too often also the care for the outsider and the poor that He commanded His followers to bear always in mind.
We should not damn the Victorians entirely for their worst faults, which were real but not the whole story. From the factory acts to universal free schooling to the final suppression of the slave trade, they sincerely believed in bettering the lot of all. Yet it is hard to see the spirit of the carpenter’s son from Nazareth in the deliberate suffocation of indigenous leadership in the emerging Church of Black Africa, or the many famines of Victorian India, or the big famine in Victorian Ireland.
Yet, lest we forget, we too have our faults – our neglect of our natural environment, for example, a subject close to the heart of the King, may yet produce human suffering on an apocalyptic scale. We have as many faults as our ancestors, and much less sense of our need to be forgiven.
Our New Testament reading, from Romans, with its unqualified command to obey the governing authorities as the servants of God, is one that we can struggle with in our democratic era. Surely, we find ourselves asking, that couldn’t have applied in Nazi Germany or Stalin’s USSR, or a number of countries today?
The American Anglican theologian, William Stringfellow, was once visited by an FBI agent as a result of his activism against the Vietnam War. The G-man made the mistake of asking Stringfellow, with specific reference to today’s New Testament reading, “Doesn’t the Bible say you must obey the emperor?”
Stringfellow reports his own reply as follows:
I could not concede the simplistic premise about the Bible which his question assumed, and I rebuked him about this, taking perhaps forty-five minutes to do so. During the discourse, he wilted visibly, and, when I paused momentarily, he abruptly excused himself and departed. This was some disappointment to me, for I had only just begun to respond to the multifarious implications of the issue he had raised.
I raise that because Stringfellow taught that we should read Scripture in tension. We should not expect a compendium of writings produced by hundreds of people, responding to God across a thousand years, to speak with one voice. When confronted by passages of Scripture that seem to contradict or clash, we should not seek to impose a false consistency on them, for we inevitably do so to suit our own ends. God often speaks to us in the dissonance between passages of Scripture – Scriptural Truth can often only be discerned by being prepared to remain with the texts in tension, and to be transformed by that tension over time.
This is particularly appropriate as we live in a time of tension, when the old order that formed the development of this country and most of its neighbours for centuries is now slipping out of people’s direct memory. The previous coronation happened at the final moment of its strength. In the intervening seventy years it has not only ended but is no longer comprehensible to most people below retirement age.
Therefore the symbolism of a coronation can seem alien in a culture where the equality of all people is rightly proclaimed and where deference to authority is rejected. Most of all, while a Christian coronation can and yesterday did embrace people of other faiths as fellow seekers of peace, justice, and good government, it sits uneasily with an atheistic intellectual and cultural order where the transcendent and the divine are often rejected as mumbo-jumbo.
Yet the authority of the experts and technocrats is starting to be as resoundingly rejected as that of the peers and prelates they replaced. The once new order is already in obvious crisis, and may turn out to have a lifespan of no more than a few generations.
Democracy, pluralism, equality, and freedom of expression didn’t emerge from nowhere. Nor have they, historically speaking, been the experience of most of humanity; even today they are blessings enjoyed by at best a narrow majority of the human race. Their flowering came at the end of complex and gradual historical processes, driven by the Christian Gospel’s call to value all God’s children equally and care particularly for the weak and vulnerable. Gospel values acted in tension against the harsher principles of a hierarchical society over many long centuries and against some of humanity’s basic instincts. They did so in a society which was saturated with Christian words and images, and faith in Jesus Christ. Now most of our thinkers and policy-makers seem to be betting that the fruits of Gospel values can continue to be harvested when the superstructure of a Christian society has been taken away. That strikes me as a risky bet.
Into this strange and nervous moment the coronation projected ancient symbols – the St Augustine Gospels made in the late 6th centuries; the Green Man present in so many of the churches built after the Norman Conquest – that connect us to the deepest parts of our story. It also enmeshed them fully with the multi-cultural Britain that has emerged between the last coronation and this one.
And in doing all this – ‘Lest we forget—lest we forget!’ – it reminded us that all our blessings do indeed flow from God. That remains the case even in a society where so many people think the very idea of God is ridiculous, and are trapped into thinking that we, as individuals, as a nation, and as a species have to make it on our own. So let us pray for them and for us, that God will continue to bless them and us – not because we deserve it, for the truth is that we never deserved it, but for the sake of His mercy. As Kipling concluded:
For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard,
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And, guarding, calls not Thee to guard;
For frantic boast and foolish word—
Thy Mercy on Thy People, Lord!
And now let us ascribe all glory to our Heavenly Father, King of the Universe, to His Son the King of Kings, and to God the Holy Spirit, the King of Love, as is most justly due, now and forever.
