A Living Sacrifice
Choral Evensong Sermon, 11 September 2022
Angela Tilby,
Canon of Honour
‘I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.’ - Romans 12.1-8
It has been an extraordinary week. Life is unpredictable at the best of times but it we never quite learn to deal with the surprises it throws at us. We knew of course that this time would come but not how or when. And now well-laid plans for this moment of transition unfold before us. We are singing different words to the national anthem, we will have a different face on our stamps and we have a new monarch, a new embodiment of our life as a nation.
To me the late Queen embodied that call from St Paul in Romans to present herself as a living sacrifice, a call we hear echoed in the communion service: ‘Here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, ourselves, our souls and bodies to be a reasonable, holy and lively sacrifice unto thee’, or in the more prosaic modern version: ‘Through him we offer you our souls and bodies, to be a living sacrifice’. So much of the Queen’s vocation was about being there in the body, which meant simply getting out of bed in the morning and turning up to events which may have been in the calendar for months, as well as dealing with what every day brought by way of demands, requests, crises and routine.
In the midst of all the comment this week I found a quote from a letter written in 1953 by the writer and Christian apologist C.S. Lewis in which he described Queen Elizabeth’s Coronation. Rather against the young queen’s wishes, the Coronation was shown on television. Lewis wrote, ‘What impressed most was the fact that the Queen herself appeared to be quite overwhelmed by the sacramental side of it. Hence in the spectators, a feeling of - one hardly knows how to describe it – awe, pity, pathos, mystery. The pressing of that huge, heavy crown on that small, young head becomes a sort of symbol of the situation of humanity itself: humanity called by God to be his vice regent and high priest on earth, yet feeling so inadequate. As if God said, “In my inexorable love I shall lay upon the dust that you are glories and dangers and responsibilities beyond your understanding”. ‘
Do you see what I mean?’, Lewis went on ‘One has missed the whole point unless one feels that we all have been crowned and that coronation is somehow, if splendid, a tragic splendour’.
I was very touched by those words. Again and again in the last few days we have heard the young queen’s vow to dedicate her whole life whether long or short to the service of her people. And she has done that day after day, in the body, always being there. In the matching hats and coats and the dresses-with-jackets and 2-inch heels and handbag. Always bright colours because she knew she was there to be seen. To fulfil her vow she had to overcome a natural shyness, repress a naturally wicked humour, learn to say the obvious things, ‘Have you come far?’ and mean it every time. There have been sacrifices beyond her own. Prince Philip’s sacrifice of his career which hurt him and made him angry. Princess Margaret’s sacrifice of her great love Captain Townsend, the tragic, broken fairy tale of Charles and Diana, and the disgrace of Prince Andrew: William and Kate and Harry and Megan. Love, duty, misjudgement, celebration and disappointment weave in and out of each other as in so many families.
The story of our Royal Family over the last seventy years is so like the stories we see of the patriarchs and kings of the Old Testament. There is a call from God, an anointing, there is obedience, and also jealousy and rivalry, there are marriages and children, there is sexual misconduct and betrayal. Yet, somehow, out of it all God’s promise continues. Perfection is not expected but obedience is. We see the truth of C.S Lewis’s words about a tragic splendour, which belongs to all of us, dust of the earth as we are and yet called to bear the weight of glory, a weight which we must accept even when we cannot. That crown pressing down upon the young queen’s head, that presses down on all of us as we are called to present our bodies as a living sacrifice, our spiritual worship.
It still staggers me that the Queen was on her feet in kilt and cardy welcoming the new Prime minister two days before she died. That last picture of her, smiling before the fire, will stay with me. This is what obedience, duty, sacrifice looks like. Over years of self-discipline she learnt something that I think is really important for all of us. And that is to be ‘in the flow’, to be present, to the demands of the day, to quieten the intrusive ego, the aches of the body, the longing to put her feet up instead. She always appeared gathered, dignified, purposeful, reliable, because she was not thinking of herself. And because of that she was able to be a channel of blessing. Think of the way almost everyone has dreamed about the queen at some point in their lives.
When I was a canon at Christ Church, Oxford, and she came to do the Royal Maundy service there was that extraordinary moment when we were all lined up in our gold copes (my curtsey having been well-practised), when suddenly there she was, this rather small person in a bright blue coat and hat, suddenly and quite terrifyingly present as she always had been in our minds and imagination. ‘Present your bodies as a living sacrifice’. Many of us in our distracted age spend our lives out of ourselves, out of our bodies, out of the flow. Playing with our smart phones, taken up with our own stuff, dreaming of being somewhere else, dipping in and out of the present time.
I think one reason people have stopped going to church is that they simply don’t know how to be present without the stimulus of distraction, fantasy and entertainment. A service like this, a slow unfolding of scripture, chant, singing, prayer is simply incomprehensible because we don’t know how to be in the moment, in the flow, how to suspend the noisy, reactive ego and just be. I hope our choirs come to know what it is to be ‘in the flow’, the fulfilment that comes from just being the music, not thinking of themselves, and so helping us to be in the presence of God.
God is there in the flow, and where we most truly are, in spite of all our inadequacies and failures. Being dedicated to God, as we were at baptism and at confirmation, is to enter that humble, royal anointed state of being given to God and to others: the awe, pity, pathos, mystery of what it is to be human.
We are all called to enter into that royal state, not being conformed to the passing vanities of this world, but transformed by the renewal of our minds.
To have a constitutional monarch, is, I believe a great gift and good fortune for our country, but it is also a window onto our truest vocation, our duty and our joy, to be the sons and daughters of the true and living God, fulfilled not by obsessing about ourselves, our identity, our grievances, our uniqueness, but by learning to bear the weight of our calling to be channels of blessing and hope to our neighbours and our world.