Chapel Royal - 06/02/02

Honour humanity; Love the community; Fear God; Honour the Sovereign. I Peter II - the epistle appointed for the Accession Service.

This is a day of mingled sadness and joy. Sadness because it is the anniversary of the passing of King George VI of blessed memory and joy because it marks the beginning of the reign of our present sovereign.

This is not the occasion, therefore, for any reflections on particular royal persons but for a word in season about Christian monarchy. Not for us, gathered in the Chapel Royal, any foolish sophistries about monarchy being justified because it is good for tourist receipts.

With you, I rejoice in a monarchy with ancient roots and biblical reverberations from the time that Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet anointed Solomon King and all the people cried God save the King. What we celebrate is ancient and stands for deep continuities and rituals without which people become disorientated and cannot change purposefully but are doomed to direction-less and exhausting flirtation with novelty.

Ancient but also fresh. We are not here lauding some antique model of monarchy such as the personal rule of Charles I (when my predecessor incidentally moonlighted as Lord Treasurer of England). We celebrate what is fresh and especially precious in our own time. The head of our state is not a successful partisan who has emerged out of countless struggles about political issues but a human being with the kind of relationships with which we can all identify. She embodies the themes in our common life together which are more fundamental than this or that new idea, I mean the themes of birth and death, love and loss. To place such a person at the heart of our life as a nation is to honour humanity above all things and above all divisive ideologies.

And we honour humanity with some very definite characteristics of the kind which bind a community together. Our sovereign has not campaigned for high office. She has been called in tragic circumstances to very great responsibilities. The monarch embodies a vocational approach to life, lived, not as a consumer with personal gratification as the supreme good, but as a servant of God whose role is to strengthen the whole community. Our community embraces its memories and unites the living and the departed. This dimension of our life together is honoured in the hereditary principle.

For a Christian monarch, the whole community includes people of different faiths and none. Because a profound relationship with God can only be developed by those who have freely chosen to respond to his call. There can be no place for coercion and contempt. It is Christian to be tolerant not because we believe so little but because we believe so much in the importance of the free response to God's call which the monarch exemplifies at the Coronation service.

The cost of this call and way of life is so great that it is proper to regard it in sacrificial terms. As a notable republican said to me the other day - "I don't believe that we should ask anyone to do the job"

But the symbolic and unifying power of this response to a divine call and this servant role is very great. Just to take one recent example. Countless Americans have commented on the eloquence of the Queen's decision to instruct the band to play the American anthem outside Buckingham Palace after the September 11th atrocity. Nothing else could have so powerfully asserted the solidarity of our community with the suffering of the American people.

We believe, as Christians, that human beings without God quickly become less than human. Exclude the dimension of the Eternal God and the demand of divine love and very soon people, encouraged by bad science, come to regard themselves as little more than rapacious bipeds, whose chief end is to gratify themselves while passing genetic information from generation to generation. Very soon in this scenario there is bad news for the seemingly unfit and vulnerable in a ruthless eugenic agenda. Christian monarchy embodies a life, a fully human life, lived in the presence and calling of God who dignifies all humanity.

Honour Humanity, Love the Community, Fear God, Honour the Sovereign.

The spectacle of such a life properly evokes loyalty. Not the calculating loyalty of the plastic loyalty card at the supermarket but a transforming and attentive love. Loyalty of course is always regulated by its consonance with the law of God because loyalty to a bad cause is not a virtue but the people I have known who exemplify true loyalty exhibit a spiritual beauty which is its own witness to truth.

This Accession Day, it is a time to speak about those things which may once have seemed obvious but which if they are not affirmed will pass into oblivion. Honour Humanity, Love the Community, Fear God and Honour the Sovereign. In a Christian monarchy these things cohere and hold together. Thanks be to God and God save the Queen.