Australian Monarchist League -

by The Very Rev'd Boak Jobbins Dean of Sydney

A Sermon preached in St Andrew's Cathedral Sydney
on the occasion of the 70th Birthday of HM Queen Elizabeth II
21 April 1996

Elizabeth, sixth Sovereign Queen and forty-second Sovereign of England since William the Conqueror. She is Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and its colonial territories, Head of the Commonwealth, Queen of eleven other independent countries including our own: Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, source of justice, fountain of honour, Supreme Governor of the Church; all government is carried out in her name.

It is the 70th birthday of the person who is all of that which we celebrate today: God save the Queen; Long live the Queen.

There is method in the madness of monarchy as we know it. At one level, it is madness: supreme power is accorded to someone who in practice is almost totally powerless. So powerless is she, that she would be required to sign her own death warrant were it ever presented to her.

But there is method in that madness. When seasoned politicians at the end of the twentieth century go on their knees before an unassuming mother of four, it is because her function is to keep power in proportion to life as a whole. The mighty have only been lent power for a season: its true home is elsewhere. All the glory, the pomp, the circumstance accorded to Queen Elizabeth II is, essentially, no more than the respect which in a democracy is the ultimate right of the most humble individual. Majesty in her terms is the majesty of the common man. And she embodies the hope that at the centre of the vast, impersonal machinery of the modern state might lie an ordinary human being, living, breathing like everyone else.

That methodical madness has evolved over millennia: it has its origins in the words of God through Moses, which we heard in the first lesson. When you want a king, says God, he must see himself as under God: Deuteronomy 17:18-20. The king rules for God: he does what God does and what God wants; he is not his own master, for God is the true, the real king. The king rules as God: what he does, he does how God does it: with gentleness and mercy, with justice and compassion, and with a burning love of truth.

The king, says God, is not to imperil the distinctiveness of the nation: Deuteronomy 17:15-16. The nation Moses addressed owed its existence to God: he had chosen it; he had rescued it from slavery in Egypt; he had called it into being to undo the sin of Adam. This nation was to be the vehicle by which God would restore creation to what he had always intended: through it, mankind would be brought back into right relationship with God, dependent, submissive, worshipful, obedient; in this nation, mankind would see how to live, what was right, what was wrong, how to relate to others with compassion and justice, as servants; through this nation, mankind would learn how to relate rightly to the rest of creation, using it but caring for it, living off it but preserving it. And let not the king imperil that distinctiveness and that role.

The king, says God, is not to imperil the dignity of his subjects: Deuteronomy 17:17. In that culture, the amassing of personal wealth, the indulgence of personal pleasure could only be at the expense of others. And that was not God's way: in recent days, Moses' hearers had experienced God's way: he rescued them, as by power and mercy he had defeated the gods and Pharaohs of Egypt; in this season of Easter, we have been reminded of God's way, his great rescue. For rescue is God's way.

To people like you and me - people who ignore God and live as though he were not there; people who flout God and live as though he were not lord; people who pay lip-service to God and live as though he did not matter, as though life were their own making; people who deny God and live as though others are for their enjoyment or exploitation - to people like that, like you and me, God comes not in the anger we deserve but as one of us. He puts skin on and he livers differently; and He dies an innocent one, and he passes through death to life. And God says to people like you and me "Cry out for mercy because of what I have done; ask for forgiveness, because I died in your place: all that you owe me because of who you are and what you have done has been paid. Just ask - and for you will be freedom in the place of bondage to self-interest, peace in the place of anxiety, hope in the place of despair, strength in the place of weakness, life in the place of death." That is what God says to you and me, and nothing else matters until we have said "yes" to God, until we have said "be merciful to me, a sinner". That is God's way: and that is the model for the king.

Our Sovereign in the twentieth century embodies those ideals, expressed in terms of our culture and history. And this particular Queen, in her own person, truly fulfils those ideals. And it is the existence, the reign, the life, the service, and the very great length of them all, of our Sovereign that we celebrate today.
In our national Constitution, there are some surprising and innocuous words: Whereas the people of NSW, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland and Tasmania, humbly relying on the blessing of Almighty God, have agreed to unite in one indissoluble Federal Commonwealth .. humbly relying on the blessing of Almighty God ...Surprising words, perhaps because people are unaware that they are there; surprising because looking at Australia with late twentieth century eyes one would not expect Australians to include such words in their Constitution; surprising because they do not appear to have had much impact - we are not a righteous nation, nor a self-consciously religious one. It may be natural for the President of the US to call his nation to prayer: were an Australian PM to do so, it would be assumed he had lost touch.

And they are innocuous words because they do not say much. They do not establish religion in general, and they do not establish a particular church. They simply give public recognition to God, to make the Commonwealth friendly to, an ally of religion. They fix the "stamp of the Eternal" in the Constitution and in national life.

Surprising and innocuous words, but they were hard won. In the 1890s there was a campaign specifically to exclude the mention of God from the Constitution. Two attempts to have the recognition of God included in the Constitution failed, a gratuitous denial of God in our national affairs. It was not widely argued that the omission of God would invite divine displeasure, though some did link the drought, the depression and the social unrest of the 1890s with the neglect of God. Nor was it argued that the mention of God would make the Commonwealth godly: rather it would save the Commonwealth from the peril of formally denying God and his authority over the nations.

That is what motivated the campaign: anxiety over the authority of God, and of religion, in society. In January 1889, Alfred Barry, the third bishop of Sydney, argued that the State ought to do something to maintain Christianity: the Christian statesman, he said, could help make the State Christian in its policy and its conduct.
Barry and his colleagues were motivated by their understanding of God and society. At heart, their view can be summed up as No King but God, No God but God, No One but Others. No King .... the true ruler, the one who holds life and circumstances, future and blessings in his hands, is not the king, or whatever the ruler is called, but God, and ideally he is enough. No God but ... let the king know that he rules not in his own right, but under God and for God. No One but ... as God did not cling to the perquisites of godness but became one of us and came to rescue us, so the king must see himself as there for others. It was to secure in the political world, in the common life of the people, that understanding of how things are that drove the campaign.

In our own time, we face the question again: what is our understanding of ourselves as a nation? Today, it presents itself in the form of monarchy or republic, what will be our system of government: and when the bugles summon us to the barricades, I know which side I will be on. But that is not the fundamental question: the fundamental question is, how do we understand ourselves as a nation? Are we our own masters, or the subjects of God? Independent, unbound, free, masters of the universe; or dependent on God, submissive to God, servants of God and of others?

That understanding of life and society is described in our present system of constitutional monarchy, with its roots in those words from Deuteronomy. It is embodied in the person of the Queen of Australia, whose birthday we celebrate. In the nineteenth century, it was acknowledged, reaffirmed even, in the Preamble to the Constitution. It will only be secured in the twentieth century if people like you and me say "Yes" to God, "Yes" to his offer of forgiveness and mercy, of freedom and peace; it will only be secured today if people like you and me show by how we are that life is to be lived under God and for others; it will only be secured today if people like you and me involve ourselves in the wider intellectual debate about the nature, not just the structure, of life and human society in Australia.

We bless you, God of the universe,
for this land,
for its contrasts of landscape and climate,
for its abundance of wealth and opportunity.
We bless you for our history,
with all its struggles in adversity,
its courage and hope.
We bless you for our Queen,
her life, her service, her embodiment of who we are.
Give us in our diversity
tolerance and respect for each other
and a passionate commitment for justice to all.
Cause us to know you and to live for you.
Bless us so that we might be a blessing to others.
We ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

On this day, which marks the seventieth anniversary of the birth of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, we have come together for three main purposes. The first, as it always is when we assemble in a church which is set apart as a House of God, is to worship God and to acknowledge ourselves as his children in need of his grace; the second is to give thanks for the celebration of our Queen's birthday and for the
wonderful example which she has given us for the past 44 years since she came to the throne; and the third purpose is to pray for Her Majesty, that she may be blessed with health and lasting happiness, and that she may continue to reign over us for many years to come.

It is obvious that no words of mine can adequately express the thoughts which come to our minds, or the emotions which fill our hearts, on this occasion. However, there is one aspect of the life of our Queen on which I should like to speak for a few moments, and that is the sense of dedication, which from years before her accession up to the present time, has been foremost in her life. In 1947 when Princess Elizabeth, as she then was, attained 21 years of age, she spoke these words in a broadcast made in Capetown but addressed especially to the people of the whole British Commonwealth of Nations: 'I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service.'

Recalling those words today, we rejoice that her life has been long rather than short, and we acknowledge with gladness that that pledge of dedication has been fulfilled in a most wonderful and enduring way. I ask you to note that the word used by Princess Elizabeth in 1947, the word devoted, has a strong religious connotation. It suggests that a vow has been taken, and I feel sure that the Princess meant the word devoted to be understood in that sense. In her life there has been no cessation of devotion to service, no stepping back from the constant demands it has made upon her, and no sign of her wishing that it could be otherwise. She has accepted her life's work as a vocation, to which she has been called by God, and has held to it with an unswerving spirit of dedication. For this we give thanks to God with all our hearts.

The Monarchy as an institution is a subject on which many words have been expended. It is not my purpose to speak on the Monarchy as a subject in itself, but I believe that if anyone wished to commend the monarchical system, he would be well served by exemplifying it in the person of our Queen. I do not mean to say that the Monarchy as an institution is dependent upon the personal qualities of a particular monarch, for I believe that monarchy as a system can be commended be reference to a number of excellent principles. However, I think that one of the best commendations of that system is to be found in the person of our present Queen. By her way of life, her demeanour on all occasions, her dignity, her allegiance to Christian standards of morality, her unaffected religious commitment, her care for her people throughout the Commonwealth, her unrivalled knowledge of State affairs, and HER COMPLETE IMPARTIALITY IN POLITICAL MATTERS, she sets an example of what a Head of State should be. When we add to those attributes, the spirit of dedication of which I spoke earlier, we have abundant cause to be grateful, and to pray, God save the Queen.

I want to conclude by saying a prayer which I wrote, at the request of the Monarchist League in Australia, about a year ago, and which is being used, I believe, in services similar to this in various parts of Australia today.

Grant Her every grace and blessing
that She may continue to serve Thee,
and the people of Her realms,
with devotion and singleness of heart.

Inspire those set under Her
with the same sense of dedicated service
that unity, peace and concord
may flourish in our land.

We make these petitions in the name of Him
who in His earthly life set before us
the perfect example of majesty,
gentleness and obedience to Thy will,
Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.