The following sermon was preached by The Bishop of Winchester, The Rt Revd Michael Scott-Joynt at Hampshire County Service to celebrate the Golden Jubilee of Her Majesty The Queen, in Winchester Cathedral on Sunday 2nd June 2002.

" Find your strength in the Lord........;   put on the whole armour of God.”

(Ephesians 6:10,11)

We are here to worship God,     to thank God for Her Majesty the Queen’s consistent, devoted service through these first fifty years of her reign,    and with her to rededicate ourselves “to hold fast that which is good”.

A fortnight tomorrow   I shall have the privilege of  reading that passage which we have just heard from St Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians    to Her Majesty and to her Knights of the Garter in St. George’s Chapel, Windsor in the annual Service of the Order.   She, they, I, and everyone else present will be dressed in the Robes and the clothes, the “gear”, that the occasion requires – as so many of us (and not only the clergy!) are appropriately clothed today; and the whole Windsor and Garter context speaks resonantly of the Monarch as “sovereign”, both authorising and representing the life of this country,  its Government at every level, its public services and  its Armed Forces.

Listen again, as the Queen and her predecessors have listened over the centuries, to those words with which I began:

“Find your strength in the Lord........;   put on the whole armour of God.”

Which is to say: “Let the “panoply”,  the whole “gear” in which you dress for whatever is your calling, be that which God gives – which if you are Christians God gave you at your Baptism;   look to the Lord   for your strength.”

At the heart of the Queen’s consistent dedication to her role, which for her is the calling that God has given her, has been her Christian faith, practised according to her early upbringing;  and she has increasingly made explicit reference to her Faith  in recent years.

In an age when so many families know marriage breakdown and all the distress that it brings, as well as the grief of bereavement,  she has encouraged many by the quality of her own perseverance through difficult times in her own family.

The Queen has encouraged and enjoyed the ecumenical  friendship that, Thank God, today so much  characterises the Churches in this country; and she has been doing so today, as representative Church leaders have signed a Covenant in her presence.

Her Majesty’s particular calling has always required her to understand  that Christian Faith necessarily requires of us discipleship - struggling to be followers and friends of Jesus who was crucified - at work and in  public life, and in the agonisingly difficult political questions that national and international developments constantly pose. People like Kenneth Kaunda have spoken of the Queen’s critically important contribution to the very existence of the Commonwealth. She has appreciated and valued the multi-ethnic, multi-Faith character of this country today, which is one of the most significant developments of these fifty years through which she has reigned; and she has recognised the extent to which ours is now, more clearly than ever before,      One World.     There must be a fascinating study, that I fear can never be written, on the influence that Her Majesty has increasingly had, through their regular meetings with her, on ten Prime Ministers from Churchill to Blair – and on five Archbishops of Canterbury!

In the Bible, in ancient Israel, “jubilee” was a time for recognising God’s Lordship over everything and everyone, over all economics and politics and over every aspect of human society and culture. We shall most appropriately thank God this weekend for Queen Elizabeth the Second, her husband and her family, and we shall best thank her and celebrate her Jubilee, if we in our turn devote ourselves freshly to listen to those sentences read this afternoon that the Queen, like her predecessors, has heard year by year in that highly symbolic Garter context.

In them, St Paul recognises the powerful pressure upon us of the age-long accumulation of human sinfulness, and of every world-view and fashion that is not opening itself to God’s judging and cleansing in Christ; and he  points us to God’s comprehensive, infinitely more powerful, equipping us with the means to withstand, to persevere, to live for others in every sphere of our lives    victoriously,    with joy,     Christianly.

“Find your strength in the Lord........;   put on the whole armour of God.”

Amen.