‘Grief is the price we pay for love’ reflecting on the passing of Queen Elizabeth II
Ecclesiastes 3:11- God has made everything beautiful in its time. God has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.
We grieve because time passes, Like the feeling of immense stillness and meaning we can sometimes feel as we see the afternoon light, the golden hour fade into evening. We feel the fleetingness of our time on this planet.
The best traits of Queen Elizabeth, and her generation epitomised calm amongst great change, constancy and generosity. Such virtues help us as we consider the disruptive world around us and provide us with a steadfastness that allows us not to see ourselves as victims of change, resisting with frustration and acting out of misplaced nostalgia.
“I know just how much I rely on my faith to guide me through the good times and the bad,” spoken by Queen Elizabeth II in 2002, according to The Washington Post. “Each day is a new beginning. I know that the only way to live my life is to try to do what is right, to take the long view, to give of my best in all that the day brings, and to put my trust in God. … I draw strength from the message of hope in the Christian gospel.”
It is not only that we grieve for her as a person, or for them as people. We grieve the constancy and reassurance that we all have craved, craved since being children. And through it all, there was one constant, and it was that, she. was. there. We grieve that that time passes. How much does this deeply touch us, and our faith! Isn’t that what we seek in our faith? The constancy and steadfastness of God? We can, in fact as Christians who follow the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth our Messiah, we must! We are called to it.
That everything we have ever known has changed, nothing remains as it was, not even the weather or the seasons are the same. We’ve grown up, grown old, grown wrinkles.
David Barrow, worships at Leichhardt Uniting Church - Excerpts from his sermon given on 11 September at St Stephen’s Uniting Church