August 26 – Privileged Sight

Let us look together today and glimpse what few were able to see even as it occurred; let’s read Brian Barker’s perception of Elizabeth II, moments away from her coronation, eight thousand royal and other invited guests in attendance, ringed about on the streets of London by three million more, but alone before God and His representatives, receiving beautiful and priceless relics of coronation antiquity. In fact, she was accepting something much, much more beautiful and without price.

Elizabeth was accepting responsibility before God.

Hers was for care and service toward a nation, a calling that had become more emblematic than emphatic, yet her calling makes England . . . England! Those who meet her on the street bow or curtsey to her, some in business suits and some in blue jeans; when she smiles at them, they beam a happy, privileged response. They did then; they do still.

Brian Barker wrote . . . “The silence in the Abbey was intense. The Quen was sitting stiffly upright in the old high-backed chair, a figure of shining gold with the jeweled Sceptres in her hands. At that moment we saw her as no one would ever see her again in her lifetime. She was remote from any familiar conception of royalty – the purple robe and the crown of regal dignity.

“The still figure in strange golden vestments seemed to have receded into a time far remote from our own. She was like an image in a hieratic ikon, a page from an old richly illustrated manuscript . . .”

May the Abbess suggest? Elizabeth was clothed in a more accurate actuality of consecration than any of us ever will ever experience, sartorially or ceremonially, but she was not gowned or vested with more salvation, more unction (anointing,) or greater responsibility than is ours for the calling with which we have been called. Husband . . . wife . . . nurse . . . salesman . . . teacher . . . cab driver . . . pastor . . . postman, or woman . . . Sunday school worker . . . lunch line volunteer . . . parent . . . we are vested with the promises of God, clothed in Jesus Christ and robed in righteousness.

No potentate on earth is clothed in more splendor or vested with greater privilege, and none hold more power and authority than do we when we obey the voice of God and obtain His promises and His will in prayer and by faith. Sometimes, by prayer, the rulers of the earth rise and fall.

We pray today that Elizabeth may remain, and in the purity of heart and purpose than God gives, that He had in mind when He saw her, sitting alone and unobserved, may He give to her to right, by faith and obedience, all that all that she may and obtain His secure blessings for the throne and nation of England. As He saw her heart on that day, as He sees her even now, and as He sees all those whose devotion is to Him and whose hope is in Him, may He openly reward us with a revival in our hearts and in our leadership, in our homes and in our governments in this hour. Amen.



St. Edward's Chair
permission granted