Sermon delivered by the Bishop of London at the funeral of Margaret Thatcher

April 17, 2013
By Richard Chartres

Excerpt:
She applied herself to her work with formidable energy and passion and continued to reflect on how faith and politics related to one another.

In the Lawrence Jewry lecture she said that:

"Christianity offers no easy solutions to political and economic issues. It teaches us that we cannot achieve a compassionate society simply by passing new laws and appointing more staff to administer them."

She was very aware that there are prior dispositions which are needed to make market economics and democratic institutions function well: the habits of truth-telling, mutual sympathy, and the capacity to cooperate. These dispositions are incubated and given power by our relationships. In her words, "the basic ties of the family are at the heart of our society and are the nursery of civic virtue". Such moral and spiritual capital is accumulated over many generations but can be easily eroded.

Life is a struggle to make the right choices and to achieve liberation from dependence, whether material or psychological. This genuine independence is the essential pre-condition for living in an other-centred way, beyond ourselves. The word Margaret Thatcher used at St Lawrence Jewry was "interdependence".

She referred to the Christian doctrine "that we are all members one of another, expressed in the concept of the Church on earth as the Body of Christ. From this we learn our interdependence and, as she said, the great truth that we do not achieve happiness or salvation in isolation from each other but as members of Society." the rest 

Music, Hymns, Poetry and Scripture – the solemn majesty of Lady Thatcher’s funeral
...The Address by the Bishop of London was a perfectly judged and quite moving account of the interplay between her faith and politics. He took us from Methodism to her understanding of interdependent civic virtue. And he set to rest once and for all the warped misinformation surrounding her understanding of society. The Bishop clearly grasped and understood her philosophy, which was not the rabid individualism of the Socialist caricature: “We cannot achieve a compassionate society simply by passing new laws and appointing more staff to administer them,” he explained succinctly, with a nod to sound money and civil service cuts. This was a bishop who knew and admired her – the sort of Anglican cleric the media tend to ignore when they seek to denigrate the Established Church or confect a church-state row. And he reminded us that death is the great leveller: all that lives must die...

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**********************************

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The leadership and about two-thirds of the members of the Diocese of South Carolina, based in Charleston, broke away from the national Episcopal Church last November over its blessing of same-sex unions, ordination of gay clergy and its liberal approach to other social and theological issues. The breakaway faction then filed a state lawsuit to assert ownership of 35 parishes, including many of the church's wealthiest in the state. The group says it shouldn't have to turn property over to a church that it believes has drifted from Biblical principles.

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