good morning and welcome to morning prayer here in the garden of the Episcopal Divinity School Berkeley Divinity School here at Yale University you'll see it a bit later it's behind me at the moment and the camera will show that but we're sitting in the gardens and we wanted you to see the extent of the gardens because they are really very beautiful but very much undeveloped and not much has been done to them for years now the trust of the Divinity School here have asked Fletcher to have a go at redesigning these Gardens completely now that they've had the restoration of the house itself and that will be an interesting thing to do I know he'll want to bring water in somehow but it's it's actually set on a a a a slope and so it's going to be um a a nerve-wracking job to do um at the moment he's showing you I think one of his favorite trees which is a great Christmas tree with a star on top the sun is absolutely on top of it this morning but all night long it stands there in silhouette with all the constellations going past it there's not a breath of wind this morning and the trees are so beautiful in the morning sunshine the sun is very hot though the air before was very cold and you will hear the birds singing Squirrels are playing on the lawn here there's one particular bird a beautiful red bird called a Cardinal which you may hear uh it's easily recognized its song our friend Andy me in Rhode Island whom we'll see this week um is uh someone who calls it a video bird because it makes the sound video video video video video video and then you know a cardinal is nearby you also might hear the sort of freaking Cry of the Blue Jay which is one of Fletcher's favorite birds and anyone who knows the character of the blue jay and no stretcher too will realize why it's his favorite bird so here we are with lots of things around us to think about and Lovely help from nature this morning on this Saturday morning as we begin our morning prayer grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ the Canticle the song of the redeemed oh ruler of the universe Lord God great Deeds are they that you have done surpassing human understanding your ways are ways of righteousness and Truth oh king of all the ages who can fail to do you homage Lord and sing the Praises of your name for you only are the Holy One All Nations will draw near and fall down before you because your just and holy Works have been revealed glory to the the father and to the son and to the Holy Spirit as it was in the beginning is now and will be forever amen our Psalm this morning is Psalm 42 As the deer Longs for the water Brooks so Longs my soul for you oh God my soul is a thirst for God a thirst for the Living God When shall I come to appear before the presence of God my tears have been my food day and night while all day long they say to me where now is your god I pour out my soul when I think on these things how I went with the multitude and led them into the house of God with the voice of praise and thanksgiving among those who keep holy day why are you so full of heaviness oh my soul and why are you so disquieted within me put your trust in God for I will yet give thanks to him who is the help of my countenance and my God my soul is heavy Within Me therefore I will remember you from the land of Jordan and from the peak of misar among the heights of Heron one deep calls to another in the noise of your cataracts all your Rapids and floods have gone over me the Lord grants his loving kindness in the daytime in the night season his song is with me a prayer to the god of my life I will say to the god of my strength why have you forgotten me and why do I go so heavily while the enemy oppresses me while my bones are being broken my enemies mock me to my face all day long they mock me and say to me where now is your god why are you so full of heaviness oh my soul and why are you so disquieted within me put your trust in God for I will yet give thanks to him who is the help of my countenance and my God that little couet at the end is like a chorus going through Psalm 42 and the sequel Psalm 43 I think it shows very much it was a lurgical song which would have been sung by the Levites in the temple of course but it's a beautiful coulet why are you so full of heaviness oh my soul and why are you so disquieted within me put your trust in God for I will yet give thanks to him who is the help of my countenance and my God that verse comes over and over again through the psalm like a refrain so we turn to our reading as I said it's from St Luke because we felt that St Luke should have one last appearance to just sort of wind up all that we've done and look forward but at the same time we are going to just do the last little bit of the the um gospel and the first little bit of the Apostles is they were doing we said we do seven um this is the eighth out of seven so um I'm starting in chapter 24 and we're here it Resurrection time the last time we were in the gospel was yesterday with the road to emus and the disciples running back to Jerusalem running back and finding already that the disciples were saying the Lord has risen indeed and has appeared to Simon and now we come to the disciples as Jesus has appeared to them on several occasions and he gives them some last words so in chapter 24 of St Luke and verse 44 then Jesus said to them these are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you that everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures and said to them thus it is written that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead and that repentance for the Forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to All Nations beginning from Jerusalem you are witnesses of these things and behold I am sending the promise of my father upon you that stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high and he led them out as far as Bethany and lifting up his hands he blessed them and while he blessed them he parted from them and was carried up into heaven and they worshiped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy and were continually in the temple blessing God we'll see how Luke opens his second volume in a moment but there's something about those words which are very specific to St Luke and it gives reason for the number of times we use the Psalms in our singing Psalms are lurgical hymns it's quite often called The hym Book of the second temple but the singing of them is still very much daily practice within our Cathedral churches and also the saying of the Psalms mning and evening is an integral part of both morning prayer and evening prayer and why well because here Jesus says to them these are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you that everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets well and good that said many many times in the gospels but specific to St Luke is Moses and the prophets and the Psalms which is an interesting development and it's it's a lovely thing to think that Jesus recommends those psalms I think on the night when he is betrayed before they leave the supper room they sing Psalm 114 the Passover hymn these Psalms were deep within their soul and as they sang them some of them were Pilgrim Psalms that they sang on the road up to Jerusalem some were Harvest Psalms some were Psalms of lament and mourning some were Psalms of huge rejoicing some were Psalms of national festivals but this was a way of worshiping because the Psalms lie easily in the memory and here Jesus is saying that Moses and the prophets and the Psalms all prophesied everything that he had lived out and everything that he had taught so if we go on to his second volume which is the Acts of the Apostles then it becomes important to us to see that it's the same writer and uh it's it's very much uh Luke in his dear reader mode he's speaking to the reader but he is speaking particularly to a friend whom he calls Theophilus which means lover of God maybe it was a real friend maybe it's just an imaginary person meaning you or me reading these books it doesn't matter he is writing this so that we may read and learn and in doing so he is giving us everything that he knows now who can say whether the Acts were written after the gospel of St Luke certainly in sequence they come after the gospel of St Luke or before the gospel of St Luke which could perfectly well have happened we'll think about that in a moment this is how he starts and Fletcher was saying yesterday there so many books in the Georgian period uh particularly and Bridget is set in the Georgian period of course and that's very much dear reader dear reader and and many of the novels the long novels of the 18th century speak very much to the reader dear reader uh but even Pilgrim's Progress is is written for the reader an anonymous reader which you which means you or me as we read those words but here is chapter one just the first few verses to start with of Acts of the Apostles in the first book o theop I have dealt with all that Jesus began to do and teach until the day when he was taken up after he had given commands through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen he presented himself alive to them after his suffering by many proofs appearing to them during 40 days and speaking about the kingdom of God and while staying with them he ordered them not to depart from from Jerusalem but to wait for the promise of the Father which he said you heard from me for John baptized with water but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now well there's his first paragraph and that's the introduction to a whole sequence of stories about the life of the early church which in the early chapter he must have gleaned from others but he was I think probably a very good interviewer Luke and a sort of sympathetic interviewer you can imagine him sitting with a notebook saying so what happened next and that must have been a very dangerous Journey what happened next there were two years at the end of The Acts of the Apostles when he was with St Paul in Paul's imprisonment in Rome and I hope that at that time um he was able to write so many of these things but there must have been other times when he was writing and I don't know whether his notebook survived shipwreck or he kept copies of them somewhere but certainly he was on many a dangerous journey and there are the sentences which talk about not they but we then went to here we then went to that as so Luke is very much a part of the poine team as they as they go around and he must have been scribing all the way they probably teased him about it but thank God he did because we got so much information from him both in the gospel and in the Acts of the Apostles he must have spent also time in Jerusalem when Paul was in prison and that too was a long time because Felix kept him in prison for a long time and then fesus arrived and then there was a further delay uh the two governor just um didn't send him on and so Luke would have had time to visit all the sites in Jerusalem and to talk to many people who were still alive from the time when Jesus himself was walking in those streets of Jerusalem The Acts of the Apostles gives us um really a travelog and on the way through we learn many things we meet many people and Luke is really good at conveying their personalities and he's also very good at conveying the drama of all this or what it was like in a Greek city rather than a Jewish city and what dangers both Paul and Barnabas in the beginning and Mark who was with them at the time but let them down by going away and was never forgiven by Paul so it caused a rift and Luke deals with all of this very sensitively so that it hardly surprises us when St Paul in his Epistles talks about Luke the Beloved Physician and then on one occasion um all the others have left him in his imprisonment and only Luke is with me now his name brings comfort and his name brings healing which was his task as a doctor but at the same time sensitivity and compassion are there at all times with those who get most unnoticed and he writes them up in a way that we can understand and it really is um quite a fact that although as the dean of a cathedral for 30 years I read the New Testament lesson at morning and evening prayer every day and you went round and it took about a third of the year to cover the whole new testament and um that actually never tired because every time you come back to it some new fact comes out and you place two facts together and you think well of course that must be the case why didn't I ever realize that before or I really do admire this person with what they're doing or you enter into the Bethany household in a different way and you sense things for Luke's gospel is very sensual in that way but what we're intending to do over the next few days is to see how different the four evangelists are and that itself becomes a a a lovely thing it's one of my hobby horses that you mustn't conflate the evangelists you get to know each one and you get to know their passions and you get to know their faith even by two or three words slipped in like and the Psalms in that little bit at the end of St Luke which takes us right back to the Psalms which we visit of course every day in our morning prayer this is a most beautiful day to be thinking these thoughts and we're glad to have done the gospel of St Luke in mini bites should we say certainly we couldn't cover much of it but I hope we've given you an insight into not only the character of Luke but the distinctiveness of each gospel and encouraged you once and again to go back daily to the script you don't need to read many verses daily but keep reading keep reading because it always comes fresh like the water Brooks that the deer is longing for in our lovely Psalm 42 this morning so let's then go on now and say our prayers and give thanks for St Luke but we'll continue morning prayer the short lesson for Saturdays in morning prayer Saturday is seen as a day of rest love is patient love is kind love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude it does not insist on its own way it is not irritable or resentful it does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth it Bears all things believes all things hopes all things endures all things but I don't need to tell you that comes from one Corinthians chapter 13 and is one of St Paul's most poetic passages his Hymn of Love or charity as it was in the King James version of the Bible and no one would have agreed with that more as a medicine than St Luke himself who was Paul's constant companion at the end so let's then think of our prayers and we first of all say a collect for St Luke and then the Saturday prayer and then we'll say some prayers about our own intentions for today almighty God who inspired your servant l Luke The Physician to set forth in the gospel the love and healing power of your son graciously continue in your church this love and power to heal to the praise and glory of your name through Jesus Christ Our Lord amen and the Saturday collect almighty God who after the creation of the world rested from all your works and Sanctified a day of rest for all your creatures grant that we putting away all Earthly anxieties may be duly prepared for the service of your sanctuary and that our rest here upon Earth may be a preparation for the Eternal rest promised to your people in heaven through Jesus Christ Our Lord amen so we bring our own intentions and prayer on this Saturday morning wherever you are in the world to the throne of grace and we pray for those whom we know most to need our prayers our general prayers which we'll be praying together for situations of War where people are afraid and in grave danger of natural disaster where homes are lost but at the same time our particular prayers of folk known only to us which might need not only prayer but maybe a word of encouragement on a telephone or with a note delivered today we know them each of us will have different names in our hearts and Minds as we pray on this lovely morning here in New Haven so we join together in the Our Father Our Father who art in heaven Hallowed be thy name thy kingdom come thy will be done on Earth as it is in heaven give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us and lead us not into temptation but Deliver Us from Evil for thine is the kingdom the power and the glory forever and ever amen the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and The Fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us all ever more and the blessing of God Almighty the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit be upon you upon those whom you love and Those whom you would pray for today and always amen now I just want to finish by reading just a little bit of the first chapter of the Acts of the Apostles which sets out for us the characters who returned to Jerusalem from the Mount of Ascension and sat in prayer in the temple or or were were constantly in prayer but this is how Luke sees that little group he names them all then they returned to Jerusalem from the mount called Olivet which is near Jerusalem a Sabbath day journey and when they had entered they went up to the upper room where they were staying Peter and John and James and Andrew Phillip and Thomas Bartholomew and Matthew James the son of alfus and Simon the Zealot and Judas the son of James all these with one Accord were devoting themselves to prayer together with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus and his brothers that significantly adds to our concept of discipleship before the day of Pentecost Jesus's brothers are already there and we know that Jesus brother James becomes the leader of the church in Jerusalem at some stage and then all the apostles are named and they've not yet at Phil judas's place but Mary the mother of Jesus is there constant from one end of St Luke's gospel right to the other and that too is a a comforting fact we shall come across that much more when we deal with St John's gospel so for the moment we're going to leave you and uh we shall carry on with our day here and we hope that you have a a great day I think the Sun is going to turn us quite Brown it's quite Hot Sun at the moment and uh the behind us here is the is the beautiful new restoration here and it is really Splendid if you'd seen it before it was nothing like that at all but it gives place to sit and to enjoy and to come and sit out in the sun which is which is lovely for the seminarians they'll be returning this weekend from their reading week in a big way so God bless you and enjoy the weekend