good morning and welcome to the deanery garden at canterbury cathedral on this thursday morning the third of june we've come to the working heart of the garden but first we thought you'd like to see this epiphyllum it's a night flowering flower and it flowered last night and will only last through that night and into the morning so we brought it out into the sunshine here so that you could see it in all its beauty and it's having its moment of glory on this feast of corpus christi but i'm here standing amongst the work of the working heart of the garden it's an area of busyness and ordinary things and uh you'll get some of the the noise in the distance of the school gardeners mowing because this is a working day of preparation the school is away but certainly the staff aren't because this is very much a growing area of the year and i'm standing here beside the mimosa tree which you saw in full flower there's a line of them here and it's been time now the flowering season over for a heavy pruning for the health of the trees and that has happened and what looks savage brings new life and also health to the branches and also light to the garden we're going to say our prayers this morning amongst the plants and pots of this area of the garden i'm walking past the tomato house where darcy and jane and lizzy were living when it wasn't a time for growing tomatoes they've now come into the outside world in a different way and the little greenhouse behind me is full of tomato plants which will now begin to grow and fruit for the benefit and well-being of people and also for our store where people can come and take vegetables and eggs and honey and give as much as they possibly can to our charities of the porch light charity for the homeless and also the pilgrims hospice so here i am amongst the cold frames and uh opposite the greenhouses and it's a lovely morning once again so bring your prayers as you come together from across the world for morning prayer on this feast of corpus christi the latin name or if you want it in the english title on the calendar the feast of thanksgiving for the gift of the holy communion this thursday the first thursday after trinity sunday when all the seasons of the christian year have been gone through and we've entered green ordinary time on the first thursday we remember that gift which was given on monday thursday but at that time there was no time to concentrate on it because the events of the betrayal of jesus and the passion of good friday follow so on the first thursday following trinity sunday we take a pause and we say thank you for the gift of the holy communion the bread and the wine and the memorial feast and the reality of christ amongst us in bread and wine so let's say our prayers on this day and then reflect on the meaning of this day as we say our prayers together o lord open our lips and our mouths shall proclaim your praise may christ the day star dawn in our hearts and triumph over the shades of night oh come let us sing to the lord let us heartily rejoice in the rock of our salvation let us come into his presence with thanksgiving and be glad in him with psalms for the lord is a great god and a great king above all gods come let us worship and bow down and kneel before the lord our maker for he is our god and we are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand blessed be god father son and holy spirit blessed be god forever the night has passed and the day lies open before us let us pray with one heart and mind does we rejoice in the gift of this new day so may the light of your presence o god set our hearts on fire with love for you now and forever amen our psalm on this third morning of the month is psalm 16 preserve me o god for in you have i taken refuge i have said to the lord you are my lord all my good depends on you all my delight is upon the godly that are in the land upon those who are noble in heart though the idols are legion that many run after their drink offerings of blood i will not offer neither make mention of their names upon my lips the lord himself is my portion and my cup in your hands alone is my fortune my share has fallen in a fair land indeed i have a goodly heritage i will bless the lord who has given me counsel and in the night watches he instructs my heart i have set the lord always before me he is at my right hand i shall not fall wherefore my heart is glad and my spirit rejoices my flesh also shall rest secure for you will not abandon my soul to death nor suffer your faithful one to see the pit you will show me the path of life in your presence is the fullness of joy and in your right hand are pleasures forevermore probably the knapsack sentence that is in that sound for this feast of corpus christi is the lord himself is my portion and my cup in your hands alone is my fortune fortune is what this psalm translation translated as we could perhaps say destiny or vocation or way forward whatever these words are always open to interpretation but the image is a lovely one as is the last verse you will show me the path of life in your presence is the fullness of joy and in your right hand are pleasures forevermore and in the hands of the lord on this day in our memory and our minds as we build the pictures of this day his hands have bread in them and the cup in them for this is the day when we give thanks for this inexpressible gift that he gave us in memory of him in order that he might be recreated among us and we might be his body in the life that we have but also in order that we might celebrate which is always the word that we use celebrate his presence among us wherever we are with ordinary things in the ordinary part of the garden before we begin our reflection on it i'm going to read our lesson this morning not from saint maceous a special lesson for today on this corpus christi day it's taken from one of paul's earlier letters and there's no doubt whatsoever that this is in paul writing so it's in having been written down much earlier than any of the gospel accounts and in uh chapter 11 of the first letter to the corinthians i'm starting a very short lesson at verse 23 and this is paul writing to the little group of christians in one corinthians they're in corinth and we know from the way the letter begins that they're not a group of very important people they're ordinary people who've been called together and he talks about how the tradition of the cup and the bread was handed on here he says in verse 23 of chapter 11 for i received from the lord what i also delivered to you that the lord jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread and when he had given thanks he broke it and said this is my body which is for you do this in remembrance of me in the same way also he took the cup after supper saying this cup is the new covenant in my blood do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me for as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup you proclaim the lord's death until he comes such a simple picture and so early in the life of the church written by paul whom we know very well from his own letters and from the acts of the apostles had many conversations with those who had been sitting around the supper table on that night of jesus's betrayal and the first three gospels are absolutely clear with what jesus says this is my body this cup is the new covenant in my blood and for that gift we give great thanks today i was trying to think which of the lessons that i could have read this morning would feed most into this feast and i could go to several these aren't the complete list i could of course have read and we shall at the communion service which will take the place of even song tonight at 5 30 even song will be said at four sashi in the cathedral but at 5 30 call even song today because of the importance of this gift will be replaced by a communion service where the bread and the wine will be shared and the gospel will tell that story but i could have read the story of the five thousand the feeding of the five thousand because in that story there is a sequence when jesus takes the bread and he says that as uh he is the taking the bread it says that the lord took the bread and he blessed it and he broke it and he gave it to his disciples to distribute amongst the people it's those actions that we remember because at the last supper although he takes the bread and gives it to the disciples there is not the consequent sequence of distribution amongst those and then the gathering up of the fragments so this is a precious resource for the church so it could have been there and when i showed you the little carved image the gift from southern tanzania from the diocese of basasi at one of our morning prayers not too long ago um you remember there were plates of fish put on the table as well which certainly weren't the literal ingredients of the last supper but it pointed to that sequence of actions which we see at the feeding of the five thousand or i could have read the sentences in st john's gospel where jesus says i am the bread of life and likens it looking back to the old testament to the bread which god gave to his people in their traveling in the wilderness wayfarers food i am the bread of life or as i said we could have read the story of the last supper or the story on the lakeside which is just as beautiful and poignant and reflects again on this and the words that of the risen christ come and have breakfast lovely words come and have breakfast they come to the shore having recognized the lord and their his physical presence still among them in his resurrection glory is standing there and there are bread and fish and the bread is what he's inviting them to take and then lastly i could have read and this is the last image i'll use but you i'm sure through the day we'll think of other things that we could have read on this day because the new testament is infused with this but on this day i could have read that lovely little energetic uh paragraph in the acts of the apostles very early on where the life of the early church is described and they say their prayers in the temple and break bread together in their homes and the sense of joy is everywhere this day has retained its latin name corpus christi and i'm not sorry about that because it's a latin word the first of those two words that we still use when we're talking about the whole body of created works by one individual we talk about the corpus of his or her material in all kinds of creativity and that corpus talks about a collectivity of creativity often throughout life developing as it goes but at the same time the word corpus so we do use the word body also for a group of people a body of people but a corpus is a collection of wonderful different creativities and it takes us once again back to our psalm and it's lovely sentence the lord himself is my portion and my cup in your hands alone is my way fortune destiny vocation and the corpus of my creative activity becomes part of the wider corpus of the body of christ it's a fleshly image in order to represent something so much more infinite so much bigger so at the same time i began to think of occasions when this feast most mattered to me i don't mean this day and the day itself in date changes as easter and ascension and pentecost change but i mean celebrations of the holy communion and you could do the same when they've been most significant sometimes in the most strange circumstances i think of a time in the city of juba in the early 1980s where with archbishop and inanna there i was celebrating with what they had on that day and i was there with orange juice because there was no wine available the city was besieged and wine was a very very very expensive and precious resource and also um wheat flour it's not this staple food there and jesus was using the staple food of the time the bread and in different parts of the world there's always a staple crop which gives substance to the meal and millet was very much fermented millet very very often at that time so that what i was breaking was not necessarily wheat flour nor in other parts of the world would it be at all rare to find a nation where that the staple plant was was rice and nothing else was available let's remember that jesus was taking something most ordinary and also most life-giving and bread is quite often used in the scriptures as simply being a substitute for the word food he gave them bread from heaven and the the manner which came down is certainly not described as wheat flour if you read the descriptions of it but it was precious gift from the lord hand and say we use wheat flour and the rules of the church in this area say wheat flour the finest wheat flour because with that we do the best we can with this to recreate what that first action that wonderful consciousness of our humanity needing things to remind us physical things for the eucharist or the communion or the mass or the lord's supper or whatever you want to call it in whichever tradition you're in is a physical activity and the pandemic has been harder on this particular uh activity of our devotion than on many others it's easy for us to say morning prayer together virtually it's impossible for me to give you communion and the bread and the wine virtually that's something which is physical for which we long but the early church has shown is having joy in their meals and making that a sign of all that goes on so another occasion that i would remember with the same archbishop before i'd ever been to the sudan and this is in 1975 when on a wonderful sunny sunday afternoon the then bishop of uh salisbury george reindorp gathered the whole diocese or those who would come onto old serum the site of the old city of salisbury now a huge green mound with the old cathedral laid out in stone on the ground because it was then demolished and moved down to where salisbury cathedral now stands but we gathered up there on that afternoon and we sat in so far as we could in our parishes in our dineries and in the middle we were welcoming archbishop elena from war-torn sudan and because of that being no particular order possible because there were so many of us thousands were there and we sang and we did lovely things together but also bread was broken we called it an agape a love feast and as the two uh the bishop and uh inanna who became archbishop of sudan afterwards i think at that time he was the the bishop in in juba um but uh he broke great loaves and it was handed round to the people regilent of the feeding of the 5000 but also a memory of what jesus was giving to us and then what i would remember and i could go on for ages like this as you could as well and i hope you will um remembering times when communion meant so much remembering times in hospital um when a friend would bring communion and other friends would gather around the bed and other times when and let's think justin fletcher and i will remember this together in 2020 very early in the year we've not been able to go to the um induction of a very very long-standing friend of both of us and for me he goes back years and years and years all the way back almost and he was being ordained as a priest changing his particular life from a solicitor to a priest and we were present at the ordinations and they were grand occasions um but then after that uh he was appointed to be the chaplain in marseille and in exxon provence and the lubron because he's a affluent french speaker and that's where he now finds himself but we were unable to go to his induction and so his name is james johnston and we say prayers for him this morning and his his people but we had a very special communion with him on ash wednesday last year before ever lockdown happened and we didn't know that this was so near and what was going to happen but in order to get that we had to have quite a circuitous journey uh flying because we had to go late on uh tuesday afternoon missed the last plane to marseilles they flew to nice next morning along the train uh the the train line to marseille and there we were able to share communion with him celebrating and his people on ash wednesday and i was able to preach a homily for him and also because the organist wasn't there i was able to to play the hymns as well which was a nice thing to be doing but we were singing and we were also receiving communion and the next day we were able to go along to uh cassie which is the place that we always go to in the summer this was not summer this was february and at the same time we were able to go to one of the little restaurants still open then and share a meal not knowing that will be the last meal with him until who knows when because still he is down in marseille and kasi and we are here so we send prayers to him but that's a memory of another communion being together all of that on this day and what i should also say is every time we do it we're reminded of the heavenly banquet and many scenes in the gospel where jesus likens the kingdom of heaven to a banquet to which people are invited and should be glad to come and some refuse to come and the invitation is given freely again so every activity of eating and sharing together with companions and friends becomes a sign of the sacred meal that jesus left us and every aspect of that sacred meal is a pointer forward to that time when all things will be gathered up in the heavenly banquet of the kingdom of heaven some dates on this day on the 3rd of june and there are good dates 1162 on this day thomas beckett was consecrated archbishop of canterbury i think there's no more we need to say about that we know how important he was to the life of this place we need we know what his fortune his destiny his vocation his way ahead was bring because we're looking at it in hindsight but this was a joyful day at the beginning of his archbishopric and in 1963 pope john the 23rd died he'd only been pope for five years but i think if you ask anyone particularly in italy he is a very very popular figure he's called the good pope papa buono in uh in in italy and um at the same time he was the one who called the bishops of the church together in a second vatican council here we are in a garden where enormous amounts of pruning has taken place and change is always evident in the greenhouse yard plants coming plants going something's dying off something's growing some things needing pruning and the life of any corpus anybody is needing to do that from time to time and after all the years of the second world war and the newly drawn shape of europe and the iron curtain which had fallen across it then pope john the 23rd who was very much on home ground and was was made pope very late in life was brave enough to call everyone together and say now how does the future look and one remembers that sentence from the leopard where the nephew says to his old uncle in that story things have to change in order that they may remain the same it's a it's a good sentence but the changes have to be the ones that actually are furthering things which are most precious and one holds on to the word and the sacrament in that to see that all things are done well for the body of christ with our eyes fixed on jesus for the way ahead in 1875 um i mentioned this because it's fun to think of his operas bizet died and his he um had didn't have a very successful life in a way and had some unhappy times when his works just weren't taking off his opera the pearl fishers i absolutely love and the the great duet uh between tenor and and and basses is something that's often sung the duet from the the pearl fishers uh speaking of their friendship which is threatened to be torn apart by the the love that both of them have um for uh the the the same person and so she uh is is someone that they're reaching for but they're also conscious of everything that they have together and so that duet but the great opera of course the opera of passion which bizet sadly never lived to see given the fame and a claim it deserved with carmen and the music of carmen i hardly need to speak about if we talk about a corpus of his activity and creativity well then the pearl fishers and carmen stand top of the list for me and then again on this day in 1967 arthur ransom died now he was known for many things he was a journalist he was a foreign correspondent and he is also an agent of government in the first world war in russia and beyond but he's best known and here again we're on the corpus of his material he's best known for his book swallows and amazons and all the novels about the the families the walkers and the blackits and uncle jim whom they call captain flint which went forward into other books i was never someone who had read the book swallows and amazon's in childhood and i found myself reading it in the most odd circumstances it's once again a a sudan story but this time not in the south not in juba but in the north sea staying in ondoman and not being able to get up a flight down to juba because of the the state of the war in the airplanes at that time and so i was i was there living in the bishop's house in ondermann and at that time you looked across the river at harshum that place where the the blue nile and the white nile come together and on the shelves of the guest room left by someone else was swallows and amazons and i read it there so when i hear it the water i was thinking of is the confluence of the great river nile in in khartoum itself but arthur ransom was describing beautiful scenes of lake windermere and coniston water and adventures on wildcat island and i was looking across it tutti island and cormorant island and also the picnics not of of bread and wine but of corned beef which you remember the children called pemmican and of ginger beer and at the same time the companionship and fun that's going on there arthur ransom created a complete world of adventure there's no no uh mystic uh um people appearing from wizardry or anything of that sort it's a straightforward tale and i i was refreshed by it in my waiting before eventually a plane came to take me south and so that's another memory of much companionship and hospitality from bishop butress and his wife long since gone to glory and i think i've probably shown you the ostrich egg they gave me as a sign of friendship which had to be carried carefully from that moment onwards and happily i still have it i managed to bring it back here all those things corpus christi the thanksgiving for the gift of holy communion in ordinary things and going back to our matthew reflections how they remind us of the teaching of jesus so that as things change we hold on to what is essential being helped by images in the past which perhaps we didn't even understand when they were happening to us thanksgivings we give to for people that we didn't even realize were so important to us at the time and then the going forward the way ahead with our eyes fixed on jesus as the writer of the epistle to the hebrews says let's say our prayers on this day is corpus christi so we are praying in the anglican communion for the diocese of cape town in south africa and we pray for the community there and pray also in this diocese for justin our archbishop for rose bishop of dover for tim bishop at lambeth and today for the parish of st martin's hearn with st peter greenhill and pray for carol smith in her ministry and cat darkens the curet and the two readers francis fenton and deborah waller and carol smith you remember is the area dean of the reculva area so we say our prayers with the prayer today for the feast of corpus christi bring your own prayers wherever you are in the world lord jesus christ we thank you that in this wonderful sacrament you have given us the memorial of your passion grant us so to reverence the sacred mysteries of your body and blood that we may know within ourselves and show forth in our lives the fruits of your redemption for you are alive and reign with the father in the unity of the holy spirit one god now and forever amen we say the prayer that our savior taught us in whichever language we like to say it 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 lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil for thine is the kingdom the power and the glory forever and ever are men moment of silence now for your own prayers and intentions the peace of god which passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of god and of his son jesus christ our lord 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 trinity tide and corpus christi is a time when many uh especially in years gone by were ordained and we mentioned our thanksgiving for jamie johnston's ministry but at the same time we've been asked by paul jacobson the parish priest at muncie in indiana for prayers for penny warren whom we've prayed for before on this anniversary of her own priesting in 1989 at and now she's in minneapolis and so we pray for all members of our garden congregation there and also in muncie as well and throughout the world so pray for those who have been ordained at this this time and enjoy this feast of corpus christi