good morning and welcome to the deanery garden in canterbury cathedral on this morning of wednesday the 10th of november as we come to say our morning prayers together wherever you are across the world please feel welcome as we begin our prayers and bring your own con intentions and concerns to whatever you are um wanting to pray for today as we always do from across the world let's begin our prayers on this day lord open our lips and our mouth shall proclaim your praise send your holy spirit upon us and clothe us with power from on high alleluia blessed are you creator god to you be praise and glory forever as your spirit moved over the face of the waters bringing light and life to your creation pour out your spirit on us today that we may walk as children of light and by your grace reveal your presence 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 as 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 are men perhaps actually this is just a bit noisy and we might put some more fresh air into the car let's see how we can go let's open up a window or two as well it's already beginning to feel a bit better we're going to read our psalm now normally on this day the tense of the month we would read psalm 50 which is all about the green earth and the insects of the field in fact i'm going to read psalm 51 which is one of the other three psalms that can be read on this morning it's a well-known psalm and it's a psalm asking for mercy and forgiveness from the creator have mercy on me o god in your great goodness according to the abundance of your compassion blot out my offences wash me thoroughly from my wickedness and cleanse me from my sin for i acknowledge my faults and my sin is ever before me against you only have i sinned and done what is evil in your sight so that you are justified in your sentence and righteous in your judgment i have been wicked even from my birth a sinner when my mother conceived me behold you desired truth deep within me and shall make me understand wisdom in the depths of my heart purge me with hyssop and i shall be clean wash me and i shall be whiter than snow make me hear of joy and gladness that the bones you have broken may rejoice turn your face from my sins and blot out all my misdeeds make me a clean heart oh god and renew a right spirit within me cast me not away from your presence and take not your holy spirit from me give me again the joy of your salvation and sustain me with your gracious spirit then shall i teach your ways to the wicked and sinners shall return to you deliver me from my guilt o god the god of my salvation and my tongue shall sing of your righteousness oh lord open my lips and my mouth shall proclaim your praise for you desire no sacrifice else i would give it you take no delight in burnt offerings the sacrifice of god is a broken spirit a broken and contrite heart oh god you will not despise i'm still feeling that sitting in here is fairly constraining in what we're doing with our prayers so maybe we can do better than this that feels better we've left the car and come here under the trees and you'll guess what we're doing because of course this is the day when those deliberating on decisions and choices we have to make about our planet at this time are making decisions about the way in which pollution and air pollution particularly is affecting especially the life of our cities but all of us are contributing to that whenever we choose to turn on an engine burning fossil fuel which i just have for a while and i've chosen now to turn it off to come over here and speak with you that beautiful sound normally known as the misery and best known when it's sung of course to the music of allegri but on this occasion we might pick out some knapsack verses from that psalm there's one which speaks about the sprig of hyssop which is used in sprinkling often we use rosemary but hyssop is the same thing and the herb and the fresh water is the image of being cleansed and made fresh verse 8 purge me with hyssop and i shall be clean wash me and i shall be whiter than snow natural images and at the same time verse 11 make me a clean heart oh god and renew a right spirit within me the verses that we begin our worship with so often verse 16 oh lord open my lips and my mouth shall proclaim your praise and finally verse 18 the sacrifice of god is a broken spirit a broken and contrite heart oh god you will not despise everything about that psalm is about cleansing and everything about today's decision-making is about cleansing but we'll start as we do always after the psalm with our regular reading from the scriptures and we find ourselves in the book of exodus taking up from the end of chapter 16 when we where we finished yesterday and beginning chapter 17 all the congregation of the people of israel moved on from the wilderness by stages according to the command of the lord and they camped at refidem but there was no water for the people to drink therefore the people quarreled with moses and said give us water to drink and moses said to them why do you quarrel with me why do you test the lord but the people thirsted there for water and the people grumbled against moses and said why did you bring us up out of egypt to kill us and to kill our children and our livestock with first so moses cried to the lord what shall i do with this people they are almost ready to stone me and the lord said to moses pass on before the people taking with you some of the elders of israel and take in your hand the staff with which you struck the nile and go behold i will stand before you there on the rock at horeb and you shall strike the rock and water shall come out of it and the people will drink and moses did so in the sight of the elders of israel and he called the name of the place masa and meribah because of the quarreling of the people of israel and because they tested the lord by saying is the lord among us or not masa means testing meribah means quarreling and if we were to read psalm 95 which always used to begin worship every day in the offices in the office of morning prayer and even back into the old breviaries then let's go to that psalm just for a moment it begins oh come let us sing to the lord let us heartily rejoice in the rock of our salvation that has come into his presence with thanksgiving and be glad in him with psalms but when we go to verse eight we have the verse oh that today you would listen to his voice harden not your hearts as at meribah on that day at masa in the wilderness testing and quarreling and at the end of the psalm is the lord saying this is not the way to enter into my rest turning ourselves to worship is a a turning to enter into the lord's rest today if you will hear his voice says the same psalm harden not your hearts as in the provocation and in the day of temptation in the wilderness that was the old translation but in our book here it returns to those words we've just read as on the day of masa and meroba testing and quarreling and today is the time to think of how that whole community has to move on to travel to go through the wilderness but on the way in the middle of everything they are given the bread from heaven they are given also now water and those gifts are heaven's gifts and yet they can be squandered and they're all a matter usually of choice as to where we find them how we use them but these are striking images and the word striking i could use advisedly with moses using that staff to strike the rocks at horeb and to discover water streams uh how easily the people are satisfied once water is given and refreshment and how good it it feels to sit in this atmosphere beneath the trees with relatively clean air which early i was chosen at choosing to to poison having let the car then run and to be burning that kind of fuel everything everything today at cop26 and with our own prayers and thinking is about the fact that we can make choices for each other's good and if we think of how those choices are to be made let's think of the current situation when early last year we were aware that we were facing a worldwide human pandemic a human crisis which was life-threatening and we didn't properly understand that then we began to be first of all puzzled and then two these are seagulls crying overhead for some reason uh i don't know why there may be peregrine falcons around at the time and they feel themselves to be in some kind of danger um uh we we were puzzled and we took the advice of people also in leadership positions right across the world and our own governments and i'm talking about all of us now with different nations and cultures across the world were attempting to make decisions for our safety and different kinds of decisions were made in different nations but everything was for the safety and welfare of people some decisions were wrong some decisions proved right and at the same time people with skills began to use their imagination to find both vaccines and also medicines which would help people who contracted kovid 19 and both those explorations into that bore fruit and now here we are almost two years on from the time when we first began to hear about this pandemic and we have grown used to making choices to protect one another to ensure the welfare and also the life of each other and this very much this day which our delegates in glasgow are facing and the days are running out now only two days left up till the 12th this day is a day when choices of a different kind are to be made but still about life-threatening aspects on this planet and we're talking more today of course with the emissions of fossil fuels going into the atmosphere of course of the attempt to slow down and even eventually halt climate change but we're talking about adaptation and adjustability for what we do now in what choices we make today uh i unusually have to go to london that's happened very rarely in the past uh couple of years simple since the pandemic began very rarely and i think back that i'm going tonight to address and i'm glad to do so the worship of a company of musicians it's a delivery company in london to which i don't belong but at that occasion will gather so many who have been at the forefront of encouraging young musicians with generous grants for their life ahead and i can speak with enormous gratitude for the life of our young musicians here who are doing such wonderful work not only in the cathedral but out also in the villages around and helping people to understand the healing quality of the gift of music and also the way in which it is an international language which binds people together it's the absolute sort of golden thread in our cathedral worship day by day and so to go and thank people who've done that and to say something about the story will be a lovely thing to do but i'm saying all this because probably 20 years ago because it it means a very late night in coming back here but 20 years ago when i came um then the automatic thing would have been to drive to london and in the same way fletcher would have been using um his car uh at his work in london all the time but to canterbury it would be in a drive backwards and forwards it's a very long time now since either of us have taken a car on a journey like that the station here is just a walk away and that train will take me quite comfortably to london it's a late train back but nevertheless the train will do all of that what changed to make us make a completely different decision about our traveling was partly stick and partly carrot as we would say the essence of giving some benefit in going in that way and also the hard fact that because of congestion charges which were put on to driving into london it became a disincentive for traveling by car and the the carrot of course was the fact that the high-speed rail came to canterbury and the train was fast and easy and public transport at that time became a really good way of doing what we would want to do and so for those two reasons incentive and also um thinking this is too costly because of the charges we changed our habits and the choice was helped by those two things and everything that we're doing today about governments local authorities and how we help people make different choices becomes part of that stick and carrot policy of helping people with benefits but at the same time putting disincentives in place the current situation today if we look back to 1950 56.2 of the global population are living in cities whereas in the 1950s it was only half of that percentage now if ideally a percentage we're not dealing with the way in which the populations have grown and grown and grown and in latin america and the caribbean it's 81.2 percent of people now living in urban areas as opposed to 41 in 1950 it's a colossal amount of urban area and in 2020 in north america it's 83.6 percent so that is growing and growing and growing and this cleansing of urban areas has become absolutely crucial it's a health issue and we know that because people breathing in polluted air and we've now begun to get the the first cause of death on a a certificate saying that it's a death through breathing in polluted air because of all the things that can also be contributory factor to other diseases are there in the air which is being so polluted and particularly by the burning of fossil fuels so that some kind of of uh adjustment has to be made with vehicles like mine here not being driven around and eventually a transition we'll deal with that in a moment and the adaptability and the adjustment a transition to other kinds of power to get transport moving along but for the moment we are where we are and we're also absolutely sure of the the way in which people's health is affected by living absolutely on the side of arterial roads and very often this is a social justice issue as the mayor of london keeps reminding us the benefits have to be given most to those living in poorer areas of cities because very often they're the ones who have the most traffic and the most uh pollution of their going on constantly and traffic jams and on queues of traffic is doing that to our cities and so london itself has now won a prize for cleaning its air but it's only a beginning it's introduced all kinds of ways and particularly the the way in which you have areas where cars absolutely can't go they're emission-free that might be inconvenient but it protects the residents on the roads in other ways of course architects can help by not building too near to roads we've known these facts about people's health for a long time but still in our city of canterbury huge buildings are going up where people are going to be there with their windows right on to traffic filled rows not even a much of a pavement and certainly not a green space between the the tree that the road and the people's windows as they look out this will be should we call it affordable housing but it's a social justice issue because those with the means to live where they can breathe clean air will be choosing that part of the city i'm not just talking about canterbury now i'm talking anywhere in the world and those who only have a certain amount of resource to find a home will be living in those parts of the city where this is just not possible and so we have to make these choices local authorities and if you consider the the local authority in something like the city of london they're intending to expand the area in which all those carrot and stick policies are are being affected so that our cities can be cleaner think of the sound and that the illustrations of pure water and being as white as snow and uh the the way in which we talk about cleanliness as something healthy and healing in human life we know all this and yet we continue with the old ways because it's convenient it's very well for me to say i can walk to the station but if a station is nowhere near you or the train is too expensive then the temptation is always going to be that you you um use the car so buses and trains and subsidies for buses and trains in particular areas and it's always been the case throughout history but a lot of public transport dropped away when the car became an easy and cheap way of going along so the current situation i don't think we need any any uh um illustration of many of you will be in areas of that kind and we need to make choices the government have said that by 2030 you will not be able to buy a new car powered solely by petrol or diesel and by 2035 hybrid cars which are powered by boats will also be outlawed new ones and we shall be in battery operated or hydrogen cars clean hydrogen and the questions over all of those things are still being discussed this is should we call it advanced technology which is rather like the pandemic search for vaccines being engaged in at breakneck pace because of the danger and also the fact that price parity as it's called the same price for the electric cars and the um petrol or diesel drivel driven cars has to come into being before people are able to make that kind of choice and yet we keep saying that we are problem solving people and across the world problems are being solved so if we think of adjustability and adaptability we put on at the end as we have on other occasions quite a lot of clips and uh films to help you if you want to just look back on them and they've certainly helped me and phil fletcher looking at them and seeing how things are in operation and going forward the city of shenzhen in china which we know well because we have a king school in in shenzhen shenzhen itself has exploded in size as a city in an extraordinary way and yet when you go there there are green spaces as you come out of your hotel and walk in the morning before work starts and so you find yourself walking in a sunflower field and or or a little woody area in the middle of the city and then you suddenly realize that below uh quite a long way below but with air holes there and filters to stop any problems there's a supermarket huge supermarket and on top a shopping mall we i should say um uh then um on top is a garden with fresh air and nothing poisonous being allowed to to come into that and at the same time shenzhen is proud of the fact that all their buses it's a huge population and all their fleet of buses are powered by electricity so you get a much quieter city and you also get the no carbon fuels being burned to take public transport around and incentives to use that public transport all of these things really speak of and one thinks back to the 19th century when we had the industrial revolution and that produced power of a of a certain type and then in more recently of course we've had a technological revolution and now both those things the mechanical and the technological the i.t all of that are feeding into what must be a green revolution to help the planet and to help the life of people and and again it's stick and carrot for governments to underwrite so much of that so that that exploration just as the exploration into vaccines and the exploration into medicines to help people with the pandemic now exploration into the ways in which these fossil fuels and older methods of transport can be phased out and the better methods of transport can be brought in you can see in some of the clips that there are companies like arrival working really hard to provide electrical at the moment electrical vans and and vehicles and cars which will take us around remembering always price parity the incentive and to just listen to some of what's going on is to be aware of a new world a world where there won't be all the noise and even better there won't be the poison pumping into our urban centers and urban sprawls and there won't be the necessity for people to live with the closed windows because of everything that is going on outside with lines of traffic emitting all of that emission-free zones and we hope that sometime everywhere will be an emission-free zone and the planet when we do this helps us always helps us the water and everything else is there we're thinking this morning about the city of cape town in in south africa and the fact that their reservoirs have run dry and at the same time invasive species of trees have populated the mountainsides pine trees and eucalyptus mainly not not native to south africa and the some of the decisions are very hard to make but the city authorities have chosen now to get deforest shall we say that area of pine trees and eucalyptus and it's a very expensive business and a bit of a risk and to allow once again the native culture of the plants and trees that should be there which will then begin to restore the water and the balance of everything will then be put back everything really is about balance between our usage and the planet's life and we've seen in so many ways during lockdowns how air can become purer quite quickly but other things take years and years and years to to peel and we're in danger at the moment with climate change of creating something as a a race of human kind which will take so many years to heal that none of us will see any of the benefits unless we act now these are all about choices but if you look at at the the work of of the heatherwick's studies that they also are working on a car and the the aero car which will be utterly clean and working towards again price parity but in that little clip we're told by the person who is explaining it so cogently that at the moment uh only 10 of the time that we own a car is being used by the car most of the time the other 90 percent of the time the car is simply standing as mine is there standing and 1.4 billion square meters of unused space is being taken up by those cars and the aero car and it's it's it's fun also to watch this and it makes you think of what ingenuity humanity is capable of the aerocar is designed not only to use that space sometimes when you're not actually driving along have a look and see how it's been designed but also when it's driving along it's not only being driven in a way by electricity but in a way that is clean when it's driving but it also cleans the air around it while it's driving and if one thinks of vehicles doing that well then we've actually found something that helps us in our endeavor to give cleaner air and have cleaner travel but none of this can happen unless people have the economic where with all the resources to make that choice and this is not only governments helping us here in the united kingdom or wherever you are to make that choice but one nation helping another to make that choice in nations which have no hope of making the right choices unless economic help financial resources are given not loaned given so that the balance of the earth can be restored all of these things are about human choice and when we think of that we realize that the choice is ours to make individually we know that here in this household we know that life can't be as it was before and every day we have to make choices real choices about what we actually need and how often we actually need to switch on an engine rather than using our feet or uh how often we need to use public transport which carries so many more all of those things are part of the choices that will go on but remember that this vehicle which i had switched on at the beginning issues really dangerous gases carbon monoxide benzene sulfur dioxide health issues toxins going into the air the whole time and we can cleanse that rather as a psalm the misery asks for forgiveness and ask for cleansing within ourselves that debate will of course go on but today people have to make decisions for action that um will be really important to us if you look at the arrival film showing how the electronic vans and cars are being planned and buses being planned it's not only exciting it's showing how with battery operated buses you don't have that great hump at the back which is the engine you've got a flat level and the batteries beneath we've seen um films also and that's a attached of how in china already it takes 20 seconds for a car to go in and its battery to be taken replaced and put on and go away with a new battery and price parity is there at the same time it hasn't become an expensive issue but as far as the the making of the the uh um arrival electrical buses and and vans and cars then they are thinking that that can be done in a small units and and places not huge factories because mass production of these vehicles becomes hugely important but they're wanting it to be done in a multitude of different workspaces so that employment is given at local level as well all these things are ideas for the future we have to remember also though of course that that the batteries in our cars are uh dependent on cobalt and lithium which are in scarce supply and the the mining of those and the the way in which we we find them is something that has dangers in itself and so governments have to make policies about that best based on the best advice this is an exploration it's a journey forward it's a wilderness journey in many ways but the dangers of the wilderness sometimes come to the point when the rock which seems impenetrable is struck and the right solution finds the fresh water which flows out of it and when that's happening then earth and the gifts of the creator on our planet begin to respond and as the balance is restored we're in partnership with the creator and the gift given the gift of each new day so many more things to say but that's enough because it's actually something about our own personal choice and we're all beginning to know that just as it was two years ago when we had to make personal choices for each other to protect health at the beginning of the pandemic we're going to say our prayers and this is uh leo the great stay i so uh leo our leo the great is having having a a day in the armchair i noticed this morning and i think he deserves it because it's his name day but it's also a day when we are praying for as i said earlier the diocese of highville in the anglican church of southern africa and in this diocese for justin our archbishop for rose bishop of dover and also for emma bishop at lambeth and our strap line which the diocese has given us in terms of praying for those in glasgow making decisions is your environment needs you and um we could point that to me as well and fletcher here our environment needs us making choices okay let's say our collect for today and bring your own prayers and intentions as we say this almighty father whose will is to restore all things in your beloved son the king of all govern the hearts and minds of those in authority and bring the families of the nations divided and torn apart by the ravages of sin to be subject to his just and gentle rule who is alive and reigns with you in the unity of the holy spirit one god now and forever are men so together we say in whatever language you'd like to use the prayer our savior taught us 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 moment for our own prayers now [Music] foreign foreign [Music] [Music] me oh [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] me [Music] me [Music] is [Music] is [Music] oh [Music] was is [Music] [Music] yes [Music] [Music] r [Music] is [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] me [Music] r [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] so [Music] r [Music] says we've come to say our prayers we want to be praying for those at the front line of exploration in this way people like that are those working with arrival and and with the heatherwick studios all like them across the world but at the same time there is mining for the resources necessary resources the cobalt the lithium and in in dangerous places and be conscious of the danger and the the hardness of choices for some and that governments may realize that so many can't afford to make the right choices to become a greener planet and they're the ones that mostly need the resources to be able to do that so let's then end with our blessing the peace of god which passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds and 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 may god by his grace help us all to be able to strike the rock and have fresh water as a sign of the planet's life helping us to our men