good morning and welcome to the garden of the deanery in canterbury cathedral on this particular morning of the 2nd of september wednesday the 2nd of september it is the most beautiful autumn morning and everything that we expect of early autumn is here there's a blue sky above me above the trees and the scent of a very heavy dew on all the grasses wherever you are in the world please feel welcome to bring your prayers and concerns together with us as we say our morning prayers this is a day the 2nd of september when last night we saw the most marvelous full moon rise and normally the september full moon would be the harvest moon this year it's not so because the harvest full moon comes the nearest to the equinox and there's another full moon as october begins october is greedy this year it has two full moons but the rising of the moon a tangerine color in the sky above the silhouette of dark trees was a wonderful sight last night in a clear sky with the planet mars just a dot of light above it and this morning we remember certain dates as we always do what happened in on the 2nd of september in other years some connected with this place in 1192 the treaty of jaffa between richard the first and saladin the sultan ended the third crusade and it was negotiated by hubert walter whose tomb is in the cathedral here and who later became archbishop of canterbury it was a negotiation which ended in the right of christian pilgrims to go to jerusalem and also a small christian presence of priests to minister to them there in 1666 on this day the great fire of london which destroyed 80 percent of the houses in the city of london and also uh destroyed sin paul's cathedral huge gothic cathedral the second foundation which was founded by augustine after canterbury canterbury rochester and then saint paul's cathedral from land grants given by king ethelbert but that huge cathedral which with its spire like salisbury was totally destroyed and then taken down and so christopher wren's saint paul's cathedral with its dome was built after the great fire in 1752 on this day something strange happened because the whole of this nation and all the areas of the world with which it was connected went over to the gregorian calendar so that having this day the 2nd of september people then woke up tomorrow to the 14th of september as the calendar changed and some were angry demanding their 11 days back and then we remember also that on this day in 1939 the national service act meant that all men of between the ages of 19 and 41 were conscripted for military service as that war began in 1939 and in 1973 j.r.r tolkien died on this day and it's to tolkien that i shall be coming back in our reflection uh after the reading from the acts of the apostles but let's begin our prayers o lord open our lips and our mouths shall proclaim your praise visit us with your salvation and sustain us with your gracious spirit 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 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 amen our son this morning the second morning of the month is psalm 9 and i'm reading some verses from that now i will give thanks to you lord with my whole heart i will tell of all your marvelous works i will be glad and rejoice in you i will make music to your name oh most high sing praises to the lord who dwells in zion declare among the peoples the things he has done the avenger of blood has remembered them he did not forget the cry of the oppressed have mercy upon me o lord consider the trouble i suffer from those who hate me you that lift me up from the gates of death that i may tell all your praises in the gates of the city of zion and rejoice in your salvation the nations shall sink into the pit of their own making and in the snare which they set will their own foot be taken for the lord makes himself known by his acts of justice the wicked are snared in the works of their own hands they shall return to the land of darkness all the nations that forget god for the needy shall not always be forgotten and the hope of the poor shall not perish forever arise o lord and let not mortals have the upper hand let the nations be judged before your face put them in fear o lord that the nations may know themselves to be but mortal [Music] so we return to the acts of the apostles and i'm still sitting on the path for paul's journey to damascus was followed by a journey which would take him right across the eastern mediterranean world and begin to expand the church let's take up from where we left off yesterday and i am reading this morning from verse 19. for some days saul was with the disciples at damascus and immediately he proclaimed jesus in the synagogue saying he is the son of god and all who heard him were amazed and said is not this the man who made havoc in jerusalem of those who called upon this name and has he not come here for this purpose to bring them bound before the chief priests but saul increased all the more in strength and confounded the jews who lived in damascus by proving that jesus was the christ when many days had passed the jews plotted to kill him but their plot became known to saul they were watching the gates day and night in order to kill him but his disciples took him by night and let him down through an opening in the wall lowering him in a basket and when he had come to jerusalem he attempted to join the disciples but they were all afraid of him for they did not believe that he was a disciple but barnabas took him and brought him to the apostles and declared to them how on the road saul had seen the lord who spoke to him and how at damascus he had preached boldly in the name of jesus so he went in and out among them at jerusalem preaching boldly in the name of the lord and he spoke and disputed against the hellenists but they were seeking to kill him and when the brothers learned this they brought him down to caesarea and sent him off to tarsus so the church throughout all judea and galilee and samaria had peace and was being built up and walking in the fear of the lord and in the comfort of the holy spirit it multiplied luke has given us a paragraph where everything is quickly conflated but as we said yesterday the timeline begins to be a little disturbed and can lead us in wrong directions luke is writing many many years after this happened even in saint paul's memory and to get what paul knew to have happened we need to go to his letter to the galatians and you can read that afterwards for in the early chapters of the letter to the galatians probably one of paul's earliest letters but one of a sequence of letters clearly to that group of churches and those other letters are not with us we only have this one letter but in it he gives us a cameo of that time in his life very quickly given but in paul's own words and there he describes how after the experience in damascus it was three years before he was brave enough to go up to jerusalem and then he went only for 15 days and met peter and james the lord's brother who was to become the leader of the church in jerusalem but not many others and from there he went off for 14 years to preach the gospel not based in jerusalem but mostly it would seem in the kingdom of aritas whose capital was in petra the rose red city half as old as time and that kingdom which was the beginning of arabia there had many towns and cities in it and went right up to damascus to which paul returned and only after that time spent in this kingdom which was even at that time outside the power of the roman empire rome conquered the kingdom of eretus in 106 so this is long before that and you will find that little cameo of paul's life given in his detail in galatians it fits with the sequence but it brings to light the growing conflict between those who in jerusalem saw the way as it was called followers of the way as christians were called as simply a continuous development of the jewish faith and wanted those who joined to adhere to certain rules particularly circumcision and those who were greek speaking to whom paul believed from his vocation that he was sent and see how he argues the case in galatians for that freedom in christ which we all enjoy that was the tenet of his apostleship that journey was to be a long one but meanwhile we get that lovely paragraph in the acts of the apostles which says that during those years the church in galilee and samaria and judea knew peace persecution was for a while over and they built up their numbers a respite in the way forward so that that building up can take place but the hidden schism or not very hidden when they come together is still there between the hellenists and the jerusalem church and that only gets resolved at paul's second visit to jerusalem we shall come to that in the acts of the apostles but if we count the years then that is well 15 or 16 years later and so there's time for that development to take place and remember the evangelist philip has gone all the way to caesarea on the mediterranean coast tomorrow we shall leave paul and go back to peter and see what is happening there but for the moment i wanted to remember another journey sketched for us i always loved stories of journeys and pathways which take people on journeys and i was interested to see that this in 1973 was the day on which chalkane died i've got my first copy here of volume one of the lord of the rings the fellowship of the ring i remember taking it from the village library at home not knowing at that time what it was i had seen three volumes and i'd passed it many times in borrowing books and in i estimate 1962 i took the first one and borrowed it and i on a saturday evening i remember was sitting reading it at home fascinated but not understanding what i was reading i was entering a completely new world but what it told me about the journey became very significant i loved the fact and it reminded me of my old commentary of the acts of the apostles where there was a map in the back of that which uh showed saint paul's missionary journeys here is the great map which tolkein provides for us of the lands around the little shire where the hobbits lived i read the lord of the rings long long before i read the hobbit and it became part of my mental landscape there are wonderful things in it and the rhyme which um tolkien wrote right at the beginning the poem there are poems all the way through the lord of the rings and and songs everyone is always singing but remember this one because this just overarches everything three rings for the elven kings under the sky seven for the dwarf lords in their halls of stone nine for mortal men doomed to die one for the dark lord on his dark throne in the land of mordor where the shadows lie one ring to rule them all one ring to find them one ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them in the land of mordor where the shadows lie this kind of landscape here this morning is very much the landscape as uh tolkien describes it of the shire it's this landscape that the fellowship of the ring set out to preserve the ethos of home and one remembers that conscription going on in 1939 when all were called to protect the ethos of home and on the way very early on we meet what uh tolkien calls it's not in the film i'm talking about the book and the film couldn't possibly cover much of this and goes to all sorts of faces but there are so many incidents in the book that you think oh i wish that was there i wish that was there and one of them is the meeting with the high elves in the wood overlooking one of the little villages of the shire where the high elf gildor gives to frodo and sam and pippin and mariadok the white bread to see them on their journey it's a very sacramental picture and in it says gildor says i think probably your journey if i look forward is going to mean that you play a significant part in this battle good against evil in all the lands beyond the shire and frodo says what i want most is courage and gildor says courage is found in strange places and true enough it's the ordinary people that in the lord of the rings have to accomplish everything for those who are full of power are properly terrified that the one ring on their finger will cause their power to be corrupted and give them wicked power so that the three elven lords and ladies galadriel and and elrond and and the the shipwright whom we we never meet sierra at the the the coast will not touch the great ring because there are three elven rings which will lose their power when the big ring is destroyed would be corrupted one remembers this isn't tolkien the thing of all power corrupts but absolute power corrupts absolutely it's the small people the little people the ones who think they haven't got courage the ones who think they have no power who accomplish this and even gollum himself with all his desperate temptations and awful imaginings is crucial to the destruction of the ring of power all have their part to play and then what at the end of that great story is so significant is sam gammy who himself represents the ethos of the shire coming home and the last words of the whole sequence sam sitting in his chair in front of the roaring fire in the shire which they have saved and the citizens are really unaware of all that has gone on he looks at his wife and says well i'm back it's like the end of a pilgrimage well saint paul is only just starting off he's not even changed his name but for the moment we're going to say our prayers on our pilgrimage this morning and give thanks for tolkien and his imagination which like the odyssey like dante like milton like bunyan is the story in allegory of an immense journey where good battles evil at every level and courage is found in strange places so this morning we are praying in our calendar of prayer across the world for the diocese of ontario in canada and michael alton the bishop bear and his people and the diocese of calcutta in the church of north india and probable canto dutta the bishop there and his people here in this diocese we pray for justin our archbishop for rose bishop of dover for tim bishop at lambeth and this morning happily for the area deanery of canterbury that's the parishes in the city and in the near countryside which surround the cathedral we pray for our friends the area dean mark griffin also the parish priest of our nearest parish here and of saint martin's the little church which augustine used to pray in when he came and we always say is the mother church of the cathedral itself because of its life it's just a walk up the road here so let's say our prayers and all of us bring those whom we would pray for today and those whom we know to be in any kind of need or trouble the catalogue i read before was a catalogue as always of destruction and also creation and re-creation so we pray for those who are facing all those situations in their life and in their communities on this particular day those combating the pandemic and those also bringing needful resources to those who are in desperate need of them here's the prayer for this week almighty and everlasting god you are always more ready to hear than we to pray and to give more than either we desire or deserve pour down upon us the abundance of your mercy for giving us those things of which our conscience is afraid and giving us those good things which we are not worthy to ask but through the merits and mediation of jesus christ your son our lord amen so we say each in our own language and unite those languages in the prayer which our lord 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 of silence now as we say our own prayers [Music] 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 the blessing of god almighty the father the son and the holy spirit be upon you upon those whom you love and upon those whom you would pray for today and always amen oh