good morning and welcome to the deanery garden at canterbury cathedral on this morning of monday the 6th of december as we meet to say our morning prayers during this week of advent bring your prayers and concerns wherever you are across the world and feel welcome we continue to remember in our prayers those being so badly affected by the ash clouds and uh burying of homesteads in in indonesia after the volcanic eruption there we're also thinking of a terrible tragedy in kenya of a bus taking a choir members of a choir to the wedding of one of their members and no doubt they were going to sing at that wedding and the bus got caught in the surge of a river and turned and then was submerged and over 23 of them were drowned a great tragedy on what should have been a really happy day and we think of them and pray for all who've been bereaved lost their lives and the kind of fragility once again of human life in the the great compass of this planet and then we think of the people of myanmar where the military dictatorship has tightened its grip by now sentencing the former democratically elected leaders to terms of imprisonment and so we we remember in our prayers all the citizens of myanmar burma and here in uh these islands we're waiting for the arrival of another storm we've hardly got over storm arwyn and there are people still without power after that storm last week and now storm barra is approaching and we are heads down for another one of those and expecting to have some trouble again with the delivering of power as the storm strikes and then more cheerful news a rare sighting off the coasts of jamaica in the caribbean the blue waters of the caribbean of a white sperm whale so rarely rarely seen only a few sightings this century so far and that's the the kind of whale that moby dick was it's got almost a mythical significance and to see just fleetingly a white sperm whale just swimming through the waters of the caribbean off jamaica is a wonderful and lovely sight and we give thanks for that sight now for uh reasons that you'll find a bit later on we've come into the greenhouse this morning to say our morning prayers and we're going to begin our prayers now and then in our reflection all will be made clear oh lord open our lips and our mouth shall proclaim your praise reveal among us the light of your presence that we may behold your power and glory blessed are you sovereign god of all do you be praise and glory forever in your tender compassion the dawn from on high is breaking upon us to dispel the lingering shadows of night as we look for your coming among us this day open our eyes to behold your presence and strengthen our hands to do your will that the world may rejoice and give you praise 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 amen our psalm on this sixth morning of the month is psalm 30 i will exalt you o lord because you have raised me up and have not let my foes triumph over me o lord my god i cried out to you and you have healed me you brought me up o lord from the dead you restored me to life from among those that go down to the pit sing to the lord you servants of his give thanks to his holy name for his wrath endures but the twinkling of an eye his favor for a lifetime heaviness may endure for a night but joy comes in the morning in my prosperity i said i shall never be moved you lord of your goodness have made my hill so strong then you hid your face from me and i was utterly dismayed to you o lord i cried to the lord i made my supplication what prophet is there in my blood if i go down to the pit will the dust praise you or declare your faithfulness hear o lord and have mercy upon me o lord be my helper you have turned my morning into dancing you have put off my sackcloth and girded me with gladness therefore my heart sings to you without ceasing o lord my god i will give you thanks for ever so we return to our reading from the epistle to the hebrews the letter to the hebrews and we finished a halfway through chapter five i'm taking up from verse 11 and then we're going in chapter 6 up to verse 12. about this we have much to say and it is hard to explain since you have become dull of hearing for though by this time you ought to be teachers you need someone to teach you to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of god you need milk not solid food for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness since they are a child but solid food is for the mature for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil therefore let us leave the elementary doctrine of christ and go on to maturity not laying again a foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith towards god and of instruction about washings the laying on of hands the resurrection of the dead and eternal judgment and this we will do if god permits for it is impossible in the case of those who have once been enlightened who have tasted the heavenly gift and have shared in the holy spirit and have tasted the goodness of the word of god and the powers of the age to come and then have fallen away to restore them again to repentance since they are crucifying once again the son of god to their own harm and holding him up to contempt for land that has drunk the rain that often falls on it and produces a crop useful to those for whose sake it is cultivated receives a blessing from god but if it bears thorns and thistles it is worthless and near to being cursed and its end is to be burned though we speak in this way yet in your case beloved we feel sure of better things things that belong to salvation for god is not unjust so is to overlook your work and the love that you have shown for his name in serving the saints as you still do and we desire each one of you to show the same earnestness to have the full assurance of hope until the end so that you may not be sluggish but imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises with all that talk about milk and infant food and the way in which uh people who are not mature need a different kind of of food to build them up whether we're talking about the building up of the mind or the spirit or the body we've naturally come into the greenhouse where infant plants are here being fed with the right kinds of food in the right kind of atmosphere so i'm sitting in the larger greenhouse and when fresher designed this trough in the greenhouse behind you can't see the depth of the trough from there but it's full of baby fur craya and the fakreya grow into an enormous plant when they flower very tall indeed and very scented with beautiful flowers but at the moment they're tiny and sitting in their rows what you can see of course are these cacti along the back and the epiphylum the the ones that are shorter here uh are the ones where we've shown you beautiful flowers that have flowered from them as the year has gone through the others are more like prickly pear cactus and they can grow very large as well but what we're seeing here in front of me is a tray of baby geraniums and all around me are plants which need protection or they need to be brought on so that later on they can go into the cold frames and out into the atmosphere outside now the great thing about the trough behind me is it was designed with a lining this is victorian principles which fletter explored a lining of of um the kind of of thermal brick which uh is is then put against the the wall and it it then soaks up the heat from these low voltage tubes down here and that makes a nice warm bed and gives out the heat to the whole greenhouse from this trough here which is then watered in the proper way and the little plants get the right atmosphere and the right food and most of all the right temperature for crai are a type of succulent and they grow to enormous heights this one is started because of the height of the greenhouse but if you go to subtropical parts of even these islands like the silly isles or the west coast of ireland itself then in gardens like nuderine you see them growing to 14 feet in height and they produce their babies on the stem and after those have been produced then the wind carries them and they then uh find the the the ground beneath to establish a place themself and grow up to the same kind of heights and produces wonderful flowers and the scent which is very very recognizable indeed so this is a mother plant which has produced many and her babies are growing in the little pots but they need nutrients of a particular kind to help them to grow into a mother plant themselves so we think of all that with the illustration that the writer to the hebrews is giving to this community that we're getting to know with all their foibles but remember they are a jewish community probably in the city of rome i say probably nothing can be certain here and the writer is probably writing from alexandria but he's worried about them looking back to the past and hankering after things that have been and he's saying to them this is a new journey a new exodus towards a new promised land and as one goes on with that it becomes uh a sense of him saying now you've fallen away in some areas and you're not as mature as i thought you were and it may be that in some areas of your teaching you need to receive once again infant food from step one now the important thing about that is that people and i speak for myself people can be quite sophisticated in their thinking and understanding about certain things in life i'm not talking in theological terms i'm talking any branch of learning and find that in other areas they've not kept pace but now if i talk theologically it quite often is the case that christians have not kept up with their study and their learning and their own reflection so that they're not mixing their own experiences with the teaching that they've been given and they need teachers to help them on the way through this is what the writer to the hebrews is saying and hence the writer uses images of milk and and feeding uh creatures human infants and other creatures milk but at the same time the the writer uses the the uh of land receiving rain and what should happen with that land receiving rain if it's been cared for properly is it it produces a good and useful crop but if it produces thorns and thistles well it's no good at all and he's quite fierce about this and the way in which that epistle is written is a little bit normally we use carrot and stick uh there's there's a bit of stick there saying really you're falling away in some areas and you've you've not kept up with that reflection and teaching and you're because of that you're falling away but then he says but i'm sure that i'm being too harsh on you and the areas where you have really progressed will mean that you're going to progress in in a a way forward in a great way noticing those areas where you yourself might be falling away or not understanding properly or not giving yourself time for reflection so that the spirit might be fed from what the mind or the body is learning in daily experience and in the kind of reading it's doing and the listening it's doing and in this generation the amount it's seeing on screens and on computer and all the information flooding in time to reflect mix it with the good teaching that you've received this is what he's saying and they're surrounded in rome by immense amounts of influences and on this journey which we're all on as as the writer says of a new exodus towards an eternal city a new promised land but the way lies through some tempting areas and the temptation is not to receive the right kind of food now all these little plants if they didn't get the right food would would die and wither pretty quickly and uh yet they're all being cared for in a particular way and then eventually they will go into the parts of the garden or at the season to be taken out of the greenhouse and flower and fruit magnificently we hope so let's let's think today in that kind of area this isn't nicholas day and saint nicholas as we saw yesterday and if you want to tune into the arrival of saint nicholas in canterbury cathedral you could do that online from the even song last night not an even song but an evening service where the cathedral was packed with people and uh little children forming a choir a big choir on the steps and saint nicholas arriving a sense of great excitement and also a stepping stone towards christmas but at the same time we give thanks for saint nicholas who was a bishop in mara around the years between 270 and 343 a.d and he became a really powerful influence throughout and some nations keep the arrival of saint nicholas in in much more formal ways than others but it is a sign of great joy i want to go though to a different kind of story prompted a bit by saint nicholas because in the city of salisbury and i ministered in salisbury from let me just think 1974 to 1978 i mean in the city itself i was in the diocese of salisbury right up until 1992 in one place or another but in the city of salisbury and uh acting as a a fairly junior role in the cathedral church in salisbury but in salisbury very near the cathedral just walking distance away not within the compass of the close but walking distance away is the hospital of saint nicholas now it's not a hospital in a medical sense it's a hospital in terms of a community which lives in a kind of of cared-for atmosphere the community of the hospital of saint nicholas and it's very historic and it has residents who are looked after there mostly in retirement and in the middle of the 19th century we're talking 1851 an officer of the post office was sent on a two-year mission to review and reorder the postal services of the southwest of england it took two years it was all done on horseback and going from community to community and he found himself in salisbury and uh saint nicholas hospital is an a feature of the life in salisbury with its master and the community they're being looked after and at the same time the life of salisbury cathedral nearby and he was prompted at that time to begin to write a story his name anthony trollope and the story he began to write the first of his barthitcher chronicles the warden about uh lovely mr harding the warden of the hospital in barchester and as we think about that um i want to think about the way in which charlotte then went on to uh create six novels now he wrote enormous numbers of books one thinks of the the palace of chronicles about political life in the middle of the 19th century but the six barchester novels basically we'll call it because some of them are set out in the county itself are probably his most famous and it began with that prompt from nicholas hospital in uh salisbury i remember old cannon hall who was the master at the time uh in sitting in the stalls of of salisbury cathedral when even song was being sung but trollope took it on through barchester towers and then dr thorne and then framley parsonage and then the small house at arlington to the last chronicle of barcet which is a large and complicated book but the characters interweave actually some of them also interweave in his other political novels too but let's stay with the barcitra chronicles for today because he paints a picture of a myriad of different characters it was his practice to pay one of the staff in his house to wake up extra early and call him so he could write for two hours every morning would have been by candlelight or lamplight but that was his discipline to get up and write and that's how an enormous amount of his his novels were written many of them published in serial form uh week by week in magazines and then eventually published his books themselves but let's stay with the chronicles of basically shall we say and think about the characters he gives us now i was introduced to that at a very early age quite um by chance the bbc television black and white in those days in 1959 put on a series called the last chronicle of barcette six episodes half an hour each on a friday night how you could possibly cover that enormous book in that way i don't know but it sort of caught my imagination and the characters in it particularly hugh burden playing the saintly mr crawley and the one who was accused if you've read the the story accused of having stolen a check which was left inadvertently by uh the agent of lord lufthan i think in his uh in his rectory and it seems impossible from those who know mr crawley josiah crawley all the way through uh poverty-stricken family but at the same time a man of total and absolute integrity as a parish priest accused and hugh burden played that and i can think of no other face when i i read anything about mr crawley now in in uh bastion chronicles now i wanted to say i was 11 at the time i wanted to say childhood impressions the way milk is given the way plant food is given are very very powerful indeed so that whatever other person is put in front of me in the in in television programs or films of the bachelor chronicles it's those faces from those black and white films which i saw on friday nights half an hour a time and archdeacon grantley who has been played about many people in in barchester towers and and in even the warden and but nevertheless it's always clive morton in my mind because that's who was playing at the time and having sort of thought about that a bit i didn't know when i when i did it but i went to my my great learning home which is the village library which was overseen by a saintly lady called miss middleton and miss middleton knew me well and would know that i'd come in very often on a saturday morning and and just look around the even the the lovely smell of the books at that point uh comes back to me if i smell a library that that actually has that scent and i went to find the last chronicle of barcet and found it and it it had that that patterned cover which i grew used to seeing in the library because i found there were six books like this here's my copy now that's the pattern cover it's not the copy from the library but it is actually a copy of a set of them that i have and they'll always be on my shelves but i found there great complications and miss middleton when i said can i take this and she said robert are you sure you want that is it is it it is very complicated book and i said no i i'd like to take that and so i took it home and began to read it and found it interesting i don't know that i completed it at the time because i was starting at the wrong end of the sequence and the great thing about the last chronicle is it is describing so many different characters who have already appeared and had their story sifted in the other books situations of great sadness and sorrow situations of happiness and joy situations of people being harassed and bullied or without money or just taking a wrong track and the whole thing is utterly fascinating because trollope was a great writer and the way he wrote about these people and they're not all clergy and by any means at all they're all kinds of people in in every every station of life as they go through and you learn them and what you find as you go through is that they either help one another as people do or encourage one another and believe in one another but trollop creates situations and particularly in the last chronicle where it's beginning to be difficult to believe in the person that they are saying but i never did this i'm being unjustly accused and the wonderful thing about josiah crawley who is a man of intense academic learning and theology and a father who taught his own daughters uh and sons to to to be as clever as he but with really no earthly wealth at all and to to see him being actually accused in that way is tragic if you've read the whole set there is a scene in family parsonage where crawley goes to see a brother clergyman mark roberts who's the hero of family parsonage and has come to chide him for having lost his way and that's seen in mark's library at the rectory at framley where one clergyman comes and says to another brother i've i've come to say you've lost your way is one of the most powerful scenes in all trolley trollop and at first mark tries to shrug it off and laugh it off and say no that's not me and corey says but i've heard this about you and it goes on and then in the end crawley stands up and lays his hand on his shoulder and says that mark's response have i become a castaway says marcan and crawley says if you remember no not a castaway but someone who in the sharp stones of the path has wandered astray and and cut their feet and been wounded and i'm here to help you back onto the track and then uh having done this he leaves the library leaves the house speaking to nobody it's a secret it's a secret uh interview with a brother clergyman and mark just locks the library door and the household and his wife can't understand why he's spending time in silence alone and crawley is walking he's got no horse walking all the miles back to hogglestock his own parish where you find in the bachelor in the last chronicle when he's the one accused that very early in the morning he goes off to the brick makers in their community there who are the poorest people and they respect him hugely and he goes in to talk with one of them there's a complete pattern of how people are are actually interacting with one another and seeing things about each other's lives and you live with with all of that so eventually of course i read all of the books one by one not all at the same time ever but now i know them all and they're all friends of mine these characters and as you read them you rejoice with some and you lament with others and you're thinking please please don't go along that path but the christ-like figure almost of josiah crawley whom even his friends doubt comes to be the central thread of that last long chronicle where every character comes back from all the others to take their bow it's worth persevering with but it's good to know what their story is up to then whether it's the country doctor dr thorne or it's the um rather well healed person mark roberts in family parsonage or is that the desperate love story of the archdeacon's son major grantley for mr crawley's daughter grace all of those stories coming together making patterns as we do day by day with the characters particularly in the gospels or earlier in the stories of the old covenant for we can do that and these books in my day and now many films and other ways of receiving things are important in our growing up but never doubt the strong impressions given to us as children because they don't go away and some are for good and some are for evil and we ourselves are needing the teaching to distinguish one from the other so that i utterly rejoice in the way that lovely miss middleton used to see me go through various books it was in the village library that i found the lord of the rings by tolkien and in the village library that i found so many other books and she would smile and stamp the book and maybe when i came back afterwards and said can you re-stamp that i've not quite finished with that yet how are you finding it she would say and watch me grow up from the age of 11 all the way through until even in uh teenage years if i was at home i'd go back and maybe borrow a book or two to read at home when i was there there was nothing like it really sitting reading in the garden or sitting reading at home but those early images stay with one and the bbc at that time had much to answer for because they would put on so many of these series and that meant that the characters visually were in my head books that you've never seen a film of are quite different because you make the characters up yourself but the minute somebody puts an image in front of you then you have to beware and i give thanks this morning for this uh pattern on the cover of the last chronicle of barcelona all the six novels because that post office rider and he went on working for the post office going around reviewing the postal services and arriving in salisbury in nicholas hospital and having the idea of the warden opened up a section of mid 19th century life in these islands and trollope went on then and gave many many more pictures in political life social life ordinary life and even descriptions of the countryside as it was and the cities that they were in those days so let's give thanks for him because this is his year's mind he died on the 6th of december 1882 and we give i very much give thanks for him and the way in which he helped me with a bit more than infant food because i had to work hard to get to know all of that as i read the books well that's quite a long passage here amongst the junior plants of this garden receiving infant food as we ourselves sometimes realize we need to oh in that section i better start at the beginning in that section of study because i seem not to know much about that and we find ourselves doing that all the time questing mentally and physical experience to being mixed with them as we go through the day so on this nicolas day and this advent monday of the second week of advent we are praying in our anglican communion today for sorry wrong page here we are the parish of saint george the martyr in sorry in deal this is the diocese and for chris spencer the parish priest there for archbishop justin of course and for rose bishop of dover and emma bishop at lambeth and the uh i missed the the curet there george ben forbes but in the anglican communion the diocese of ichiala in the church of nigeria in the niger province let's then say first of all the collect for st nicholas day and then the advent college and bring your own prayers and intentions as we do so almighty father lover of souls who chose your servant nicholas to be a bishop in the church that he might give freely out of the treasures of your grace make us mindful of the needs of others and as we have received so teach us also to give through jesus christ our lord amen and our advent collect almighty god give us grace to cast away the works of darkness and to put on the armor of light now in the time of this mortal life in which your son jesus christ came to us in great humility that on the last day when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge the living and the dead we may rise to the life immortal through him who is alive and reigns with you in the unity of the holy spirit one god now and forever amen so together and in whatever language you like to use we say 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 of reflection on this day so so christ the son of righteousness shine upon you scatter the darkness from before your path and make you ready to meet him when he comes in glory 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 are men well tiger i think you're my thermal brick keeping me warm on this cold autumn day all right i'm going to stay here for hours and hours i'm sure but i'm not so sadly you're going to have to use a real thermal brick to keep yourself warm why is it boy okay don't know that's right hello is 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