good morning and welcome to the dinery garden at canterbury cathedral on this morning of thursday the 19th of august i'm sitting in a particular place to welcome you this morning wherever you are across the world and invite you to bring your own concerns and prayers at this time when we see so much of the the world burning in different places in the world and at the same time we are focused on the peoples of afghanistan in a situation of great danger and tension and i've caused us this morning to be given the sight of the huge magnolia tree here the great green canopy and it therefore becomes a sign of our care of god's world magnolias grow really well here in the deanery garden and they give us beauty in three completely different ways the architecture of the bear tree it in winter time is itself of great beauty the flowering which we've seen of the magnolias when the flowers are out is of intense beauty and purity but the great green canopy and here it is as its best of our large magnolia tree is something which prompts us to think of our care of the green earth this magnolia is the largest of all our magnolias and it was planted uh by ursula macdonald in memory of her parents canon and mrs livit with the permission of uh my predecessor dean ian white thompson and his wife wendy and it has flourished as do magnolias in this garden some of the trees are already in the garden beginning to lose their leaves this one is absolutely in the splendor of its green canopy and is a sight to cause us to give thanks for the green spaces of our world and our responsibility for them things have to be big here in the precincts for people to notice them because the cathedral itself is so huge but one of the most popular sites in the precinct is the site of the great wooden horse which has become it was a temporary structure put up by students in 2018 to mark the centenary of the end of the great war but now it's become much much more than that it's become a sign of our need to care for all the life of the planet and it's also a cheerful sign because people relate to it there's a wonderful sense when people come through the christchurch gate particularly with children looking up to that end which is tree filled and in front of the trees this very friendly but huge horse one of the most moving ceremonies of the year is when we have the special day when animals slaughtered in war are commemorated and people gather around that that wonderful horse and give thanks for it it shows how temporary thing can suddenly grasp our hearts and minds and become a symbol of something which is really potent and we give thanks for it in the middle of all our intentions and turning in on ourselves as humankind being the only thing that matters these things like the great green magnolia and the site of the war horse as it was and the the horse that is was was used by humanity in so many different ways which fill us with with horror um is now a sign of challenge to us look after the green trees look after the creatures of the earth but things like that have to be big here and they also had to be attractive so it thrills me when great groups of pilgrims and children and schools not only picnic around the horse but stand under it and have a wonderful photograph taken none of that was expected when we we put that up temporarily in the beginning so we give thanks for all of that on this day and it helps us with our prayers on a day when our whole planet is seen to be under threat and most of the pictures on our media are things of um real horror for us whether in fire or flood or war and these things are here to give us a sense of god's undergirding hand and the life of the planet which can recover so we give thanks for them let's begin our prayers on this day o lord open our lips and our mouth shall proclaim your praise may christ the day star dawn in our hearts and triumph over the shades of night blessed are you creator of all to you be praise and glory forever as your dawn renews the face of the earth bringing light and life to all creation may we rejoice in this day you have made as we wake refreshed from the depths of sleep 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 so god set our hearts on fire with love for you now and forever amen our psalm on this day of the month is psalm 96 sing to the lord a new song sing to the lord all the earth sing to the lord and bless his name tell out his salvation from day to day declare his glory among the nations and his wonders among all peoples for great is the lord and greatly to be praised he has more to be feared than all gods for all the gods of the nations are but idols it is the lord who made the heavens honor and majesty are before him power and splendor are in his sanctuary ascribe to the lord you families of the peoples ascribe to the lord honor and strength ascribe to the lord the honor due to his name bring offerings and come into his courts o worship the lord in the beauty of holiness let the whole earth tremble before him tell it out among the nations that the lord is king he has made the world so firm that it cannot be moved he will judge the peoples with equity let the heavens rejoice and let the earth be glad let the sea thunder and all that is in it let the fields be joyful and all that is in them let all the trees of the wood shout for joy before the lord for he comes he comes to judge the earth with righteousness he will judge the world and the peoples with his truth a wonderful psalm with its wonderful knapsack sentence shall we call it in the middle o worship the lord in the beauty of holiness let the whole earth tremble before him but also the sense the real sense of the trees crying out for joy the trees of the wood and our responsibility for them and for the creatures of the earth as we were saying with the great horse as a symbol of that for he comes he comes to judge the earth and the judgment will be severe of our stewardship of this planet so that's also turn now to our reading from the book of genesis and we're carrying on with the story of abram as he still is i'm reading parts of chapter 17. i'm going to read from verses 1 to 10 and then 15 to 22 of genesis chapter 17. when abram was 99 years old the lord appeared to abram and said to him i am god almighty walk before me and be blameless that i may make sorry the book is sticky from yesterday's reign my covenant between you and me and may multiply you greatly then abram fell on his face and god said to him behold my covenant is with you and you shall be the father of a multitude of nations no longer shall your name be called abram but your name shall be abraham for i have made you the father of a multitude of nations i will make you exceedingly fruitful and i will make you into nations and kings shall come from you and i will establish my covenant between me and you and your offspring after you throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant to be god to you and to your offspring after you and i will give to you and your offspring after you the land of your sojourners all the land of canaan for an everlasting possession and i will be their god and god said to abraham as for you you shall keep my covenant you and your offspring after you throughout their generations this is my covenant which you shall keep between me and you and your offspring after you every male among you shall be circumcised and god said to abraham as for sarai your wife you shall not call her name sarai but sarah shall be her name i will bless her and moreover i will give you a son by her i will bless her and she shall become nations kings of people shall come from her then abraham fell on his face and laughed and said to himself shall a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old sarah who is 90 years old bear a child and abraham said to god oh that ishmael might live before you god said no but sarah your wife shall bear you a son and you shall call his name isaac i will establish my covenant with him as an everlasting covenant for his offspring after him as for ishmael i have heard you behold i have blessed him and will make him fruitful and multiply him greatly he shall father twelve princes and i will make him a great nation but i will establish my covenant with isaac whom sarah shall bear to you at this time next year abraham the man of obedience and great faith laughed at the impossibility of god's promise in human terms and yet the beginning the promise the root of all things was to come from that kind of promise which is given right at the beginning of our new covenant our new testament as well where also zechariah doubts right at the beginning of sin luke's gospel the words of the angel gabriel and there's the sense also in gabriel's message to mary when he says that she will bear a son when he also says your cousin elizabeth is now in her six months for with god nothing is impossible but for the moment it seems so shall we say ludicrous that although abram bows on his face to before god he laughs at the ridiculous nature of the age of his own body and of sarah too the covenant is established physically and the physical circumcision becomes important to that community in which jesus grew up and it's an important symbol also for saint paul in his epistles but the early church fast realized that the physical circumcision is only a sign of the covenant at that time and they begin to think of a spiritual circumcision and you can read about that in in the various epistles of course because when paul is is speaking of all of that in the epistle to the romans in the first episode of the corinthians and in that epistle yesterday and it's worth looking it up in galatians an early epistle of sin paul he begins to think of the fact of circumcision the covenant between god and physical humanity to be something of the heart not just of the body but it's important to to know what that means because of the reading in the new testament mentioning that sign of the covenant so many times and then at the same time let's think of the importance of names in all of this for names become important we have the sense of physical things in in baptism and in baptism and naming becomes important and our name becomes very personal to us and now god is giving a new name to abram he now becomes abraham and sarai becomes sarah and these two are to receive the child of promise isaac even though abraham gives god a way out and says well you could use ishmael and god says isaac shall be the one i remember ishmael and i blessed ishmael but that's different isaac is the child of promise and he earlier has given the sign in the stars and the sand and saying your offsprings will be so many great nations across the world for time signs of human life kingdom societies nations in history but it's like the stars in the sky and the sand on the seashore but at the same time my covenant is with you and with sarah and abraham is called on to believe that which he does but he'll be challenged again soon so as we sit under this great spreading tree this green canopy and we remember we're challenged by our queen to think of a green canopy for her platinum jubilee which we shall do and already the trees are being planted across the the world in memory of that or in readiness for it [Music] and i want to think today of the person who was named by saint luke as the great protector of the pax romana across the world when jesus was born caesar augustus for he octavius caesar as he was in the beginning died on the 19th of august in the year 14 a.d having been born in 63 bc he was 75 years old when he died and had transformed the world into a place where people could travel around with a relative degree of safety and in his imperial years and the ones which followed the pax romana guaranteed the passage of the gospel around the mediterranean region of course it broke down from time to time and of course there were aspects of it which were cruel but at the same time the gospel spread with the epistles and paul's journeys and all under the pax romana the peace of rome and caesar augustus really was one of the the greatest military leaders but also creators of that huge area around the mediterranean world where roman culture heavily influenced by greek culture and every educated roman could speak also the greek some of it the classical greek many of them the koine greek in which the gospels and the epistles are written and in which the old testament was translated so this passage with ease of the gospel is done first of all under the reign of caesar augustus and then of his his nominated heir the son of his wife livia tiberius and in that area um we have the overarching power under which jesus was born in a relatively unknown and unimportant province galilee and we see today the great spreading of a tree of over me and it's a it's a good sign of the way in which the pax romana sheltered society and gave contact around and guaranteed the trade routes and all of those things but coming from the root i'm sitting by the mighty root of this this magnolia tree which is spreading up and it it could be also a sign of of abraham as at the root and beginning abraham and sarah and growing up through to branch after branch after branch and then perfect green leaves and the growing life of the of the world when octavius as he was inherited the power from julius caesar at the assassination of julius caesar in 44 bc it was not an expected transition he was caesar's great nephew but nominated heir but he at the first was with two others the most famous of those of course was anthony and that triumphant uh governed at first but octavius made the going and in the end after the battle of actium in 31 bc when anthony was defeated of course everything was there for octavius by his own skills but he was also a cultured man and one thinks of virgil the great poet writing from legends using almost the style of homer in order to write his inid uh and showing how rome itself found its foundations but in all of that is giving an undergirding as the the genesis stories do with this particular story which we are telling at the moment and that kind of of uh historic poetry was complemented too by the pastoral poetry of virgil wonderful poetry and and of course the ecklog where he talks about a child being born that will usher in a golden age and and the the early church and and also the medieval church rather rested on that as a prophecy and that's why virgil is dante's guide through the the inferno and through purgatory until dante comes to beatrice as his guide leading him into heaven itself and at that point um we will leave that particular date and come to another date which i wanted to mention today and that is on the 19th of august 1662 at the age of 39 blaise pascal the french mathematician physicist philosopher theologian and writer of beautiful prose died and i don't want to go too much into his life because one can spend a very very long time on pascal and many of you will know an enormous amount more about him than i do but i do want to think of him in his posse because those thoughts were gathered towards the end of his life he was setting trying to set out his thinking in order and it was left in a sort of disorder for others to put together and eventually published as his thoughts his ponce faithful catholic theologian of um at first a scientific mathematical way of thinking and we we think of him in his uh theory of probability and all those things but in november 1654 he dates it 23rd of november 1654 he even times it between 10 30 and 12 30 at night blaise pascal had an intense religious experience he was a faithful catholic christian much affected by jansenism as well but uh at this time he had a complete transformation and it was an experience which caused him to to change his way of perceiving he wrote on paper immediately afterwards fire god of abraham god of isaac god of jacob not of the philosophers and scholars and then a quote from psalm 119 verse 16 i will not forget thy word our men and then he caused every coat he wore to have a a pocket where he could push that piece of paper to carry with him as a reminder of the new insighted experience which god had vouched safe to him and from that moment onwards the ponce begin to make sense and the quotes that come from pascal begin to make sense we know the truth not only by reason but by the heart that's one of his quotes but it rests on all his thinking and scientific study and theories of probability and mathematics but it rests also on that experience which caused him to turn in a different direction too with the blazing of his heart just the word fire and then the god of abraham god of isaac god of jacob whom jesus mentions in the present tense saying to the people criticizing him god is the god of the living and in the present tense the god of abraham i am the god of abraham isaac jacob and here pascal feels the present tense of that god on fire within him we know the truth not only by reason but by the heart and then all men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone the enormous necessity for us to reflect on what god is giving us with insights given we're trying to do this morning by morning pascal went into retreat at the convent immediately after this experience that he had the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing he wrote and that sense of quietly allowing the heart to speak as well as the reason and then allowing the balance between them the one informing the other but not necessarily reason understanding what the heart is telling it that's why virgil gives over to beatrice when dante begins to go into the heavenly realm and then there are other lovely things from pascal and perhaps the most famous of them all is when he had written a long and diffuse letter to someone and say and and said if i'd had more time i've written you a short letter sometimes getting one's thoughts in order to write things or say things in a short way how often i find that when i'm speaking with you in the mornings is much more time consuming than just letting things ramble on and that moment of quiet alone distilling crystallizing what god is telling us sitting under this great tree standing before the shall we say temporary as it was thought to be wooden horse and letting creation speak to us and god speak to our heart as well as to our minds becomes an absolute must worship the lord in the beauty of holiness says our psalmist this morning and then speaks of as we do that all creation the trees of the wood the beasts of the field and the the sense of the skies and the canopies of leaves and everything else um and even little lily herself speaking to us in all of this way so as a garden congregation we give thanks for all of that [Applause] so now let's um let's say our prayers together on this particular morning with great thanksgiving for all the lessons that we learn and also with enormous intention for the areas of the world which are so much endangered and not only people losing their homes but creatures and trees and wildlife absolutely being destroyed this is a morning which is rather misty and it's full of insects as well which is which is uh which is a nice thing there are all kinds of insects flying around and probably you see them on the lens they're around here too so it shows exactly how full of life our earth is and how much damage we as the stewards are able to do so let's first of all remember our stewardship and our necessity constantly to reflect on that we're praying in our anglican communion today for the diocese of edinburgh in the scottish episcopal church for that lovely city and all worshipping there and we also are praying with the ospring deanery for the parishes around uh faversham and osbringe and borton under bleen and that that area not too far from here the deanery is praying for their fresh expressions and missional learning communities today and we also pray for justin our archbishop and for rose bishop of dover tim bishop at lambeth bring your own prayers and intentions as we say the colic for today oh god you declare your almighty power most chiefly in showing mercy and pity mercifully grant to us such a measure of your grace that we running the way of your commandments may receive your gracious promises and be made partakers of your heavenly kingdom through jesus christ our lord amen so each in our own language we 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 of silence now for our own thoughts and reflections and prayers [Music] wow 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 from those whom you love and those whom you would pray for today and always amen you