good morning and welcome to the dinery garden at canterbury cathedral on this morning of monday the 7th of february it's the most lovely morning and it's a meadow monday so we've come into the meadow but for the moment you are looking at the cathedral itself where a large scaffolding is being put up over a section of the cathedral this is regular work repair work and a large scaffolding is needed for what in our terms is a relatively small job the scaffolders are at work and when we started and put the camera up there uh there were a team of scaffolding scaffolders working there in in fact in the last few minutes they've removed themselves to the other side of the building scaffolders aren't normally shy and the skills that they have we're really proud of because it's a very skillful job to erect scaffolding of that sort but it's rare that there is no scaffold of any kind on the cathedral and uh true enough here a piece of ordinary repair work but we've come into the meadow and we've also come to two people who aren't shy and i'm talking here of clemmy who's beside me uh and when he who i think would appear the the moment she realizes breakfast time but we'll we'll stand up and uh give them their breakfast and i think that will please them immensely i've got it just here and i can put it out so that they can come on uh tell me come on come on winnie come across here we are got some bread as well here we are off we go now let's put this around for you here's winnie coming at once and i'll put them around here so they can spread about and have a nice walk when he was on the drier side of the enclosure there but there's lots of nice things for them to eat and to enjoy as we enjoy our nourishment of morning prayer on this monday morning in the meadow so let's uh take our book and begin our prayers on this morning no wind uh not too cold slightly frosty right at the beginning but the thrush is singing when i went across to matins early and not a cloud in the sky so lovely uh the chickens are longing longing to come out but of course they are in their own lockdown because of the avian flu but we hope that will come to an end at some stage 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 to you be praise and glory forever in your tender compassion that 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 and 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 our son this morning on this seventh morning of the month is psalm 36 sin whispers to the wicked in the depths of their heart there is no fear of god before their eyes they flatter themselves in their own eyes that their abominable sin will not be found out the words of their mouth are unrighteous and full of deceit they have ceased to act wisely and to do good they think out mischief upon their beds and have set themselves in no good way nor do they abhor that which is evil your love o lord reaches to the heavens and your faithfulness to the clouds your righteousness stands like the strong mountains your justice like the great deep you lord shall save both man and beast how precious is your loving mercy o god all mortal flesh shall take refuge under the shadow of your wings they shall be satisfied with the abundance of your house they shall drink from the river of your delights for with you is the well of life and in your light shall we see light oh continue your loving kindness to those who know you and your righteousness to those who are true of heart let not the foot of pride come against me nor the hand of the ungodly thrust me away there are they fallen all who work wickedness they are cast down and shall not be able to stand well this morning we begin a two-part adventure we are back in the first book of samuel and we're back with david and with saul and uh we are starting chapter 17. now chapter 17 is almost 60 verses long and so i'm putting it in two episodes and it tells as a real storyteller's story in a great way it will be familiar to you but it's good to read it again so for this morning i'm reading from verse one and then we'll go up to uh halfway through and after that uh we shall come back to the story tomorrow so chapter 17 and verse 1 and going up to verse 30. now the philistines gathered their armies for battle and they were gathered at soccer which belongs to judah and encamped between sakko and azekah in ephesdam and king saul and the men of israel were gathered and encamped in the valley of elah and drew up in line of battle against the philistines and the philistines stood on the mountain on one side and israel stood on the mountain on the other side with a valley between them and there came out from the camp of the philistines a champion named goliath of gath whose height was six cubits and a span he had a helmet of bronze on his head and he was armed with a coat of mail and the weight of the coat was five thousand shekels of bronze and he had a bronze armor on his legs and a javelin of bronze slung between his shoulders the shaft of his spear was like a weaver's beam and his spear's head weighed 600 shekels of iron and his shield bearer went before him and he stood and shouted to the ranks of israel why have you come out to draw up for battle am i not a philistine and are you not servants of saul choose a man for yourselves and let him come down to me if he is able to fight with me and kill me then we will be your servants but if i prevail against him and kill him then you shall be our servants and serve us and the philistines said i defy the ranks of israel this day give me a man that we may fight together when saul and all israel heard these words of the philistine they were dismayed and greatly afraid now david was the son of an aphra site of bethlehem in judah named jesse who had eight sons in the days of king saul the man was already old and advanced in years the three oldest sons of jesse had followed saul to the battle and the names of his three sons who went to the battle were eliab the firstborn and next to him abinadab and the third sharma david was the youngest the three eldest followed saul but david went back and forth from seoul to feed his father's sheep at bethlehem for forty days the philistine came forward and took his stand morning and evening and jesse said to david his son take for your brothers an ifa of this parched grain and these ten loaves and carry them quickly to the camp to your brothers also take these ten cheeses to the commander of their thousand see if your brothers are well and bring some token from them now saul and they and all the men of israel were in the valley of elah fighting with the philistines and david rose early in the morning and left the sheep with a keeper and took the provisions and went as jesse had commanded him and he came to the encampment as the host was going out to the battle line shouting the war cry and israel and the philistines drew up for battle army against army and david left the things in charge of the keeper of the baggage and ran to the ranks and went and greeted his brothers and as he talked with them behold the champion the philistine of gath but goliath by name came up out of the ranks of the philistines and spoke the same words as before and david heard them all the men of israel when they saw the man fled from him and were much afraid and the men of israel said have you seen this man who has come up surely he has come up to defy israel and the king will enrich the man who kills him with great riches and will give him his daughter and make his father's house free in israel excuse me [Music] and david said to the men who stood near him what shall be done for the man who kills this philistine and takes away the reproach from israel for who is this uncircumcised philistine that he should defy the armies of the living god and the people answered him in the same way so shall it be done to the man who kills him now eliab david's oldest brother heard when david spoke to the men and elia's anger was kindled against david and he said why have you come down and with whom have you left those few sheep in the wilderness i know your presumption and the evil of your heart for you have come down to see the battle and david said what have i done now was it not but a word and he turned away from him towards another and spoke in the same way and the people answered him again as before that tells like very much a storyteller's tale and notice how like a good storyteller names are repeated from time to time places are repeated from time to time just so that you catch up and the scene shifts it shifts from the battle lines where the philistine army is on one mountain and the israel light army on the other the army of king saul and in the middle is the valley of elah and we're told about that and then suddenly we're back in bethlehem with jesse and the youngest of the eight brothers david who is as we saw uh a dare to go out keeping the sheep but jesse has an errand for him so david makes sure that there's a keeper left in charge of his sheep and he himself goes on the errand that his father gives him and he goes to take provisions for his brother with the loaves and the parched grain and then he also is given ten cheeses for their commanding officer to just give the brothers a little bit of a favor with their commanding officer from old jesse who were told as an old man in seoul's time david arrives full of the excitement of going to the battle lines and at the same time leaving his sheep well cared for and when he gets there it's the time for the armies to set out in the morning and he carefully leaves everything he is carrying with those as they say keepers of the baggage there the supply lines and goes up to the front to find his brothers and is talking with them when the giant goliath comes out and notice how everything about goliath has been by the storyteller told in the weight of his armor and the height of everything and his spears shaft being like a weaver's beam everything is written very large indeed as the giant comes forward and shouts at the armies of israel and the armies of israel are terrified and we're told and once again 40 days it's a storyteller's length of time 40 days and 49 morning and evening morning and evening we have we have that that sign of of everything uh that is going on now that's a pheasant calling us from over there um and then at this time also david begins to notice that no one no one is brave enough to face up to this who is this this man however big he is to defy the armies of the living god here is a story which is written up for the bravery of young david and we shall continue that story tomorrow but as i say it's told at length it's a long chapter 58 verses to be exact and we've moved from scene to scene and we've seen that now the brothers and here are echoes of joseph and the story of joseph in genesis the brothers defied him and said who you coming here get back to those few sheep in the wilderness you've no place here in the battleground and eliab we've met these three sons and we know that they themselves are of well carriage and strong because samuel had seen eliab first and thought surely this is the new king if you remember in the story of the anointing of david but eliav at the moment is is really cross with his younger brother and one remembers the story of joseph where the brothers themselves despise their younger brother and uh the things that he said would annoy them well here's another older brother being annoyed by his young brother david we'll continue that story tomorrow but i want you today to look at the way in which very often it's a a young person in the story who carries the story through and the most unnoticed is the one that we are going to fix on and i'm caused to do that by the fact that this 7th of february in 1812 was a day on which charles dickens was born he's born in portsmouth so later in his life as you probably know he had a a a time very much here in kent he knew the city of canterbury knew the city of rochester and lived for a while at fort house in uh in uh broadstairs which became called bleakhouse later but not because we are certain he wrote bleak house there but because we do know that he wrote david copperfield there and fort house is still very much there in broad stairs and becomes a dickens house at this time but for the moment let's remember him in his early days as i say he was born in 1812 and he had all kinds of career moves and many of his stories well all his stories dwell on his own experiences and he was a master storyteller he he knew how to tell a story but that skill developed he'd had popularity with his comic book pickwick papers but not until the writing of oliver twist in 1837 and it was published in serial form in magazines between 1837 and 1839 and uh dickens aged uh 25 published this second novel and it had us another title as so often victorian tales do it was called oliver twist or the parish boys progress now that can remind you of an influence to the pilgrims progress or the rakes progress two very different books but at the same time dickens is charting the story of someone born as an orphan in a workhouse his mother dying his father unknown and therefore he's brought up first on the charge of the parish and the beadle of the parish is responsible for oliver twist now unlike david copperfield and nicholas nickleby and pip in great expectations oliver twist himself the little boy can seem quite a passive character all kinds of things happen to him and he becomes the the agent of so many bad things and also the the realizer of so many good things but at the same time others are the active ones and at the beginning uh this book which will be dickens's first attempt at social action in a novel getting people to perceive just how grim the conditions of so many of the poor and of children in the streets of london how grim those conditions are he unromantically portrays the sordid lives of criminals and the cruel treatment of orphans in london he portrays child labour he portrays domestic violence he portrays the recruitment of street children as criminals and the perfidy of those set up by the poor law to look after them like mr bumble and of course mr bumble who's doing very well nicely thank you out of all this is absolutely shocked to the marrow when the other orphan boys make oliver twist an agent of them again um go forward and utter his most famous sentence as he goes with his empty bowl of what was probably disgusting thin gruel and say lisa i want some more and those of you who know the david lean film of that will register the shock in in that that that extraordinary black and white film which which gives a picture of of uh of that with alec guinness and and robert newton and all kinds of people of fame in those days 1948 it was it was made and probably as we think of oliver twist we have two images in our mind though there are more modern films but that 1948 image is a very powerful one but at the same time the 1960 musical of lionel bart simply called oliver which is full of wonderful songs food glorious food and and the the the business of consider yourself one of us which is a great song for an orphan boy to hear but it comes with so many strings attached and then the song you've got to pick a pocket or two as the criminal uh insidious mind that wiggles its way by perfectly attractive and charming characters like the artful dodger into oliver's life but at the same time in that in that story there are those from whom he derives great good and i suppose that the the image of all that is mr brownlow who is a person of great trust and dickens uses and remember this is being published i think in 32 episodes it it went right through the years from 1837 to 1839 and people would be waiting for the next episode to come out in the magazine and to enjoy the characters though with some degree of horror i say domestic violence and of course one one remembers the brutal killing in a fit of rage of nancy who had shown love and and and care for oliver nancy by bill's site the brutal bill sykes who ends up in a really bad way himself as he's trying to escape and falls from the chimney uh and hangs himself as you will well remember all that from that david lean film is etched in my mind but also in the musical itself which can't avoid despite the fact of many cheerful and joyful songs can't avoid the horror of all this going on and dickens was a consummate storyteller he knew when to change the scenes he knew rather like modern soap operas on television exactly which line to end the episode in the magazine so people would buy the next episode and every episode was given an engraving by george crookshank whose drawings have become immortal with the the dickens stories this is an early early novel and dickens is just trying things out his own life is portrayed in so many of his novels particularly david copperfield but at the same time incidents that he has witnessed affect his own moods and uh the way in which he is writing and give ideas for for stories of that kind and as as he himself writes those stories he is also reading them to audiences for he came here and read and went to the queen uh and prince albert and and read his stories and dicken's own voice at those readings on both sides of the atlantic became something which really did uh really did give him my chair forward a bit because this is an essential part of breakfast at the end let's go forward a bit earlier i can then reach you and still keep talking to you as well um and uh as we think of of him doing that perhaps as we go forward there's a a sight of sort of darkness there was enormous financial demands made on dickens by his family and the books poured out of him and of course we've we've read the christmas carol my other favorite the tale of two cities and i love reading david copperfield but all of those books uh have that quality of trying to show life as he himself knew it and that's the art of the storyteller you feel this is deep within their own experience and we're getting that with the story of david which is only just beginning and will be episodic and and that's why it's such fun to read it but also feeling that the storyteller is telling you things like children listening to stories that are repeated as they go through so uh one thinks and and fletcher was reminding me this this morning i don't know that i knew it before but in 1865 there was a terrible train crash and it was the foxton to london boat train [Music] are approaching a section of line where the line had been removed but the man with the red flag is staple housed where the man with the red flag had been placed too near to the piece of removed line the distance prescribed was much longer than that to give the train time to stop the train didn't have time to stop and there was a terrible accident where there were i think 10 fatalities and many many more people are wounded and at that that time dickens himself was on the train and stepped out to this scene of desolation and death and many many people uh injured and suddenly from a nice trip up through back to london from the boat train at foxton he found himself at this scene tending someone who then died as he was tending that wounded person and his dick and son said he never really recovered from that and the the the sense of uh of of the the darkness of novels like edwin drude um tends to pervade the the last scenes so we remember how much life in imposed itself into dickens novels all the way through and he wanted to set before us that which he experienced that which he saw that which humanity was caused to bear in joy and sorrow and also in evil and good and all are balanced you also get this this rather idealistic picture quite often of the countryside in in dickens as a place where these things didn't happen if you go to thomas hardy it's quite different but but in the city there was every opportunity for this to be happening unnoticed and so we think of oliver twist in that way now i have one other date that i want to to share with you because on the 7th of february in 2005 the young yachts woman ellen macarthur achieved her solo voyage on a yacht around the world a trimaran around the world non-stop sleeping only in snatches of 20 minutes at a time practically the longest she could sleep she had to be on watch day and night for any storm or different current or what was going on all alone for 71 days 14 hours 18 minutes 33 seconds and that was a world record at that time for a lone yachtsman to make the circumnavigation of the globe all alone quite a young uh lone yachtsman and she arrived back and the next day was made the um adam of the british empire dbe and she's the youngest dame ever to have been awarded a damehood and so in in her in her childhood she had read swallows in amazon's arthur ransom's book swallows in amazon's and she's saved her dinner money for three years to buy an eight-foot dinghy which she named after the old coin thripping a bit and she stuck one of those old coins uh this was after decimalization so she found an old struck me bit which had those sides if you remember and she stuck it on the front of her boat and called it thripny bit as we used to call those coins threatening bits but that was only the beginning and of course it went on from there and her trimaran which was called bnq castorama was 75 feet that's 23 meters long but in that boat she made her home alone as she went around the world an amazing achievement in 2010 she retired from professional sailing and she has formed the ellen macarthur foundation and her aim is to clean the planet particularly of plastic which was in the ocean she saw so much of that and also to get people to to subscribe to what she calls a circular economy where instead of linear economy where you take things make things and then throw them away what we take from the earth from the planet we actually make sure can go back to feed the planet again in a circular economy the ellen macarthur foundation so remember that on this day and remember the shall we say almost uh confidence of the young of david and of the young dickens and of young ellen macasa on this day and we give great thanks for that so let's say our prayers on this day and we are praying in the anglican communion for the diocese of karamoja in the church of i'm sorry i'm on the wrong day the diocese of karachi in the united church of pakistan and we're praying for archbishop justin and bishop rose of dover and bishop emma at lambeth and today for the parish church of saint john the baptist margate and dawn watson in her ministry there and for the school holy trinity and st john's church of england primary school there in mar gate so we come to the collect for today which is ordinary time and so we're on the collect on the fourth sunday before lent bring your own prayers your own intentions your own concerns from across the world as we pray together on this meadow monday oh god you know us to be set in the midst of so many and great dangers that by reason of the frailty of our nature we cannot always stand upright grant us such strength and protection as may support us in all dangers and carry us through all temptations through jesus christ our lord our men so we say the prayer our savior taught us in whatever language we like to use 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 are men so we say our own prayers and reflections in the silence which follows and we remember also how strong that scaffolding has to be over arching the cathedral for the safety of those who will work on it to do what for us as i said at the beginning is an ordinary piece of work but that's been being done through the centuries by skilled hands oh [Music] is [Music] oh [Music] is [Music] is [Music] yes [Music] uh [Music] so 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 those whom you would pray for today and always are men you