good morning and welcome to a new sport this morning it is still the dinery garden and this is known as the dean's walk i'll explain its context in a moment but this is a very special day it's sint alphage day it's the day in 10 12 april the 19th that the archbishop of canterbury saint alfaj was murdered martyred by the danes who had besieged the city in 1011 and in the end captured the city sacked the city burned the cathedral and took the archbishop away and he refusing a ransom from the poor citizens of canterbury finally was murdered brutally by the danes at greenwich his body later was brought back here and today a candle will burn over the site of of that particular uh memorial in the cathedral church to the the north side of the altar but we remember all that in our reflection i've come here because these are the city walls of uh that particular time which were breached and then have been rebuilt in their flint so many times repaired shall we say they date back to roman times in their foundation but the romans found fortifications already there from the tribe that the kantiaki who had been here for well back into the midst of history and from that tribe's name we get the name canterbury and kent so we're stretching right back and in alfaj's time these would have been the city walls and these the walls of the monastery and that was so until about 1320 when the monastery then took over all this whole area and so this walk goes in two ways uh along the wall and up through here round to what was the dean's bowling green but the dean gave that at the end of the great war to the city for the memorial and the war memorial and uh those of you who remember our broadcast i think an even song on ve day we walked all the way along the wall and filmed from there down into that green space of war memorial there so this is looking quite sort of clean and and full of rubble because it had been full of grass and long growth until we brought we started bringing the girl pigs up here to forage in damp weather and they loved it here and they've cleared the ground and now wild flowers are beginning to grow there was some scaffolding work going on on the wall to repair it that's now been taken away and so as gardeners we can start again and the the tower here which already has a colony of bats in in a conservation way which is wonderful that is hoping to get some owls who will nest in there as well and so all kinds of things can happen in places like this but this morning we're thinking of alphage i wanted also to send our prayers to the people of cape town with the huge fire blazing on table mountain and so many losing their homes and people bravely fighting that wildfire which has already destroyed homes and historic buildings and we lament the destruction done to the um jagger library in the university of cape town which was the great center for african studies and we we think of the people there those with care of that library and also all the students of the university of cape town who have been evacuated so let's remember all that going on in our prayers even as we say our morning prayers on this sin alphage day easter season still oh lord open our lips and our mouth shall proclaim your praise in your resurrection o christ let heaven and earth rejoice hallelujah blessed are you lord god of our salvation to you be praise and glory forever as once you ransomed your people from egypt and led them to freedom in the promised land so now you have delivered us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of your risen son may we the firstfruits of your new creation rejoice in this new day you have made and praise you for your mighty acts 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 are men our psalm on this 19th morning 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 is 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 special reading for today as with the canterbury saints and we are not in the gospel of saint john our time with that gospel is now complete for the moment but on this day a special lesson from the acts of the apostles and i'm reading from chapter 7 and from verse 54 and we'll go up to chapter 8 verse 2. now when the members of the council heard these things they were enraged and they ground their teeth at stephen but stephen full of the holy spirit gazed into heaven and saw the glory of god and jesus standing at the right hand of god and he said behold i see the heavens opened and the son of man standing at the right hand of god but they cried out with a loud voice and stopped their ears and rushed together at stephen then they cast him out of the city and stoned him and the witnesses laid down their garments at the feet of a young man named saul and as they were stoning stephen he called out lord jesus receive my spirit and falling to his knees he cried out with a loud voice lord do not hold this sin against them and when he had said this he fell asleep and saul approved of his execution and there arose on that day a great persecution against the church in jerusalem and they were all scattered throughout the regions of judea and samaria except the apostles devout men buried stephen and made great lamentation over him but saul was ravaging the church and entering house after house he dragged off men and women and committed them to prison the reading for morning prayer on synth alphaage day and there is a great similarity as to the violence which was given to stephen and the violence shown by the raiding viking armies who had encompassed the city of canterbury in 1011 where alphage was the archbishop now the important thing is that alphage had been a monk at bath abbey and that's where he had received his training in the south west of england that benedictine abbey i brought this morning actually as the mug emma bridgewater's mark of the city of bath i was born between um between um bristol and bath and uh so both cities were easy reach just a few miles along the road either way along the old roman via julia and here is bath abbey and one in childhood i knew that well and one can visit it and and see still the the lovely abbey there well it wouldn't have looked like that in uh alfige's day probably he was a monk there and grew up there had his education there and eventually uh became the abbot of bath a bath abbey and then was moved and for a long time i think about 24 years he was the bishop of winchester so we send out our prayers to dean catherine and the people of winchester cathedral this morning the community at winchester cathedral this morning and then after that our phage was made archbishop of canterbury came here in 1006 and in 1011 as i said the invading the raiding viking forces came around the city and held it for siege throughout the month of september until they breached the walls broke in sacked the city burned the cathedral and took the archbishop away and when they asked for ransom and the citizens of canterbury amongst the ruins of canterbury were ready to try to find the money to to ransom their archbishop being held at greenwich and at the time the archbishop who felt she was coming to the end of his earthly course anyway said that their money shouldn't be spent on his poor old bones but that they should look after the city and rebuild it and the rage of the vikings at one of their feasts when they had become as the contemporary accounts tell very very drunk at that time at their feast and they they brought the archbishop in and pelted him with the bones and the heads of the the the ox that they were feasting on and in the end perhaps as an act of kindness by someone an axe shaft um raised against the archbishop's head killed him almost to end his suffering that wasn't the end of the story for he was as with stephen um devout men buried stephen and raised lamentation over him his body was taken to saint paul's cathedral to start with and then in the reign of king canute a danish king in in england at that time as england was the danish king can you brought the body with great sorrow to canterbury to be buried in the cathedral church here and after archbishop landfrank in norman times had come and restored the cathedral and again when it was restored after the great fire following thomas beckett's martyrdom about which we'll think in a moment in 1174 when all of that was recreated then the lead casket of alphage's body was placed on the north side of the high altar and there the stone still bears the name alphage and throughout today a candle will burn over that stone just as out on the south side the lead casket containing the remains of dunstan who had been the archbishop of canterbury at the first millennium was placed just there and uh when we have seen dunstan's day a candle burns there twice this week a candle will burn over uh sites of the graves of archbishops who've been canonized because we keep this week also sindh anselm's day and we shall burn a candle over that site when we come to saint anselm's day with another set of special readings but let's stay with our phage for the moment for alphage's death as a martyr a christian martyr made canterbury it was already a place a pilgrimage because augustine of canterbury having come here was canonized people traveled here but the martyrdom of alphage brought pilgrims already to this place and beckett had a great justice as alfred had a devotion to dunstan so beckett had a great devotion to alphange and when he sensed his own likely martyrdom coming with the violence all around him from the knights of king henry the second who had crossed the channel people warning him then he went to the high altar and said a prayer to sin alphage for help and then it's thought now here we have to go into a different story but it's an interesting story for when at the reformation the great libraries of christ church here and centaur augustine's monastery which was dissolved and and ended as a monastery those libraries had beautiful things in them and archbishop matthew parker the elizabethan archbishop elizabeth the the first uh archbishop took many of those volumes for his own library and then when he died he left those volumes as the parker library to corpus christi college cambridge with which we have good relations but you might call those books a library in exile if we go back to uh to edmund de val's scene of libraries in exile that have been dispersed there are many libraries throughout the world and if i think of the morgan library in in new york uh fletcher and i visiting there one day suddenly found a great volume which had belonged to christ church library our own library here in canterbury cathedral and there is this really ancient set of the gospels in in in the morgan library there from this library here libraries get dispersed just justice our magna carta was was uh taken by the constable of dover castle in that sort of way dispersed by powerful people but what we know is that our friends at the parker library in corpus christi college cambridge care for and research those books with great assiduousness and we thank them for it but thank particularly for christopher de hamel who's done great research on this and not only on the augustine gospels but also on assaulter which is known now to have belonged to thomas beckett but christopher believes that from the evidence and from even the pictures in our stained glass from that time not soon after thomas beckett was was murdered that it could well have been the book that the salter that beckett was carrying when he himself was martyred and his last christmas sermon in the cathedral certainly spoke of the martyrdom of alphage well in 2012 we kept in high state here the millennium of the martyrdom of alphaage and cardinal koch was here with us from the vatican and we had a huge service of thanksgiving up there by the high altar with the stone bearing alfige's name but alphage and stephen both are witnesses witnesses and martyrs the same word in greek and that that martyrdom rings down through history and speaks not only of the life of this place but the life of the christian church throughout the ages from stephen's martyrdom stoned outside the city wall to alphage's martyrdom and he's become patron saint of those kidnapped for this archbishop was kidnapped and taken away and stoned to death well with meat bones rather than stone in the in the feast and then the shaft of the axe all of those things in this violence uh and and very terrifying martyrdom but it just is the original scattering of christians in jerusalem meant that the gospel itself was scattered and the story is told and we could go on in the acts of the apostles and if you read on you'll find that philip the deacon goes off and begins to tell the story and you come to the story of philip talking to the ethiopian eunuch and telling him the story and so on so the story spreads through martyrdom and the martyrdoms become part of the stories five archbishops of canterbury were murdered in office but alphage was the first to be accounted in that way so let's say a prayer for our friends at the parker library at corpus christi college cambridge and their care of that particular library in exile and we give thanks also for places of learning libraries and lament when things happen to them as with the jagger library of the african studies in cape town this morning as the fire rages well what else can we say about this day on april the 19th um we can say that in 1775 the shot heard round the world was fired at concord in massachusetts by the minuteman and that began on this day in 1775 the american war of independence we've stood at concord with our friend from the uh society of saint john the evangelist jeffrey tristram uh and uh on a very cold day and on a spring day and stood also by the statue of the minuteman and historic place in that beautiful area of massachusetts and then on this day also uh the conservative prime minister benjamin disraeli first dollar beckonsfield died he'd been prime minister twice in the in the victorian era and was a great favorite of the queen and he was the one who after years of seclusion and mourning persuaded the queen that her people wanted to see her well that's a lesson our queen knows very much already from her heart right from the beginning of her reign and uh enormous love for her following the the funeral service which i think something like 2.5 billion people maybe more were part of the the virtual congregation on saturday for that and we continue to pray for queen elizabeth ii and the royal family on this day in 1882 charles darwin died at his home at downhouse and it's very near here and so one could go there and enjoy darwin's greenhouse after his voyage in the beagle darwin spent most of the rest of his life with all those things that he had collected came a place of experiment as did his gardens so downhouse is almost a a holy place of exploration into creation it's certainly a beautiful place when you go there greatly loved by those who've kept it and under a sky like this would be a good place to be this morning so the sky is becoming bluer by the minute and the sun which is beyond these walls to me this morning is shining on the treetops around me uh and then in uh 1824 let's just mention lord byron the poet died we spoke a bit back of the french officer who um being a study of classics left the french army of louis the 18th and went to join the greek war of independence against the ottoman empire where lord byron of course did the same thing and it caused his death in missalongi on this day so we give thanks for his poetry and we give thanks also for his commitment to that cause so let's say our own prayers on this day when we think of so many things but also we give thanks for the martyrs throughout the ages who have followed their lord even to death but we give thanks that in his death since stephen cared for those who were martyring him and uh asked for forgiveness in that way on this day we are thinking in the anglican communion of justin our archbishop and today the diocese of boga in the province of the anglican church in the congo and pray for the people there this is a day the 19th of april that i see in the calendar is set aside by our diocese for a listening and discerning on the way day and there are many things to begin to discern as we come out of this lockdown and think what lessons we've learned as we've gone through it we pray for areas of the world that are still suffering dreadfully from the pandemic and those really wrestling in overcrowded hospitals in so many different places continue to pray for the the people of india the people of brazil and areas where the pandemic is is spreading in such a way daily you will have your own thoughts in your mind and you will know people that you want to pray for as we pray on this day to collects because we're going to say first the prayer of alphage and then the prayer for this week which is the easter prayer for the this third week here is the pulpit collect bring your own intentions and concerns merciful god who raised up your servant alphage to be a pastor of your people and gave him grace to suffer for justice and true religion grant that we who celebrate his martyrdom may know the power of the risen christ in our hearts and share his peace in lives offered to your service through jesus christ our lord amen the easter colic for this third week of easter almighty father who in your great mercy gladdened the disciples with the sight of the risen lord give us such knowledge of his presence with us that we may be strengthened and sustained by his risen life and serve you continually in righteousness and truth through jesus christ our lord amen so in whatever language you like to use we say together 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 are men limit of silence now for your own prayers [Music] the god of peace who brought again from the dead our lord jesus christ that great shepherd of the sheep by the blood of the eternal covenant make you perfect in every good work to do his will working in you that which is well pleasing in his sight 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 amen [Music] [Music] you