good morning and welcome on this thursday the 10th of february to the deanery garden at canterbury cathedral we've come out into the orchard and i invite you to bring your own prayers and concerns and intentions to our morning prayers as i always do but our themes this morning as we reflect in psalm and lesson are themes of new growth new shoots and sitting where i am in the orchard i'm sitting beside one of the mulberry trees there are many in the precincts uh which are sons and daughters of the tree which uh traditionally in the archdeaconry garden the knights hung the bridals of their horses on when they went to murder archbishop thomas beckett so the mulberry has special historic significance but on this tree at the moment there are a few signs of life but around me in the garden are plentiful signs of spring bursting up from the damp earth and even flowering behind me snowdrops and hellebores are coming to the end of their flowering period but around me little yellow aconites are here in plenty and it's difficult almost to walk without finding new shoots and new growth and behind fletcher which i can just see are cyclamen comb flowering in a wonderful way so that the green shoots that are coming up are bulbs which will blossom and flower very soon now and we've already seen in warmer parts of the garden daffodils blooming so new shoots but also something about the pruning of the trees the preparation for all of this and the necessity to have good earth and and damn perth at this time so that life can begin to grow let's say our prayers then and we'll develop that theme as we go through on this particular morning oh lord open our lips and our mouth shall proclaim your praise may christ the true the only light banish all darkness from our hearts and minds blessed are you sovereign god creator of all to you be glory and praise forever you founded the earth in the beginning and the heavens are the work of your hands in the fullness of time you made us in your image and in these last days you have spoken to us in your son jesus christ the word made flesh as we rejoice in the gift of your presence among us let the light of your love always shine in our hearts your spirit ever renew our lives and your praises ever be on our lips 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 does 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 one of the three psalms for this tense morning of the month is psalm 51 it's generally known as the miserary from its latin beginning i shall read it now in the words given to me in daily prayer and we shall just follow through the sequence of ideas of this sound so well known particularly as we begin to look forward to lent and passion tide have mercy on me oh god in your great goodness according to the abundance of your compassion blot out my offences wash me thoroughly from my wickedness and cleanse me from my sin for i acknowledge my faults and my sin is ever before me against you only have i sinned and done what is evil in your sight so that you are justified in your sentence and righteous in your judgment i have been wicked even from my birth a sinner when my mother conceived me behold you desire truth deep within me and shall make me understand wisdom in the depths of my heart purge me with hyssop and i shall be clean wash me and i shall be whiter than snow make me hear of joy and gladness that the bones you have broken may rejoice turn your face from my sins and blot out all my misdeeds make me a clean heart oh god and renew a right spirit within me cast me not away from your presence and take not your holy spirit from me give me again the joy of your salvation and sustain me with your gracious spirit then shall i teach your ways to the wicked and sinners shall return to you deliver me from my guilt o god the god of my salvation and my tongue shall sing of your righteousness o lord open my lips and my mouth shall proclaim your praise for you desire no sacrifice else i would give it you take no delight in burnt offerings the sacrifice of god is a broken spirit a broken and contrite heart oh god you will not despise oh be favorable and gracious to zion build up the walls of jerusalem then you will accept sacrifices offered in righteousness the burnt offerings and ablations then shall they offer up bulls on your altar it's the great psalm of penitence but it's also a psalm of new beginnings purge me with hyssop using the plant hyssop and it's on a rod of hyssop that they try to perhaps refresh jesus with the sour wine when he is on the cross but at the same time hyssop is a created plant and it's a symbol of healing but here purge me with hyssop and one thinks of hyssop being used to sprinkle the people and at the same time i shall be clean wash me and once again i shall be whiter than snow make me hear of joy and gladness that the bones which you have broken may rejoice images of the creation but notice too that in this psalm set so beautifully to music by allegri and the great secret of the sistine chapel until the young mozart memorized the whole thing and wrote it down and the secret was out and the music is enjoyed by choirs all over the world particularly as we go towards lent and the time of penitence preparing ourselves for all this freshness and notice in that psalm the opening sentence that we use every morning as the first sentence of our prayer that sentence is there new beginnings for each day the gift of this new day verse 16 oh lord open my lips and my mouth shall proclaim your praise the opening of worship a new springing up for a new day whatever it may bring and the clean heart and the petition for truth deep within me and wisdom in the depths of my heart so let's go to our reading now which is from the 19th chapter of the first book of samuel and i'm reading from verses 1 to 18 and we're back in the chemistry of david and king saul and prince jonathan today samuel who reappears here we are chapter 19 verses 1 to 18 and king saul spoke to jonathan his son and to all his servants that they should kill david but jonathan saul's son delighted much in david and jonathan told david saul my father seeks to kill you therefore be on your guard in the morning stay in a secret place and hide yourself and i will go out and stand beside my father in the field where you are and i will speak to my father about you and if i learn anything i will tell you and jonathan spoke well of david to saul his father and said to him let not the king sin against his servant david because he has not sinned against you and because his deeds have brought good to you for he took his life in his hand and struck down the philistine and the lord worked a great salvation for all israel you saw it and rejoiced why then will you sin against innocent blood by killing david without cause and saul listened to the voice of jonathan saul swore as the lord lives david shall not be put to death sir jonathan called david and jonathan reported to david all these things and jonathan brought david to saul and he was in the king's presence as before and there was war again and david went out and fought with the philistines and struck them with a great blow so that they fled before him and then again our harmful spirit from the lord came upon saul as he sat in his house with his spear in his hand and david was playing the liar and saul sought to pin david to the wall with his spear but david eluded saul said that he struck the spear into the wall and david fled and escaped that night saul sent messengers to david's house to watch him that he might kill him in the morning but michael david's wife told him if you do not escape with your life tonight tomorrow you will be killed so michael let david go down through the window and he fled away and escaped and she took an image and laid it on the bed and put a pillow of goat's hair at its head and covered it with the clothes and when king saul sent messengers to take david she said he is sick then saul sent the messengers to see david saying bring him up to me in the bed that i may kill him and when the messengers came in behold the image was in the bed with the pillow of goat's hair at its head saul said to markham david's wife why have you deceived me thus you have let my enemy go so that he has escaped and michael answered saul he said to me let me go why should i kill you now david fled and escaped and he came to samuel at ramah and told him all that saul had done to him and he and samuel went and lived at naoth and it was told saul so that quartet of characters in deep and violent tension and one sees once again the love and loyalty that jonathan has for david i think one sees something of the puzzlement of david as to why all this desperate hostility towards him he's trying to be a good servant of the king and yet there is not only hatred but violence shown towards him no new shoots here saul makes a promise swears an oath but the moment david shows himself with prowess in the military field on saul's behalf and comes back having defeated the philistine army the darkness descends on saul again and he is determined to slay david in his jealousy and his violence and in the darkness of the moon see we see david once again playing the liar to help dispel saul's mood in all innocence as we've seen earlier on but by now things aren't growing too tense too desperate in that situation and it seems and we've all known situations like this it seems that there can be no new beginnings here david flees and in doing so of course he's leaving his wife uh saul's daughter and he's leaving jonathan whom he loves saul's son but being let down out of the window with the clever plot in the bed to have a a person lying there seeming to be sick with the goats seeming to be david's hair then the messengers take that but saul sends them back and says bring the bed here the anger is so deep and the rage so great and it's hard to understand it but in the depths of our heart we know it it happens in these chemistries of people and often the one who is innocent of every everything gets the violence thrust onto them and here's david puzzled at all this and jonathan beginning to sense his father's moods and taking uh counsel with david and also with david's wife for the safety of the young david at this time who is shall we say out of his depths with all that's going on so where can he go well he flees to the fourth member of this tense quartet to samuel who's already gone we we saw that the last time samuel was with saul he said you you you will not see my face again i've gone and said samuel has simply disappeared and where he is of course he's at ramah which is his place and he's surrounded if you read on in the chapter he's surrounded by a company of prophets and david arrives to to tell samuel and lay at samuel's feet all that's happening to him eventually saul will send messengers there but the messengers are sort of confounded by the activities of the prophets not just samuel but all the prophets around and there's that sense of a deep connection with the creator's activity in rama at this time but samuel sees this as not being a safe place for david and he takes him to naoth and gives him his protection and probably tries to make him understand what really is is happening if david can receive in his heart which is now probably missing jonathan and missing michael and and really lamenting the relationship which saul is forcing upon him when all he has been trying to do is to serve the king loyally all those all those things are there that dimension in the king's court at this time so that the music that david is playing has a hollow feel and the sense of him being that the the shepherd is deep within him but for the moment he is one of the sheep fleeing the wolf and tragedy awaits in all this for the whole quartet and we know that there can only be one end and it will be tragic but there's some way in the journey to go yet but no better morning to be singing the psalm 51 the miserie which is full of new beginnings but full also of penitence for what we have been for memories which need cleansing and those petitions purge me with hyssop and i shall be clean wash me and i shall be whiter than snow it sounds like the prophet isaiah who is always using images of snow to to for whiteness but at the same time here is uh a psalm and psalms are linked with david so to use this psalm 51 is a psalm of penitence but also to rejoice in the fact that our opening sentence of every day's worship is rooted and grounded in that psalm of penitence which admits that the lord is our only grounding and we seek wisdom deep in our heart but we also seek forgiveness for sins conscious and unconscious in new beginnings make me hear of joy and gladness that the bones you have broken may rejoice that all this pruning and preparation results in new shoots and probably that's the best image for today i've um i've got though in this this message of things have to begin somewhere and they're beginning fruitfully here and i'm wanting to talk really only about the russian poet playwright novelist of the romantic era alexander pushkin who was born in moscow in 1799 and died according to one of the calendars we deal with two calendars whenever we're dealing with russians the russian calendar the old style and the modern style 10th of february 1837 which actually meant that he was 37 when he died very young but let's trace him let's trace his roots because he is seen really as the father and founder of russian literature in the 19th century and 20th century and beyond he was of noble birth in one of the old aristocratic families of russia and he lived the whole of his life in the empire of the tsars born in moscow educated in st petersburg at the academy at saskosilo which now bears his name as a city and he was brought up now if you're used to war and peace and know the beginning of war and peace you will know that the russian aristocracy at that time and the court of the tsar spoke french not russian russian was a vulgar language it's rather like in in the england of of uh the the norman conquest following william the conqueror and right up through even to the time of henry ii french was spoken rather than the the more course as it was thought anglo-saxon uh language which was growing up through that was something that peasants spoke but in the russian court french was spoken by the educated and the ideas of the enlightenment which were very dangerous ideas by then for the tsar's court actually were common currency at that time but pushkin was brought up in a house where his parents spoke to him in french not russian he only learned russian from the household surfs for the serfs had not been liberated yet they were liberated in the end by alexander ii that we were talking about yesterday and that's much much later on he was assassinated in 1881 the year that dostoevsky died so young pushkin suddenly found himself surrounded in the kitchens and the workplaces with russian but in the the civilized as his parents saw it parts of the house with uh french and his nanny taught him parts of russian he loved her dearly but when he then went to st petersburg of course in aristocratic circles russian itself was a developing language of culture and literature but it was pushkin who took it by the shoulders and gave it new birth and began to to extend the the russian language in so many different ways he had been affected by the the french enlightenment he'd been a student of dederow and voltaire i mean reading their books not actually sitting at their feet but he spoke of voltaire as the first to follow the new road and bring the lamp of philosophy into the dark archives of history and like lord byron he was inspired by the greek revolution against the ottoman empire and in his poetry was constantly clashing with the government of the tsars because this was the time following the battle of waterloo and the defeat of napoleon when the european monarchies were clamping down on any dangerous sorts of more revolution and trying to re-establish all they they were they had had before it was a very conservative time but pushkin was digging up the roots and pruning and and and creating new growth and taking new shoots with language he took the russian language and in a highly nuanced way developed it so that it could actually be a vehicle for his poetry now there are examples of pushkin's writing of nearly every literary genre of his day lyric poetry narrative poetry novels short stories drama critical essays personal letters and one sees just how the russian language is becoming the vehicle for all of that so no wonder he is called the founder of the literary tradition which went on through ta genius and tolstoy and as we saw dostoevsky yesterday yesterday but well on beyond that into the 20th century influencing not just russian literature but also through the people who took up those new shoots planted their own developed them made them fruit and flower and others people like henry james and virginia woolf all sorts of people plucking them and then using them for their own literary ventures and going on all the way through well let's look back at what pushkin was giving us because uh if i look to see what he wrote probably the most famous thing that he wrote was the verse novel in poetry but it was a novel and a story a tragic story eugene onyegin and that not only inspired the poetry of others it also inspired musicians so that we best know eugene on yeagin now not from pushkin but from tchaikovsky's magnificent opera where the heroine tatiana larina is is there with the letter in her hands singing that beautiful letter song from eugene onigen and tchaikovsky has lifted a really russian story and there is um the music of the the orthodox church in that as well as the the harvesters give thanks and all of those things together with a combination of music using all the romanticism of the early part of the the the 19th century and following through in music but he wasn't the only composer to do so for the play boris godinov was set as a huge opera which is constantly performed by muzorski and his tale lovely tale ruslan and ludmilla was set as an opera by glinka and tchaikovsky took his other story the queen of spades and made of that an opera that we see constantly performed at the international opera houses beautifully done at the same time it was pushkin who wrote the story mozart and salieri rimsky-korsakov turned that into an opera but we know it better as a play which peter schaffer actually wrote and then it was made into that magnificent film amadeus and at the roots of all this was this rediscovery by really taking it up by the roots and it seems so unpromising for the purpose the russian language which pushkin then began to develop much to our benefit i referenced war and peace and right at the beginning of war and peace you will remember that uh tolstoy sets a scene in an aristocratic salon and there's much talk about what's going on with napoleon because it's in those early days when people are sort of seeing him as a almost a nightly hero they would soon learn that that was a great threat to russia but at the same time one of them is telling a funny story and he has to say to them all i i i beg you did you forgive me i have to tell this story in russian and they all because the joke will be lost if i tell it in french and that takes us into that area where the russian language was considered a coarse kind of vehicle pushkin lifted it and made it into that vehicle which carried carried so much human emotion carried so many quartets of tension such as we've been seeing seeing with saul and jonathan and david and samuel with and if you think of the characters not only in pushkin but in war and peace and and the way in which they interact and the differences of vision that they have um and and you think of the character of a prayer of of pierre and and prince andre and natasha all of those and you have to trace all that back to pushkin as uh as um that that's that that is happening so that he also was a master of tiny short stories there's one magnificent one about a station master told and beautifully poignant full of tragedy but with an ending which makes you know that a new shoot had occurred in that story and something wonderful had happened in something which had in a in a place which through the story itself through the visits of the narrator once or twice was to the station master it's not a railway station it's actually a total station on the road where horses can be changed and refreshment can be given and the perfect way as the story opens that a particular station master is keeping that road station and then as the imperial highway is transferred from there over to a distant place the the road station begins to to to fail because it's not so necessary anymore and i'll leave you to read the story because it's only a short story but as i say pushkin was the master of this vehicle and died if you think of eugene onyegan and it's not just an opera it's it's also a wonderful ballet set to tchaikovsky's music but not from the opera uh eugene ron jagen and and uh and choreographed by john cranko and you will actually probably have have seen that but uh the ballet portrays as the opera does tragically the death of the idealistic young man lenski and he dies shot in a duel which his opponent hadn't wanted and in the ballet in the white snow of the stage i remember a huge roll of a blood red cloth shooting across the stage at the death of linsky and the tragedy of that particular death well i have to say that pushkin himself died in a duel which he insisted on fighting because he was jealous of someone paying attention to his wife and so he was shot dead and at the age of 37 so that almost the tragedy is lived out in pushkin's own life but the new shoots of the russian language are handed on and for that we give thanks on this day of new shoots all around me and also what will come of the the awful violence of the quartet of saul and jonathan and david and samuel and each having different emotions and in the middle of all that a new shoot of new kingdoms will begin to sprout so let's say our prayers on this particular day as we think of situations of that sort but give thanks for our opening sentence from psalm 51 the psalm of penitence the misery oh lord open our lips and our mouth shall proclaim your praise verse 16 of that particular psalm so we're praying today in our anglican communion on this 10th of february for the diocese of karim nagar in the united church of south india and in in our own diocese as we pray for justin our archbishop for rose bishop of dover for emma bishop at lambeth we're praying for the ministry of dominica piccaro of the canterbury diocese refugee project she is the officer of that project and we're praying we're asked to pray for all refugees the world over but particularly those who have sought shelter in kent from across the channel and so we're thinking of that this morning and we're going to use the connect for this week here it is bring your own prayers and intentions 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 our such strengths and protection as may support us in all dangers and carry us through all temptations through jesus christ our lord amen each day i say we say the our father in whatever language we're used to and it reminds us today when we think of pushkin and new shoots and roots of the way in which our language is so very much part of our culture and identifies each one of us so each in our own language in our own way across the world 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 are men some time now for your own reflections on these themes and on this day [Music] foreign [Music] is [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign is [Music] r [Music] is [Music] so is [Music] yes [Music] yes oh [Music] is [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] oh [Music] is [Music] [Music] [Music] jesus [Music] it [Music] me [Music] is [Music] [Applause] foreign [Music] oh [Music] is [Music] let us [Music] is [Music] oh [Music] [Music] r [Music] r [Music] oh [Music] is [Music] foreign [Music] the peace of god which passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of god and of his son jesus christ our lord and the blessing of god almighty the father the son and the holy spirit be among you among those whom you love and those whom you would pray for today and always are men you would have noticed that new shoots and new life is not just limited to the plant life around me but also there's a busy robin preparing for a new brood and coming down and having a a good feed on the mealworms here very very tame birds and always our friends right through the year even on snowy days as you will remember this uh