good morning and welcome to the deanery garden at canterbury cathedral on this sunday the 17th of january it is the most beautiful morning and wherever you are in the world feel welcome here bring your own prayers and intentions and the sense of the blue sky pure blue sky and the rising sun just beginning to gleam through the yew trees at the end of the garden and not a breath of wind we've brought clemmy and the girls up here and this is saint anthony of egypt's day and one of the the signs of saint anthony on any of his icons is uh is a pig because he for a time became a swineherd and we'll look at his life a little bit in our reflection but also today the 17th is uh epiphany for those in orthodox churches and so we brought the star here to remind us of our unity with them even some places for a long time when the calendar changed and the 11 days were lost used to keep this in the southwest of england as the feast of the epiphany no harm in remembering that in this epiphany season let's begin our prayers oh lord open our lips and our mouth shall proclaim your praise your light springs up for the righteous and all peoples have seen your glory blessed are you sovereign god king of the nations to you be praise and glory forever from the rising of the sun to its setting your name is proclaimed in all the world as the son of righteousness dawns in our hearts anoint our lips with the seal of your spirit that we may witness to your gospel and sing your praise in all the earth 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 oh god set our hearts on fire with love for you now and forever amen our psalm on this morning of the month the 17th morning is sun 87 her foundation is on the holy mountains the lord loves the gates of zion more than all the dwellings of jacob glorious things are spoken of you zion city of our god i record egypt and babylon as those who know me behold philistia tyre and ethiopia in zion were they born and of zion it will be said each one was born in her and the most high himself has established her the lord will record as he writes up the peoples this one also was born there and as they dance they shall sing all my fresh springs are in you the most glorious hymn to the heavenly city which is the mother of us all and the mother of all cities in the world in terms of the eternal dimension we've come here to sit in front of this bush which is the choice and its golden leaves here remind us of the gold brought on epiphany by the wise men and then the scent of its flowers which are all around me and beginning to burgeon at this time of year remind us of the myrrh and the frankincense because they are gifts of that which is scented the leaves themselves have a lovely essence as well so those gifts of gold recognizing kingship but an eternal anointed kingship and frankincense representing the gifts that we show for a god and myrrh the vocation of giving up life and all of those we remember as the star burns in front of them on this epiphany day in the season of epiphany for us and on the epiphany feast itself for those of the orthodox and from that moment onwards we've we've got the the robin flying around us and giving us some bird song as well on this lovely morning i'm going to read this morning it's sunday so the readings interrupt the gospel of sin mark it it's a passage from the sixth chapter of the first letter of paul to the corinthians which is the matins lesson the morning prayer lesson for this morning is beginning at verse 12. it's paul exasperated and his his jewish background comes very much into this as we'll see in a moment exasperated by the sexual antics of his congregation in corinth who are of a greek persuasion of totally different culture and so the the message is is full of important things but it's also tinged with a family rage from one who sees himself as the father of this family but gets reports of really bad behavior all things are lawful for me but not all things are helpful all things are lawful for me but i will not be dominated by anything food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food and god will destroy both one and the other the body is not meant for sexual immorality but for the lord and the lord for the body and god raise the lord and will also raise us up by his power do you not know that your bodies are members of christ shall i then take the members of christ and make them members of a harlot never or do you not know that whoever is joined to a harlot becomes one body with that harlot for as it is written the two will become one flesh but he who is joined to the lord becomes one spirit with him so flee from sexual immorality every other sin a person commits is outside the body but the sexually immoral person sins against their own body or do you not know that your body is a temple of the holy spirit within you whom you have from god you are not your own for you were bought with a price so glorify god in your body paul exasperated and one ought first to look at the way in which the jewish faith looked at a human being as a whole body mind and spirit a whole but there were greek traditions which saw the spirit as something entrapped in a body of flesh which itself was corrupt and therefore anything could be expected of it but the spirit was pure and holy paul would have no trying to kind of truck with that what one aspect of a human being did affected all other aspects of that humanity there are sometimes vestiges of that left in the prayers that come through to us they're not meant to be there but there is the sense that the body is something which is almost less capable of accepting uh total redemption than the spirit and in the middle of course the mind think of think of that that prayer which we say which was written for the book of common prayer called the prayer of humble access we do not presume to come to this side table or trusting in our own righteousness but in thy manifield and great mercies we're not worthy to gather up the crumbs under thy table we kneel with the syrophoenician woman saying i'm not worthy to to gather up the crumbs she says yes no but even the dogs eat the crumbs under the table we put ourselves in that humble position but remember when we get to the end of that prayer we say that our sin sinful bodies may be made clean by his body and our souls not our sinful cells our souls washed through his most precious blood that is all put right by the next sentence and that he we may ever more dwell in him and he in us you are the temple of the lord your body is the temple of the lord and that temple is holy so glorify god in your body says saint paul and the there is a an omission because some texts and you get that in some translations use that as so glorify and carry god in your body the sense of knowing that your body is a holy vessel there to glorify god as much as your spirit and your mind but even more important the body of a brother or sister in the faith and of every human being is capable of being or already is a holy vessel which receives the spirit of the lord remember the older prayer of the giving of the ring in the book of common prayer the old one the 1662 one uh marriage service where the husband says to his wife giving the ring with my body i the worship and that only makes sense if the divine spirit is seen nowadays both tend to make that but it's been changed the word worship is no longer there we have honor uh instead but worship is not too much when you begin to think that the the body is the temple of the received spirit remember that that hymn which teaches this in a wonderful way come down our love divine in its last verse and so the yearning strong which with which the soul will long shall far out past the power of human telling for none can guess its grace till they become the place wherein the holy spirit makes his dwelling see therefore says paul exasperated by what's going on in corinth see therefore that you recognize that that the body is the temple of the holy spirit and is a fit vessel for the glorification of god it's strong meat for the corinthians and maybe even a culture change and i think that's why that letter is so full of of this but for the moment we just take that little passage and remind ourselves by all sorts of things how very important the word body is to us i can't have said that word any word more than that in my whole ministry how many times have i placed the bread into people's hands and said the body of christ over all years of ministry and also in the marriage service another sacrament with my body i honor you the modern version says and all that i am i give to you well that's why it's a sacrament for christ in his human body and in his divine nature says to us all that i am i give to you and the capacity of receiving the gift of the holy spirit within our bodies creating them as temples of god that we may glorify and carry him in every aspect of daily life so when we say the resurrection of the body maybe although we're thinking forward we ought to think now as well for every day we need to accept our bodies as the temple of the spirit and the capacity for that resurrection to begin its work even now in the way we use them so also we come to other dates i said this was the feast of saint anthony of egypt who was is called cindante the great i suppose is anthony of padua but sin anthony is the father of of monasticism to many and his life began when as a rich young man he heard the uh if you really want to be perfect lesson in the gospel of saint matthew go and sell all you have give it to the poor and come and follow me and he did and first of all spent years of asceticism and and the striving against his own body and so many paintings show the temptations that saint anthony received but he held firm we know of him most because sint athanasius wrote his life santa athanasius of alexandria wrote the life of sinter anthony of egypt they lived at the same time antony of egypt was reckoned to have been born in about the year 251 maybe a bit later because he certainly died on this day in the year 356 that would make him 105. well maybe but certainly he was of a great age and the life of sin of saint anthony by athanasius actually was then translated from the greek into latin and then became a bestseller for hundreds of years it was one of the great texts of the medieval church and what he he did during those years trying all the time to live a life of simplicity and also of asceticism but so many came to him and he would send them away and say no no i want to be left and in the end he gave way and became the center of a very large community of those who wanted to live their life like that he traveled to the council of nicaea to to uh to fight against uh the heresy of arianism but mostly he was there as a fixed location living out that life and as i said for part of his life he was a a swineherd as they call it a keeper of pigs and i thought of him when we were driving um the or not driving leading actually he didn't need any driving he's clemmy and her girls across the green lawn this morning as the sun came up and now it's gleaming really strongly onto me through the yew trees so we give thanks for all of that on this day when epiphany is remembered i wanted also just to mention that on this day in 1820 ann bronte was born another of the bronte family in um hey hello um another of the bronte family who who lived out their life from time to time in the parsonage at house with their father patrick who was the incumbent of house and whose elder two daughters had died early from consumption and he was to lose more of his children very early too his wife had died one year after anne was was born from cancer but the girls and branwell died of of consumption that enormous plague which was around at that time we were fighting a pandemic at the moment but consumption tuberculosis as we call it was a scourge of victorian life and branwell um bronte also was someone who was tempted by lots and lots of of of of temptations uh alcohol being one of them but at the same time it was a really creative family and we remember anne bronte for her novels agnes gray and the tenant of wildfell hall which charlotte thought was too strong too much strong meat for the victorian reading public it was published once and then when anne died charlotte kept back the publication of it again but when it was published uh later on it became an absolute best seller and um it was said that the the sound of the slamming of helen huntington's bedroom door on her husband reverberated across victorian england but it really did become a great bestseller so we give thanks for all that creativity and faithfulness of the bronte family as we say our prayers on this feast day of saint anthony of egypt and also the feast of the epiphany for so much of our um orthodox friends and this little piglet is coming to remind me of saint anthony of egypt who kept pigs and is also the patron saint of those with skin diseases we're praying this morning in the anglican communion for justin our archbishop and on this day for the whole of the anglican church of australia well that's a very very big canvas but we remember all our friends in australia so many of them too many to name but you'll have them in your hearts if you have people there and bring your own intentions to as we pray for our own diocese and the parishes of the sitting born deanery and for all clergy who help in the ministry at that of that scenery um so near us here in in canterbury only only a few miles away and so we pray for the ministry also of rose bishop of dover and tim bishop at lambeth and we've a new prayer today because it's a sunday morning the prayer for the second sunday of the epiphany season almighty god in christ you make all things new transform the poverty of our nature by the riches of your grace and in the renewal of our lives make known your heavenly glory through jesus christ our lord amen we pray each in our own language the prayer our lord 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 for your own prayers on this beautiful morning here in canterbury [Music] so let the golden bush with its wonderful scent both in leaf and in flower remind you of the epiphany gifts let the star remind you of pilgrim journeys that the pigs around us remind you of the life of saint anthony and the little robin here who is really my companion this morning and hopping about and enjoying all kinds of things here on this fresh green morning no frost no anything and that we give thanks for but remember also the injunction of saint paul to his children in the corinthian church as he would see them glorify god in your bodies carry him in your bodies and give glory to god for our bodies are temples of the holy spirit a wonderful thought on this day 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 amen