good morning and welcome on this monday the 3rd of may we've come up high this morning because we are starting matthew chapter 5 and jesus goes up high to begin that but we've come up into a place which some of you will have been to before because we did part of last year's good friday reflections in that not this year's but last year's and last year was much farther advanced but this year the cold weather has meant that this little bastion garden which fletches created on top of a a flat roof here and brought us up into the tree line so that completely different kinds of birds and creatures tend to be here put water up also to be here so that they can drink here and it's a sunny place but of course it's a frost trap as well but what the garden does is takes you through plants of completely different parts of the world and they flower at different seasons last year everything was in flower at this particular time this year only a very few things have flowered because of the extreme cold conditions and some of the plants you'll see are still under clutches to keep them safe however we've come up high in order to illustrate this i say that last night for those of you who uh watched amongst the minions that watched line of duty which has been a a long-running series and came to a de numer a great climax last night which is disappointed so many that who is h climax in this uh story about the police and um i'm not going to give any spoilers because some of you won't have seen the end yet but uh let me just say that fletcher has a different theory about the end and believes that things haven't finished yet and so the excitement will go on but it was meant to be a great conclusion and so let me leave it there otherwise it will become a spoiler for those of you who watched and those of you who are intending to watch so here we are beginning our easter prayers on this monday morning on the bastion and the wind is quite chilly but you see behind me that the cherry trees are now in full bloom down below 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 say o may the light of your presence o god set our hearts on fire with love for you now and forever amen so our psalm this morning on this particular morning of the month is psalm 11. [Music] i'm wrong [Music] sound 15. [Music] lord who may dwell in your tabernacle who may rest upon your holy hill whoever leads an uncorrupt life and does the thing that is right who speaks the truth from the heart and bears no deceit on the tongue who does no evil to a friend and pours no scorn on a neighbor in whose site the wicked are not esteemed but who honors those who fear the lord whoever has sworn to a neighbor and never goes back on that word who does not take lend money in hope of gain nor take a bribe against the innocent whoever does these things shall never fall so we turn once again to the gospel of saint matthew in our regular reading and we have arrived at chapter five the end of the first narrative which we completed with chapter four and the beginning of the first discourse which as i said was the is the most famous of all the discourses and generally goes under the title the sermon on the mount and we'll take it section by section but so many of these verses christians know well many of them by heart and certainly the verses that we are reading this morning should be part of our journeying backpack as i say they're in our hearts and minds and memories and we tend to think of them as separate separate sentences but let's let's read them to start with and then we'll talk about them and think about them seeing the crowds jesus went up on the mountain and when he sat down his disciples came to him and he opened his mouth and taught them saying blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness for they shall be satisfied blessed are the merciful for they shall receive mercy blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see god blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called children of god blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake for theirs is the kingdom of heaven blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account rejoice and be glad for your reward is great in heaven for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you of course those sentences are normally called the beatitudes and they begin jesus is teaching on the sermon on the mount we've said when we were looking at luke last summer that luke puts many of those sentences in the evangelists group them together in teaching both matthew and luke do that and they do so in different ways and let's think that jesus must have said this many times that here we see matthew calling the disciples up to jesus and the teaching first is given to the disciples the learners so that they may learn something which is nothing to do with the world's teaching and jesus has come not down on the plane as with luke the greek the greek teacher walking about as in so many of the schools of thinking here is a new moses as far as matthew's concerned moses went up to receive the law jesus is beginning in this first discourse to give a new law he comes up onto the mountain and he takes his seat as a teacher of wood calls his disciples his learners to him and then he opens his mouth and teaches them saying making it quite clear by three completely different bits of the sentence that he's going to teach open his mouth taught them saying and then start these sentences the beatitudes and the amazing thing about the beatitudes is that they turn worldly learning upside down worldly expectation upside down and teach the truth that jesus of nazareth wanted people to learn and have deep inside them i want to come first of all to um a little thing which which also jerks me when when and i'll say shall i say irks me when i hear it done wrongly by people reading and that is the difference between blessed and blessed it's something which people used to take for granted because as the meaning of the words are quite different and all of these are blessed are the and then comes the beatitude there's a word spelt exactly the same in the english language you get it in sin luke when you get simeon blessed mary and joseph that's different it's spelt the same and they're pronounced differently and there are no accents on the end but then generally if we know the words if you think of um a word like kicked and a word like wicked you would never say kicked nor wicked actually if you said wicks you'd be meaning something different you've been a candle had a wick whereas wicked means something entirely different but we know instinctively and it's more difficult with words that aren't used too often but blessed and blessed are very very distinctly different and the greek words are different for them so that the word that is being used when simeon is blessing is taken from a word which comes out into the adjective eulegatos whereas this one is makarios blessed uh perhaps i can say this in brackets that our book daily prayer which i use in the psalms because it's thought that people find this distinction difficult puts a note in the beginning of the salter for those reading the sorter aloud as to when to say one and when to say the other and the spelling of the one is blessed e.d and the spelling of the other is now given as st blessed and if you've got a daily prayer then psalm 72 verse 17 will give the clue as one might find in other places this is the verse may god's name remain forever and be established as long as the sun endures may all nations be blessed hasty in him and call him blessed ed blessed be the lord the god of israel who alone does wonderful things i say all that because macarios blessed is a quality which is very very difficult to define and translate i've seen translations which have said happy are that well that doesn't cover it at all we know what it is to be happy but to be blessed uh is a a state of being where one is in tune with god's will for us it's a lifetime study but deep within us we sense when this is right and jesus is illustrating his teaching and the things that will be discovered as he interacts with people in his own land first and foremost in galilee as these things go through and the beatitudes are simply a summing up of all that so if we look at those beatitudes and read them through they are separate sentences blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth it's a promise but also it's a state of being i used to think they were separate sentences and i kept that i think from an experience i had when i was probably 10 years old when the teacher was teaching us the the attitudes at school and after we read it through and then read it through together then we were asked to shut our books and each of us to put a hand up if they could remember one of the sentences and we got there in the end but mine was and i could remember it because it was near the beginning blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth and i was called up to stand in the position where that came in the beatitudes and then we all said our sentences together and learned that the attitudes in that way and it caused me to think that they were separate qualities that here at the meek and here are the pure in heart and here are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness all of that and here are the peacemakers in fact more and more as i read the gospels and ponder them i imagine them as the qualities which make up the humanity and the divinity of jesus himself of course some people have stronger aspects of these qualities but in totality they make up those who walk freely on god's earth and also realize their need of him and those beatitudes become a lifelong study body mind and spirit and one gets spiritual messages given to one in one's life by the most unexpected people these are a series of unexpected sentences which confounds the world's values and they fit well with psalm 15 which we read this morning and as i said we could go on reflecting on these sentences blessed and thinking of words that the greek word macarios bless it might mean and there are some and there's a translation i was reading this morning which began congratulations to the completely different sort of sentence but blessed suits me well and i think we'll stay with that as we read the beatitudes i want to look a little bit as we sit on the mountain here at what happened in years gone by on this date as we always do and in 1469 the philosopher machiavelli niccolo mackel machiavelli was born and of course he is best known is a bit of a caricature of his teaching but he's best known for his for his book the prince and he's at the time of the borders and the medici and he's talking about the way that a political leader can get political gain if he pays no attention or she pays no attention to right and wrong and if you think that's all his teaching is well that's actually a caricature of machiavelli but there are those who have in political leadership use that and how different from the set of beatitudes that jesus gives as his teaching from the mountaintop and also how different from the psalmist in psalm 15 in terms of action that we would take and it comes all into the stories of jesus saying to those with many possessions that it's very hard for you to enter the kingdom of heaven both in this life by activity and to imagine beyond spiritually all of those things there are lovely things which have happened today in the past in 1830 on this particular day the third of may the canterbury whitstable steam railway which became known as the crab and winkle line because it was here and the little engine the invicta which still is in the canterbury museum here brought the shellfish up from whitstable which is quite often been known as canterbury by the sea just the five miles along its track to the markets of canterbury and then citizens seeing that this was happening wanted to have a ride and so the company opened a passenger uh a section of that attached a carriage first of all it became very popular and it was the first railway company to offer steam railway season tickets to take people before they'd had to walk there or if they were more affluent take a pony and trap or something of that kind to to go to whitstable uh to the sea and now there was the steam railway the crab and winkle line it no longer exists but the path it takes mostly is now open as a wonderful walking way a grassy walking way and it leads you through lovely countryside starting near to canterbury east station where there's a map of the old line and going along to the sea at the whitstable so that journeying is something that people from canterbury can still do along the line that for years was the crabbean winkle steam railway from whitstable this day in 1844 richard doyley carter was born we think of him mostly because of the doily cart opera company which are quite often called the savoy operas because he built the savoy theater he was a shrewd businessman saw the opportunity of the collaboration between siratha sullivan and w s gilbert and he used them and really made them both a fortune and himself a fortune and then built the savoy hotel and all of that on the riverbank but it's lovely that outside the savoy hotel between the hotel and the riverbank is the memorial to sir arthur sullivan who was a particular friend of richard doleycart and also quite near on the embankment just there just a few minutes walk along the road the memorial to sir william gilbert and we remember the imagination of doily cart who certainly made a big profit from it but also gave so much pleasure from what he produced by recognizing the opportunity of that partnership in creativity 1926 on this day the general strike began and england was meant to come to a complete stop nine days the the strike lasted and people rushed to become uh milkman and and and post people as they walked along the postman was the job was taken over by others and tried desperately to keep the show going but of course that became something in the legend of our nation at that time and i'm going to go hop a date and go forward to 1979 and talk about in 1979 the election of margaret thatcher as uh the first woman prime minister of the united kingdom so we remember that on this particular day but now i want to go back and say that in 1951 on this day king george vi our present queen's father opened the festival of britain it was set on the south bank of the river now we we we talked about the um great exhibition in 1851 this was a centenary exhibition it was a festival for this nation with london still much of it especially in the east end a complete bomb site for money to recover after the second world war was in short supply and rationing was still happening and yet the government planned a wonderful exhibition of how the nation would seize the opportunity and go forward in development and on the south bank the royal festival hall festival of britain the royal festival hall was built and still stands as a grade one listed building and a great concert hall but the the biggest aspect of that festival which was the dome of discovery which was on the bank there has gone and the the great skylon which was a a thing which stood a bit like the wheel all of those things the population of britain was 49 million something like that in those days and it was reckoned that half the population in some way or another enjoyed the festival parts of it were taken to different parts of the country i mean in terms of exhibitions and acting troops and part of it came to canterbury at the end of july and and the beginning of august and i remember my father and two of my uncles going up on the train to see the festival of britain and coming back with catalogues and stories about how wonderful the vision of the future was in terms of townscape and countryside and the life that people would have in a new age of prosperity it was a shall we say an antidote not only to the years of hardship and worry of the second world war but of the years of austerity which followed to make up all that had been spent in the second world war and then had somehow to be recouped but it paved the way for the economic development of the 1950s and uh at the end of that particular year a general election brought winston churchill back as the prime minister which then actually brought in 13 years of conservative government after the very proactive years of labor government under kevin atlee which saw the beginning of the national health service after the second world war all those things we remember but we remember the nation looking at itself and saying we can go forward well maybe that is something that seems a little bit far off while pandemics still rage across the world but as people begin to come out of the pandemic and continue to help each other and encourage one another then all those qualities of the beatitudes become and of psalm 15 become crucial that people may sense themselves to be blessed representing the holy qualities of the kingdom of heaven without even knowing it that's always the way forward and as they do that then nations will begin to recover in a shared way we read this morning of wonderful national health service workers at wales's largest hospital that's the university hospital of wales in cardiff and those in critical the critical care unit for those suffering from kovidge 19 are also planting a wood so that they can offset carbon emissions what a wonderful thing to be doing and of course we've been speaking about the way in which trees have been planted here we've gone to find them and plant them and across the world things which help carbon emissions are going to be the way forward for this particular aspect of the planet in this century well so much to talk about think about but there's a lot of the summit of the mount left so we need to do it all this morning but we do give thanks for those beatitudes each beginning with the word blessed and so unexpected in what its teaching is but also every part of it illustrated by the humanity and divinity of jesus say our prayers on this particular morning and we will continue to pray for the family of julia james who was the police community support officer murdered here so near to canterbury on a quiet walk with the dog and her family are still appealing for help for the kent police at this time but we also pray for the repose of julia and also pray for her family at this time of enormous grief and her community still in shock and you will have so many things to pray for we continue to think of course of the people of india and of brazil and places so hard hit by this pandemic bring your own prayers as we pray for archbishop justin and the life of our anglican communion today the diocese of central buganda in the church of the province of uganda and our own diocese is asking us to listen and discern on the way again well let's think of the way this morning is that lovely footpath from um canterbury to whitstable opened up by the crab and winkle line which no longer exists there and uh then think spiritually and mentally of the the way followers of the way titled it christians were first called at the very beginning as we walk this day's journey and apart from that we would pray for bishop rose of dover and bishop tim at lambeth and i ask you to pray for your own leaders of your faith communities throughout the world as we pray the collect for this day almighty god who through your only begotten son jesus christ have overcome death and open to us the gate of everlasting life grant that as by your grace going before us you put into our minds good desires so by your continual help we may bring them to good effect through jesus christ our risen lord amen here we say the prayer that our savior taught us in whichever language you would like to use our father who art in heaven hallowed be thy name thy kingdom come i 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 your own prayers on this day the god of peace who brought again from the dead our lord jesus the 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 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 well leo you've been a faithful worshiper this morning here's some breakfast for you i think it's the first time leo's been up here much because as i say it's pretty chilly up here and he's climbed the mountain with us this morning you