good morning and welcome on this morning of tuesday the 23rd of february welcome to the orchard of the dinery garden at canterbury cathedral and we are in february but the morning feels much later in the year you see how the little daffodils of the orchard and all kinds of flowers are popping out each morning it's that time of year when you see something fresh and new and surprising every morning in the garden and the birds are recording that too we've got the song of robin's and great tits and thrushes and blackbirds and the cackle of magpies and jays around us and it's a lovely morning to be out here so please feel welcome wherever you are in the world whatever your climate borrow some of ours this morning as you join in our morning prayers and bring your own intentions and concerns this is the uh bicentenary of the death on this day in rome in 1821 of the poet john keats the romantic poet in the second wave shall we say of romantic poets of england one might put wordsworth and coleridge in the first wave and then uh byron and shelley and keats in the second wave he died of tuberculosis deadly disease in those days in rome on this day in 1821 aged only 25 but we shall remember him in our reflection remember also because he is the person in our calendar and because he's worthy of remembrance and polycarp who was martyred on this day in the year 155 polycarp was ordained by the apostle john whose work lies and memories lie at the base of that fourth gospel that we're studying at the moment so his martyrdom is a significant one he's one of the three apostolic fathers of the church together with clement of rome and ignatius of antioch and we remember polycarp for his epistle to the philippians at that time he died aged 86 in 155 having been born around about the year 80 69 so let's begin our prayers on this rather significant day there are many more anniversaries and they're all creative and lovely oh lord open our lips and our mouth shall proclaim your praise hear our voice so lord according to your faithful love according to your judgment give us life blessed are you god of compassion and mercy to you be praise and glory forever in the darkness of our sin your light breaks forth like the dawn and your healing springs up for deliverance as we rejoice in the gift of your saving help sustain us with your bountiful spirit and open our lips to sing your 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 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 23rd morning of the month is psalm 111 i will give thanks to the lord with my whole heart in the company of the faithful and in the congregation the works of the lord are great sought out by all who delight in them his work is full of majesty and honor and his righteousness endures forever he appointed a memorial for his marvelous deeds the lord is gracious and full of compassion he gave food to those who feared him he is ever mindful of his covenant he showed his people the power of his works in giving them the heritage of the nations the works of his hands are truth and justice all his commandments are sure they stand fast forever and ever they are done in truth and equity he sent redemption to his people he commanded his covenant forever holy and awesome is his name the fear of the lord is the beginning of wisdom a good understanding have those who live by it his praise endures forever so we turn to our reading from st john's gospel and we are in chapter five i'm going just to go back two or three verses to introduce this little bit so we ended yesterday at verse 18 but i'm just going back to verse 15 where the man who has been healed to walk at the pool on the sabbath day is mentioned and that gives context to what we're about to read so verse 15 of chapter five the man went away and told the jews that it was jesus who had healed him this was why the jews were persecuting jesus because he was doing things on the sabbath but jesus answered them my father is still working and i am working this was why the jews were seeking all the more to kill him because not only was he breaking the sabbath but he was even calling god his father making himself equal with god so jesus said to them truly truly i say to you the son can do nothing of his own accord but only what he sees the father doing for whatever the father does that the son does likewise for the father loves the son and shows him all that he himself is doing and greater works than these will he show him so that you may marvel for as the father raises the dead and gives them life so also the son gives life to all whom he will for the father judges no one but has given all judgment to the son that all may honor the son just as they honor the father whoever does not honor the son does not honor the father who sent him truly truly i say to you whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life they do not come into judgment but they have passed from death to life truly truly i say to you an hour is coming and is now here when the dead will hear the voice of the son of god and those who hear will live for as the father has life in himself so he has granted the son also to have life in himself and he has given him authority to execute judgment because he is the son of man not marvel at this for an hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and come out those who have done good to the resurrection of life and those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgment [Music] this is a a passage once again brought on by jesus's wonder that people cannot understand the message that he is giving here we are in the chapter of the third sign but even right at the beginning of chapter 3 where we started this reflection on monday have nicodemus not understanding and jesus saying to him but unless you're born again you you you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven of water and the spirit you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven that we looked at the monday before last time's going on more quickly than i thought and here we are with the second sign accomplished and the reflection there and now the third sign the healing of the man who had not asked for healing and as we saw there is no word of the man's faith or of gratitude from the man he simply walks away not knowing who's done this and later when he finds out from jesus himself first thing he does is to go and tell the authorities which is what this constant reference to the jews mean not the jewish people but the authorities whose nervousness about what jesus is is doing to their authority and teaching is growing daily to such an extent that now in john's gospel we have this great strand of violence of the desire to kill jesus so early in the gospel and jesus to strengthen what she's saying to us in this passage three times uses his double underlining of what he's saying used to say in the king james version do you remember very verily i say and and now here in this translation truly truly the new english bible very truly underlining his teaching but later he changes tack we've not got there yet but in chapter six he will change and illustrate the signs by the seven i am statements which metaphorically link earth and heaven for the signs of heaven are so great life and light and truth and word itself so great that humanity cannot conceive them except by signs like the vine or the bread or the shepherd and that is coming in chapters to come but for the moment jesus is giving them the teaching as it has evolved in him he made himself equal with god they say but in fact there's always for the humanity of jesus a dependence on the creator whom he calls abba father the other gospels and simply her father the father the son the parent the child the dependents and later in the illustrations given from the things around him like the vine that dependence on the root and the stem is extended to those he makes his own not disciples but apostles those who have received the spirit and note here also the double imagery of the son of god that one dependent on the creator in his humanity and the son of man which is could easily be translated the the representative the child of humanity and he is a sign of our humanity's capacity to embrace and receive the the the actual not only the sign of heaven but the the fact of heaven the gift of the spirit which transcends this life in the next and even the word dead here is actually being used in some sense figuratively because he's looking at those around him who should know better who know the law by heart the authorities speaking to him and is actually likening them to dead wood really not able to bear fruit until they turn around as he said to nicodemus and realize that they must be born again of water and spirit to receive that gift of life and that word life too becomes something so big that humanity can hardly comprehend it so all these things underlined twice truly truly as truly truly i say to you and later on we shall see jesus extending this gift to the dependency of his disciples and then us on his humanity to receive that gift of the divine image which transcends life and death but what we find here is that jesus himself sees his own realization and humanity developing as the creator unfolds more and more as the father gives more and more knowledge to the son of what that vocation will mean there is always as i keep saying a present reality to the gospel what was then is now and will be and those concepts are very very present in this fourth gospel so you see how much we could be thinking of that today we've many other things to think of which will point in this direction but we've also days ahead when we can go through this through our lenten journey and as each of us plucks an idea or a thought or something that feeds the spirit or the mind with contemplation and it might come in as rupert brooks says in one of his poems otherwise from just a word that you've heard this morning from the scriptures from the psalms something that we think about in the lives of those who are affected by this date february the 23rd and there are many take that use it physically sometimes by making something drawing something writing something being creative and later on maybe not today intend to share that gift for that gift of the spirit lives when it is shared and life can be shared too well on this day there are really so many wonderful things to think about i've already said that it's the day of polycarp his actually his name means in the greek many fruits a life of fruitfulness polycarp and at the same time we're thinking of the fact that in his 86 years he served his lord and said that as the flames came around him in his martyrdom in smyrna in one of the persecutions he had refused to burn incense to the emperors to a god and said how could i possibly desert jesus who in all my life i have served and he has never done any wrong to me and we hear the words of the old man who had known the apostle john and been ordained by him and was the bishop of smyrna but had visited rome to talk to the pope about divisions in the church even then and then back to smyrna and died on this day and so we give thanks for the faithfulness of polycarp and the way it anchors us into this particular fourth gospel with its source and roots in the uh the person of john the apostle collected together here in this wonderful book and then we think of um john keats and um a bit later on in the reflection i want to read just a couple of verses of keats because keats had a way of capturing what we're experiencing this morning in the creator's gift to us of this earth and how that transcends that which we know to be uh finite and lifts us into the infinite but there are one or two things more that we might think about before the three great anniversaries i want to mention today um one is the fact that in 1633 samuel peeps was born now he was secretary to the admiralty and he's called the father of the english navy but what we remember him for is the fact that he kept a diary just as our little lent books will be noting the days through and any of you who keep a journal as i certainly do will know that a sentence written down will 40 years later awaken a whole scene for you and it's a wonderful thing to do because it recreates development and things around us and old friends relive when they're named in that diary in our memories uh in 1863 lake victoria was found to be the source of the river nile by speak and grant to british explorers who found that and sources of course are very important things i've talked about the the the life of john the apostle being the source of the fourth gospel already this morning a bit of fun now 1874 major walter clopton patented the game which became lawn tennis and was soon adopted by the all england croquet club so that three years later they sponsored the first wimbledon lawn tennis championships how grateful we are for all of that and then on this day in 1995 james alfred wright whom we know better as james herriot died a vet and author of all creatures great and small which on bbc television on sunday nights used to give enormous pleasure and has been recreated since in so many different ways in 1898 this is a brave thing emil zola the french novelist was imprisoned after writing the letter jacuzz condemning and accusing the french government of anti-semitism against captain alfred dreyfuss and we remember that whole episode of the dreyfus case then in uh 1850 cesaro ritz was born who's founded the hotel in london on piccadilly and paris in the place one dom which is a a lovely place and then in 1603 we remember the botanist and philosopher andreas alpino dying 1792 joshua reynolds the great painter dying and we've seen know so many of his paintings in the huntington museum in pasadena where a friend of ours is the curator of the english collection there and we remember melinda this morning and then in 1976 the english painter ls lowry a great favorite of my sisters he died and in 1983 the composer herbert howells whose music we use so much particularly in our even songs his great settings like collegium regali and the gloucester service so so much lovely music from howl's and the hymn uh the him tuned to all my hope on god is founded which he named after his son michael today also is the birthday of naruhito the emperor of japan and we wish him a happy birthday he has given gifts of cherry trees around special places in england and we are grateful for those gifts of signs of reconciliation and peace we can talk about that on other days because there are important signs of what used to happen here in terms of human reconciliation in august on days when japanese guards and former prisoners would shake hands here in the cathedral and go outside together to see the cherries so all of those things but we remember magnificently on this day the uh births of george frederick handel 1685 handel was born and was born in germany but in fact which of course wasn't germany then born in the holy roman empire but uh was in fact then came over here when the hanoverian kings came here he became really a naturalized englishman and his great oratorios and operas are of course known to so many we we can we can hardly do enough about handel this morning but i have no time to do that but let's remember probably that all of us will have our favorite sections of his most famous oratorio messiah which received its premiere in dublin at easter in 1742 it has a text by charles jennings who has woven verses from the king james bible and coverdale psalms which we find in the book of common prayer into the way in which the messiah's vocation develops and as i say all of us will have from the ancient scriptures where it begins with the the the word every valley shall be exalted that there's there's wonderful beginnings but then as one goes through you go through what it means from isaiah to be the anointed one and you get right through to the end and the great are men oddly my mother used to sing contralto her favorite piece in the whole of messiah was he was despised and rejected of men and whenever that came on with a radio program or on the gramophone as it was as those chords began for he was despised she would go ah i'd say it was the most wonderful thing to be listening to but what it did all those choruses cemented the scriptures in our heads so that all we like sheep have gone astray which is exciting to sing uh and i'm in danger of going on too long with this but at the end this morning um we put on a couple of of handle uh memories one his coronation anthem zadok the priest which was sung here when her majesty came for the royal mundi but is a favorite anthem and then made for the coronation of written for the coronation of george ii and then uh secondly um the lovely uh um solo of the not solo but uh the boys singing um uh let the bright serif him and so that's at the end and then also today in 1934 edward elgar died and we remember him for various works but those grand pieces for which he was fated aren't the ones which move us most deeply his enigma variations when he was still in worcester in relative obscurity were pictures of his friends of course nimrod in that number nine the picture of jaeger who encouraged him one of the the people working at his publishers novello uh that is very famous but uh the the lovely pictures of all his friends around in in in musical terms but then we can go on to his oratorio jarontius this is the best of me he wrote and was so saddened by the way in which the first performance didn't do it justice and gradually it took root and has become one of the great oratorios for listening to you but so too his oratorios where he actually himself cut up the gospels and made the story of the apostles and then the early church in his oratorio the kingdom into something live and in our memories and again we could talk a lot about that but because this is the day when we remember him dying and perhaps his cello concerto is the thing we might play but that will be a long thing to play so we've just put on our um acting organist david newsham playing elgar's chanson which i'm sure elgar would play as he did transson de mata and saluda more to his wife uh carys not alice sorry his daughter carys and then we are also as i said thinking of keats and i brought out father's golden treasury again paul grave i want to read just two verses of ode to a nightingale we're here in the morning sunshine keats wrote this when he was just in his late teenage years and it's written at night because he's heard the song of a nightingale but it could have happened here in bleen woods you can still hear them in april if you walk there not in the city and first of all the verse talks about the way in which although the nightingale is singing he can't see the flowers around him it's may and he is conscious of their scent and conscious that they're there but the nightingale song is awaking thoughts from the past and also of our eternal dimension i'm just going to read two verses the second of the verses speaks and this i find a really almost a tear-jerking image he speaks of ruth in the scriptures all these poets assume a knowledge of the scriptures he speaks of ruth standing in the fields gleaming with the the corn all around her in a foreign land she's come there for loyalty to naomi and it's before she meets uh boraz properly and in her loneliness she weeps for her own home as an exile and that lovely thing is evoked in his mind by the song of the nightingale in the second of these verses here are the two verses i cannot see what flowers are at my feet nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs but in embalming darkness guests each sweet were with the scene of seasonable months in dao's the grass the thicket and the fruit tree wild white hawthorne and the pastoral egglantine fast fading violets covered up in leaves and mid-may's eldest child the coming muskrose full of dewy wine the murmurous haunt of flies on summer eaves thou was not born for death immortal bird no hungry generations tread thee down the voice i hear this passing night was heard in ancient days by emperor and clown perhaps the self-same song that found a pass through the sad heart of ruth when sick for home she stood in tears amid the alien corn the same that oft times has charmed magic casements opening on the foam of perilous seas in fairy lands for lorne a song for now a song for then but a song which transports says so many things to scents and sounds and smells and just everything around us on a morning like this to that which is beyond an eternal which jesus is so longing to give in the gift of the spirit to those whom he meets on this day so one last thing here and that is that on this day in 1954 the first inoculation a mass inoculation of children against polio took place here and i remember in childhood what a deadly threat what we called not polio in those days polio my life is we called it infantile paralysis was and i remember too at the hospital series which now would be a sort of casualty thing called emergency ward 10 causing i think so people would know how this went one of the surgeons there who was one of the heroes of the plot to be diagnosed with polio and showed him for months in the iron lung which now looks like a museum piece which was used then in polio if you want to read an account of courage in polio read dustin lance black's book mama's boy about his mother and the enormous and courageous battle at a time when polio was a life threat as was consumption as it was called for keats and we give thanks for courage in days gone by in pandemics and epidemics but at the same time we give thanks for the vaccines which are rolling out today on this february the 23rd in 2021 so let's then uh say our prayers on this day together and we are praying in the anglican communion today for the diocese of northern argentina in the anglican church of south america continuing to pray for justin our archbishop for rose bishop of dover tim bishop at lambeth and for the parishes of the dover deanery we'll begin to name them again tomorrow but today that deanery asks us to pray for the deanery fresh expressions and missional learning communities so we do that and we bring our own prayers and give thanks for creativity and the way in which we ourselves can perceive that which is divine within our humanity embrace it and share that gift here's the collect for today almighty god whose son jesus christ fasted 40 days in the wilderness and was tempted as we are yet without sin give us grace to discipline ourselves in obedience to your spirit and as you know our weakness so may we know your power to save through jesus christ our lord amen so we say together eat in our own language 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 amen moment of silence now as we say our own prayers on this day christ give you grace to grow in holiness to deny yourself take up your cross daily and follow him 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] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] uh [Music] [Music] [Applause] breakfast [Music] is [Music] yes [Music] god [Music] wow [Music] [Applause] oh [Music] 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