[Music] good morning and welcome to the deanery garden at canterbury cathedral on this sunday the 13th of june the second sunday after the feast of the holy trinity welcome wherever you are in the world you're looking at the moment it's something that you've seen before but a different color an epiphylum a night flowering plant which just really has 24 hours of glory but early in the morning one can catch them and here like a sunrise is another epiphylum enjoying its moment on this sunday morning it's a morning when we remember that our queen will meet the president of the united states and his wife today the bisons will go to windsor to be with her majesty the day after she celebrated her official birthday with a scaled-down trooping of the color at windsor castle she's had a busy time and we ask god's blessing upon her as always as we say our prayers please pray for your own heads of state wherever you are in the world because these are difficult times as far as any kind of decision-making particularly about the pandemic is concerned and we um give thanks for the meeting of the heads of the g7 and their guests in cornwall now drawn to our clothes and pray that their decisions will be for the welfare of our whole planet as they work themselves out across the world let's begin our prayers on this sunday morning oh lord open our lips and our mouth shall proclaim your praise visit us with your salvation and sustain us with your gracious spirit o come let us sing to the lord let us heartily rejoice in the rock of our salvation let us come into his presence with thanksgiving and be glad in him with psalms for the lord is a great god and a great king above all gods come let us worship and bow down and kneel before the lord our maker for he is our god we are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand 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 o god set our hearts on fire with love for you now and forever amen our psalm on this 13th day of the month in psalm 68 it's a long psalm so we'll say portions of that sound let god arise and let his enemies be scattered let those that hate him flee before him as the smoke vanishes so may they vanish away as wax melts at the fire so let the wicked perish at the presence of god but let the righteous be glad and rejoice before god let them make merry with gladness sing to god sing praises to his name exalt him who rides on the clouds the lord is his name rejoice before him father of the fatherless defender of widows god in his holy habitation god gives the solitary a home and brings forth prisoners to songs of welcome but the rebellious inhabit a burning desert oh god when you went forth before your people when you marched through the wilderness the earth shook and the heavens dropped down rain at the presence of god the lord of sinai at the presence of god the god of israel you sent down a gracious reign oh god you refreshed your inheritance when it was weary your people came to dwell there in your goodness oh god you provide for the poor blessed be the lord who bears our burdens day by day for god is our salvation god is for us the god of our salvation god is the lord who can deliver from death sing to god you kingdoms of the earth make music in praise of the lord he rise on the ancient heaven of heavens and sends forth his voice a mighty voice ascribe power to god whose splendor is over israel whose power is above the clouds how terrible is god in his holy sanctuary the god of israel who gives power and strength to his people blessed be god this is a sunday morning and so we have a special lesson and you remember last week we read a lesson from the acts of the apostles about sin paul himself very much a story of the early church paul had come back to jerusalem wanting to bring offerings for the christian community there but wanting also to continue his roots with his own people and to pray in the temple and his presence in the temple caused a riot and at that point if you remember he was taken to safety by the tribune who became nervous when he saw that paul was a roman citizen and he had ordered him to be flogged but now we're going to continue on that time let me just see where we're continuing from it's chapter 23 verse 12 that we're going from so i shall begin there when it was day the jews made a plot and bound themselves by an oath neither to eat nor drink till they had killed paul there were more than 40 who made this conspiracy they went to the chief priests and elders and said we have strictly bound ourselves by an oath to taste no food till we have killed paul now therefore you along with the council give notice to the tribune to bring him down to you as though you were going to determine his case more exactly and we are ready to kill him before he comes near now the son of paul's sister heard of their ambush so he went and entered the barracks and told paul paul called one of the centurions and said take this young man to the tribune for he has something to tell him so he took him and brought him to the tribune and said paul the prisoner called me and asked me to bring this young man to you as he has something to say to you the tribune took paul's nephew by the hand and going aside asked him privately what is it that you have to tell me and he said the jews have agreed to ask you to bring paul down to the council tomorrow as though they were going to inquire somewhat more closely about him but do not be persuaded by them for more than 40 of their men are lying in ambush for him who have bound themselves by an oath neither to eat nor drink till they have killed him and now they are ready waiting for your consent so the tribune dismissed the young man charging him tell no one that you have informed me of these things then he called two of the centurions and said get ready 200 soldiers with 70 horsemen and 200 spearmen to go as far as caesarea at the third hour of the night also provide mounts for paul to ride and bring him safely to felix the governor and he wrote a letter to this effect claudia's liceus to his excellency the governor felix greetings this man was seized by the jews and was about to be killed by them when i came upon them with the soldiers and rescued him having learned that he was a roman citizen and desiring to know the charge for which they were accusing him i brought him down to their council i found that he was being accused about questions of their law but charged with nothing deserving death or imprisonment and when it was disclosed to me that there would be a plot against the man i sent him to you at once ordering his accusers also to state before you what they have against him so the soldiers according to their instructions took paul and brought him by night to antipatris and on the next day they returned to the barracks letting the horsemen go on with paul when they had come to caesarea and delivered the letter to the governor they presented paul also before him on reading the letter the governor asked what province paul was from and when he learned that he was from celestia he said i will give you a hearing when your accusers arrive and he commanded paul to be guarded in headed practicum it's a long and dramatic piece but it has the flavor of the way in which luke generally writes in terms of giving an ordered narrative and making us know the scene now we have to just remember the geography of what we're talking about at the moment but it's nice that even because of the letter gives us the tribune's name claudius when he writes to felix the governor but let's think about the geography all this is happening in the barracks the tower of antonia in jerusalem and everything else is going to happen in caesarea that's a long journey that's going north and west right up to the mediterranean coast but caesarea is still within the roman province of judea and for some time the roman governors have chosen rather to live at caesarea very important port on the mediterranean coast rather than in jerusalem we know that interestingly from some excavations that were done there in 1961 and on one of the excavations is pontius pilate's name carved the only piece of archaeological evidence of pilots property ships but now here is felix the governor there and the tribune clearly by now he's got to know paul well for see how paul's nephew is able to gain access to the tribune quite quickly and also how the nephew is allowed into the barracks to see him paul is a roman citizen and that counts for a great deal and the tribune knows that it's his duty to protect him the enormous numbers of soldiers that luke's details shows uh the the kind of guards that the tribune placed around for but let's think of the significance of this journey last week we ended on sunday by the lord appearing to paul in the night saying you have testified to me in jerusalem now you must testify to me in rome in the letter to the romans that paul writes it's clear he's never been there and it's clear he longs to go there and intends to make a journey to the christian church there and in the dream he had last week or the coming of the lord to him the message is given you will testify in rome how that was to happen he had no idea but now we see the whole thing unfolding this imprisonment in the barracks and the riot in jerusalem which was not of his own making he wasn't wanting it he was intending to carry on with his missionary journeys but was now under arrest and the tribune is keen that he should have a fair trial as a roman citizen so he is sent with a huge guard from jerusalem you'll never see jerusalem again he is leaving now on a journey which eventually will take him to rome and he's going to caesarea caesarea is not only the headquarters of the roman governor it's also a place where there is a strong christian community and it was founded by philip the deacon the one who who uh baptized the ethiopian unit and uh philip and his daughters there uh give hospitality to paul in the acts of the apostles but here paul is being sent not to philip the deacon in the christian community but to caesarea and when he gets there and felix reads the letter he puts people under the care of uh the soldiers and in the praetorium it says herrera's praetorium because herod the great that's the the person right at the beginning of the gospels at the time of bethlehem and the massacre of the innocents head of the great had built caesarea as a great city for himself on the coast of the mediterranean and now it was the seat of the roman governors so it's herod's pretorium that he's put in and they will wait for the the um accusers to arrive so that the case can be made against paul this is dramatic and it helps us understand um the fact that there are people around paul there's a community around paul but we don't have too many details about paul's nephew or paul's sister and nor do we have too many details about the christian community and caesarea but we do have the chance to feel there's a much bigger story going on here and paul now goes into imprisonment there's one date that i want to concentrate on today and you'll see why because it's a date which helped people begin to imagine as we do that these people in the new testament were real people as the people in the old testament real people and the date is the 13th of june 1893 when dorothy l sayers was born now dorothy el-sayers was a great scholar but she was best known first of all for a series of novels detective novels that she wrote and before the second world war if you said dorothy l says then it would be the novels with her detective lord peter whimsy uh and uh his faithful man servant bunter that people would know about and certainly those novels are still read by some and i remember reading first of all the novel that i still like best of dorothy ellsayers the nine taylors those of you who've read it will know it's all about bell ringing and uh i'm not a bell ringer but i i hear our own band ringing when the bells ring out from canterbury cathedral and all my life as a priest bell ringers have been part of my life and the terms and language that they use is very special to them now the important thing about the tailors is that they aren't tellers and each bell at i think it's called finch sinkhole in the fen lands um that's lord peter whimsy if you remember if you've read this i'm not going to give the game away but we'll just set the scene uh is on new year's eve comes to a halt with his car and finds himself stuck in that little community but he is himself a ringer and one of their bands has fallen sick and they're needing to ring a new year's eve new year's day nine hour peel and so he gives himself to that and they ring that peel in the tower on the nine taylors and the nine taylors of the bells the tellers of time and celebrations it's a very very exciting murder mystery but uh it is one of the one it's not the first novel that she wrote it's the ninth novel letter the number nine is everywhere in this one and in 1936 the secretary of the friends of canterbury cathedral approached her and asked her to write a play for the canterbury festival in the same way that that uh um t.s eliot would write the the the play and john maysfield would write plays in their time with the murder in the cathedral and the coming of christ and dorothy l sayers was asked by miss babington who was the immensely she was a legend here and still is um the immensely powerful secretary of the friends of canterbury cathedral at the time and margaret babington had a way with getting her will with people and all those people i just mentioned responded to her and uh dorothea says wrote a play called the zeal of thy house and the quote in the psalm also one remembers the disciples thinking of that when jesus cleanses the temple zeal for your house will consume me the dangerous business having too much zeal and the story is about canterbury cathedral after the disastrous fire in 1174 four years after the assassination of beckett the murder of beckett and how the chapter decide and dorothy old says uh play they're given a bit of a prompt by archangels the chapter decides uh we could often do with some prompts from archangels when we're making decisions in chapter today but they decide that they will appoint the the norman builder guillaume de song william of song to come and be their builder in chief and that means their architect so the architects weren't used in that way and the master builder was in charge of all of that and he took over the building but at one stage he had a disastrous fall from the scaffold down into the onto the ground below and from that moment onwards was left uh very disabled indeed it's that play that she wrote and from that moment onwards she was known as someone who would write these plays on religious and biblical things and classical subjects as well because she was a great scholar and as the second world war broke out no more peter whimsy novels were written that the bbc came to dorothy el-sayers and asked her to write a series of radio plays on the life of jesus to dramatize them to make people feel that the scriptures or the gospels were lifted out from the pages in order to be recognized in real nice life through the voices of people it caused enormous controversy some people felt it was sacrilegious to have jesus's voice portrayed in this way on the radio for the wireless as it then was and others felt that the bbc were giving too much space to christianity these were war years and the bbc were trying to give heart to the nation but dorothy says set about her task with a will and between 1941 and 1942 12 radio plays each one one hour long were broadcast on the life of christ from uh the each month one hour episode and they became a very popular listening for the people i you can still hear a version of that the bbc have done them since and on google you can find the 12 episodes slightly shortened as done in 1967 but here are the titles and you'll you'll get how the story unfolds kings in judea episode 1 the kings herald from the baptist kelly a certain nobleman the heirs to the kingdom the bread of heaven the feast of tabernacles the light and the life royal progress the king supper the princes of this world the king of sorrows the king comes to his own and dorothy l sayers called the the whole sequence the man born to be king you can buy the scripts and you can also by the explanation of how she set about writing it and the way in which she used the scriptures because as i say she was a great scholar but also an imaginative writer and had the power to help us imagine in a constructive way and a positive way how these new testament scenes played out we've been imagining how it played out in the acts of the apostles but her plays deal with the life of christ himself and the characters around that it didn't end there because after all of that when the war ended penguin classics approached her to ask her to translate for them the whole of dante's poem the divine comedy and her translation of the divine comedy is still the one that i would always turn to because of the way in which it keeps the poetic rhythm but also because of the explanations and lovely diagrams and things which she uses to interest you as you go along excuse me i first came across them long long ago um and bought the penguin classics and i've got all three copies here three volumes she took a long time to write them to translate them the divine comedy hell she actually actually finished and then a few years later the divine comedy purgatory she finished and then the divine comedy paradise she almost finished but left a named friend to complete everything and if i pick up the first one um and uh then read just a verse or two at the beginning you'll get the flavor of how she does it there's a lovely long introduction because dante is fairly foreign learned for us to go into straight away and the diagrams and the way in which she times things and shows a massive interest in what's going on so here is the beginning of kanto one and how she helps us understand it now interestingly enough there is a memorial by an artist in the water tower garden here of a long pole and on it in italian is the beginning of kanto one i'll read the beginning after her little introduction though this is dorothy l says and at the top of the page she's put dark wood monday thursday night on to good friday at 6 00 am and then the story this is still dorothy el says dante finds that he has strayed from the right road and is lost in a dark wood he tries to escape by climbing a beautiful mountain but he's turned aside first by a gambling leopard then by a fierce lion and finally by a ravenous she-wolf as he is fleeing back into the wood he is stopped by the shade of virgil who tells him that he cannot hope to pass the wolf and ascend the mountain by that road one day a greyhound will come and drive the wolf back to hell but the only corset present left open to dante is to trust himself to virgil who will guide him by a longer way leading through hell and purgatory and from there a worthier spirit than virgil beatrice will lead him on to see the blessed souls in paradise dante accepts virgil as his master leader and lord and they set out together and then just the first little bit dorotheal says kept to the poetic structure of dante which many translations don't and the rhymes go across two verses each verse has three lines and she kept to that all the way through very difficult translation and a poetic translation for her to do here we are midway this way of life we're bound upon i woke to find myself in a dark wood where the right road was wholly lost and gone i me how hard to speak of it that rude and rough and stubborn forest the mere breath of memory stirs the old fear in the blood it is so bitter it goes nigh to death yet there i gain such good that to convey the tale i'll write what else i found their wiz it's rather like the beginning of pilgrim's progress and then it goes on from there it's not so much the poet village virgil who is chosen because in medieval times he was considered a prophet of the coming of the child who would transform the world and um it's it's very much the way in which she accompanies you through all the cantos of dante's work right up through right to the end really because her research had got that far and i think barbara reynolds who continued that work uh brought it safely to conclusion after dorothy el sales had died you see why i want to make so much of her this morning she's doing so much for us what we try to do ourselves she is in our mind helping us imagine those scenes in reality but then also with the aid of metaphors as the psalmist stars and as so many of the prophets do and the book of revelation does helping us to imagine not just this life but the eternal world beyond that the man born to be king anchors us in the physical human life of christ and sketches those aspects of his divinity which are shown in the gospels to help us understand better so we give thanks for her on this day let's say our prayers on this particular morning this second sunday after trinity and this morning we're praying for the church of nigeria in the anglican communion and here in the diocese as we pray for archbishop dustin and bishop rose of dover and bishop tim atlantis we're praying today for the parishes of birchington all saints with ecole sint mildred and st thomas minister that's all part of the senate area deanery which we've been praying for as a whole now we're splitting down to the parishes themselves and we pray for mark ham in his ministry in those parishes of birchington and ecole and minnesota and all the life of those parishes let's then say the prayer for this day and please bring your own intentions and concerns and prayers to the college lord you have taught us that all our doings without love are nothing worse send your holy spirit and pour into our hearts that most excellent gift of love the true bond of peace and of all virtues without which whoever lives is counted dead before you grant this for your only son jesus christ's sake amen here we say 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 are men moment for your own prayers as one of our own tailors the teller the belle dunstan rings out to call me eventually through matins in the cathedral [Music] so [Music] [Music] the peace of god which passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of god and with 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 [Music]