[Music] um [Music] um [Music] [Music] oh [Music] so [Music] um [Music] um [Music] um [Music] good morning and welcome to the deanery garden on this sunday morning the 30th of august it's a morning of roaring wind all around us and the rain for the moment has stopped how very different from a few weeks ago with sunshine and warm weather quite chilly and here we are having found shelter beside a great bay tree and surrounded by the trees of the orchard with their leaves on and the old wall behind me here so we come this morning in our reflections to the book of jonah again and wherever you are in the world please feel free to bring your thoughts and prayers as we say our morning prayers together sunday mornings always give us different lessons from our normal reading of the acts of the apostles through the week and for the last two sundays before this we have read jonah chapter one chapter two chapter three is a new beginning as god presents jonah with his vocation all over again but it's also about the great city of nineveh which is made in this story to look enormous as you'll see and jonah's mission is just there the anniversaries connected with this day august the 30th seem to fall into two kinds of categories works of destruction and works of creation shall we call it creativity working in communion with the creator let's think of the works of destruction to start with in the year 70 the roman general titus ends the siege of jerusalem and leaves the whole city of jerusalem in complete destruction the temple is destroyed and the bloodshed and the carrying away of people to slavery is horrendous in 1939 children on this day began to be evacuated from british cities because of the thought of the blitz of the cities and the destruction that would ensue in 1941 on this day the siege of leningrad began a most horrendous siege in the second world war works of destruction works of creation well there are many on this day in 1682 william penn sailed from england and what he created in pennsylvania the city of philadelphia is a work of creation and that city if you've been there is the most marvelous city on the top of the city hall stands a great statue of penn himself and we remember being up there on the top of that by penn statue on about the coldest day i've ever experienced down below was solid frost and ice and the the guard who let us up in the elevator said uh i'll send you up there and after a bit i'll send the elevator up to take you down again because nobody else wanted to go up on that day it was a still day but my goodness the frost crackled and when we were up there after a while we thought we hope we remember to send he remembers to send the elevator back and we shall freeze to death up here but standing by the feet of the great statue of william penn the cities of melbourne and houston were both founded on this day melbourne in 1835 houston in texas in 1836 and on this day also capability brown the landscape designer who we'll come back to in our reflection was baptized we have no idea the date of his birth it must have been a few days before but the register shows him being baptized on this day in 1716. the novelist mary shelley was born and the sculptor anthony gormley was born in 1950 we have a work of anthony gormley which moves people greatly in the cathedral crypt it's called transport and it's made of the nails of the medieval transept when it was being restored and it's a figure which hangs over the original site of beckett's tomb which speaks of the way in which our bodies are the agents by which we experience things and another work of creativity in 1791 the british ordnance survey the mapping agency of immense correctness was founded and we've reason to be very grateful for that well enough of that but have in your mind as we go with jonah to the city of nineveh in our reflection works of destruction and the ability of humanity to destroy works of creation the ability of humanity to create let's say our prayers o lord open our lips and our mouth shall proclaim your praise blessed are you creator of all to you be praise and glory forever as your dawn renews the face of the earth bringing light and life to all creation may we rejoice in this day you have made as we wake refresh from the depths of sleep open our eyes to behold your presence and strengthen our hands to do your will that the world may rejoice and give you 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 does 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 30th morning of the month is psalm 144 blessed be the lord my rock who teaches my hands for war and my fingers for battle my steadfast help and my fortress my stronghold and my deliverer my shield in whom i trust who subdues the peoples under me o lord what are mortals that you should consider them mere human beings that you should take thought for them they are like a breath of wind their days pass away like a shadow oh god i will sing to you a new song i will play to you on a ten-stringed harp you that give salvation to kings and have delivered david your servant save me from the peril of the sword and deliver me from the hand of foreign enemies whose mouth speaks wickedness and whose right hand is the hand of falsehood so that our sons in their youth may be like well nurtured plants our daughters like pillars carve for the corners of the temple our barns be filled with all manner of store our flocks bearing thousands and ten thousands in our fields our cattle be heavy with young may there be no miscarriage or untimely birth no cry of distress in our streets happy are the people whose blessing this is happy are the people who have the lord for their god so we turn then to the book of jonah in the old testament and we have now read the story of jonah trying to escape his vocation now grudgingly in chapter 3 as god presents it as he does again and again and again in different forms jonah grudgingly obeys then the word of the lord came to jonah the second time saying arise go to nineveh that great city and cry out against it the message that i tell you so jonah arose and went to nineveh according to the word of the lord now nineveh was an exceedingly great city three days journey in brett jonah began to go into the city going a day's journey and he called out yet 40 days and nineveh shall be overthrown and the people of nineveh believed god they called for a fast and put on sackcloth from the greatest of them to the least of them the word reached the king of nineveh and he arose from his throne removed his robe covered himself with sackcloth and sat in ashes and he issued a proclamation and published through nineveh by the decree of the king and his nobles let neither man nor beast herd nor flock taste anything let them not feed or drink water but let humanity and beast be covered with sackcloth and let them call out mightily to god let everyone turn from his evil way and from the violence that is in his hands who knows god may turn and relent and turn from his fierce anger so that we may not perish when god saw what they did how they turned from their evil way god relented of the disaster that he had said he would do to them and he did not do it but it displeased jonah exceedingly and he was angry well this book which in four chapters is the most wonderful parable shows jonah grudgingly taking on his vocation but deep inside him he is filled with resentment as we shall see next week in chapter four for the moment though the repentance of the city of nineveh the turning from ways of destruction in their humanity to ways of creation in their humanity and such that the king orders even the fasting of the animals and covers them with sackcloth to say this city realizes this great city repents perhaps the creator of all things will listen to our cry and god does but his prophet and here's the parable too is still intent on the sense of destruction because of his own anger and as we shall see the only person that he is harming is himself he's not working in tune with his creator and with these special particular vocation which god has intended for jonah which he has resisted and resisted and resisted and now has carried out with an unwilling heart a parable indeed i said that this was the day on which the great english landscape designer capability brown was baptized in 1716 the nearest state to his birth that we can find let me just say that this also is a date when our calendar if it weren't a sunday would keep john bunyan tomorrow the 31st of august was the day he died and i'm in telling i'm intending to give bunyan full credit and and and use him tonight at complin and tomorrow morning but for the moment let's go back to lancelot brown for that was his real name why was he called capability brown because when he went round to the great parks and landscapes of potential in england at that time and one great householder after another would use him to help them redesign the whole landscape he would say this has capability for improvement one of his great statements capability for improvement certainly that's what jonah should have been thinking about the city of nineveh for god saw in that great human and conglomeration of humanity and creatures and plant life and everything else capability for improvement and brown's great principle was to use what was there not only in house but in the natural landscape and in the capability of a particular area to grow particular things to encourage particular creatures bird life everything else brown saw that in a huge way and not only those things which he designed as you will see hugely in denim palace in hampton court grounds in the landscapes that you see in somewhere like chervin castle which i know well you see that he's used simple things in order not only to make the house look grand but to make the house the dwelling of humanity fit in and use its landscape and be almost a humble player in god's creation where there was a little spring of water brown would see the capacity for subtly damning that to create a great lake standing like a mirror in front of so many houses i remember that principle being used for badminton house which wasn't brown's work but it was brown's influence and it was a bicycle ride away from where i grew up that principle we've used in this garden with the stream which is running down here and being just stopped to form a place where fish and water plants can be but we've kept the runnel here with the water running down shallow so that natural life can drink that that hedgehogs and all kinds of birds can come here that amphibious creatures like newts and frogs themselves all kinds of things can be here in the orchard and as the slow worms and everything else which are in this patch of natural life grow the fact that water has been made from a small trickling stream to become much greater well this is absolutely tiny but if you look at some of the great water scenes in landscape with the clumps of trees which brown saw proper then in the same way as we planted trees we've been very sure that this is setting the cathedral church a church of prayer for this community and for all who come here setting it in god's natural landscape so that the wind in the trees this morning is as natural as sound as the music from the organ and next week from the choir when they start to sing again is in this particular place i remember at uh at home there were two great views when i was growing up if i looked out of the window on the east which was my parents bedroom the bedroom window there looked out right across to a place called kelston round hill where a clump of trees gave meaning to the whole lovely landscape and on that top of the tree there of the top of the round hill was a trig point set by the british ordnance society showing it was a high point from which maps could be made but when you got there you knew you were at the top and could look out if you looked the other way from my own bedroom first a huge ash tree was there but beyond was in a far far distance hills in somerset and the tower standing there you need binoculars to see it except when the light shone from it at night the distant pinpoint but between at night there was a glow and that was the great city of bristol and all its teeming life we couldn't see it but you could see the glow coming from that city and mother used to say in the war they had stood there and watched it burning for bristol was very very badly destroyed in the bombings of 1940 works of creation works of destruction let us see that with the streams of the holy spirit in our own life that we are very much intended to be part of the stream of creativity not of destruction and when we set out on each new day with god's creation all around us we set out first with our prayers that we may be ourselves aware of our vocation what god wants us to do what god wants us to do this day and also the capacity of the small stream of the holy spirit working in us to be a great lake of wonder for creation as we accomplish our own vocation as members of the body of christ ungrudgingly and not like the prophet in the parable right let us say our prayers for this 12th sunday after trinity whatever you are thinking about in your hearts and minds please bring this to your prayers it means that across the world an enormous amount of prayer is being said as we come together almighty and everlasting god you are always more ready to hear than we to pray and to give more than either we desire or deserve pour down upon us the abundance of your mercy for giving us those things of which our conscience is afraid and giving us those good things which we are not worthy to ask but through the merits and mediation of jesus christ your son our lord amen god always sees in us capability for improvement and we give thanks for that this morning as he gives us the gift of his spirit to pray as our savior taught her and in whatever language we normally use 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 so to the music of the wind in the trees we keep silence and make our prayers this morning 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 upon you upon those whom you love and those whom you would pray for this sunday morning and always amen