good morning and welcome to the deanery garden at canterbury cathedral on this friday the 4th of june wherever you are in the world feel welcome to our morning prayers and bring your own concerns and intentions to our prayers we had thought this morning that we would need to be in the greenhouse because the weather forecast for today is a day of fairly solid rain thunderstorms and heavy rain but it's late coming so we thought we'd just seize the opportunity to show irises at their very best in the garden the rain may do awful damage to these beautiful flowery dresses that the irises were but there are irises across the garden of different colors and this is their season but they're very delicate flowers so we take the chance to enjoy their colors and shapes on this friday morning i'm sitting uh by the brazier here on the lawn and i wanted to say something about the lawn itself which you're used to seeing normally we would be mowing it in a very neat and tidy way because there'd be many functions happening on the lawn and thousands of people throughout the summer season would be here the royal horticultural society has issued a plea to people to stop watering their lawns well we've never had the the capacity to water this one a great deal but they've suggested that people simply mow and let their lawns die back and become brown and actually in the actual depths of the heat of summer almost white and then to revive when the september rains come fletcher's had a different policy with this and is going to experiment with it he thinks that if we let the grass grow it will have more juice in it and we'll keep greener longer and so we're going to do that because this summer we shall see many social gatherings because of the pandemic and so the lawn doesn't need to be looking like wimbledon or the cricket ground lords really fine and clipped it can be itself for a year and have a a bit of a rest and in the middle already we're seeing that wild flowers of all sorts are popping up and butterflies and insects are using them and i think that we'll see that the birds are coming down and enjoying it and this if it's a day of heavy rain the the lawn will benefit from a great deal well enough horticulture for a moment we need to get on with our prayers uh but here we are in the garden i don't think it's going to rain while we're here though the clouds are gathering and i don't think the weather forecast is wrong oh lord open our lips and our mouth shall proclaim your praise may christ the day star dawn in our hearts and triumph over the shades of night blessed are you creator of all to 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 refreshed 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 as we rejoice in the gift of this new day so may the light of your presence so god set our hearts on fire with love for you now and forever amen our psalm this morning on this fourth morning of the month is psalm 19. now we mentioned this psalm last week on a sunny day when we were rejoicing in the years mind of joseph haydn and talked about his oratorio the creation and here this psalm is very much part of the text of that great oratorio psalm 19 the heavens are telling the glory of god and the firmament proclaims his handiwork one day pours out its song to another and one night unfolds knowledge to another they have neither speech nor language and their voices are not heard yet their sound has gone out into all lands and their words to the ends of the world in them has he set a tabernacle for the sun that comes forth as a bridegroom out of his chamber and rejoices as a champion to run his course it goes forth from the end of the heavens and runs to the very end again and there is nothing hidden from its heat the law of the lord is perfect reviving the soul the testimony of the lord is sure and gives wisdom to the simple the statutes of the lord are right and rejoice the heart the commandment of the lord is pure and gives light to the eyes the fear of the lord is clean and endures forever the judgments of the lord are pure are true and righteous altogether more to be desired are they than gold more than much fine gold sweeter also than honey dripping from the honeycomb by them also is your servant taught and in keeping them there is great reward [Music] who can tell how often they offend oh cleanse me from my secret faults keep your servant also from presumptuous sins lest they get dominion over me so shall i be undefiled and innocent of great offence let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight o lord my strengths and my redeemer a song of creation which jesus would have known well but also a song of metaphor and allegory the way in which the law of the lord is likened to the brightness of the sun in creation and the glory of creation itself and the words used about that law and then at the same time the metaphors like sweeter than honey dripping from the honeycomb well the bees in our orchard in their hives will know that after these warm days and the flowering of the garden and so we give thanks for the way in which we can use metaphor but at the same time we give thanks for the psalmist's conviction that the voice of all creation and even voice is a human metaphor but the voice of all creation is crying out in praise to god by simply being itself in fruitful glory let's turn now to our reading from st matthew's gospel and it's a very short reading this morning it's the conclusion of chapter 13 of saint matthew's gospel and when jesus had finished these parables he went away from there and coming to his hometown he taught them in their synagogue so that they were astonished and said where did this man get this wisdom and these mighty works is not this the carpenter's son is not his mother called mary and are not his brothers james and joseph and simon and judas and are not all his sisters with us where then did this man get all these things and they took offense at him but jesus said to them a prophet is not without honor except in his hometown and in his own household and he did not do many mighty works there because of their unbelief jesus comes home to where he's known in a completely different way amongst the people that he's grown up with amongst the people who taught him and amongst the people who saw him working is not this the carpenter's son it's they're not saying joseph's son so we assume that joseph has passed on and the brothers are still there and the sisters and mary as mentioned is not his mother called mary so this sense of familiarity breeding contempt as the old proverb said who's this person to teach us when we taught him and jesus then quotes another proverb which was no doubt known to them a prophet is not without honor except in his own tone amongst his own people because their eyes at the moment can't look beyond what they had known and receive and accept and reception and accepting is all part of the ministry that jesus has your faith has made you well is the thing that he so often says or looking around at the people truly i've not seen someone of such faith even here in israel when he's speaking of the centurion who said i'm not worthy that you should come under my roof the respect and perception that people have is hindered by familiarity and the the expectation therefore grows small and we've just had uh in matins in the cathedral the first sorry the eucharist in the cathedral the mouse i celebrated just now um the first lesson was from the book of tobit and again a story that jesus would know well it was the coming home of tobias from his journey to ekbatana to collect money for his father who's become blind having obeyed the law and slept outside you remember the story when he had buried a dead body he couldn't go back into the house and droppings from sparrows had fallen into his eyes and blinded him and at the same time as uh as um tobias is is setting off for his journey remember the archangel raphael in the disguise of a companion goes with him all the way to guard him from the forces of evil and now he's coming home in the lesson that we read this morning and it was from chapter 11 and the first part of that up to verse 15 um and he's coming home with his new bride and raphael uh says to him still in the guide tabas has no idea who this person is and has no idea of the angelic presence says i think we should go on because you remember what state your father was in when we left why don't we go on ahead and your bride and all her friends and family can make their way and that won't be too much of a surprise to your mother and father and rather like the prodigal son anna is his mother is waiting and watching and looking down the road and sees them coming raphael and tobias and the dog we mustn't forget the dog who's a great character in the book of tobit and they go on and raphael says remember the ghoul that i told you to take from the fish have that with you it will be good medicine for your father anna runs to the door to meet them embraces her son and then calls her goes back in to call tobit the blind bit and uh tiger come this side baby come inside hey um calls tobit who stumbles out because he's blind and tobias rushes up to him to embrace him and as he does so he grips his father and smooths onto his eyes the medicine and suddenly tobit can see his son and there's a lovely play which happens in the english language between the word sun s-u-n the light that tobit is seeing and sun s-o-n the light of his life light has come to me because i see my son which is a wonderful image so he's coming home and lovely coming home images abound in the parables and in the scriptures which jesus would have known but at the same time there is this sense of those at home tending to see someone as they had before you are always your mother and father's son or daughter amongst your home people and the mutuality of respect has to be established but we give thanks for nazareth the little community which saw the hidden years of jesus and on this day we also give thanks for the holy family for we well know that mary and certainly james the uh eldest of the brothers uh become very very much there at the beginning of the acts of the apostles and they're listed mary the mother of jesus and his brothers with the apostles there is those who have realized the great gift that god has given them just as joseph's brothers as another story that jesus would have known well had to have their eyes opened to realize that all this was done for good for their good for the good of their home and people with joseph historic story and with jesus receiving the anointed one matthew it can this be the son of david is the question all the way through and people accepting that and say yes this is the one we're waiting for it's not surprising that nazareth was slow to realize that having had this little boy grow up amongst them but there are the brothers in the list at the beginning of the acts of the apostles of those who receive the gift of the spirit and james becomes the leader of the church in jerusalem we know that from saint paul's letters and simples conversations with him and james is chairing of the council of jerusalem when the message the of good news is sent to the gentiles and the ministry is opened up to the whole world in uh shall we call it a synodical decision at the council of jerusalem well on this day if we think of dates i want to think of someone who was intensely home loving and also deeply popular with his people as were his his his family in the sense of as they grew up they were the person will surprise you i think born on this day in 1738 it's king george iii who's had a mixed press throughout the world and it shows how politicians in seizing someone and cartoonists in seizing someone can create a picture of their own let's look at george the third and intensely devout man who spent time regularly at his prayers in the day and was the first of the hanoverian kings to be born in england to have english as his first language and at the time had no thought of succeeding george ii because he was his grandson not his son one of those who suddenly had greatness thrust upon them but let's look at the kind of character he was he was someone who loved gardens and agriculture he got the nickname and it was meant to be an insulting nickname father farmer george but the people seem to know the kind of monarch that they had and respected him partly because of his family like partly because of his ordinariness and yet constitutionally he's the one who set the current constitutional monarchy of this land in place he had many hard decisions to make but he never stepped either side of the constitutional line however much he loathed some of the politicians he was dealing with and also despised the life not only of his politicians sometimes but also of his own children and his own brothers george needed a wife the politicians decided when he first became king so unexpectedly because of the death of his his father before his grandfather george was someone they knew well his english is totally first language first of the three hanoverian kings to be like that but he was still the elector of hanover in the holy roman empire and when the empire was abolished by napoleon he became king of hanover he never went there but then george didn't travel much he wasn't one for traveling as far as we know he never really left the south of england in the whole of his life and it was a long reign from 1760 to 1820 but we think of him again because of the way he's been portrayed and correctly so at the end suffering with that terrible disease where in the end the regency act had to be passed and the prince regent took over because of the insanity of the of the king he'd had bouts of this before and his faithful politicians who were looking after his welfare must have despaired let's think about him though because across the atlantic at that time were the american colonies which he took a deep interest in and was completely opposed to so many of the things that his politicians were doing but he had established the constitutional principle that the monarch acted on the advice of his ministers so he had to find himself good ministers and it took a while before he found the youngest prime minister we've ever had william pitt but by then the government activity uh had has caused those in the in the uh united states as they now are to break away much to the sadness of king george because they were heart and soul rather like him developing the states in that way and he took a huge interest in the industrial revolution in the agrarian revolution and lived for most of his time at kew or windsor or bought buckingham house as a quiet retreat for the royal family well that's become buckingham palace and it's certainly not the quiet retreat of the royal family now but windsor very much still is and q is now the home of the royal botanical gardens as it was then and cue palace not used in that particular way but we think of him and let's remember that he became king i think at the age of 22 and sorry and the wife was found for him from mecklenburg australia's princess charlotte and he met her can you believe this he met her first on their wedding day and it turned out to be the happiest of marriages and uh just a few a couple of weeks later both of them were crowned in westminster abbey as king and queen of the united uh kingdom of of of uh scotland and england and wales but at that time ireland was a separate kingdom so until 1801 he ruled that separately with a different parliament and at the same time was as i say elector of hanover he had to look in different directions excuse me at that time he had to look across the atlantic and he had to look into europe because he was a european monarch in hanover and he had to look to the east where the east india company was fast developing its trade routes across there and his different sequence of politicians began to just almost bully him into either policies which helped the east but caused the americas to stray away because the policies were not good for them or else policies which uh helped in hanover or which way did george look and his principle you see this when in giving up all the crown lands and accepting a privy purse from parliament he placed himself in the hands of parliament for the good of the nation and at the same time tried to look after his own interests he was a great collector of books and a student in many ways and pitt the younger was someone to his taste but there was something around the corner that none of them expected and that was the long series of french revolutionary and napoleonic wars which would go through and once again and that there was a period of madness which has been um one of the should we say kindly caricatures of of george iii played by nigel hawthorne in the allen bennett nicholas hitner film which was so popular the madness of king george but at the same time pitch at the end of that gives thanks to god that that george the third recovers himself and king george and queen charlotte uh are remembered for that period at the beginning of the napoleonic wars when pitched up to 1805 when sadly pitt died he was the one who was advising the king and so we remember also that george was very keen to find the right ministers and he found the next prime minister that she could really trust in the son of one of his earlier advisers and that was the earl of liverpool and the earl of liverpool's son became lord liverpool one of the longest serving prime ministers all the way through uh in british history so from 1812 all the way through to 1827 lord liverpool whose name isn't really known held the ministry of all kinds of talents together safely through the battle of waterloo safely into the congress of vienna through the congress system of europe as nations met together dealing through skilled ministers by then the king was consigned to windsor but liverpool seem to know how to deal with the prince regent so let's go back to the sense of this age that george was reigning 1760 to 1820 the last 10 years are generally called regency when he was consigned but the georgian era is an era when we think in terms of art and thinking and architecture of of light our library here was re-shaped and reconfigured in the georgian period the windows were made massive to look out onto the sunrise here and the room itself shaped in a double cube because a library needed good proportion so it's twice as long as it is wide and high two cubes with light flooding in and that sunshine is something when we think of the the georgian era it was the music of haydn's creation that was causing london to to be wowed by an oratorio and it was the music of handel that was being heard at the coronations it's that kind of georgian aspect that king george and his wife queen charlotte who always spent their holidays at weymouth and began the the kind of holiday resort pattern and if you want to see a picture of that if you read thomas hardy's trumpet major remember reading it and the citizens of weymouth whom which he called badmouth are so glad to see and they're all nudging each other and saying there's king george and there's queen charlotte intensely popular and yet home life being put right into the center of the nation and that life was accepted and wonderful to the nation and the georgian area era speaks of all that so i want to give thanks for him because his own intentions and passions put aside the struggling with the doubts of the way his mind was failing him but at the same time his constant attention to prayer reading those psalms that we read reading the fact that the law of the lord is perfect and delights and then looking at country images all that it's lovely to think of king george and terrible to think of what political folk have done in caricaturing him and cartoonists have done and blaming him for things when at the same time he was creating a constitutional monarchy that would listen to the will of the people in elections in a very different kind of parliament in those days well i didn't want this only to be a history lesson i wanted to think of jesus coming home and having to deal with impressions rather than with reality and this is a day that we deal with impressions rather than reality it's the day when the dunkirk evacuation ended which was at that time let's admitted a huge defeat the whole british army stuck on the beaches having been defeated with the french army by the forces of nazism and then little boats going to bring them back home and at the same time that has always been perceived as the most amazing victory and if you look at lovely films like dunkirk which was two or three years ago done how there's no one real hero there and my mother and father would talk about dunkirk as though it was a great victory and in fact it was a victory snatched from the jaws not only of defeat but shambles but perception is everything and we want to just correct the perception of king george and queen charlotte at this time and think of the lovely georgian period which exalted in the light and put home at the center of the nation i perhaps should mention that the same kind of georgian flavor that wouldn't be called georgian over there um those of you who've been to either mount vernon or monticello the flavor of the way in which agrarian life and the way in which um both washington and jefferson were taking lessons from gardens and proportion all of that is very inherent in what we find at that time in american history too so although you won't be calling it georgian if you're watching from american then that proportion and that light and the care of home life and the care of creation was inherent in all of that and the the laws that they were trying to create go back to psalm 19 were based on that law and that proportion and order and sunlight light being let in onto everything these were the ideals and uh always they're challenged and changed by different centuries so let's give thanks for that late 18th century very early 19th century time so let's go now back to our prayers and we are thinking this morning of the diocese turn it over the diocese of north eastern caribbean and aruba in the church in the province of the west indies and also we're praying in this diocese not only for archbishop justin and bishop rose and bishop tim but for cint alfred sea salter in the whitstable team ministry sid alfied whitstable saint peter's whitstable all saints whitstable and st john's swellcliff they're all linked in ministry and the clergy there we pray for rachel webley paulette stubbings simon tillotson rob tagwell the readers denise blasket david wright jane edinburgh isabelle legg and their reader in training anne price all of that community which is so connected with us in our district that and so and and quite uh quite near us that uh if we want to go to see the sea we go to winstable so give thanks for all of that and we're going to say our prayers this morning uh going back to the the collect which of course is the colic from last sunday bring your own prayers and intentions as we pray this quality together almighty and everlasting god you have given us your servants grace by the confession of a true faith to acknowledge the glory of the eternal trinity and in the power of the divine majesty to worship the unity keep us steadfast in this faith that we may ever more be defended from all adversities through jesus christ our lord amen say we say each 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 [Music] 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 those whom you would pray for now and always are men [Music]