good morning and welcome to the dinery garden at canterbury cathedral on this morning of friday the 29th of april as we gather to say our morning prayers welcome wherever you are in the world we of course begin with our constant prayer for ukraine for his citizens still so many of them in danger of war and also those who have left members of their families and their homes behind to seek shelter in other places and are being given hospitality elsewhere we pray for all world leaders and the decisions that they have to make sometimes hard for their own nations as well in terms of resources to try to restore justice and peace to that nation at the same time this is a a forest friday we've come here to the the normal area that we come to on friday mornings but it is also the feast of saint catherine of siena the 29th of april she died on this day in 1380 a 14th century saint having been a dominican oblate from against her family's will from her 18th birthday but what this day reminds me of the 29th of april is the bishop of london at that time bishop richard charters standing in the pulpit of westminster abbey and being broadcast to millions across the world on television beginning his sermon with not with any words but a quote from sin catherine of siena be who god meant you to be and you'll set the world on fire well you'll remember that in 2011 this was the day when he was preaching at the wedding of prince william and another catherine be who god meant you to be and you will set the world on fire so said saint catherine of siena whose festival day it is today marriage is intended to be a way in which man and woman help each other to become what god meant each one to be their deepest and their truest selves many people are fearful of the prospects for our world but the message of the celebrations in this country and far beyond its shores is the right one this is a joyful day it is good that people in every continent are able to share in these celebrations because this is as every wedding day should be a day of hope in a sense every wedding is a royal wedding with the bride and the groom as king and queen of creation making a new life together so that life can flow through them into the future william and catherine you have chosen to be married in the sight of a generous god who so loved the world that he gave himself to us in the person of jesus christ and in the spirit of this generous god husband and wife are to give themselves to each other and spiritual life grows as love finds its center beyond ourselves faithful and committed relationships offer a door into the mystery of spiritual life in which we discover this the more we give of self the richer we become in soul the more we go beyond ourselves in love the more we become our true selves and our spiritual beauty is more fully revealed in marriage we are seeking to bring one another into fuller life it is of course very hard to wean ourselves away from self-centeredness and people can dream of doing such a thing but the hope should be fulfilled it is necessary that a solemn decision is made but whatever the difficulties we are committed to the way of generous love you have both made your decision today i will and by making this new relationship you've aligned yourselves with what we believe is the way in which life is spiritually evolving and which will lead to a creative future for the human race we stand looking forward to a century which is full of promise and full of peril human beings are confronting the question of how to use wisely the power that has been given to us through the discoveries of the last century we shall not be converted to the promise of the future by more knowledge but rather by an increase of loving wisdom and reverence for life for the earth and for one another marriage should transform as husband and wife make one another their work of art it is possible to transform so long as we don't harbor ambitions to reform our partners there must be no coercion if the spirit is to flow each must give the other space and freedom chaucer the london poet sums it up in a pithy phrase when mastery cometh the god of love anon beateth his wings and farewell he is gone as the reality of god has faded from so many lives in the west there's been a corresponding inflation of expectations that personal relations alone will supply meaning and happiness in life this is to load our partner with too great a burden we're all incomplete we all need the love which is secure rather than oppressive we need mutual forgiveness in order to thrive but as we move towards our partner in love following the example of jesus christ the holy spirit is quickened within us and can increasingly fill our lives with light this leads on to a family life which offers the best conditions in which the next generation can receive and exchange those gifts which can overcome fear and division and incubate the coming world of the spirit whose fruits are love and joy and peace i pray that all of us present and the many millions watching this ceremony and sharing in your joy today will do everything in our power to support and uphold you in your new life and i pray that god will bless you in the way of life that you have chosen that way which is expressed in the prayer that you have composed together in preparation for this day god our father we thank you for our families for the love that we share and for the joy of our marriage in the busyness of each day keep our eyes fixed on what is real and important in life and help us to be generous with our time and love and energy strengthened by our union help us to serve and comfort those who suffer we ask this in the spirit of jesus christ and we all say amen and we pray for them today on their wedding anniversary but i take comfort once again and inspiration from that quote that the bishop gave us be who god meant you to be and you'll set the world on fire it's a good beginning so let's begin our prayers on this particular day of the year the 29th of april oh lord open our lips and our mouth shall proclaim your praise in your resurrection o christ let heaven and earth rejoice alleluia 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 first fruits 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 is past 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 o god set our hearts on fire with love for you now and forever amen well it's forest friday and we've come into this area in front of the deanery with the trees overarching us not too thickly leaved yet so light is still coming through from a cloudy blue sky but below there's a sure sign of what the seasons have done this year there's a sign behind me of the appalling hurricane that we had hurricane for england in england's terms not those that really get hurricanes but certain damage was done as to the cathedral itself but also to this poor metal tree behind and the gardeners have now pruned back and then shorn it up and we're hoping it will come to new life so many of these areas have been pruned back like the vine we saw yesterday unnecessary pruning so things can sprout and flower again but on the on the ground underneath the trees there is a sign of how warm it was for a while in spring with the daffodils and tulips springing up and now over but then now a pause because the weather is now much colder and we've gone back into a colder spell it's not deterred some of the little flowers from beginning to bloom we have an immense amount of the the wood anemones in both blue and in white canterbury colors and at the same time we have blue bells beginning to come around us now this is an area i'm going to do i think what i've done sometimes in years gone by um this is an area where we like to uh encourage english bluebells which are a bit later than the spanish ones which you've seen many of down in our woodland days on wednesdays here's a spanish bluebell and you can see its shape it has no scent and the flowers are the the stem grows straight up and the flowers are open and they're a beautiful blue and here beside it very different is an english bluebell with its elegant bowed head and its bells hanging long and downwards a deeper blue and it's scented this is the one which carpets the woodlands and fills them with the scent of bluebells carpets or bluebells and this is the one which decorates our gardens but is a bit intrusive and seems to get into all kinds of places where we don't want it to go so there's a little bunch of these growing up at my feet here i'll forgive them for now because they are beautiful in their own right but the elegance of the english bluebell with its graceful stooping and the bells hanging down and its lovely scent is second to none in english woodlands and the carpets of them across the woodland is always a wonderful thing to wait for in spring well there are many many more coming up but i can see patches of them around the garden here already and we'll take good care of these and place them in some water in the house afterwards to enrich our day the psalm this morning that i'm going to use is psalm 179 and this is a psalm for the 29th morning of the month oh lord you have searched me out and known me you know my sitting down and my rising up you discern my thoughts from afar you mark out my journeys and my resting place and are acquainted with all my ways for there is not a word on my tongue but you o lord know it all together you encompass me behind and before and lay your hand upon me such knowledge is too wonderful for me so high that i cannot attain it where can i go then from your spirit or where can i flee from your presence if i climb up to heaven you are there if i go down into hell you are there also if i take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea even there your hand shall lead me your right hand held me fast if i say per adventure the darkness will cover me and the light around me turn to night even darkness is no darkness with you the night is as clear as the day darkness and light to you are both alike for you yourself created my inmost parts you knit me together in my mother's womb i thank you for i am fearfully and wonderfully made marvelous are your works my soul knows well my frame was not hidden from you when i was made in secret and woven in the depths of the earth your eyes beheld my form as yet unfinished already in your book were all my members written as day by day they were fashioned when as yet there was none of them how deep are your counsels to me oh god how great is the sum of them if i count them they are more in number than the sand and at the end i am still in your presence search me out o god and know my heart try me and examine my thoughts see if there is any way of wickedness in me and lead me in the way everlasting well could any psalm go better with saint catherine of siena's great quote be who god meant you to be and you'll set the world on fire it's a psalm of god from the instant of our conception knowing us absolutely inside out and being there whatever situation we are in and we as we now read in the gospel of saint john are conscious that in the word made flesh he also shared our human life in all its limitations so let's go to the passage which is here for us today it's in john chapter 15 starting at verse 18 and i'm going to chapter 16 verse 4 this is still jesus talking to the 11 disciples as they make their way to the garden of gethsemane and perhaps pause for this in the temple courtyard if the world hates you know that it has hated me before it hated you if you were of the world the world would love you as its own but because you are not of the world but i chose you out of the world therefore the world hates you remember the word that i said to you a servant is not greater than his master if they persecuted me they will also persecute you if they kept my word they will also keep yours but all these things they will do to you on account of my name because they do not know him who sent me if i had not come and spoken to them they would not have been guilty of sin but now they have no excuse for their sin for whoever hates me hates my father also if i had not done among them the works that no one else did they would not be guilty of sin but now they have seen and hated both me and my father but the word that is written in their law must be fulfilled they hated me without a cause but when the helper comes whom i will send you from the father the spirit of truth who proceeds from the father he will bear witness about me and you also will bear witness because you have been with me from the beginning i have said all these things to you to keep you from falling away they will put you out of the synagogues indeed the hour is coming when whoever kills you will think they're offering service to god and they will do these things because they have not known the father nor me but i have said these things to you that when their hour comes you may remember that i told them to you well many things we can think about that particular passage of jesus to those whom he's calling his friends and as we think about them we come to the great dichotomy as as jesus sets it out between the world now that's not meaning the earth it's not the greek word for the earth and all that god has created is meaning the word is cosmos but it's meaning that which is the world's agenda the way in which uh everything is seen as utterly important to world society or world business or world whatever it's that world we're talking about where the agenda can be quite quite different from god's own agenda and also if someone stands against it that agenda then they risk both hate and controversy and violence and death speaking against the agenda of the powerful and i don't mean powerful necessarily in charge of nations i mean powerful sometimes in little areas of human life even family life or powerful in uh community life and and and small enterprises getting the priorities wrong this is what this is all about but jesus actually says to those 11 round the table but you have been with me from the beginning and yesterday we saw how he called them friends not servants any longer he's intending to hand this on to them and he's not leaving them without help he speaks again and again of the here's the greek word parakletos sometimes it's said in english as we said yesterday the paraclete but it can mean so many different things it can mean the one who consoles and comforts and encourages it can mean the one that counsels and gives wise advice it can mean the one who is the advocate and that advocate can sometimes be heard in the words spoken as jesus says it won't be you that is speaking before the synagogues it will be the spirit within you when you are being attacked it is the spirit within you that you rely on to say those words and all of those things are given in this particular way to those who were eyewitnesses from the beginning what a vocation it's something that the apostle paul never had it's certainly something that we have never had eyewitnesses from the beginning to the physicality of jesus the the true eyewitness of course from the very beginning is the mother of jesus you know me from my mother's womb says the psalmist and were present and we're talking once again about the creator spirit you present as i was formed when my my members my body members were not yet known but that presence of god and the gift of the spirit of truth there's the word the spirit of truth that too is another label a word for the paraclete the gift that is to be given and jesus is not going to leave them without that gift but it's a gift that must be received through faith and then used and we shall see in the gospel and also in st luke sacks of the apostle luke himself was not an eyewitness there from the beginning he joined the early church quite late on as far as the apostles are concerned but here we're being shown how the gift of god is given to the eleven and then they in turn will know later how to use it but let's look also at the fact that here is one of those sentences where we're being told by jesus that he or that the 11 are being told that i have said these things to you that when that hour comes you remember he's saying i don't expect you to remember all this now and much of this teaching probably was given to them quite a few times but i don't know i expect you to remember or understand it now but when the time comes and that time can come when you hear any kind of teaching or peer jesus speaking in this way or find yourself vilified and hated because the world's agenda is against you all kinds of things that we have heard and stored away the human memory and the spiritual memory can suddenly leap out and say ah i now realize what that meant for me it's the way a vocation develops and every one of us has to be the person that god means us to be so that often we have to wait on our journey through life to see how that jigsaw piece which is you and me is actually fitting in to the pattern that john that god is wanting us to create of our lives each one utterly distinct from every other human being who's ever been created and the paraclete to use the the greek word in english is the one who will help us interpret express perform those works which will as jesus says be greater works than ever he has managed to do because he's widening this out to the whole of humanity and to the whole of time ahead and giving a gift which goes outside time in spiritual terms but it's being received by those who are eyewitnesses from the beginning and we receive their testimony and it's testimony that they've remembered as they've gone through terrible times in the life of the early church i just want to use one date today well we've used another of course we use these the the wedding of prince william and catherine in the quote of bishop richard but on the 29th of april 1957 the actor daniel day lewis was born it's his 65th birthday so happy birthday to him he was absolutely sure it seems to me of his vocation to be an actor from the very beginning he was the son of the the poet laureate cecil day lewis but he himself was wanting to act and he went to the bristol old vic theatre school no finer place for learning acting and i remember how i saw so many productions from from that in the theatre royal the old theatre royal in bristol and uh enjoyed it my sister used to take me to things to see it the bristol old vic theater and then after that he became much better known in films he did theater he did television he did films and it's films that he settled on i first was aware of him in 1982 i looked at that date this morning because he made a film on jennifer johnston's uh novel which is set in ireland and at the time of the first world war and it's the story of two young men of very different social backgrounds both very interested in horses and actually becoming friends in ireland and one of them is played by daniel day lewis that the novel is called how many miles to babylon it's a short novel it's a lovely novel it's not got a happy end but it is very very well written and i wouldn't be without it on my shelves the actual television program it's hard to find now but 1982 was the early days of being able to video things and quite by chance i was director of tisbury the time quite by chance i videoed this because the bbc had made a a a an announcement about it and i found it really compelling viewing and it tells the story of how a a young man a sensitive and shy young man of aristocratic family in ireland at the time the relationship between him and his mother and his father how he gets caught up in the hostility between the two his mother a great pianist bored stiff in the country house there the father absolutely loving the countryside of ireland and looking after his estate properly and alexander who has no friends but makes friends with one of the village boys and then goes on as they grow up to explore the horses together and all of this i won't give the story away but it caused me to notice um daniel day-lewis and he is known for always entering into a part he he quite often he's five years between films that he makes but whenever he chooses a part he will enter right into it as far as he possibly can and that the the list of his films are is immense but each one he became that person even to eating a prison diet or when he was playing someone in in my left foot who had to be carried around but could only be creative with the dexterity of the left foot because of cerebral palsy he stayed in the wheelchair and even got the the the um people who were filming to lift him around and also to feed him um and that because he wanted to see how it felt and how he was treated that that's part of the way it went on he he stopped plays having been in uh as romeo in romeo and juliet with the national shakespeares he had all of that but when he played hamlet he suddenly found himself having entered into the role so utterly found himself faced with the ghost of his father on the stage as hamlet's father came in and he describes that experience now as as something is hard to explain but he suddenly went into uncontrollable sobbing and had to stop the play at this time and his place was then taken by an understudy and he never never went into theater again it was too heartbreaking that experience extreme experience but at the same time each film that he plays in he does the same very private person we're told and has left england and london because he found that public notice in the press was too intrusive and he wanted a family life so he's a dual citizen of ireland and of england but if i read some of the films he was in and he's the only actor to have achieved an academy award for best actor three times my beautiful laundrette 1985 a room with a view the enforcer novel 1986 the unbearable likeness of being 1988 took eight months to film and he refused to break character at all in the middle of that he even learned czech during those eight months my left foot for which he won an oscar 89 playing jim sheridan the last of the americans 92 93 in the name of the father 93 the age of innocence the needed wharton novel 97 a boxer and then he retired from acting and went off and apprenticed himself to a shoemaker in italy so he could do things with his hands and live a completely different life but came back in 2002 gangs of new york 2007 there will be blood another oscar 2012 lincoln with steven spielberg another oscar and in 2017 phantom thread and then he declared that's that and he has retired now from filmmaking and everything and gone to lead a much quieter life in ireland and sometimes in the united states but he was knighted in 2014 and we remember him today because he could enter into that vocation which was his even to the pain of those he was representing and he wanted to be there absolutely in the middle of all of that so we give thanks for such devotion to what he knew he was meant to be and hear said catherine be who god meant you to be and you will set the world on fire so i give thanks for his long career and also for that very early sight of him in uh how many miles to babylon all those years ago let's then say our prayers on this day when we're thinking very much of who god might mean us to be in our individual vocation we are praying today for in the anglican communion the diocese on the lake in the church of nigeria the awarie province and for justin our archbishop and for rose bishop of dover for emma bishop at lambeth and today in the sitting borne area again we're praying for deanery fresh expressions and missional learning communities so let's say the prayer for today and then uh the our father together in whatever language we like to use almighty father you have given your only son to die for our sins and to rise again for our justification grant us so to put away the malice of leaven and the leaven of malice and wickedness that we may always serve you in pureness of living and truth through the merits of your son jesus christ our lord amen so be our father in whatever way you like to say it 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 now of reflection on this day when we are thinking so much of what god meant us to be [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Applause] foreign [Music] so the god of peace who brought again from the dead our lord jesus that 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 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 well let's look at a riddle it's a friday morning so i'm going off in a moment to chair the chapter but we will look at our riddles first and uh first of all i am a seed with three letters in my name take away the last two and i still sound the same and the answer is a p and i am a word i become longer when the third letter is removed and the answer is a lounger because you is taken out and the word becomes longer i have no eyes and no legs i have no ears and i am strong enough to move the earth what am i and then i only point in one direction but i guide people around the world what am i and lastly an ethos fable back into classical times yesterday the last one we did uh let's get to it was the old lion and the fox today we just do one the monkey as king at a gathering of all the animals the monkey danced and delighted them so much that they made him their king the fox however was very much disgusted at the promotion of the monkey so having one day found a trap with a piece of meat in it he took the monkey there and said to him here is a dainty morsel i have found sire i did not take it myself because i thought it ought to be reserved for you our king will you be pleased to accept it the monkey went at once for the meat and got caught in the trap then he bitterly reproached the fox for leading him into danger but the fox only laughed and said oh monkey you call yourself king of the beasts and haven't more sense than to be taken in like that and then the moral a position earned without merit is as easily lost as it was gained so the sun's coming out on me but i must go and seat myself at chapter and leo can go and have his breakfast or you've been rather a long way off today so i couldn't give you a scratch so here we are now and we'll go in together hope you all have a good day thanks you