okay well it's it's warm enough for you here i'll give you some food no okay then perhaps you'll be a bit less a bit less playful here you are there you are how's that how's that all right good morning uh and welcome wherever you are in the world to the deanery orchard at canterbury cathedral as we meet to say our morning prayers on this tuesday the 7th of december the first day of sin ambrose of milan and we'll talk about him in our reflection and of course we continue to pray for those areas of the world suffering as we set out yesterday in so many different ways bring your own prayers and intentions and concerns as we say our morning prayers together o lord open our lips and our mouths shall proclaim your praise reveal among us the light of your presence that we may behold your power and glory blessed are you sovereign god of all to you be praise and glory forever in your tender compassion the dawn from on high is breaking upon us to dispel the lingering shadows of night as we look for your coming among us this day 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 o god set our hearts on fire with love for you now and forever amen our morning psalm on the seventh morning of the month is psalm 36 sin whispers to the wicked in the depths of their heart there is no fear of god before their eyes that their abominable sin will not be found out they i'm sorry they flatter themselves in their own eyes that their abominable sin will not be found out the words of their mouth are unrighteous and full of deceit they have ceased to act wisely and to do good they think how to mischief upon their beds and have set themselves in no good way nor do they abhor that which is evil your love o lord reaches to the heavens and your faithfulness to the clouds your righteousness stands like the strong mountains your justice is like the great deep you lord shall save both man and beast how precious is your loving mercy oh god all mortal flesh shall take refuge under the shadow of your wings they shall be satisfied with the abundance of your house they shall drink from the river of your delights for with you is the well of life and in your light shall we see light oh continue your loving kindness to those who know you and your righteousness to those who are true of heart let not the foot of pride come against me nor the hand of the ungodly thrust me away there are they fallen all who work wickedness they are cast down and shall not be able to stand it's a psalm using many natural images a psalm of mountains and clouds of height and of depth of the river of delights from which we may drink and the well of life for with you is the well of life and in your light shall we see light and then the lovely line you lord will save both humankind and creatures and that stretching of salvation across the whole natural world with this sun is an important feature as we sit here by the water and hear not the song of the thrush but to them i'm sure the most beautiful song of the guinea fowl and in the distance also the song of the magpie and those creatures birds and and all kinds of creatures in the waters and around us mentioned in this psalm well let's go to our lesson now which we are returning to the epistle to the hebrews and reading today from chapter 6 verse 13 and up till chapter 7 verse 10 for when god made a promise to abraham since he had no one greater by whom to swear god swore by himself saying surely i will bless you and multiply you and thus abraham having patiently waited obtained the promise for people swear by something greater than themselves and in all their disputes and oath is final for confirmation so when god desired to show more convincingly to the heirs of the promise the unchangeable character of his purpose he guaranteed it with an oath so that by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for god to lie we who have fled for refuge might have strong encouragement to hold fast to the hope set before us we have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain where jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf having become a high priest forever after the order of melchizedek for this melchizedek king of salem priest of the most high god met abraham returning from the battle of the kings and blessed him and to him abraham apportioned one tenth part of everything melchizedek is first by translation of his name king of righteousness and then he is also king of salem that is king of peace he is without father or mother or genealogy having neither beginning of days nor end of life but resembling the son of god he continues a priest forever see how great this man was to whom abraham the patriarch gave one tenth of the spoils and those descendants of levi who receive the priestly office have a commandment in the law to take tithes from the people that is from their brothers and sisters though these also are descended from abraham but this man melchizedek who does not have his dissent from them received his descent from them received tithes from abraham and blessed the one who had the promises it is beyond dispute that the inferior is blessed by the superior in the one case tithes are received by mortal men but in the other case by one of whom it is testified that he lives one might even say that levi himself who receives the tithes paid tithes through abraham for levi was still in the loins of his ancestor when melchizedek met abraham it's a complicated sort of lesson but it contains some amazing imagery which the writer to the epistle uses and at the same time goes back and roots his writing in the imagery of the book of genesis which we were studying earlier on this year i'll go back to those verses i'm in genesis chapter 14. this is before abram becomes abraham as a sign of god's promise but in chapter 14 and at verse 18 abraham is is returning from the battle of the kings victorious with the spoils and it simply says in verse 18 this is the only reference and melchizedek king of salem brought out bread and wine and he was priest of god most high and he blessed abraham and said blessed be abram by god most high possessor of heaven and earth and blessed be god most high who has delivered your enemies into your hand and abram gave him a tenth of everything that's it and as the uh writer of the hebrew says in the scriptures normally you get lists of genealogy of where people come from there is no provenance for melchizedek he's simply listed as king of salem and priests of god most high just that second half of the word jerusalem and connected of course with the word shalom or salam meaning peace and the writer to the hebrews says if you translate his name in the first place it is king of righteousness in the second place king of peace and he brings bread and wine and offers it to the patriarch when he blesses him and the patriarch abraham the un as paul says the ancestor of all those who have faith uh the patriarch in return gives to melchizedek the image of eternal priesthood without genealogy without any reference to where he's come from or reference to him thereafter gives to him one tenth of everything now we also remember that in psalm 110 there is that designation given to the anointed one of the royal line of david you are a priest forever after the order of melchizedek that's psalm 110 so two old testament references which the writer to the hebrews picks up as an image of eternal priesthood quite different from the human priests which those in jerusalem hankering after the past as we said to whom he is writing quite different from those but he uses imagery of christ passing through the veil as the one who opens the kingdom of heaven to us and of the promises given to us an anchor for ourselves what a wonderful image it's the first time we've had that image used that of an anchor which is giving us an absolute foundation even amid storms an anchor for our soul with those promises and as that promise is given so too there's the image of christ passing through the veil and that is likened to the way that the human high priest would go through the veil to the holy of holies to make reparation and offerings for the sins of the people but also for his own sins because the high priest that they are thinking of and all the priesthood of the aaronic line are simply human people and sinful people of flesh and blood as everyone is a sinner but at the same time now here is an image of one who lived a life without sin a human life without sin and through suffering passed through that veil and became like melchizedek priest of our god on our behalf and that word priest simply means making offerings for us in that infinite kingdom toward which the writer to the hebrews keeps reminding us we travel as wayfarers and pilgrims in this earthly life so much imagery but beautiful imagery and imagery is really like the parables of jesus pointing to things to help us visualize and understand and mix with our own experiences and we ourselves have our own images of how things go on we've seen how the psalms said psalm this morning psalm 36 full of imagery of the river of god's delights of the well of life from which we may participate in drinking and finding thirst not only for our bodies in in water but the living water when jesus speaks to the woman at the well of samaria here's the image of a well again with you is the well of life and in your light shall we see light all those images which jesus puts into the present tense in his i am statements in the gospel of saint john and this is referred to again and again by the writer to the hebrews in saying here is a better covenant for it's an eternal covenant and it is promised on oath by god himself who will not break his promise rich imagery but let's go to some of the things which today were caused to remember because of the date i started with ambrose of milan now ambrose began life in an important family in the roman empire he is thought to be born about the year 340 a.d but we know that he died on the 7th of december 397 and he was brought up in a very powerful family and became a roman governor in milan which at that time was the capital city it had moved from rome by decree of one of the emperors to milan at that time and he became a governor in milan and then when the bishop of milan died the people by acclamation said we want ambrose as our bishop ambro wasn't even baptized at the time but by popular acclamation ambrose sensed his vocation was baptized and ordained and consecrated and became their bishop and began to study to study and to reflect on that that studying which he did we were speaking i think yesterday about the importance of that training which goes on and that training ourselves in those things which we maybe are infants in when we were talking about being fed with milk in another uh reference by this writer to the hebrews saying you're not ready for solid food you're actually people in in certain areas that need to to begin again and have milk given to you rather like infants as you grow in the faith well ambrose was sure that he needed that he was a great scholar he became one of the great doctors of the church into not of medical healing but of learning and at the same time he was a great hymn writer and many of his hymns have been translated but the thing which he also gave us in the ambrosian chanting of the psalms is antiphonal singing which we still do that means that the verses move from one side of the choir to the other particularly in psalm singing backwards and forwards and that's how our anglican chance psalms are sung and the gregorian chants are psalms are sung by our choir the choir takes one verse on one side they all start together with the first two verses and then off they go with the verses one side and the other side one side then the other side it gives a short pause and a a brief respite and then it's taken up again and at the end gloria is sung by all and the next psalm the first two verses sung by everybody and then off we go again one side the other side one side the other side so that one can go on taking that respite with a breather in the middle while the other side sing and sometimes there's great competition between the two sides sometimes antiphonal singing happens in in anthems as well but mostly we're talking about the singing of the psalms but one of the great things that is attributed to ambrose so it's thought to have its roots before that is what in latin would have been said pronounced tay damn and in english here in the english church it was mostly called the tdm which was always sung at matins and people used to know it in parish churches when matins was the main choral service of the morning we would sing we praise thee oh god we acknowledge thee to be the lord all the earth does worship thee the father everlasting to the all angels cry aloud the heavens and all the powers they're in and so on and so on if you were brought up on that kind of matins coral matins and we still sing choral matins here with great tdms composed by people like stanford the one in b flat is a is sung by our whole king school on special occasions and once again it doesn't happen antiphonally but there are rests for the congregation when the choir sings some of the hard bits and then we all join in again tdm was the great thanksgiving of the church and it's a sort of sadness it is dropped out of use because oftentimes when something amazing had happened and people wanted to give thanks they would gather for the coral singing of a tdm quite often with orchestra and choirs and parts for them to sing or simply them to glory in as they listened it was the cornerstone of the church's thanksgiving and always in the old breviary it it was uh placed at the end of matins whenever gloria was to be sung at the mass that means on on sundays and feast days throughout the year tdm would be there and people would know it so we give thanks for ambrose in leading the church's thanksgiving through the centuries with his hymns and with his tdm now i want to come to someone else at this particular time and uh it's a bit chilly here isn't it for you leo this morning you want some more food are you okay um i want to come to somebody else and this is a novelist and she's an american novelist and she's written books her name is willa casa and willa cather was born on the 7th of december 1873 and i happened upon her novels by chance i've got the novel that i like best of hers in my hand and i'll mention that in a moment but some of you will have read her novels and i remember reading the professor's house and one of ours which is a first world war novel but most of her novels take place in the united states she her family moved to nebraska and her stories are stories of the the planes there but the one that i got in my hand is a novel called death comes for the archbishop it sounds a grim book but it's not it's actually a really wonderful set of images and stories of priestly ministry and it's set in new mexico at a time when the church the catholic church was attempting to establish again christian missions there and it begins in rome with cardinals talking together about whom they should send as the first vicar apostolic and the first would-be bishop of that area and they send their best person and so after the prelude we have these passages and i'm going to read a little bit now i've seen this is reading from willa cather's book death comes to the archbishop one afternoon in the autumn of 1851 a solitary horseman followed by a pack mule was pushing through an arid stretch of country somewhere in central new mexico he had lost his way and was trying to get back to the trail with only his compass and his sense of direction for guides the difficulty was that the country in which he found himself was so featureless or rather that it was crowded with features all exactly alike as far as he could see on every side the landscape was heaped up into monotonous red sand hills not much larger than haycocks and very much the shape of haycocks one could not have believed that in the number of square miles a man is able to sweep with the eye there could be so many uniform red hills he had been riding among them since early morning and the look of the country had no more change than if he had stood still the blunted pyramids repeated so many hundred times upon his retina and crowding down upon him in the heat had confused him the traveler was sensitive to the shape of things may say fantastique he muttered closing his eyes to rest them from the intrusive omnipresence of the triangle when he opened his eyes again his glance immediately fell upon one juniper which differed in shape from the others it was not a thick growing cone but a naked twisted trunk perhaps ten feet high and at the top it parted into two lateral flat lying branches with a little crest of green in the center just above the cleavage living vetted vegetation could not present more faithfully the form of the cross the traveler dismounted drew from his pocket a much worn book and bearing his head knelt at the foot of the cruciform tree under his buckskin riding coat he wore a black vest and cravat and collar of a churchman a young priest at his devotions and a priest in a thousand one new at a glance he bow his bowed head was not that of an ordinary man it was built for the seat of a fine intelligence his brow was open generous reflective his features handsome and somewhat severe there was a singular elegance about the hands below the fringe cuff of the buckskin jacket everything showed him to be a man of gentle birth brave sensitive courteous his manners even when he was alone in the desert were distinguished he had a kind of courtesy towards himself towards his animals toward the juniper tree before which he knelt and above all the god whom he was addressing his devotions from his breviary lasted perhaps half an hour and when he rose he looked refreshed he began talking to his mayor in halting spanish asking whether she agreed with him that it would be better to push on warior she was in hope of finding the trail he had no water left in his canteen the horses had had none since yesterday morning they had made a dry camp in these hills last night the animals were almost at the end of their endurance but they would not recuperate until they got water and it seemed best to spend their last strength in searching for it and then as he goes on things get worse and worse until we get to the moment when with all the uh the canteen empty and no water whatsoever he's growing fainter and fainter and at that moment we go on all at once father la tour thought she felt a change in the body of his horse she lifted her head for the first time in a long while and seemed to redistribute her weight upon her legs the pack mule behaved in a similar manner and both quicken their pace was it possible they scented water nearly an hour went by and then winding between two hills that were like all the hundreds they had passed the two beasts winning simultaneously below them in the midst of that wavy ocean of sand was a green thread of virgil and a running stream this ribbon in the desert seemed no wider than a man could throw a stone and it was greener than anything latour had ever seen even in his own greenest corner of the old world but for the quivering of the hide on his mayor's neck and shoulders he might have thought this a vision a delusion of thirst running water cloverfields cottonwoods acacia little adobe houses with brilliant gardens a boy driving a flock of white goats toward the stream that was what the young bishop saw and he finds that the place is called agua segreta secret water it's a wonderful passage but it's the first of many as his ministry and later joined by a faithful friend another priest and they begin to build up a ministry with the families there and find that at aguas the greater there are the remains of a catholic community amongst the people from long long ago it's really a wonderful book and right to the end which marks the moment of our young priest archbishop jean-marie latour entering into glory it holds you and gives you images on a day when we're thinking of christ's high priesthood and the living water of delight of the river of your delights in psalm 36 and the the well of life all of those things but notice it's the creatures who suddenly sent the water and uh take father latour to the safety of that place well willa cather writes well and i enjoy her books so you may know her already or you may like to find death comes for the archbishop because it's well in print and lastly on this day this was the day in the in december 7th of december 1863 when the composer pietro masganyi was born who at the age of 27 on may the 17th in 1890 composed a short off sorry conducted the premiere of a short opera he had written which had won a prize amongst many operas being written it was called cavaliera rasticana rustic chivalry and he conducted the two short acts with the intermezzo in between and at the ovation at the end it was a sign that this had already won all hearts you may know it well it was only two years before it was being performed at the royal opera house in the metropolitan opera in new york it was performed in milan at la scala and now very often is performed as a double bill with pagliacci not written by him but in cavalier arasticana the young man pietro maskandi had found his vocation and in finding that vocation it meant that the intermezzo which is played so often and you will know it very well the intermezzo but then also the easter hymn which in english translate rejoice for the lord has risen we've often had it sung here with a a soprano singing uh uh the the the part of the choir backing her on easter afternoon after all the music of passion tide and holy week and all the eucharistic music in on easter morning and the tdm sang it asang matins but in the afternoon this sometimes with an orchestral backing is a wonderful thing to sing him and and we remember pietro mascany at the age of what was he at that time 27 and he never had a success like that again but that success is still there sometimes people find their vocation in one moment and give us a chance to drink at the river of musical delights and be inspired with that easter hymn or the tranquil beauty of the intermezzo from uh the cavaliera rusticana rustic chivalry it means and one thinks of the courtesy and hospitality with that little beleaguered uh christian community in new mexico who give hospitality to the thirsty priests and most of all to the creatures who've helped him find the way there well let's then uh let's then uh say our prayers for this day and let's see whom we're praying for in the anglican communion the seventh we're praying for the diocese of ijebu in the church of nigeria in the lagos province and we are praying in this diocese for the parish of sin leonard's deal with sin richard sheldon and saint nicholas with great manju saint martin and uh always when we pray for saint martin the great mundane we remember our friends freddie and amelia arvidsson freddie used to be the champion here at the king school and uh is now living with his wife emilia in great mountain so and is a member of our garden congregation so we ask god's blessing on all of them and the the priests there monica cameron and uh patrick kavanagh and his ministry with her so let's say our prayers on this day with our memories for archbishop justin for bishop rose of dover and bishop emma at lambeth and we use first the colleague for sin ambrose day and then after that the advent collect god of hosts who called ambrose from the governor's throne to be a bishop in your church and an intrepid champion of your faithful people mercifully grant that as he did not fear to rebuke rulers so we with like courage may contend for the faith we have received through jesus christ our lord our men and together the advent collect almighty god give us grace to cast away the works of darkness and to put on the armor of light now in the time of this mortal life in which your son jesus christ came to us in great humidity that on the last day when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge the living and the dead we may rise to the life immortal through him who is alive and reigns with you in the unity of the holy spirit one god now and forever amen so let's each in our own language say 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 reflection now on this advent day [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] today [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] is [Music] oh [Music] oh [Music] oh [Music] [Music] is [Music] [Music] oh oh [Applause] [Music] uh [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] uh [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] christ the son of righteousness shine upon you scatter the darkness from before your path and make you ready to meet him when he comes in glory and the blessing of god almighty the father the son and the holy spirit be upon you from those whom you love and those whom you would pray for today and always are men well leo you went for a little drink in the stream and we're waiting for the arrival of storm barra today so the tranquility we see at the moment won't be here for long and we'll go inside and find some warmth and shelter shall we [Music] you