good morning and welcome to the dinery garden at canterbury cathedral on this morning of friday the 12th of november as we gather to say our morning prayers we welcome you wherever you are in the world as we begin our prayers we're remembering that today is the last day of an agenda and decision making for those gathered at the glasgow conference which we've been following day by day thematically and we're going to just drop back a couple of days because when we were dealing with carbon emissions we didn't deal with carbon emissions on the seas and so we're thinking today of the great oceans and seas of the world and we're using images which are tiny to represent images which are absolutely vast in our planet and we've borrowed from the bathroom uh three people who are more used to the warm bath waters rather than uh this cold air of the wind across the bastion garden this morning on the one side we've got uh peppa pig and grandpa pig representing cruise liners and on the other side igglepiggle representing any kind of cargo ship particularly the massive container ships although she is carrying a cargo of stars and flowers but think of those tiny things and as the images stay in your mind then let them go big as we think of all the transport necessary transport across the oceans to provide people not only with the necessary resources for for day by day but also to carry them in great numbers across the seas let's then begin our prayers on this particular morning as we sit in this windy bastion garden because we're beginning to expect the the end part of a hurricane to hit these islands but i don't think that it will come very much here we think of those farther north who will be getting much rain across the weekend oh lord open our lips and our mouths shall proclaim your praise send your holy spirit upon us and clothe us with power from on high blessed are you creator god to you be praise and glory forever as your spirit moved over the face of the waters bringing light and life to your creation pour out your spirit on us this day that we may walk as children of light and by your grace reveal your presence 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 and as 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 twelfth morning of the months is psalm 62 on god alone my soul in stillness waits from him comes my salvation he alone is my rock and my salvation my stronghold so that i shall never be shaken how long will all of you assail me to destroy me as you would a tottering wall or a leaning fence they plot only to thrust me down from my place of honor lies are their chief delight they bless with their mouth but in their hearts they curse wait on god alone in stillness o my soul for in him is my hope he alone is my rock and my salvation my strongholds say that i shall not be shaken in god is my strength and my glory god is my strong rock in him is my refuge put your trust in him always my people pour out your hearts before him for god is our refuge the peoples are but a breath the whole human race a deceit on the scales they are altogether lighter than air put no trust in oppression in robbery take no empty pride their wealth increase set not your heart upon it god spoke once and twice have i heard the same that power belongs to god steadfast love belongs to you o lord for you repay everyone according to their deeds so we turn to the book of exodus to begin where we left off yesterday i'm starting with chapter 18 and in chapter 18 one of the most popular characters in my mind of the old testament who is pretty well unknown leo do you want some food for you cleo come on um jethro appears moses father-in-law and he is appearing today he makes a short appearance but you'll see why he's a favorite character of mine jethro the priest of midian moses father-in-law heard of all that god had done for moses and for israel his people how the lord had brought israel out of egypt now jethro moses father-in-law had taken zipporah moses wife after he had sent her home along with her two sons the name of one of the sons gershom for he said i have been a sojourner in a foreign land and the name of the other eliezer for he said the god of my father was my help and delivered me from the sword of pharaoh jethro moses father-in-law came with his sons and his wife to moses in the wilderness where he was encamped at the mountain of god and when he sent word to moses i your father-in-law i'm coming to you with your wife and her two sons with her moses went out to meet his father-in-law and bowed down and kissed him and they asked each other of their welfare and went into the tent then moses told his father-in-law all that the lord had done to pharaoh and to the egyptians for israel's sake all the hardship that had come upon them in the way and how the lord had delivered them and jethro rejoiced for all the good that the lord had done to israel in that he had delivered them out of the hand of the egyptians jethro said blessed be the lord who has delivered you out of the hand of the egyptians and out of the hand of pharaoh and has delivered the people from under the hand of the egyptians now i know that the lord is greater than all gods because in this affair they dealt arrogantly with the people and jethro knows his father-in-law brought a burnt offering and sacrifices to god and aaron came with all the elders of israel to eat bread with moses father-in-law before god let's stop there we'll go on again tomorrow because jestro has a more important work to do yet but he always strikes me when he enters is someone who who has come to give encouragement now if you don't know after that lesson that jethro is moses father-in-law then i can't say it too many times again because the lesson keeps making clear that here is a reuniting of families in a physical way in a very different place but the last time we saw jethro was when moses was keeping the flock of jethro who is a shepherd priest of midian a kenait and he is moses is is thinking of himself in a foreign land and he has married jethro's daughter zipporah and had two sons uh gashome and eliasa which which have those names as we saw in the second chapter i think of the book of exodus have meaning for moses in terms of what has happened to him names often have meaning but here is jethro who when moses left to do this very dangerous thing in his vocation he took thought for his family and sent his wife and the two sons to jestro and said clearly look after them my father-in-law look after them now jethro is quite an adventurer he takes him he the the his daughter-in-law i'm sorry sorry his daughter back to her husband and he takes the two boys as well and they travel not a comfortable journey at all through the wilderness to find moses and the children of israel and chapter 18 shows that journey it's a journey that the old man which he must be by now is clear he must make and must carry with him uh his daughter and the two boys to go to moses and when he comes or when moses hears that his father-in-law is coming with zipper and the boys moses leaves to meet him and there is this touching and affectionate meeting the meeting with zipporah and garcia man eliezer is not itself described but the meeting with jethro is and is a meeting both of affection and intense respect they they kiss one another and tiger you are come on um they kiss one another and greet one another with intense respect and then moses takes his father-in-law after those initial greetings into his tent and they sit and talk and what does moses do he tells the story of the hardship of all that's gone on now yesterday we were looking at moses being completely worn out by all the demands being placed on him massively worn out by all those demands placed on him and in that way it's difficult to know what was going to happen to restore his strength we saw him sitting on the stone with aaron and her lifting up his arms we'd seen him with the people angry against him at the rock when he had to strike the rock with the waters they'd seen him with the people angry against him because there was no food in the wilderness and we'd seen him with his physical resources and his mental resources and his spiritual resources all in danger of running completely dry and what happens now this is this is really lovely jethro his father-in-law arrives and first of all there's the family reunion which clearly makes a wonderful difference to moses but there's also and we'll deal with this today and tomorrow the presence of jethro himself the shepherd priest of midian who now goes with his son-in-law into the tent to converse and no doubt to share refreshment but to hear the full story of everything and that will be the story of moses himself and how he is feeling for he has a wise intuitive man his father-in-law who's come to to just see how his son-in-law is in all this as well as to bring his son-in-law's wife just his own daughter and the two boys and they begin to talk and moses expresses all the danger all the hardships and at the end this is why i like him so much jethro gives thanks for all that the lord has done for them in releasing them from slavery and for the danger that they had there he's almost saying everything you've done is right and i see that and the people have reason to be full of gratitude to their god and also to you for the job that you're doing it's a wonderful ministry of encouragement from his father-in-law let's give thanks for this says jestro and at the same time he wants to do much more he says now i know by all these signs that your god is above all gods and i too want to worship him and now he brings choice offerings to worship god with moses there in the desert this too is giving encouragement and thanksgiving and a sacrifice of thanksgiving as as well as a real sacrifice going on here in the desert and then what happens next well aaron and the elders are brought into the tent to eat with moses and eat with jethro either into the tent or outside it we don't know how big the tent was but certainly those last sentences are sentences of huge encouragement let's read them again jethro said blessed be the lord who has delivered you out of the hand of the egyptians out of the hand of pharaoh had delivered the people from under the hand of the egyptians now i know that the lord is greater than all gods this is the priest of midian because in this affair they dealt arrogantly with the people the egyptians and jethro moses father-in-law brought a burnt offering and choice sacrifices to god and aaron came with all the elders of israel to eat bread with moses father-in-law before god thanks be to god for jethro but thanks be to god also for that wonderful ministry of encouragement there's more to come tomorrow an enormous amount more to come tomorrow but at the same time we've got today enough ministry of encouragement and enough ministry of uh of of thanksgiving so we want something for tiger to eat also to have a ministry of thanksgiving and i'm looking in vain here we are tiger come on let's come and eat something here come on baby come on tiger come on there we are good boy i think also probably it's time to put in some food for the great whales we shall be talking about in a moment in the water because this pond believe it or not has a multitude of little fish in it too the ponds are beginning to get filled with leaves as they fall down into the waters which is a wonderful thing because they then decompose and as they decompose they fall through the waters enriching them with food for the fish but also making a bed where the fish can go deep in winter weather and be safe below the waters and as that's happening uh everything begins to be enriched by the falling of the leaves and so when we're there that possibly is what tiger might need as well um uh when we're there uh at in the the watching all these leaves fall the policy of uh leaf blowing noisy leaf blowing and sweeping up every leaf of his it falls is actually damaging the earth by not letting the leaves begin to decompose and be a wonderful thing for the the ponds and the ground beneath in the dampness that they bring so let's go on then with as i said our reflection on the oceans of the world now i'm i could flood you i'd have to read it because i'm hopeless with numbers as you probably know but uh i could flood you with statistics but under maybe the clips that we put on uh this morning uh in part two perhaps of the morning prayer will be things that can give you any of those statistics that you need we'll give you some but not many what we want to do is give you massive pictures of this and this is here to remind you of what we're talking about the way in which both people are carried and cargoes are carried across the world and what that is doing in terms of carbon emission to the planet and the waters of the world so let's just make some points first of all we're using cargo ships to carry goods from one nation to another massive journeys and massive ships some of those container ships this is the ship that igglepiggle is representing and the the great whales are coming up around the ship now um this isn't a great whale this is tiger i mean the the fish coming up through uh and 90 of world trade is carried and reliant on shipping fifty thousand container ships and two to three times that in terms of large ships sinkhole sales liners oil tankers military vessels super trawlers many other kinds of massive cargo ships and the emissions of carbon that those ships are actually creating as they go across the the shipping lanes have that in mind first then have in mind also the other kinds of ships the great cruise ships which have got bigger and bigger and bigger and some of them are like great floating cities carrying people across the world let's just go back to that domestic scene that uh jethro brought back to moses and that scene of refreshment and entertainment in the family atmosphere it's that kind of community that you miss when you're journeying and journeying even for jethro was a hardship but when one journeys generally you journey to go to the people that are there the sense of these huge cruise liners is that you carry everything that you're used to in terms of facilities with you as though it's being taken right across the world and you're kept in the same comfortable atmosphere without any really deprivations to go and see what you want to see but then to return to a completely different kind of atmosphere on board the massive cruise ships themselves we'll think about that later on in our reflection but for the moment i wanted to think about the noise pollution that both the enormous container ships some of the container ships are longer than the empire state building is high massive containers piled high with containers on their decks and the noise of all that going on in the oceans itself let's forget the emit the carbon emissions to start with the noise is damaging as we saw with uh ocean life it's also dangerous when great whales get in the paths of those ships they're far too big to to notice that that's going to happen and some of the the the videos showing what happens to whales in terms of facing those ships and then being destroyed despite the noise uh shows how certain parts of the oceans are being spoiled in that way the killing of whales and large fish through collisions but also the damage to coral reefs and the damage to seabeds by massive anchors dropping down and scraping along them and collisions with the reefs or collisions with the the coastline or aspects of of everything that the ships come into contact with and then we think of the damage created by the gigantic cruise liners and here we are back with peppa pig and grandpa piga uh on on their cruise liner the damage created to the very things that people are wanting to go to see so the damage creating in polar regions or fields or coral reefs or atolls or and perhaps this is an even more familiar vision the damage created to historic cities like venice which is like a beacon of what those massive cruise ships can do in terms of endangering a place we remember some uh years ago now because the the huge cruise ships of now these these cities are fighting back been banned from the judica canal where they were creating huge danger there was a time when 1300 of those each year went backwards and forwards in the judica canal and as you sat outside saint mark's venice then your view across it judica itself was obscured by these huge floating cities and the damage they did that was there we've got actually this this um drug here is a jug from venice from the cafe florian and a reminder of synthmark square and the way in which it floods and walking across it on the duck boards that they have to put up there but the the cruise ships themselves were doing a different kind of damage with the kind of damage they also do with coral reefs and and everything when the the power of these ships and everything that they they represent is destroying what the people have come to enjoy so now the journey has to be a bit more uncomfortable to get to venice but then let's go back to jethro's journey when you journey when you journey in any kind of land you journey with the intention of not only seeing but enjoying the atmosphere and culture and people of the place whether it be in any of the continents traveling in africa traveling in india always i found it better staying with the people of the place and journeys are times when you do have discomfort and have to carry things with you so that the image of being able almost in a pod which still gives you every creature comfort in the right temperature uh and and you go back to those creature comforts and just simply view what's going on is something which is a luxury which pollution is not allowing us anymore to indulge and so all of those things are damaging in a huge way but let's go to the way in which we can begin to think of adapting with the present situation to improve the situation and as in every day we've got multitudes of things which can do that so in new technologies and this uh perhaps we could start here because it's a windy day and the rags of a hurricane are coming across the atlantic the wind which always helped sailing in the past is beginning now once again to be able to help ships which are huge ships which are powered by fuel at the same time with new kinds of devices which give wind power too in tall funnels on the ship deck themselves and rotors which are operated by wind power that seems strange but at the same time airships which went out of fashion in the 1930s are being brought in to convey heavy cargos in certain distances sometimes also the matter is helped by simply slowing ships down and the vast ships of mask which carry the cargo and the containers right across the world by slowing down their speed are burning less fuel and massacre already on a policy of that the speeds they used to use have been lowered and that is bringing things down in terms of carbon emission or investigating other fuels different kinds of fuels rather than the really heavy oil which is used at present and that is well on the way to being thought about prices and all of those things for people who have to buy the products when they get there come into this but uh australia itself is investigating green hydrogen for uh and and they think they can have ships on that kind of power by 2026 and at the same time uh we are thinking of the way in which these huge container ships have to be broken down at the end at the end of their life and the way at the moment about how they are taken off to areas of the world where the population is in an an area where they they have enormous needs but the pollution is being added to by sending the great ships there to be broken down the steel cut up that's a very complicated situation indeed and a balancing of social justice and people's needs in part of the world and then the getting rid of things which have served their usefulness and how we break that down with without too much carbon emission going into the atmosphere i said this morning will be complicated but these images are not complicated to see when you see pictures of what is happening in those various areas and now we come to the clyde bank declaration which was achieved between 22 nations and it's hoped that many more will add to that just this week in glasgow when governments and industry leaders committed to zero carbon corridors along major shipping routes green shipping corridors with zero emission fuels so that the shipping which blasts over a billion tons of co2 into the atmosphere each year 2.9 of all human emissions that's set to double by 2050 is being tackled by those green corridors and the roots of those initial green corridors will be the iron ore route which goes from australia to japan and the container shipping route from asia to europe so that dealing with that is is is one of the great aims of the clyde bank declaration and we like jethro can give thanks for those times of good news when we're thinking we can not only change our behavior so that the present situation is not exacerbated by our behavior but we can also use our technological skills as a human race and use the imagination which we saw with transport on land at transport by the sea to protect the oceans the islands and the historic cities that these huge ships visit so eagle pickle and um peppa pig and and grandpa uh pig is is actually both of those are actually images of something to stay in your mind both of protection now by changing our behavior slowing ships down using different fuels and also the intention for the future of technologies which will increase the supply of things like wind power and green hydrogen to drive that sea power across the oceans with less danger to the planet it's a huge topic and we hope we've given you enough images this morning to be thankful like jethro who when moses told the story of despair and his own physical resources his his mental his spiritual his physical needs just really as they say scraping the barrel perhaps that's a good oil image scraping the barrel and jethro comes and in so many ways the old shepherd priest who is his father-in-law rebuilds moses with encouragement and that best gift of all thanksgiving we give thanks for that and jesus all the way through is looking in moses's story is looking for things to give thanks for having brought family life back to moses and shared all kinds of things with him uh now he gives time to moses to listen to his story that is something we can do for one another constantly and then having listened to the story one fixes on the way in which god is blessing that community or blessing that person despite the hardship and then say i give great thanks for that and jethro goes further and says your god is above all gods this shepherd priest of the kenai tribe then says then i i now want to to offer myself to god and then last of all what we like doing whenever we're giving thanks and at the end of something and i'm sure there'll be plenty of that at the conference in glasgow we sit down and break bread together share a meal share the celebration tell more stories but stories of of of hope we think uh and uh so let's say our prayers on this particular morning let's move this out of the way and then you can bring a book on board we are thinking this morning do you want to come up tiger are you just bouncing around yes or no he'll do it if he can come up if you want warmth if you want okay we're going to our collect the third sunday in advent and somewhere i can be told what we're praying for this morning in the anglican communion and we're praying for the diocese of the uh turn the page i'm still on the high velvet from uh a couple of days ago here we are um we are praying for the diocese of ho in the province of west africa in the ghana province pray also for the life of our anglican communion for justin our archbishop for the life of this diocese for rose bishop of dover emma bishop at lambeth and bring your own prayers and intentions now there are two areas we also wanted to bring in mind one of them is once again myanmar burma where this uh very recently the the the us journalist danny fenster has been sentenced to 11 years imprisonment and that 11 years imprisonment for talking to members of the opposition no one was allowed in his trial so we think of dany now imprisoned and his family who are praying for him and we pray with them and then also we are thinking of the tensions at the belarus polish border where migrants have been driven across belarus and placed at the border and now face uh the the authorities in poland who are one and no one really you need an international agreement between those two states to decide exactly what to do but we pray for those who are caught at the border in a wilderness situation without resources and in the hands of two two nations that are needing to make decisions bring your own prayers on this day as we say the collect for today getting grayer by the minute whether by the minute too almighty father whose will is to restore all things in your beloved son the king of all govern the hearts and minds of those in authority and bring the families of the nations divided and torn apart by the ravages of sin to be subject to his just and gentle rule who is alive and reigns with you in the unity of the holy spirit one god now and forever are men so across the world and in whatever language you like to use let's 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 are men moment of silence now for our own intentions watch that old fire as it flickers and dies the once blessed the household and lit up our lives it shone for the friends and the clinking of glasses i'll tend to the flame you can worship the ashes [Music] capture the wild things and bring them in line and on what was never your right to confine the lives and the loves and the songs are what matters i'll tend to the flame you can worship the ashes do you feel heavy your eyes drop with green your spirit is wild and your suffering is breathed so never you buckle and bend to the masses i'll tend to the flame you can worship the ashes get round a fire with a glass of strong ale and tell us a story from beyond the pale bury some seeds and expect some strong branches i'll tend to the flame you can worship the ashes [Music] now show me a man that can meet all his needs for what we need most now is seen a common old song for all creeds and all classes i'll tend to the flame you can worship the ashes [Music] i'll tend to the flames [Music] what will we do when the world it is ending and time it is halted for friend and for foe try to hold on to the time as it passes i'll tend to the flame you can worship the ashes i'll tend to the flame you can worship the ashes i'll tend to the flame you can worship the ashes 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 give thanks for today and always amen right i think we'll go in it's rather wet tiger isn't it the rain is falling on us let's go and find somewhere warm and give each other encouragement oh yes we need to take peppa pig and grandpa pig and eagle pickle from here back to their warm bath waters and take the cruise ship home safely with all its passengers