good morning and welcome to canterbury cathedral to the dinery on saturday the 15th of january we've waited a little while this morning because we woke to thick fog uh hiding the trees and still from where i'm standing on the roof here the top of belharry is obscured and the sun is mistily trying to break through but we thought we'd make a beginning or we would never get started and we don't know whether this mist because there's no wind whatsoever will clear at all it reminds us of just how near to the sea we are here and welcome wherever you are from across the world as we come to say our morning prayers our thoughts are very much filled with the uh massive eruptions of tonga hungar tonga hapai the mountain in the south pacific which is threatening and actually causing tsunamis already in tonga and threatening places like samoa and the coasts even of new zealand and places as far away as fiji but we think particularly of the people of tonga because even as we're praying those tsunamis are growing and the waves are crashing in so we pray for them all at this time we're told uh by the reports that from satellite this is one of the largest explosions ever witnessed from eruptions of a volcano and it is very dramatic to see from the satellites but on the ground immensely difficult and dangerous for everyone there so we think of those people as we say our prayers later on in our uh uh film with you this morning we shall be thinking about the genealogy which is right at the end of the book of ruth said we've come up here and we'll be in a different location for the reading of ruth itself as we complete that book but at the same time we shall return here because of the top layer of the windows of the cathedral here which speak about people's abiding interest in genealogy and that continues even to this day as we well know in our archives as people come to look for their family records and and try to trace their ancestry but for the moment let's begin our prayers and then we shall come to the lovely ending of the book of ruth and then the little bit of genealogy at the end of that o lord open our lips and our mouth shall proclaim your praise your light springs up for the righteous and all the peoples have seen your glory blessed are you sovereign god king of the nations do you be praise and glory forever from the rising of the sun to its setting your name is proclaimed in all the world as the sun of righteousness dawns in our hearts anoint our lips with the seal of your spirit that we may witness to your gospel and sing your praise in all the earth 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 oh god set our hearts on fire with love for you now and forever amen our psalm this morning is psalm 76 in judah god is known his name is great in israel at salem is his tabernacle and his dwelling place in zion their brokey the flashing arrows of the bow the shield the sword the weapons of war in the light of splendor you appeared glorious from the eternal mountains the boastful were plundered they have slept their sleep none of the warriors can lift their hand at your rebuke oh god of jacob both horse and chariot fell stunned terrible are you in majesty who can stand before your face when you are angry you caused your judgment to be heard from heaven the earth trembled and was still when god arose to judgment to save all the meek upon earth you crushed the wrath of the people and bridled the wroteful remnant make a vow to the lord your god and keep it let all who are round about him bring gifts to him that is worthy to be feared he breaks down the spirit of princes and strikes terror in the kings of the earth so before we begin to read our last chapter of the book of ruth the last bit of chapter four we're going to go downstairs and find a different location but we shall return here later so we've come down here into the orchard to complete our scriptural reading the fourth chapter of the book of ruth in his poem about his lamentation at the the felling of a line of poplar trees uh which he calls aspen's uh gerald manley hopkins talks about the destruction of a sweet especial rural scene well a sweet special rural scene is really the context of the book of ruth and we're going to complete that today down here in the grass so of course it's a very wintry scene down here but nevertheless it's quietly by the beehives and behind me in the oh here's robin hello hello in the in the b bowl which the uh which the monks used in the wall there for their bees um he you're being very brave good boy look at that how spend it we put a bird box and we have had robin's nest in that so these very brave little birds who are with us all weathers snow and frost and this morning with missed uh his back and he's beginning to look for a family life of his own because it's coming round to that time of year well we're going to read then chapter 4 of ruth and i'm starting at verse 13. so boaz took ruth and she became his wife and he went into her and the lord gave her conception and she bore a son then the women said to naomi blessed be the lord who has not left you this day without a redeemer and may his name be renowned in israel he shall be to you a restorer of life and a nourisher of your old age for your daughter-in-law who loves you who is more to you than seven sons has given birth to him then naomi took the child and laid him on her lap and became his nurse and the women of the neighborhood gave him a name saying a son has been born to naomi they named him obed he was the father of jesse the father of david now these are the generations of perez perez fathered hezron hezron fathered ram ram fathered aminadab a minidab fathered narshon nashon fathered salmon salman fathered boaz boaz fathered obed obed fathered jesse and jesse fathered david we have to get to the end of the line to reach the crunch point for here is the royal line of david coming from perez who is of the line of judah and you'll find all that in st matthew's gospel but sin matthew unlike luke actually in his genealogy mentions the mother of boaz being rahab and of course we know her from the story of joshua and jericho and rahab's family being saved so all these things tend to point together from beginnings to conclusions but let's think first of the lovely scene of marrying ruth yesterday we dealt and a marriage is always like this probably in every culture there are legalities there are these days papers to sign there are things which one must swear on oath for civil society but also make a vow in a ceremony which is happening in a christian context or the context of a faith make a vow in terms of that faith itself and here is not only that legality which we saw yesterday with the taking off of bazi's sandal and the never-right marriage which he is faithfully performing for the sake of the one who has died who is near ken to him and he's raising up a son for for uh his near kin all of that was a legality a duty done now we're in a completely different realm for bearas loved ruth and there's a great sense of tenderness in all of this and as we read the story it is really heartwarming and the women of beslehem also who have seen the devastation in naomi's face when she and ruse came back from their spell in moab where elimelech and marlon and chilean have all died leaving naomi a widow leaving ruth a widow leaving oppa a widow but orpah chose to stay in moab ruth with that amazing promise of loyalty given to naomi decided to come with her and here is the fulfillment of all of that god has now blessed naomi and ruth with what is called a redeemer wonderful word to save them from this situation and give them comfort and a sense of a renewal of family life within the context of bethlehem where all things begin we're looking at a lovely wedding ceremony but we're also going on to see the conception of the child and naomi taking the child who is to be called obed onto her lap and then that lovely line saying that obed was the father of jesse the father of david well next week we'll be looking at that story of of david as it unfolds and between now and the beginning of lent we can look at some of the old testament stories leading up to that so that we're giving context to these lists of names but particularly the list simply from jesse to david and we shall see how all of that works out but for the moment let's give thanks for this new beginning in bethlehem which is started by a civil contract and started by boaz also noticing the loyalty and love that ruth is showing to her mother-in-law naomi and the care she's showing after having been brought herself a foreigner into a land she did not know but faithfully gleaning in his barley fields in his wheat fields and now all this is rewarded by a new beginning springing up for the royal line of david let's then uh give thanks for that on this day as we complete the story of ruth and perhaps because we're going to look at genealogies will go back to the roof and consider those wonderful stained glass windows in the cathedral historic ones which give the genealogy of our lord jesus christ from the very beginning in the artists minds and in the skill of their work i was saying downstairs that genealogy is a very important factor in the books of the old covenant the tracing of one's family and one's roots and it still is to many people who find a fascination in attempting to work out their family tree and going back as as far as ever they can but it's also a great factor in the books of the new covenant two of the gospels include a genealogy the first chapter of the gospel of saint matthew begins with that and matthew himself traces the ancestry of jesus from abraham to joseph and then says the husband of mary and he traces the fact that from abraham to david there are 14 generations and from david to the exile in babylon there were 14 generations and from babylon to the birth of the christ there are 14 generations he is going from the historic point and coming forward to the birth of christ and then begins his story with joseph of the royal line of david receiving the angelic message luke on the other hand doesn't begin with that he leaves that till chapter 3 when jesus is ready to begin his earthly ministry at luke tells us about the age of 30 and in chapter 3 luke does something quite different luke measures jesus and begins with him and then takes the ancestry all the way back not to abraham but to adam and ends adam the son of god in luke oddly because lucas is very very keen to point out the role of women in his gospel but strangely luke's genealogy includes only men son of son of son of all the way back until it gets to adam son of god matthew on the other hand does mention the mothers from time to time significantly now i'm saying all this because here in the line of windows that you're looking at there is a complete genealogy but because there were 86 spaces for that genealogy to be made in beautiful stained glass and these are some of the most historic windows of stained glass in the world and when this was made it was designed from the way of putting 88 of those windows into what you see here the choir area at the highest level so that the sun would come through and it also goes round the transepts on both sides and then comes back above the choir and it starts at the beginning of the choir on the north side and it begins with god and adam the window of adam now one of the most famous adam digging is in the west window of the cathedral but it's still very much there as one of the ancestor windows the historic ancestor windows and then off went the story of the genealogy of christ up the north side around the transept up to the end of the choir and then on the other side taking up the story again and into the south transept and back and then coming back to the the entry to the choir where one found mary with jesus absolutely facing god with adam and there was a significance of all of that but with 86 windows to fill one genealogy was not enough so there is a conflation of names from matthew and from luke as that genealogy unfolds now when the stained glass was taken out of the cathedral in the nave by the roundheads and much of it destroyed later on the nave itself became rather plain and some of my predecessors in earlier centuries decided they would move some of the stained glass from the genealogy windows into the south window and the west window of the cathedral but at the same time people over the ages reconstructed those that were missing and so the majority of the old windows here are from the 12th century the late 12th century but excitingly and this is what makes the story so wonderful recently it has been proved absolutely proved that some of those windows predate the fire which followed in 1174 after beckett's assassination and were part of the cathedral before ever this was built so they would be the foundation stone of that line of genealogy um bits of stained glass or pieces of stained glass and they are life-sized when they're down but there are four windows which might have been even prior to that so that we're looking at something which has been absolutely proved for some of the glass to date from probably 11 30 to 11 60 and not as most of them later 11 uh late 80s up through to the beginning of the 13th century but those other pieces of glass definitely from 11 30 there but there may be some that even predate that and that would put them at 1070 or round about that when land frank's cathedral was made and here is a a crafting of all of that at the same time it puts it at the same sort of period as the making of the bayer tapestry which was probably woven here in canterbury by canterbury weavers and then taken across to normandy which actually was part of of the kingdom of uh of of england at that time anyway at the in the reign of henry ii so we're thinking of all these things and the fascination with genealogies but when the south window which was not part of our original restoration plan suddenly lost a piece of stone and we had to restore the whole window and have our stone masons carve that massive window again much to the fascination of people going by because we did some of it on the green court on the um the lawn of the cathedral outside the south side of the cathedral when all that was being done and the window was not the home of all these some of the windows went across and i probably told you this story before they went across to the getty museum to be shown there and then on to the cloister museum which is part of the metropolitan museum in new york so these ancestors which had never left the building before went right across the world to be seen elsewhere now i'm saying all this because in new york when they were there and both exhibitions actually attracted massive public attention as these windows seem always to do and they recently have had more because of the proving of that being more old than people thought well when they were in new york i was asked so why would people concentrate on a genealogy of jesus and i had to think and say well i think for two particular reasons one is the total interest in the fact that jesus was rooted in a human community with a history a checkered history as every nation's history is checkered with times of disaster times of joy times of triumph and times of simple peaceful uh times of harvest and and and seed time so here is jesus's genealogy going all the way back in this particular rooted line of ancestors and at the same time every one of the ancestors when one eyeballed them because when they were down you could do that every one of them were distinct personalities they were in the imagination of the the crafts people who were making them the glaciers who were making them of course and none of those nowadays are named in fact that the best one of all who was known to have made the stained glass of methuselah is generally simply called the methuselah master but he was a stained glass artist of absolute stellar quality and methuselah was not allowed to travel six were allowed to travel only so particularity but also rootedness and what we see in the gospels is jesus reaching out to people for their own distinctive personality and their own distinctive problems desires yearnings and quite often he says what do you want and uh the person will say lord i want my sight back but if he's totally intuitive and the person is being surrounded by people who are hostile he will sort of make the decision for them but oftentimes he he looks at them and says what do you want me to do for you and that's because every human being is particular but also we live in communities with histories of that sort this is a day when uh uh in 1759 the british museum first opened and 10 people an hour were allowed in to that very small collection if you think of its work now it's just gargantuan but at that time still there was a growing fascination of looking back to the history of a culture the british museum now covers the cultures of the whole world of course as just so many of the great national museums across the world on this day also coincidentally in 1859 the national portrait gallery opened its doors for the first time it had 56 portraits at that time and you could only go on wednesday or friday by appointment now those are beginnings and we've been dealing with beginnings and on this day also there was another beginning in 2001 when on the 15th of january wikipedia debuted itself on jimmy wales and larry sanger's wikipedia and now so many of us use it for encyclopedia constantly from computers and smartphones and well all sorts of ways of getting into wikipedia but all of that shows the fascination of this continuing and we know that in our archives people will come and say we believe we have family roots here can you help us find them and you don't say why you know why because it gives a sense of stability one of the great words of the benedictine rule but at the same time of particularity i'm the only one who've come up through that line in that way and here are the historic influences in my life and so we absolutely treasure our uh windows of the genealogy of jesus but we recognize as we go around the world and we were thinking this morning when we were talking about this of going when we went to hong kong go to the cathedral there and then traveled on outside to shenzhen to the the king school canterbury there but when we went there we were shown a lovely old chinese house a a shine inside it which was devoted to the ancestors of that family beautifully decorated and with the writing up and down of both men and women in that that house who caused the the roots of that family to know itself to belong there and also just a way off we we found the the family uh cemetery but here in the house was this honoring of the the roots there and that was very much part of the the way in which uh uh the the culture of of of ancient galilee and judah saw itself and so it's not surprising that matthew began there and even luke from a completely different cultural background decided he would put in a genealogy and our crafts people then took it up conflated them and gave us pictures of all those names as they went round and of course boaz is there and obed is there and jesse is there and david is there holding his harp in his hand so that all these characters were displayed some famous some hardly known but there were signs given as to what kind of character they had as you looked in their eyes well this is a big topic but it's a lovely one to do on this saturday morning as the sun now lifts itself a little above the mist and i'm going to say our prayers up here on the roof on this day we are surrounded by pigeons standing looking a little bit disconsolate for the moment because the morning's not warmed up yet we're praying this morning on the 15th of january for the those who work as chaplains in the recover area deanery those those parishes that we shall be praying for one by one through the week but for the moment we're thinking of the area deanery of of reculver and so long list of chaplains for the armed services the police youth organizations prisons hospitals all of those and we give thanks for their ministry this morning in that area of our diocese in the anglican communion so we pray for justin our archbishop and i should of course mention in the diocese bishop rose of dover bishop emma at lambeth but in the communion the diocese of san joaquin in the episcopal church of the united states and we pray for that particular diocese let's say the prayer for this day for the last time we've got a new colleague tomorrow bring your own intentions and concerns as we do so eternal father who at the baptism of jesus revealed him to be your son anointing him with the holy spirit grant to us who are born again by water and the spirit that we may be faithful to our calling as your adopted children through jesus christ our lord amen so we say together each in our own way and on 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 are men moment of reflection now for all foreign [Music] r [Music] r [Music] oh [Music] is [Music] [Applause] [Music] the windows below the genealogy windows are the windows of the miracles which occurred following beckett's death and those windows began to be made almost immediately after his death as the cathedral following the disastrous fire was recreated and the stained glass became part of that so that many of the windows on this side are local stories and the glaziers would be dealing with people whose families and they themselves were very much around they begin this side with canterbury stories and then kent stories and go around to the other side and it's only on the other side that you begin to get the international pilgrim stories over on the south side so a huge story in stained glass of particularity and many different family backgrounds christ the son of god perfecting you the image of his glory and gladden your hearts with the good news of his kingdom 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 are men so we hope your day is a as finer one as this and the mist i think will clear but it's still making the trees a a shroud all round of mist so nothing too clear yet [Music] oh [Music] so oh [Music] please [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] hey [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] is [Music] oh [Music] you