good morning and welcome on this sunday the 30th of may trinity sunday the feast of the verse holy trinity as we gather for morning prayer in the deanery garden at canterbury cathedral and welcome wherever you are in the world this morning bring your own prayers and intentions last year this sunday at the end of may which was the 31st of may was the feast of pentecost this year it's the feast of the holy trinity and we've come to the same place to enjoy the abundance of this wonderful rose which is called etual doland and this year it's flowering in abundance but it holds a secret and we shall come to that later we're thinking of the needs of all those across the world and you all have many names in your hearts and we're thinking of two friends of ours brian and his husband mark in california in los angeles and their two children and we're thinking of them because mark has been diagnosed very recently with the brain tumor and is awaiting results so our prayers to you this morning and constantly to both of you our love and our prayers from here in canterbury and then also we want to send congratulations to our prime minister boris johnson and his wife uh carrie simmons they were married yesterday in westminster cathedral and we give thanks for that occasion we hope they're having a relaxed and celebratory day i can't believe it for a leader um of a political leader of a nation at this time but we we certainly send our congratulations to them both on this day so let's begin our prayers on this trinity sunday o lord open our lips and our mouth shall proclaim your praise may christ the true the only light banish all darkness from our hearts and minds blessed are you creator of all to you be praise and glory forever as your dawn renews the face of the earth bringing light and life to all creation may we rejoice in this day you have made as we wake refreshed from the depths of sleep open our eyes to behold your presence and strengthen our hands to do your will that the world may rejoice and give you praise blessed be god father son and holy spirit blessed be god forever the night has passed and the day lies open before us let us pray with one heart and mind does we rejoice in the gift of this new day so may the light of your presence so god set our hearts on fire with love for you now and forever amen our son on this morning of the 30th of the month is psalm 143 [Music] sorry 144. blessed be the lord my rock who teaches my hands for war and my fingers for battle my steadfast help and my fortress my stronghold and my deliverer my shield in whom i trust who subdues the peoples under me oh lord what are mortals that you should consider them mere human beings that you should take thought for them they are like a breath of wind their days pass away like a shadow bow your heavens o lord and come down touch the mountains and they shall smoke cast down your lightnings and scatter them shoot out your arrows and let thunder roar reach down your hand from on high deliver me and take me out of the great waters from the hand of foreign enemies whose mouth speaks wickedness and their right hand is the hand of falsehood oh god i will sing to you a new song i will play to you on a ten-stringed harp you that gives salvation to kings and have delivered david your servant save me from the peril of the sword and deliver me from the hand of foreign enemies whose mouth speaks wickedness and whose right hand is the hand of falsehood so that our sons in their youth may be like well-nurtured plants and our daughters like pillars carve for the corners of the temple our barns be filled with all manner of store are flocks bearing thousands and ten thousands in our fields our cattle be heavy with young may there be no miscarriage or untimely births no cry of distress in our streets happy are the people whose blessing this is happy are the people who have the lord for their god [Music] so this morning as we go to our lesson special lessons of course this is a sunday morning so we've left st matthew for a bit and we shall leave him for three of the days of this week today and tomorrow which is the feast of the visitation and thursday the feast of corpus christi for special lessons but today i'm going to read three lessons don't let your heart sink they're very short or at least two of them are immensely short the first one is taken from the second letter of sin paul to the corinthians it's chapter 13 and it's verses 11 to 14 and verse 14 you can almost say with me finally brothers and sisters rejoice aim for restoration comfort one another agree with one another live in peace and the god of love and peace will be with you greet one another with a holy kiss all the saints greet you and here's the verse you can say with me the grace of the lord jesus christ and the love of god and the fellowship of the holy spirit be with you all the end of the second letter of paul to the corinthians now we go we do go to matthew but we go to the very end of his gospel i'm in chapter 28 and this is jesus's farewell to his disciples 16 of chapter 28. now the 11 disciples went to galilee to the mountain to which jesus had directed them and when they saw him they worshipped him but some doubted and jesus came and said to them all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me go therefore and make disciples of all nations baptizing them in the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit teaching them to observe all that i have commanded you and behold i'm with you always to the end of the age i don't even have to turn a page to read the next passage and this is just a tiny bit longer but not much because as matthew ends in our new testaments so mark begins and this is a gospel verses 1 to 13 of mark chapter 1 this is a gospel which shows the holy trinity at work among us the beginning of the gospel of jesus christ the son of god as it is written in isaiah the prophet behold i send my messenger before your face who will prepare your way the voice of one crying in the wilderness prepare the way of the lord make his paths straight john appeared baptizing in the wilderness and proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins and all the country of judea and all jerusalem were going out to him and were being baptized by him in the river jordan confessing their sins now john was clothed with camel's hair and wore a leather belt around his waist and at locusts and wild honey and he preached saying after me comes he who is mightier than i the strap of whose sandals i am not worthy to stoop down and untie i have baptized you with water but he will baptize you with the holy spirit in those days jesus came from nazareth of galilee and was baptized by john in the river jordan and when he came up out of the water immediately he saw the heavens being torn open and the spirit descending on him like a dove and a voice came from heaven you are my beloved son with you i am well pleased and the spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness and he was in the wilderness 40 days being tempted by satan and he was with the wild animals and the angels were ministering to him in those three short passages one gets the flavor of this feast but this feast is one which names itself after a teaching which it took a long time for the church to evolve the statements that i've just read particularly second letter to the corinthians were early and already those statements which are so used to using those prayers and the great commission baptized people in the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit and paul's grace that he gives us the grace of our lord jesus christ the love of god the fellowship of the holy spirit the teaching of the trinity is there embedded in all of that but in order to state it in words we come across the fact that the holy trinity is what the church would call a divine mystery a holy mystery there's a letter from gerald manny hopkins to his friend the poet who became the poet laureate robert bridges and they've been talking or bridges has been talking about a mystery because hopkins had mentioned a mystery in his letter and hopkins replies in words and i'll paraphrase it and say when you speak about mystery we're not meaning the same thing you're talking in human terms about a mystery as something that um you can understand if you get there eventually with enough clues and enough evidence and the day will come when you say ah now i understand everything has pieced itself together and mentally i can accept that and i feel satisfied that i now understand the church does not use the word mystery when it's talking about a holy mystery like that the church is talking about something which is so wonderful and so infinite that the mystery itself has to be perceived can never be resolved in human terms but at the same time can be something which causes us to wonder and glorify and praise our god for and those two themes are best worked out for me in a hymn by father faber and it goes like this it's quite a simple hymn and goes to a simple tune and at the end of our little filming this morning we'll put that hymn on sung by the pupils of our king's school our cathedral school here his favors him most ancient of all mysteries before thy throne we lie have mercy now most merciful most holy trinity when heaven and earth were yet unmade when time was yet unknown thou in thy bliss and majesty didst live and love alone thou wert not born there was no fount from which thy being flowed there is no end which thou canst reach but thou art simply god how wonderful creation is the work which thou didst bless and oh what then must thou be like eternal loveliness most ancient of all mysteries before thy throne we lie have mercy now most merciful most holy trinity the simplest of verses but enshrining the most wonderful and constantly challenging of shall we call it the doctrines of the church but we receive our god in glory as creator whom jesus called taught us to call father in his humanity still fully god and in that glorified humanity with the gift of god's spirit left for us to show divine qualities in our lives all of that is within the compass of the creeds that we say which have been worked out by the church but also our wonder in every aspect of the life of the holy trinity and the rest of the ordinary time which stretches out sunday by sunday by sunday through the creative year is a time when the life of the trinity is shared with us i said that we'd come specifically to this rose this grunge and we've done so not only because it's at the a trial dollar uh i've i've come so because it not only shows us in all its glory the flowering of creation and it's full of fragrance and scent i wish you could you could smell this this lovely rose the star of holland here but we've come also because it's a day when in 1640 the painter peter paul rubens died and we will be giving thanks and exploring his paintings in a moment but of course this rose comes from the low countries which when he was born were divided between the the spanish empire and the growing netherlands under the house of orange but at the same time this rose bush holds a great secret which we've been observing over the last few weeks for just behind me is a black bird's nest and it has live and feathered fledglings in it three and the blackbirds mother and father are feeding them they have sat on the nest the mother blackbird sitting on the eggs and then the fledglings through all the storms and winds which you've observed in the garden and the colder weather but they've brought their little family to birth and are now feeding them and ready then on a particular morning to allow them to come and look at the world itself and begin their life the great glory of creation in the rose the fragrance of creation in the rose sheltering something so fragile and it's a symbol of the the human life in all its fragility too that our lord assumed and the way in which the holy trinity touched us there's a wonderful handsome omania mysterium which we hear sung particularly at christmas time it talks about the great mystery whereby animals were allowed to witness the birth of jesus christ himself the word made flesh in the stable and the manual mysterium is the holy trinity which is actually given out to us so we give thanks for that peter paul rubens the artist he was born in 1577 and died on this day in 1640 and he's listed as a flemish artist and diplomat he was also a huge ambassador for the catholic counter-reformation in the lands of europe where he was working he had gone with um or at least his parents had fled from the netherlands the spanish netherlands at that time uh because they were themselves or the father was of the protestant faith in a very strict way and they feared persecution from the catholic authorities there but when father died uh say they were ruins was born in westphalia in in what is known germany um when father died mother who was a strong catholic brought rubens back and antwerp becomes most associated with him but i wanted to think about just three of his works he painted altarpieces and portraits and landscapes and scenes of myths and allegories and biblical scenes but three biblical scenes the first is one just because i like it it's called the prodigal son and it shows the prodigal son leaning beside the pig trough as a maid from the house where he's working pours the pig's food into the the trough and around the farmyard animals eating what they're given but no one will give him food because he's lost all his money and the friends he'd made were simply friends he had bought by the excess of riches which he was squandering and here he is longing for something of the pig's food it's a wonderful painting and very realistic in in in what it portrays in the farmyards that rubens would have known but the real two paintings i want to discuss are found in the cathedral of our lady in antwerp the first is called the elevation of the cross and it shows a scene under the darkness of the sky of human muscle and that muscle is there really in enormous quantity human strength lifting the cross to crucify jesus who himself is lying on the cross as all that human effort to destroy the word made flesh is lifting the cross up to the darkness of the heavens the elevation of the cross a massive canvas but the other canvas also in the cathedral church of our lady in antwerp is called the descent from the cross this is quite different the body of jesus is indeed being lowered quite carefully by two fairly ancient carpenters right on the top standing at the tops of the ladders and as a workman might he doesn't have enough hands so he's holding the piece of cloth which they're using to lower the body in his teeth as well as using their strong hands simply to lower the weight of the body but where is the body going it's going into the loving arms first of john who is standing halfway up the ladder observed also they're halfway up on ladders by nicodemus and joseph of arimathea and the foot of christ's body is resting on the shoulder of mary magdalene and the arms of the blessed mother mary herself are reaching out to receive the body of her son and with her is salami or mary cleophas the traditionally thought to be the mother of james and john and these are friends this is an intimate picture of what they take to be deaf as the body is being received by them but all these friends will know not death but life in resurrection and so those two pictures given to us by rubens who was knighted both by charles the first of england for his work but also by philip iv of spain an ambassador across europe in its divide and then the other date that i wanted to remember on this day and this is very much a canterbury date is the fact that on this day on the 30th of may 1593 christopher marlowe the poet and playwright died fletcher and i both remember an occasion in westminster abbey in 2002 july 2004 i'm being told uh when we met in poet's corner with others and saw the unveiling of a window to christopher marlowe and marlo's life is full of mystery so that even the date of his death and the the how he died the strongest legend goes that he was killed in a a pub brawl a fight in a pub in detford in kent he having been born in canterbury but westminster abbey put a question mark after the date but the question mark could also be the mystery of marlow formal was born here baptized in the church of saint george which was bombed in the blitz but the tower still stands here in canterbury and having been baptized in 1564 just a couple of months uh um difference from the baptism of shakespeare in stratford-upon-avon completely different um but at that time um we see marlow coming here to the king's school as a scholar on full scholarship because his parents were quite poor and also to corpus christi college cambridge now there the mystery begins because at the end of his time the college is refusing to grant the degree and the rumor was that he was about to go off to reims to be trained as a roman catholic priest which was a criminal activity and so the college was withholding the giving of the degree but then a letter came from the privy council from queen elizabeth the first privy council and from uh wolsingham uh who was uh her uh secretary of state and sir francis wolsingham sent the letters saying um that uh the college couldn't understand affairs of state but this degree must be given and there thus begins the rumor that through his life marlow was in some way a secret agent mystery everywhere here but the sort of mystery not the gerald manny hopkins type of mystery but the robert bridges type of mystery that with enough facts could be so solved but there aren't enough facts and so scholars go on teasing out how much of shakespeare marlowe was meant to have written and how much marlow was a a secret agent and how he died and so on and so forth what we do know is that his scholarship was enough to translate ovid in 1587 and the works of ovid he translated um in such reality that later on after his death archbishop whit gift had them publicly burned to show that they were not the sort of books people should be reading the plays that you wrote i suppose the most famous are dr faustus and edward ii that we had performed here because it was about them the massacre in paris about the persecution and appalling massacre of the huguenots and we did it in the crypt which has given shelter to the huguenots ever since but even in that there's a question mark as to whether one of the characters is marlow himself receiving instructions about uh political work who can say what i do know is that uh the city has always had difficulty in locating the the memorial to marlow and it was first put in the butter market with all kinds of people here and then after that it was moved so the war memorial would go there and eventually it's now outside the marlow theater so no better place for it and what i wanted to read was his his poem the passionate shepherd to his love because it's the best piece of pastoral poetry i know come live with me and be my love and we will all the pleasures prove that hills and valleys dales and fields woods or steepy mountains yields and we will sit upon the rocks seeing the shepherds feed their flocks by shallow rivers to whose falls melodious birds sing madrigals and i will make thee beds of roses and a thousand fragrant poses a cap of flowers and a curdle embroidered all with leaves of metal a gown made of the finest wool which from our pretty lambs we pull fair linid slippers for the cold with buckles of the purest gold a belt of straw and ivy buds with coral clasps and amber studs and if these pleasures may thee move come live with me and be my love the shepherd's swains shall dance and sing for thy delight each may morning if these delights thy mind may move then live with me and be my love wonderful piece of pastoral poetry from the pen of the mystery man christopher marlow let's say our prayers on this day and on this day we are praying for the diocese of the anglican church in mexico and also we're continuing to pray for the parishes settled around reculver and the area deanery of recalva we're praying also for justin our archbishop for rose bishop of dover and for tim bishop at lambeth and here is the prayer for trinity sunday bring your own prayers and intentions also almighty and everlasting god you have given us your servants grace by the confession of a true faith to acknowledge the glory of the eternal trinity and in the power of the divine majesty to worship the unity keep us steadfast in this faith that we may ever more be defended from all adversities through jesus christ our lord amen so we say each in our own language the prayer our savior taught us our father who art in heaven hallowed be thy name thy kingdom come thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil for thine is the kingdom the power and the glory forever and ever amen moment now listening to the cathedral bell ring formations which will happen in 10 minutes or so it's calling me as well but let's be silent together for a moment as that sound rings out [Music] [Music] [Music] the peace of god which passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of god and of his son jesus christ our lord and the blessing of god almighty the father the son and the holy spirit be upon you and upon those whom you love and those whom you would pray for on this trinity sunday and always are men i'm going to leave you now and join the congregation for matins in the cathedral i hope your day is enjoyable and it is a happy sunny one [Music] more [Music] yes [Music] uh so [Music] foreign 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