good morning and welcome to canterbury cathedral to the dinery garden on this saturday the 7th of august we've come into the chick enclosure here the last time you saw the chicks we're not doing the pigs this morning because it's time you saw these little guys again they were inside and they were much smaller but now they have their own enclosure now this is a very exciting morning for this country because the uh die the final of the diving has begun and uh we're all rooting of course in this nation for tom daley so we wish tom luck and send all our love to uh not only to him but to lance and all the family uh and are really hoping that after this we shall go in to see him win another gold but uh here we are with the chicks and uh i've got here two brothers from the same hatching and uh they are up first here a silky a siamese silky are quite quite a a rare breed and on this side we've got a little uh miniature peking and the two of them inside got on quite well but now as brothers they scrap all the time and we should watch a bit of that possibly this morning the others are being quite peaceful with their greens this morning but i'm going to put these two are eyeing each other up here and you'll see that's quite helpful for our reflection a bit later on um but this is the uh this is the time that i'm going to put them down and then i'll give them all some something of a treat and they can go on with that and we will begin our morning prayers there we are guys you go down and enjoy the company of the others and not too much fighting quite yet because we're saying prayers here we are come on let's uh the one thing that is always a an amazing treat for just about any creature of this kind is mealworm these are dried mealworms so that gives them a little breakfast time treat as we say our prayers together and we are remembering of course the people of greece and the and turkey and the eastern mediterranean combating disastrous and very dangerous fires and lives have been lost and and so much uh property and also people being lifted off the the islands with boats and the city of athens now surrounded almost by by flames and fire very frightening indeed so we pray for the people of greece and of turkey on this particular day and we also pray for all those suffering from flood and from the pandemic which is still very very dangerous in different parts of the world we remember those still in lockdown some of you will be in in areas which are locked down and so our prayers are for the whole of our planet at this time with so many dangers let's begin our prayers and on this day 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 and 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 son on this 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 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 out 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 like the great deep you lord shall save both man and beast how precious is your loving mercy o 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 o 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 so we come back to our reading in the book of genesis and today we're in chapter four remember we've said that chapters 1 to 11 are a collection of stories which help us to understand our humanity and something about the quality of our freedom to choose in all sorts of different directions but at the same time it's sketching a huge canvas and in time it's undateable this even when the stories were put together undateable so so far back and yet there is a sense of us as with all cultures with with a foundation stone of these stories which attempt to explain our human condition and reach out for that which is divine and shall we say god-like in so many of the myths and legends of cultures but here are foundation stones for our lord's own ministry and we shall see that as we go through this morning but we've arrived at a strange chapter chapter four and we'll read it now i'm going to read from verse 1 of chapter 4 up to verse 16. now adam knew eve his wife and she conceived and bore cain saying i have produced a man with the help of the lord and again she bore his brother abel now abel was a keeper of sheep and cain a worker of the ground in the course of time cain brought to the lord an offering of the fruit of the ground and abel also brought of the firstborn of his flock and of their fat portions and the lord had regard for abel and his offering but for cain and his offering he had no regard so cain was very angry and his face fell the lord said to cain why are you angry and why has your face fallen if you do well will you not be accepted and if you do not do well sin is crouching at the door its desire is contrary to you but you must rule over it cain spoke to abel his brother and when they were in the field cain rose up against his brother abel and killed him then the lord said to cain [Music] where is abel your brother cain said i do not know am i my brother's keeper and the lord said what have you done the voice of your brother's blood is crying to me from the ground and now you are cursed from the ground which has opened its mouth to receive your brother's blood from your hand [Music] when you work the ground it shall no longer yield to you its strengths you shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth cain said to the lord my punishment is greater than i can bear behold you have driven me today away from the ground and from your face i shall be hidden i shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth and whoever finds me will kill me then the lord said to him not so if anyone kills cain vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold and the lord put a mark on cain lest any who found him should attack him then cain went away from the presence of the lord and settled in the land of nod east of eden it's a story where death enters the picture in this story going through from eden which is mentioned again as a geographical place the land of nord east of eden but there are in this story so many vestiges of what we receive as our own condition and i suppose that the first of those is jealousy cain and abel our two little chicks here are behaving quite well at the moment because the uh the temptation of food is much greater than the temptation of fighting but that won't last for too long and this sense of competition and jealousy becomes inherent in all things but at the same time you're given the two images and it's done with so much interpretation in our own minds going on and we have to be aware of that but abel a keeper of sheep well the image instantly is one that we relate to all the way through right through the line of david to david himself keeping the sheep and on on into the line of david right up to the anointed one and that line in the moment i'll talk about at the same time we have kane a tiller of the soil but both entirely entirely fit and honorable things to be doing and the only clue as to why the one offering was better than the other is not in kane's offering he produces things from the soil and gives rather as we were remembering last sunday on llamas day with the first fruits of the harvest but it doesn't say anything about that with kane it simply says cain produced an offering and abel produced the first born of the flock and the the fat of the of the flock those those words are saying that abel's was a quality offering which he was actually giving up at some cost to himself as cain and this is a wide interpretation a perfunctory offering and not regarded by the lord but when the one was received and the other wasn't then instantly there is the seed of jealousy and jealousy as the lord god's voice says later in this story jealousy breeds a temptation sin crouching at the door think of our son this morning the psalmist writing in psalm 36 sin whispers to the wicked in the depths of their heart and this kind of of of temptation not only to be jealous but also to be violent and to slay the one who is causing the jealousy becomes inherent and the blood of his brother on the ground these are powerful images taken from these 11 chapters and we've two more powerful images in the stories which follow before we get to the point where we begin ancestral history rather than shall we call it primeval history with all those signs of what it means to be a human being and the kind of things that beset humankind don't look for logic because of course kane goes away and then uh has a son through his wife i think one has to go back to the the first writers in genesis chapter 1 concept of creation where humankind is created and now we've focused on the figures of of humanity with names cain and abel abel is slain the shepherd is slain and the other senses himself from that moment to be cursed but here we have something else in god's hands but let's look at first a sentence which has come crying down from that story to all of us where is your brother says the lord a strange question for the omnipotence of the lord god it's a question where the answer should be already known but cain says how can i know and then the sentence which rings out through all the uh the the question which rings out through all these scriptures am i my brother's keeper and the answer is never given but the answer is of course yes your brother and your sister's keeper in terms of their welfare and so many today will be living that out in dangerous situations but others may be resisting sin crouching at the door because of jealousies and all of those things are part of the picture given to us by these first 11 chapters of genesis and cain then goes away and and eve bears another son called seth well i mention him simply because instant matthew's gospel which we've been looking at the genealogy the list of the ancestors going all the way back go back to the foundation stone of abraham the foundation stone of the lord's own people the nation in which jesus was born and and grew up but in luke's gospel the genealogy is one that luke wants to be worldwide and he goes back all the way to adam you'll find that at the end of luke chapter three and as that happens you notice that he bypasses cain and abel and takes the line from seth adam and eve's third child according to this there are many lists around here with names that we know like methuselah because methuselah lived for such a very very very long time we know nothing more about him but it causes me to think and we may come back to this again it causes me to think of a set of windows almost unnoticed in the cathedral church 86 of them had been put in around the clear stories of the the uh the choir area and the transepts and they went all the way around from adam until one came to the birth of christ the genealogical genealogical line which goes through and when i came here i don't think i paid much attention to that until in 2009 a piece of stone fell from the great window in the south transept it fell on the outside one ordinary july day onto the grass below no one was hurt it was a piece of stone without any kind of of of sign of having aged but it was a very big piece of stone and fell onto the ground and no one could think why it had fallen and so immediately because of the the worry of this wonderful glass and it's just of course coming to its own again as being older than even we thought then but we knew that the methuselah window which was uh had had been created by an unknown artist of enormous quality called the the methuselah master in our our way of describing it and so all that glass was taken out and the window was re-carved much to the interest a massive piece of recarving in stone by our people but what i'm going to say is that that six of those panels then went across to the pacific at the the getty museum in the pacific and that was in september of 2013 and we went across for the opening of that and saw the boulevards of los angeles with their lamp stands hanging with the pictures of the stained glass and it was a a great event but for us one began to notice because these characters are known and i was i was asked by the um broadcasting company that now why ancestors why genealogy and i had to think every one of them all 86 so we only have 44 now i think um all 86 had a completely different personality and that's one of the facts of humankind and all 86 were in a line going back well for matthew to abraham but for luke all the way back to adam so these names in the lists meant that jesus was rooted in our humanity as far as luke was concerned and rooted in a particular people as far as matthew was concerned and that's also a clue to the two evangelists so this story is much more important than one begins to think and all those lists become much more important even though you might think what on earth are all these lists well we should go on with this as we go through but i wanted to think that those windows had become much more noticed since that accidental event of the stone falling and now we know them well and the world knows them well because those ancestors should we say masuda wasn't allowed to go but six of the ancestors travelled right around to the other side of the world in the pacific coast and these are windows that the sun shines through so they were seeing a pacific sun rather than one here they stopped off on the way back in new york at the metropolitan museum at their cloister section for everyone to enjoy them there but now they're well back in that window and the ancestors show those things the distinctiveness and uniqueness of every human being in the imagination of the artist and also the distinctiveness of one line of genealogy which all of us has going back back back and and untraceable but much more sought after now that things like dna tests are involved but the responsibility for each other am i my brothers keeper am i my brother and my sister's keeper and the answer says in terms of welfare the good news is saying yes you're given these gifts in order to share them and also to guard and there's the voice of the lord god saying that you have to resist sin crouching at the door he says that to cain but he protects cain because life is in and death is in the hands of god and so um the the sense of of giving the chicks oops let's give them a bit more of a a little treat here this morning as i'm talking like you are chicks come on come on there we are a little bit of welfare here come on there we go good okay there's one other date that i want to mention this morning and that is that on the 7th of august 1893 alfredo catalani died if you know his name then uh um i i doubt many will you'll know that he was a composer an italian composer of opera who at the age of 39 died tragically of consumption one of the great scourges at that time and a very very painful and awful disease to have with with no real remedies people were sent away to mountaintops and all of that but but uh catalani died he had written by then some lovely music but was already feeling jealous of puccini and was feeling that his hour was yet to come it it never really did in his lifetime his operas uh lorelai and la wally were performed one in turin one in milan but his name is is not a household name like puccini or verdi and he had to wait 90 years for almost an accidental thing to happen for me even to know his name and love his music and the accidental thing was that a filmmaker jean-jacques benny made a film in 1981 called diva and diva is uh in the in the category of a favorite film of mine it is exciting it's it's beautifully set and it's it's it's all the way through thrilling so that the the desire of people to to kill one another in it and the way in which they escape or don't escape and the the the desire to to to get something for the sake of their own financial gain all of those things are there but in the middle of it is the little story of the the the postman jewel a young postman who is crazy about opera and crazy about the voice of a particular diva and that part is well played by wilhelmina fernandez the united states the american soprano who sings so beautifully and as a back cloth to the film catalani's lovely aria where la volley is is is thinking that she must go away and the aria is called that nandro lontana very well i must go a long way away and she sings that and it is a really really beautiful soprano aria and has become totally famous the world over and probably when you hear that played and you can tap it out on online you will know that that is catalani but in the film the diva will not allow her voice to be recorded i think she feels uh as i do about sermons that they are for one occasion and one occasion only it's like this morning we're actually talking in this way i can't recreate what i've said it's for now and she doesn't want it recorded at all so she is actually doing it for the people sitting in front of her and the little post boy getting a seat for this secretly gets a tape a really quality tape of her singing and that the the attempt to steal all of that becomes really exciting in the film and i mustn't carry on too much what i'm talking about is accidental piece of stone falling out of the wall of the transept onto the floor causes us to take notice and value so much more across the world the quality of ancient glass portraying biblical stories even right back to adam who is one of the most famous windows of all in the west window of the cathedral adam delving as they say digging the ground by the sweat of his brow and at the same time one remembers that robert runcie the archbishop at a particular time and who who trained me as the principal of my theological college would sit in this in augustine's chair and he would say i i tell myself whenever i'm sitting here with a high miter on and a coat looking so grand that i'm only level because the throne goes up step step step step and i'm only level with adam digging i'm only a member of humankind at this point in time doing my work as best i can and resisting all kinds of temptations he didn't go into this detail but that's what he meant uh in in this particular way so accidental happenings ought to be set aside nor should any sense of well this piece of work i've done really hasn't been recognized because who knows as catalani was not to know that 90 years later something other accidental will cause it to be so let's give thanks for this picture of our own human condition given by um uh kane and abel and the story as it goes on and even seth and we do that as the rain begins to paddle on the roof ahead but in fact the they're protected but the guinea fowl have now come to take an interest in their cousins the chicks and i think are probably going to find a little bit of shelter from the rain they don't like their feathers getting too wet let's say our prayers on this morning before fletcher and i go in and see what is happening in the diving before cathedral machines so let's uh say our prayers on this particular day the 7th of august and we're praying for the diocese of dublin and glendale in the church of ireland in the dublin province and at the same time we are praying in our diocese for a special ministry of welfare of make lunch working with families experiencing holiday hunger during school holidays we we pray for all those working with that and we pray for justin our archbishop rose bishop of dover tim bishop at lambeth bring your own prayers and intentions for this day as we say the collect for this morning almighty god who sent your holy spirit to be the life and light of your church open our hearts to the riches of your grace that we may bring forth the fruit of the spirit in love and joy and peace through jesus christ our lord amen so each in our own language we 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 justices 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 let's keep a moment of of hardly silence because the rain is falling uh but just to pause while we say our own prayers and i'll just give these a little bit more welfare here the ministry of [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] up [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] what's up so the peace of god which passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of god and live 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 pray for today and always are men but i think we came to the right place boys and girls this morning because the rain is falling hard and we are all sheltered and your older cousins here are coming back in even the duck has come back in for a bit of shelter this morning so we're going back into the olympics and uh see how things go [Applause]