good morning and welcome to the deanery garden at canterbury cathedral on this tuesday the 1st of june welcome wherever you are in the world and be um bring your own concerns to our act of morning worship it is the most beautiful day and once again we're enjoying may weather now early june and it's becoming quite quite warm so i had lily here with me a little while ago but i think the sun is even too hot for her and she may return but she has been helping me clear thistles maybe an hour's work at a time just in the middle of the day to do a different kind of exercise i'll talk about that in in the the reflection but today is part of the school's half term and so everything is quiet here this whole week our cathedral school kingsweep king's school canterbury is away and also the choristers who live here in the the uh boarding house of the choir school which is part of the gentleman school behind me here you'll see that the end of the table hall 13th century building which was the priors dining hall and that was all part of monastic life in those days well this is a day when we remember the christian martyr whose name was justin and he's known as justin martyr born in palestine in the early years of the second centuries a very early martyr but embraced the christian faith having been dabbling in all kinds of philosophy embrace the christian faith at the age of 30 and became a teacher and an apologist for christianity in ephesus in rome a teacher of philosophy in both those places and in the end in the year 165 was beheaded with his disciples the justin martyr very early christian martyr and the court records of his beheading have survived and so that martyrdom is very well attested so we give thanks for his teaching and for his life on this day so let's begin to say our prayers on this particular day of the week which is the first of the month oh 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 o god set our hearts on fire with love for you now and forever amen so the first day of the month gives us of course psalm 1 as we begin the reading of the psalter through and so i'll just read the first of the morning psalms psalm 1 blessed are they who have not walked in the council of the wicked nor lingered in the way of sinners nor sat in the assembly of the scornful their delight is in the law of the lord and they meditate on his law day and night like a tree planted by streams of water bearing fruit in due season with leaves that do not wither whatever they do it shall prosper as for the wicked it is not so with them they are like chaff which the wind blows away therefore the wicked shall not be able to stand in the judgment nor the sinner in the congregation of the righteous for the lord knows the way of the righteous but the way of the wicked shall perish so we turn once again to our regular reading of st matthew interrupted yesterday and the day before first by trinity sunday and then yesterday by the feast of the visitation of the blessed virgin mary but today we're back with matthew and you remember that on saturday we read the parable of the sower because chapter 13 of saint matthew's gospel starts the third discourse remember how we have said over and over again that matthew collects his material into a section of teaching and a section of activity a section of teaching a section of activity a section of teaching that's where we've arrived at that's discourse number three the first was the sermon on the mount the second the little commission to those being sent out and now the third which is a chapter full of parables this is the parable discourse and the sower was the first of those and now i'm taking up from verse 24 of chapter 13. this is called in this translation the parable of the weeds and as i'll say i don't like that translation i think weeds is the wrong word for reasons that we'll talk about later tears which king james uses not so much better too general the word in greek means donal poison darnold which looks absolutely like wheat when it springs up so it's donal that i'm going to use and then we'll talk about donal in our reflection i'm going to split this little bit and and reorder matthew because the parable of the wheat and the darnold comes in two sections in chapter 13 and there's an interruption so i'm taking the interruption and putting that on to tomorrow with the next little bit of the parable discourse and we'll deal with the parable of the wheat and the donal altogether in one piece and i'll explain when i stop where i'm going on to jesus put another parable before them saying the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field but while his servants were sleeping his enemy came and sowed darnold among the wheat and went away so when the plants came up and bore grain then the donald appeared also and the servants of the master of the house came and said to him master did you not sow good seed in your field how then does it have darnel he said to them an enemy has done this so the servant said to him then do you want us to go and gather them but he said no lest in gathering the donal you root up the wheat along with them let both grow together until the harvest and at harvest time i will tell the reapers gather the donald first and bind that in bundles to be burned but gather the wheat into my barn and i'm going on then to verse 36 then jesus left the crowds and went into the house and his disciples came to him saying explain to us the parable of the donal in the field he answered the one who sows the good seed is the son of man the field is the world and the good seed is the children of the kingdom the darnel are the children of the evil one and the enemy who saved them is the devil the harvest is the end of the age and the reapers are angels just as the darnel is gathered and burned with fire so will it be at the end of the age the son of man will send his angels and they will gather out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all law breakers and throw them into the fiery furnace in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their father whoever has ears let them hear i think i said uh before how amu is very suspicious of any word for word explanation of a parable and that happens with the parable of the sower and it also happens here with the parable of the donal and the reason sorry to repeat myself from saturday morning but it bears saying twice i think the reason is that it is limiting the meaning of the parable and the way that the picture of the parable also is being received by us and this becomes intensely important when one's mind is thinking what is it that's going to be gathered and burned and here is straightforward it's as though jesus is saying this is this and that is that and that's that's it cut and dried and there's certainly explanation enough in that way but if you turn to the parable of the good samaritan or something like that then there are a multitude of ways in which that parable can be taken and new dimensions and learnings and new applications of the picture are given to us as life goes on with different experiences that we have so the limiting of a parable too much i see what matthew is doing he's teaching his own people in his own community in that particular place where certain dangers were the dangers of the church other dangers would be the dangers of the church today but jesus's intention is that good seed shall find good ground within those hearing it might not at first but it will be sown again it might not second or third or fourth and uh the old adage try hard fail try again fail better goes on in this particular way these things happen by grace sometimes and they're worth waiting for but i wanted to look at our meadow that we've planted on this particular day i didn't do it as we normally do it on meadow monday but i didn't do it yesterday because it was the feast of the visitation and we were wanting to be amongst the flowers of the garden we found some blue flowers and uh fletcher and i have an apology to make because we've grown into the habit of of of calling a particular flower bugloss and uh actually it's not that flower that was first shown is not bug loss bluegrass will be there in flower later but this is alcanet and so let me be absolutely exact and we've been sloppy in our language so it's alkanet uh and we give thanks for the reminder of that which came accidentally really from an old friend whom i knew very well when i was both in salisbury and in sherburne in ministry and he and his wife robert and rosemary gooden robert was a chorister in salisbury cathedral and also his son was a chorister at sherbourne abbey when i was there but they keep a butterfly farm and worldwide butterflies between cherbin and yeovil is a wonderful place at the time i was in sherburne based at campton house the the old family house of the goodens but fletcher has been using them unbeknown to me to get the larvae and and caterpillars that we need to breed the butterflies how well i remember the first time we ever hatched a beautiful swallowtail butterfly and the excitement we had over that but in sending this time so that they can be netted on the heads of the nettles growing here and feed on that robert gooden wrote back and said please give my regards to robert and fletcher said to me do you know robert and rosemary gooden and i said yes i do they kept the butterfly farm so this is a big coincidence because we've been using them and since then we've had some conversation and it was robert who said looking yesterday um the bugloss is actually our connect and we both had this crash of memory and thought of course we've just been calling all these things bugloss so apologies for that for the blue flowers but back today to the green meadow which is beginning to become a meadow full of little flowers but amongst the meadow will you remember that winston and clemmy and the piglets as they grew up cleared this ground but what they couldn't clear of course was thistle seed and the thistle seed has sprouted into thistles and i've been spending some time my task from time to time i was able to spend an hour or two yesterday doing it with the help of lily in the meadow here pulling out the thistles it's the only way to do it now thistles are not as clever as darnold darnold has been the bane of farmers right back through history well beyond classical times right back through because it looks exactly the same as wheat there's some wheat coming up here at my feet and over here has sown itself but this really is wheat but it's hard to tell because the two when they come up side by side look exactly the same until the heads of this poison rye grass make themselves known and that's what happens in the parable jesus as a countryman knew all these things and in talking about the thistles and the grass i'm using images that he would have known but the thistles are easier than the donal they're quite tough to pull up once they've established their tap root but they have to be done singly one by one and gradually we're getting there so as i look across the wire fence towards you then beyond the fence is almost thistle clear from work i've already done with this trusty tool and it has to go deep sometimes there was a reading in the book of job i think chapter 8 this morning at matins in the cathedral earlier and it talked about how sin weaves its roots when it finds a stone right underneath and sometimes the thistle will do that seeking for water and when the taproot is established on the thistle then they get this beautiful green color if i see them yellow then i know that they will be easy to pull with just a little nudge from the trowel because they haven't yet established their route but they always make themselves known so that when they spring up although they're tough and they can wound your hand if you don't wear protection when you're doing this and the tap root is liable to snap and whatever's left behind will still grow some more thistle then nevertheless you can spot them because a little thistle doesn't disguise itself from the moment it's tiny leaves poke above ground you know it's a thistle so once cleared it will be easier we shall leave some of the thistles and robert gooden was was encouraging with that also because as i've said before goldfinches adore the thistle heads but only a little bit i tend to call this area in the middle thistle high command uh and uh it's the source of all things that that spring up and it's those things that when the the trowel pick it up those are thrown into the bucket and taken off those things which are insidious in our own lives jesus is talking about and the way in which rather like the little prince in the story has to clean out his planet of bearbabs before they grow taller than just a tiny seedling because then it's easy to take them out and if he lets them grow and remember there's that saint exupery cartoon of the baobabs which have grown actually breaking the planet apart it's the way things go but this work in terms of our spiritual life and our activity and our mental life um all of which i feel i'm engaged in when i'm pulling up the thistles thinking and having new thoughts also about the parables and deciding on things but at the same time doing physical work as the thistles come up all those things are done much better before things have taken root but they have to be spotted and that's why we need clarity in our prayers and grace to perceive that clarity so the donal which we have in our greek testament and the greek testament uses this the word for donnell zesanian and that means the poison darnold which often times in medieval times was called cockle and it was something that all farmers recognized i remember when i was the director of tisbury a farming parish in wiltshire that the boys of the village used to be given pocket money to go out roguing getting out the rogue wheat the minute it showed itself and they would walk up and down the lines and pull out the uh darnold and anything else that got in the way because otherwise it will be damaging the wheat nowadays as modern methods of separating the poison darnold from the wheat when they are actually fruiting but in jesus day it had to be done by care and it was puzzling how it arrived but then sin tends to whisper and the psalmist says that to those who are unwary and gets its taproot deep all these wonderful parables and the big lesson is don't limit their meaning by thinking what does that mean jesus only ever says the kingdom of heaven is like not the kingdom of heaven is the kingdom of heaven is like this farming image like this fishing image like this image of the kitchen we'll come back to many of those tomorrow because matthew helpfully collects the parables together but let's think of dates today as i said there's some justin martyr martyred on this day in 165 with some of his disciples beheaded in rome and at the same time this let me go through the dates in a sort of chronological order there's i'll just use a few of them i want to start with two cartoonists and the extraordinary thing about cartoonists if they're good cartoonists the political cartoonists that we have in our newspapers a few lines will show the character that they're trying to show us and the odd thing is we recognize they're good cartoons we recognize them they don't need to do any more and soon if the cartoonist is really clever you begin to think of that person and amalgamate that with the cartoon and uh i'm thinking today of two cartoonists the first in history was a man called james gilray who died in 1815 and he was a cruel cartoonist of the reign of george iii perhaps perhaps the cartoons of william pitt the prime minister and the emperor napoleon with the world on the plate like a great plum pudding and each taking a helping is one of his most famous cartoons but at the same time his cartoons of the prince of wales at the time who became the prince regent were very cruel and the cartoons of george iii and the various parts of life very cruel but cartoonists have that way of teaching lessons and pointing out where the darnell is where the poison in society the best ones do and that means once it's spotted it can be corrected and the other one james gilray first who is still alive so we wish him happy birthday today june the first um born in 1936 gerald's scarf and once again his cartoons but also illustrations of books that we have just a few lines and you think oh that's so-and-so that's so-and-so and the cartoonist can do that and teach the lessons as easily in a picture as a parable at the same time we've got some writers today john maysfield who was born in 1878 the poet laureate from 1930 to 1967 longer than anyone else as poet laureate except for alfred lord tennyson and he was someone born over in ledbury in the west of england and became a poet and his poetry and his atmosphere that he creates together with books that he wrote and plays that he wrote become intensely important let me come back to that in a moment we'll mention also today in 1967 the beatles launched their sergeant pepper's lonely hearts club band very different album from anything they'd done before and uh so people were taken by surprise the songs i get by with a little help from my friends when i'm 64 lucy in the sky with diamonds they've become part of legend but when bob dylan bought this took it back and listened to it he instantly exclaimed oh i get it you don't want to be cute anymore and paul mccartney later said it was with that volume we matured and became more of a recording band than those who got their energy from the adulation and screaming when we were on stage so we remember that day in 1967 and also in 1980 on june the first cnn was launched the world's first 24-hour television news network we take that for granted nowadays but 370 million homes and hotel rooms receive cnn what an influence and then at the same time on this day in 1941 sir hugh walpole died he was a novelist known better during his time than he is now and was actually a member of the king's school canterbury he he came here as a scholar and was educated here but there's one book that i'll always have on my shelves a few walpole and that is his novel the cathedral which gives the way of the life of a particular cathedral um about a century ago or more and it shows how thorns and sissels and nettles can grow up metaphorically in the life of any community and so i won't give the game away about that but the cathedral is a book worth reading and let's go back then to mazefield because john maysfield we showed you a picture of john maysfield very recently sitting beside gustaf host because maysfield wrote the very first play that was performed in an english cathedral since medieval times it was called the coming of christ and after it was performed in canterbury cathedral it his photograph was taken outside the front door here with gustav health who wrote the music for it and the odd thing is that it was a breakthrough to us it seems amazing because when mayfield began to write plays about the bible stories he suddenly found himself challenged by a law on blasphemy it was illegal to do that and the the law had been revived because of oscar wilde's play salome and so that was banned by the lord chamberlain's office so he had to fight against that extraordinary prohibition and at the same time dorothy el-sayers had to fight against that when she did the man born to be king on the radio it was illegal to portray jesus's voice in that way so those laws were were then amended and maesfield wrote his coming of christ but maysfield could get a wonderful atmosphere out of his his poetry and out of his books many of you will have read the children's book the box of delights a great christmas story with a mystic dimension and at the same time um many of you will know his sea fever he could gain an atmosphere of longing for something remembered and we all have those and a smell or the weather or something of that would think oh if only i could go through that again it's marvelous and here's his sea fever which was set to music i think by roger quilter i must go down to the seas again to the lonely sea and the sky and all i ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by and the wheels kick and the winds song and the white sails shaking and a grey mist on the sea's face and a gray dawn breaking i must go down to the seas again for the call of the running tide is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied and all i ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying and the flung spray and the blown spume and the seagulls crying maysville at his best so let's say our prayers on this beautifully warm day and i will take my trowel in my hand to show you that our reflections and our prayers are the way in which we identify and then take action and it sometimes has to be draconian to weed out by grace that which is threatening to destroy what god would have us be we're praying today on this day of justin martyr aptly for the same thing in the anglican communion as we are here we're praying with the whole anglican communion for the diocese of canterbury and for its diocesan bishop who happens to be the archbishop of canterbury justin and so we pray for him on this day and we pray for the communion of which he is leader in all its aspects and give thanks for it and at the same time here in the diocese on this first day of the month we're praying for the parish of christ church in hearne bay down by the sea and the parish of saint andrews at hampton and for the priest there anthony everett and the ministry of that particular parish so let's pray the prayer for this week 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 that jesus 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 so a moment now for your own prayers on this day 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 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 really hey you taking shade from me where are you there in the shade i think i won't lift her up lily likes to go where she wants to go but she is lying here out of sight behind me hi good morning you're ready for more thistles this afternoon