I want to reflect for a moment on the role of music in our life at St Edwards, and, by extension, in our lives more generally. Music is made of invisible waves and patterns in the air, physical vibrations in the body, and yet it speaks directly to the soul and mind. Music is made on the boundary between the physical and the spiritual, and so it is essential for the life of a church in which the mystery of the Incarnation is at the heart of things. Almost all churches make use of music, but what is striking at St Edwards is the range and variety. In a typical week we might have a nineteenth century concerto played at the start of an Odyssey, a Bach chorale sung in the course of the service, Rock music played at a Goth Eucharist, and in all our services there might be Taize chants that draw on the Gregorian monastic tradition, Iona songs that draw from the celtic folk tradition, Wesley hymns from the great evangelical revival, Office hymns that draw on Latin theology, and Communion hymns that draw on Orthodox liturgy. There might be music that has echoed for a thousand years, followed by music that was composed in the last decade.

Each of these musics has its place, does its work, and celebrates its mysetery within God's gracious provision for us here. It is cause for thanksgiving that we have in Fraser a vicar who can play and sing and who can draw to the church such a wide array of musicians and singers to take part in our services, that we have amongst our Goth congregation people who can introduce us to completely different music and challenge us to find the links and build the bridges between the sacred and the supposedly secular. It is a blessing too that our chuch is known as a musical venue and that we host so many concerts here. God is just as much present in His house on a week-day concert evening as on a Sunday morning, and though we are more conscious of His presence in the midst of liturgy it may be that in the midst of an evening concert His presence is suddenly disclosed and concert goers maybe moved to return to our church on a Sunday and find Him here in another form. George Herbert's poem on church music expresses for many of us the way music can lift and move us at St Edwards, when he addresses music thus: Now I in you without a bodie move / rising and falling with your wings / we both together sweetly live and love... / ...if I travell in your companie / you know the way to heavens door.

Earth felt the wound, and nature from her seat / sighing through all her works gave signs of woe / that all was lost.

So Milton describes the moment of the fall in Paradise Lost, the moment a single human action breaks and wounds both the relationship between humanity and God, and the relationship between ourselves and our world. Milton sees the deep link between our spiritual state and the state we keep and leave the world in. But these harrowing lines might well describe the tragedy unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico. The oil welling up uncontrollably through a hole that we have made and cannot cap is a sign, to many of us, of our wounded planet, a sign of the damage we have done and are doing, and of our seeming inability to put it right.

And it's no good blaming BP. They are deep-water drilling to meet our demands, and the real cause of the tragedy is our collective addiction to oil itself. We have a lifestyle, an economy, even an agriculture, entirely based on burning oil, a way of life that is not only unsustainable but invisibly toxic. But this wound in the earth's surface, this oil welling up through the waters, has also brought the toxins of our whole way of life to the surface and made them visible.

For those recovering from addiction, it has sometimes taken a crisis to make a change, it has needed a break-down for a break-through, and it may be that this crisis in the Gulf, an environmental disaster on an unparalleled scale, is the world's wake-up call, our Kairos moment. If we can face it at its worst we can also have hope. Though Milton wrote 'all was lost', his poem is alive with the promise of 'one greater man' who would 'restore us and regain the blissful seat'. Christians, who know that the wounds in our world stem from those same wounds in us that Jesus came to heal, have a special calling to speak both judgement and hope into the present crisis.

I leave you with the words of another poet, Wendell Berry, from an interview about the oil spill in the Gulf, in which he names the values we need to espouse in order to have hope: 'diversity, versatility, recognition and acceptance of appropriate limits or getting the scale right, and local adaptation - those ideas, it seems to me, put us in reach of work that we can do. To assume that all experiences like that oil well can only be handled by experts at great expense is a mistake.'

We will begin our liturgy this July with an Odyssey service in which we explore, through Wendell Berry's writings, what that diversity, versatility and recognition of limits might look like for us locally.