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Good morning. Today Anglicans commemorate George Herbert – parliamentarian, priest and poet, for whom I have a particular fondness.

He was born in 1593 in Mid-Wales, a few miles from where I grew up. (By coincidence, he also has relatives buried in my church in Cardiff.)

George Herbert’s gift with language and rhetoric swept him into politics. He was briefly a Member of Parliament, and it seemed a career at court awaited him. But then he unexpectedly turned to the Anglican Church; and spent the last three years of his life as a parish priest, dying of consumption, aged only 39. 

Throughout his adult life Herbert was a prolific writer of religious verse, though it was only published after his death, to immediate acclaim. Such was his fluency and lyricism, he was described as ‘a soul composed of harmonies’. 

Much of Herbert’s poetry enjoys lasting popularity in the words of well-known hymns. For example we still sing ‘Teach me, my God and King, in all things thee to see.’  

It’s this capacity to avoid dividing the world into sacred and secular, which is particularly engaging. 

Herbert reminds us that, wherever life takes us, God reigns over it all. ‘Let all the world, in every corner, sing: my God and King!’ he wrote. It’s no platitude. His writings tell us he often wrestled long and hard with the God he came to know as the love that ‘bade him welcome, though his soul drew back’ – as one poem puts it.  

Herbert encourages us to keep on striving after God, and his redeeming love in action, not only in church, and not only on Sundays. 

So in the words of George Herbert…  

King of glory, king of peace – help us to see you in all situations, and seven whole days, not one in seven, let us praise you.  Amen.