The Meaning of Evensong. 10 September 2023
Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity
Choral Evensong
10th September 2023
Ezekiel 33.7-11
Acts 19.1-20
Angela Tilby,
Canon of Honour
Words from our Second reading from Acts: ‘The Word of the Lord grew mightily, and prevailed…’.
And from our First Reading from Ezekiel: ‘I the Lord will speak and it will be fulfilled’ from our First reading.
Choral Evensong is a Service of the Word of God, a service built around the Bible. Not only do we listen to two hefty readings, one from the Old Testament and one from the New; we also listen to the choir chanting a psalm, sometimes more than one, from scripture; and we hear two songs, or canticles from scripture: the Magnificat, the Song of Mary and the Nunc Dimittis, the Song of Simeon, both from Luke’s Gospel. And that is not all. Almost all the other parts which the Precentor sings with the Choir, are taken from scripture: from ‘O Lord open thou our lips’ at the beginning, to ‘take not thy Holy Spirit from us’, words which lead into the prayers.
There is something quite remarkable about the fact that here in the twenty-first century on this Atlantic island to the West of the European continent we are directly linked into the prayers and songs of ancient Israel, and to the worship of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. This is our version of the end of the day sacrifice of praise which accompanied the lighting of the lights of evening. The first Christians did not change this pattern, they too offered praise and prayer at the beginning and the end of the day, seeing in the rising and setting of the sun, an image of God’s grace sustaining the world, giving new hope in the morning and peace in the evening. Jesus often quoted from the Psalms and the early Church found prophecies of his life and death and resurrection in the Psalms. So the book of Psalms took on a special significance. They came to be seen as Christ’s prayer to God the Father through the Church, and the prayer of the whole Church to Christ. So when we say, sing, or listen to the Psalms we are brought right into the presence of God,
It is extraordinary, perhaps a quirk of fate, perhaps an act of providence, that we are able to worship in this way today – that the rhythms, of sitting and standing, listening and responding, singing and speaking are still available to us, and to the generations of children, young people and adults who come together to sing and lead our evening worship.
It is extraordinary because at the Reformation many of the new churches on the continent did away with such forms of worship, associating them with what they thought of as the errors of the Roman Catholic Church. You will remember how, in this country, Henry VIII abolished 800 monasteries, making ten thousand monks jobless and homeless, and leaving many of the poorest of the poor without a place of refuge. No matter, from Henry’s point of view, it all raised a stack of cash which he needed badly. But what an act of vandalism. We can perhaps be grateful that Henry’s Archbishop, Thomas Cranmer, unlike some of the continental Reformers, worked hard to ensure that something of the legacy of the monks was preserved for worshippers after the Reformation. He put together elements from two of the original seven monastic daily services to make Evensong. So our Evensong is an amalgam of Vespers, the Evening service, the service of praise to God at the lighting of the evening lights, and Compline, the last service of the day before bedtime.
And it works, whatever ‘works’ means in this context. The thing is about Evensong, you can participate at your own level and within what we might call your own comfort zone. It does not intrude, demand or require your consent. Nobody will try to force anything on you. But if you attend you may well find something speaks, something sticks, even if it’s just a passing feeling, an intuition of God. Just for a moment the internal chatter of our lives recedes and there is a moment of presence, a moment of grace. When I was a canon of Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford, and we had Evensong most days there in term time as we do here, a colleague of mine used to say that the wonderful thing about Evensong was that no matter how flustered, exhausted or furious you were when you arrived, by the time you got to the end you were a different person. So perhaps this is the Church of last resort.
And for those who sing here, sing these ancient words from the psalms, what an exposure it is to the mystery of creation, to the exquisite world of order and spontaneity depicted in the coloured threads of our exhibition in these weeks.
This is God’s world, this interwoven tapestry of life with all its promise and potential, yes, and danger and suffering which the Christian Gospel addresses. There is a place for lament, for the minor key, for an acknowledgment of our weakness and fragility as we confront the sufferings of the world and the perils of life, the wars and defeats and the injustices all around us. But while we bring all this into the presence of God in our worship we are mysteriously renewed from within, given a new faith and new hope. I love that little dialogue in our second reading when St Paul asks a group of disciples of Jesus in the city of Corinth, ‘Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you became believers’ and they answer ‘Whoah, we haven’t even heard there is a Holy Spirit’. Well when you find yourself in a different place after Evensong at the end from where you were at the beginning, that is the Holy Spirit, God’s nudge to you to trust, and hope and believe and live. Choristers and choral scholars, lay clerks, congregation and all of us, welcome back, welcome home, welcome onwards.
Angela Tilby
Canon of Honour