The Parish Church of St John-at-Hampstead

Psalm 119.41-56
OT Reading: Exodus 14.5-end
NT Reading: Matthew 6.1-18

The Scripture moveth us in sundry places … Brought up as a Methodist, on a sorry diet of hymn sandwiches, my earliest encounters with Evensong were associated with Sunday evenings on holiday.  I remember thinking that was what ‘sundry places’ must mean, the scattering of cool and peaceful but mostly empty churches to which my father would take us at the end of a long, hot day spent diving off the rocks or trying to surf the breakers.   I began to appreciate the beauty of choral evensong when one of my more disreputable uncles, limping along in a shabby raincoat with nicotine-stained fingers and teeth that didn’t fit, was allowed to take me out from school to attend evensong at his Cambridge College, which happened to be King’s.  We sat in the great stalls behind the choir, using the enormous and venerable leather-bound prayer books.  Later, when I when I went up to King’s myself, I was required to take my turn at reading the lessons from the great lectern in the centre of the aisle.  More recently I have enjoyed the privilege of singing evensong in many of our great cathedrals, and playing my part in our services here.  So when I was asked to preach this evening at the first choral evensong under our new Director of Music, I thought it might be a good opportunity to reflect on what it is that makes choral evensong so special.  Why do we continue to use a service which in its present form goes back 350 years, and was even then the restoration of a service more than 100 years old?  Over and above the sheer beauty of the musical settings which we are so privileged to enjoy, what does this ancient form of worship still have to offer to a congregation exposed to the very different pressures of life in the sharply competitive society of our great city in the twenty-first century?

The Scripture moveth us in sundry places.  The first thing to be said about evensong is indeed its emphasis on the Scriptures.   Cranmer’s original version of 1549 did not even begin with the now so familiar exhortation, confession and absolution.  Starting with the Lord’s prayer, he moved straight into the cyclical recitation of the Psalms and then the Scripture Readings, to which the choir responds on our behalf with the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis – themselves lifted straight from the New Testament.  Even the Lesser Litany, which follows the Creed, consists largely of quotations from Scripture.  The pre-reformation offices had contained just a few verses in the lesson.  When Cranmer reduced the seven daily monastic offices to just two  – Morning and Evening Prayer – he devised for them a new daily lectionary that covered nearly the entire Bible, as well as reading every Psalm once a month.  With such intensive exposure to the whole of the Bible, the intention was that within the context of daily prayer and praise, priests and people alike should become deeply familiar with the text of the whole Bible in the English language.  With the benefit of such familiarity, the Biblical narrative becomes our story, our narrative.  Those of us who do not say the offices daily have lost something of that – we have to make up for it in other ways, for example by reading our Bibles at home – but we still cover a good deal of ground if we attend evensong regularly.  A high proportion of what we hear or say at evensong draws directly on the Bible, so that our hearts and minds are formed as we absorb that great treasury of man’s experience of God.   

Evensong then immerses us in the Scriptures.  It also provides us with models of response, first in praise and then in prayer.  After the penitential introduction, which may be regarded as an essential ground-clearing exercise, a ritual hand-washing if you like, concluding with a first recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, we move quickly into the first set of responses, which are mainly about praise. The Lord opens our lips, and our mouths shew forth his praise.  After a first round of praise in the words of the Doxology (Glory be to the Father, and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost) the opening responses conclude with more praise: Praise ye the Lord. The Lord’s name be praised.   Praise is indeed the primary mode of our response to the Scriptures. We respond to each Psalm, whether the tone be one of confident and joyful adoration or sorrow and despair, with another round of the Doxology. This has the effect of affirming that God’s glorious presence is to be found in all the joys and sorrows of human experience which are so richly reflected in the poetry of the Book of Psalms.  The Magnificat and the Nunc Dimittis, with which we then respond to the readings from the Old and New Testament respectively, are again great songs of praise, which together represent the widest possible gamut of prayerful human response to the activity of God in our lives.  A few years ago Samuel Wells summarised these contrasting responses as follows:
The two canticles, the Mag and the Nunc, represent the two halves of Christian experience.  The first is the song of a young girl, the second of an old man. The first is the song of a social pariah, a young woman pregnant outside marriage; the second the song of a pillar of the establishment, a fixture in the temple.  The first is the story of God’s sudden irruption into history, of his explosion into the life of an unsuspecting girl; the second is the story of centuries of longing, of a man as old as Israel, whose yearning for God to answer his prayer is as earnest as the near despair of the nation itself.
   
But these responses go beyond praise. As we echo the faithful responses of Mary and Simeon, we open ourselves to the radically transformative culture which breathes in and through the Biblical narrative.

Only then are we ready to pray.  The double use of the Lord’s Prayer is not an oversight on Cranmer’s part, some sort of botched consequence of combining the old offices of Vespers and Compline into a single service of Evensong.   The rubrics hint at the difference.  First time around, following the initial acts of confession and absolution, we are like children being taught how to pray. We are bidden to repeat the prayer with the priest.  Indeed, until 1662 the first recitation of the Lord’s Prayer was spoken by the priest alone, as if he were praying with Christ for us. The second time around, after we have responded to the Scriptures with songs of praise and affirmed our faith in the words of the Apostles Creed, the Lord being with us, the rubric directs Ministers, Clerks and people to ‘say the Lord’s Prayer with a loud voice’.  If the first Lord’s Prayer, led by the priest, helps to prepare our hearts and minds to receive the Scriptures, and to respond to our experience of life in the words that our Lord himself used, the second Lord’s prayer releases in us the springs of prayer, as we pray with our Lord for matters of concern in our lives and in the life of the world, for matters that He would want us to pray for.  In the Lesser Litany we pray briefly but confidently for ourselves and our salvation, for the Queen, for the government and for the people, for peace in our time, and for the continued presence with us of the Holy Spirit. We conclude with the three Collects – for the Day, for Peace and for Aid against all perils. Nothing more is needed, but provision is made for an anthem, and it has become customary to further extend the office, especially on Sundays, with one or more hymns and a sermon, all of which can be used to add depth to our meditation on the Scriptures appointed for the day, as well as a few more particular intercessions. 

These final intercessions are an expression of the transformation that has taken place as we have passed through the experience of evensong.  We are not in the same place as we were when we came in.  In the Scriptures we have encountered the God whose faithfulness and loving care were revealed in the experience of the people of Israel, and supremely in the life and death of our Saviour Jesus Christ.  We have in some measure absorbed the culture of the Biblical narrative, embracing it and responding to it with hymns of praise.  And now, formed and reformed by our worship into the Body of Christ, we are ready to engage with the world in prayer and service, in obedience to the will of God our Father, just as He did. 

There has been much emphasis in recent years on the value of the Eucharist as the central act of worship of the whole Christian community, and that is very much to be welcomed.  But alongside the Eucharist, the Church of England is right to cherish the traditional office of Evensong, which we can still follow and enjoy with great profit, as it helps us to make sense of our lives in the context of the Biblical narrative of our salvation.  Moreover the music of choral evensong raises our worship to a higher level, giving richer expression to both praise and prayer that cannot be adequately expressed in words alone.  So it is with great pleasure that we both welcome back our choir after the summer break, and that we extend a very warm welcome to James as our new Director of Music.

Note: This sermon draws heavily on Ashley Cocksworth, Being moved in sundry places: Evensong, transformation and the theology of prayer, in Theology Vol 115 No.5, Sept/Oct 2012