A sermon for Evensong, St Peter\u2019s Bramley, 10 May 2026.
Text: Revelation 21:22-22:5
Featured image: the New Jerusalem, from online-ministries.org. Copyright unknown.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAnd I saw no temple in the city: for its temple is the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it: for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb.\u201d (Revelation 21:22-23)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n I will come back to those verses from Revelation in a moment, but first, it might help those of you who are new to Evensong to understand what this service is, and how it came to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The first Christians adopted Jewish practice of praying two or three times a day. By the Middle Ages, monks had up to seven set times of prayer. For ordinary people, three were enough: mattins, vespers and compline. When our English Prayer Book was written in the 16th<\/sup> century, vespers (said at sunset) and compline (said at bedtime) were combined into one service of Evening Prayer. When used with music, it became known as Evensong, and the name has stuck, even though we are using a contemporary version of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is therefore a lot of history behind the various elements of the service. For instance, the New Testament reading is never from the Gospels, because the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis are themselves Gospel readings. Magnificat came from Vespers; Nunc Dimittis, with its request to \u2018depart in peace\u2019, came from the bedtime prayers of Compline. The collects \u2013 that is, the set prayers \u2013 are translations of ancient texts going back as far as the 5th<\/sup> century. So we join with past generations of Christians down the centuries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What makes this service different from others is that it is passive and reflective. If you go to a Cathedral evensong, the only parts that the congregation join in are the confession, creed, and if you are lucky, a hymn. For the rest, we sit quietly and listen to the choir. But this is not a concert. The choir\u2019s role is to enable the congregation to worship through four elements. Praise (mainly using the Psalms and canticles), Thanksgiving, Scripture and Intercession.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is much benefit to this passive form of worship. Partly it is a matter of personality: some of us prefer a more reflective way of engaging with God, compared with the joyful action songs and creative activities of our family celebrations. But also, we all need to quieten our hearts sometimes and be open to what the Holy Spirit is saying through the words of the Bible, whether spoken or sung.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To understand why that it important, consider the interaction between worship and Christian service. In the early Church, there was no clear distinction between them: to worship God was to serve him, and to serve him in practical ways was a form of worship. \u2018Orare est Laborare\u2019, said St Benedict: \u2018to pray is to work\u2019. Attending Evensong, then, is not an escape from our daily living out of our Christian faith in the service of others. It is engaging in worship as a form of service, so that we may be strengthened to go out through the week ahead to worship by serving.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But back to that quote from Revelation. John\u2019s vision is of the life to come, when there will be no Temple, and no sunlight or moonlight, for we will worship God the Father and Jesus Christ directly, and they will be our light. Simeon takes up this idea in his hymn of praise, the Nunc Dimittis: Jesus will be the one to \u2018lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of God\u2019s people Israel\u2019. And in that most ancient of the Evensong collects, we ask, \u2018Lighten our Darkness, Lord, we pray, and defend us from all perils and dangers of this night\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n May we know the light of Christ within us this evening as we go from here, inspired by the worship in which we have all participated. And may we know his light with us through the coming week, as we worship him through our faithful service. Master. Let us go in peace. Amen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Reference: <\/em> A sermon for Evensong, St Peter\u2019s Bramley, 10 May 2026.Text: Revelation 21:22-22:5Featured image: the New Jerusalem, from online-ministries.org. Copyright unknown. \u201cAnd I saw no temple in the city: for its temple is the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it: for the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":380,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[137,150,69,112],"class_list":["post-378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sermon","tag-contemplation","tag-evensong","tag-light","tag-revelation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pilgrims.org.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pilgrims.org.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pilgrims.org.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pilgrims.org.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pilgrims.org.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=378"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/pilgrims.org.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":381,"href":"https:\/\/pilgrims.org.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378\/revisions\/381"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pilgrims.org.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/380"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pilgrims.org.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pilgrims.org.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pilgrims.org.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Sansom, Michael, \u2018Worship in the Church of England\u2019 (revised edition), SPCK 1982. See pp 2-9 on the nature of worship, and pp 92-96 on Evensong.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"