Homily preached at Evensong at Christ Church
Greenwich, Connecticut
May 12, 2019 / Fourth Sunday of Easter
Craig Walter Casey Memorial
Wisdom 1:1-15
1 Peter 5:1-11
The Anglican evening service, for which we have all gathered here tonight, in some ways sits anomalously in the life of this town and even this parish. It is a truism, and I assume that it is as boring for you to hear from the pulpit as it is for me to say it, that we are a preoccupied people. But the fragmented quality of our attention encouraged by constant digital communication and its implements is not just an annoyance: it presents a spiritual danger. Having divided us, evil may chip away at our attention. Saying, “I don’t have time to care about that right now,” can often be the first step down the road to perdition, whether for ourselves or for the neighbors whom we are called to love as ourselves.
Most religious celebrations tend to unintentionally recapitulate the busyness of daily life. They gather us around a table of some sort. They hand us a book, or a plate, or speak a word and demand a response. They want to ‘touch’ us. Evensong is a liturgical expression of Christ’s saying Nolle me tangere – “Do not touch me. I have not yet ascended to my Father.”[1] And there is a purpose to that.
Evensong is the name given in 1549 to the service we commonly call Evening Prayer. The service was adapted after the Reformation from the monastic hours of Vespers and Compline, designed to be simple and compact enough to be said by the faithful, alone or in groups, at home or in church, every day. It does not require the presence of a priest. It is – in its quiet way – a wondrous phenomenon, perfectly suited to its purpose. Even the word ‘Evensong’ is poetic, and it seems to chime in perfect harmony with the seasons of the year: Autumn’s melancholy, early evening light; the merry crackle of Winter frost; Spring’s awakening, or the lazy, protracted sun strained through the warmed windows of a Summer afternoon.[2] On a day like this, the warmth of the light and the music fortifies us against the cold and damp outside the walls of this church.
In our choral service this evening, the choir sings those parts of the service, which – if we were saying Evensong alone or in the company of others – we would read together: the selection from the Psalter, Magnificat, Nunc dimittis, and the responses.
There has been a long debate since the beginning of Christianity about the role of music in worship. Even St. Augustine, who famously said that “He who sings, prays twice,” was concerned with the power of music’s beauty to distract the listener from the worship of God.
But in our case this evening, the music is not chiefly decorative. Because the choir sings settings of the regular prayers and canticles, and chants the psalms, music comes to reinforce the words, well known to the faithful: O God, make speed to save us; My soul doth magnify the Lord; Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.Music can highlight particular aspects of familiar texts in ways that are unexpected and which draw the listener into a deeper appreciation of well-known phrases.
As for the idea that listening is necessarily passive, attendance at this service helps us all develop something that may be called the “spirituality of attention.” Attention is active engagement with what is at hand, and it is opposed to unconsciousness – the condition of mindless action – which is at the root of all our inhumanity. Think of the things that have unconsciousness at their root: from basic rudeness to littering to heinous crimes of passion. So when the choir sings on our behalf, we are called to listen, to be attentive the words, and “our experience of listening will be one of participation, and our experience of participation will be one of prayer.”[3]
It is often thought that the purpose of the Christian life is to do certain things, and there is a reason for this, even beyond our nervous tics to be active all the time. When we hear verses of scripture that say things like, “by their fruits ye shall know them,” the imperative to do certain things and not do other things seems paramount.[4] When we confess our sins in the words of the Prayer Book, we come clean that “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done.”
But the Christian life is not merely a list of to-dos and not-to-dos. The Christian life is about the cultivation of character.
In our second lesson this evening, we heard St Peter’s words of caution to his brothers and sisters in Christ: “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour: Whom resist, steadfast in the faith.” In the translation we heard this evening, that verse begins, “be disciplined.” That discipline begins in prayer, begins in attention to our surroundings, to the present moment, to ourselves, and to God himself. That is what we do here this evening. It’s not just an aesthetic experience, though we do our best to make it beautiful. This service is part of the school of prayer which is the church, whose end is training us to be sober and vigilant, to give us the training to face the challenges of our lives with fortitude, prudence, temperance, and justice. If you think of the people whom you have admired in your lives, I bet their they were distinguished by their strength of character. This is what it means, as our first lesson began, to “love righteousness… [to] think of the Lord in goodness and [to] seek him with sincerity of heart.”
This service is sung tonight in memory of Craig Walter Casey, who as a clergyman was affiliated with this parish and its Choir of Men and Boys for more than a dozen years. Fr Casey well knew the power of Evensong to focus the attention of the faithful – even the attention of the choirboys who will find the rhythms of Evening Prayer in their bones long after their voices have changed and they have graduated to the back row. It is why the Casey Memorial Fund enables boys of the choir specifically to participate in the choir’s periodic tours to England, where their work consists not in concerts and applause, but in the daily singing of Evensong.
Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour: Whom resist, steadfast in the faith.
Thanks be to God.
AMEN.
[1] John 20:17
[2] Stephen Hough, “‘Do not touch me’: the wisdom of Anglican thresholds,” The Telegraph, January 25, 2012,http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/culture/stephenhough/100059899/do-not-touch-me-the-wisdom-of-anglican-threshholds/.
[3] Stephen Cherry, liner notes to “Choral Evensong Live from King’s College, Cambridge,” EMI Classics, 1992.
[4] Matthew 7:20