All Hallows Evening Prayer for Sunday, Evening (July 4, 2021)

 

Evening Prayer

The Service of Light

Jesus Christ is the light of the world.
A light no darkness can extinguish.

Open this link in a new tab to hear Stephen Sturk’s choral arrangement of the Phos hilaron, “O Gracious Light.”

1. O gracious Light,
pure brightness of the
everliving Father in heaven.
O Jesus, Christ, holy and blessed!

2. Now as we come to the setting of the sun,
and our eyes behold the vesper light,

we sing

we sing
we sing thy praises, O God:
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

3. Thou art worthy

thou art worthy 

at all times

at all time
to be praised 

to be praised by happy voices,
O Son of God, O Giver of life,
and to be glorified

be glorified

through all the worlds

be glorified 

through all the worlds 

be glorified 

through all the worlds

be glorified 

through all the worlds

be glorified

through all the worlds 

be glorified

through all the worlds.

Thanksgiving

Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.
It is right to give our thanks and praise.

Blessed are you, Sovereign God,
our light and our salvation,
eternal creator of day and night,
to you be glory and praise for ever.
Now, as darkness is falling,
hear the prayer of your faithful people.
As we look for your coming in glory,
wash away our transgressions,
cleanse us by your refining fire
and make us temples of your Holy Spirit.
By the light of Christ,
dispel the darkness of our hearts
and make us ready to enter your kingdom,
where songs of praise for ever sound.
Blessed be God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Blessed be God for ever. Amen.

Psalm 141 is sung and incense may be burned.

Open this link in a new tab to hear Peter Inwood’s responsorial setting of Psalm 141, “O Lord, Let My Prayer Rise Before You Like Incense.”

O Lord, let my prayer rise before you like incense,
my hands like an evening offering.

1. Lord, I am calling:
hasten to help me.
Listen to me as I cry to you.
Let my prayer rise before you like incense,
my hands like an evening offering.

O Lord, let my prayer rise before you like incense,
my hands like an evening offering.

2. Lord, set a guard at my mouth,
keep watch at the gate of my lips.
Let my heart not turn to things that are wrong,
to sharing the evil deeds done by the sinful.
No, I will never taste their delights.

O Lord, let my prayer rise before you like incense,
my hands like an evening offering.

3. The good may reprove me,
in kindness chastise me,
but the wicked shall never anoint my head.
Ev’ry day I counter their malice with prayer.

O Lord, let my prayer rise before you like incense,
my hands like an evening offering.

4 To you, Lord, my God, my eyes are turned:
in you I take refuge;
do not forsake me.
Keep me from the traps they have set for me,
from the snares of those who do evil.

O Lord, let my prayer rise before you like incense,
my hands like an evening offering.

5 Praise to the Father, praise to the Son,
all praise to the life-giving Spirit.
As it was, is now and shall always be
for ages unending. Amen.

O Lord, let my prayer rise before you as incense,
my hands like an evening offering.

Silence is kept.

Let the incense of our repentant prayer ascend before you, O Lord, and let your loving kindness descend upon us, that with purified minds we may sing your praises with the Church on earth and the whole heavenly host, and may glorify you forever and ever. Amen.

The Psalms

Open this link in a new tab to hear Dan Schutte’s adaptation of Psalm 139, “You Are Near.”

Yahweh, I know you are near
Standing always at my side
You guard me from the foe
And you lead me in ways everlasting

Lord, you have searched my heart
And you know when I sit and when I stand
Your hand is upon me
Protecting me from death
Keeping me from harm

Yahweh, I know you are near
Standing always at my side
You guard me from the foe
And you lead me in ways everlasting

Where can I run from your love?
If I climb to the heavens you are there
If I fly to the sunrise
Or sail beyond the sea
Still I’d find you there

Yahweh, I know you are near
Standing always at my side
You guard me from the foe
And you lead me in ways everlasting

You know my heart and its ways,
you who formed me before I was born
in the secret of darkness
before I saw the sun
in my mother's womb.

Yahweh, I know you are near
Standing always at my side
You guard me from the foe
And you lead me in ways everlasting

Marvelous to me are your works
How profound are your thoughts, my Lord
Even if I could count them
They number as the stars
You would still be there

Yahweh, I know you are near
Standing always at my side
You guard me from the foe
And you lead me in ways everlasting

Silence is kept.

Creator God,
may every breath we take be for your glory,
may every footstep show you as our way,
that, trusting in your presence in this world,
we may, beyond this life, still be with you
where you are alive and reign
for ever and ever. Amen.

Open this link in a new tab to hear Omer Westendorf’s translation of the Latin hymn Ubi Caritas, "Where Charity and Love Prevail."

1 Where charity and love prevail,
There God is ever found;
Brought here together by Christ’s love,
By love we are thus bound.

2 With grateful joy and holy fear
His charity we learn;
Let us with heart and mind and soul
Now love Him in return.

3 Forgive we now each other’s faults
As we our faults confess;
And let us love each other well
In Christian holiness.

4 Let strife among us be unknown,
Let all contention cease;
Be his the glory that we seek,
Be ours his holy peace.

5 Let us recall that in our midst
Dwells God’s begotten Son;
As members of his body joined,
We are in Him made one.

6 No race nor creed can love exclude
If honored be God’s name;
Our family embraces all
Whose Father is the same.

The Proclamation of the Word

The Reading

Mark 6: 1-13 The Rejection of Jesus at Nazareth

He left that place and came to his hometown, and his disciples followed him. On the sabbath he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were astounded. They said, “Where did this man get all this? What is this wisdom that has been given to him? What deeds of power are being done by his hands! Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?” And they took offense at him. Then Jesus said to them, “Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their own house.” And he could do no deed of power there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them. And he was amazed at their unbelief.

Then he went about among the villages teaching. He called the twelve and began to send them out two by two, and gave them authority over the unclean spirits. He ordered them to take nothing for their journey except a staff; no bread, no bag, no money in their belts; but to wear sandals and not to put on two tunics. He said to them, “Wherever you enter a house, stay there until you leave the place. If any place will not welcome you and they refuse to hear you, as you leave, shake off the dust that is on your feet as a testimony against them.” So they went out and proclaimed that all should repent. They cast out many demons, and anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them.

Silence is kept.

May your word live in us
and bear much fruit to your glory

The Homily

People Are Not Pigeons

How many of us really know the people around us? I suspect that many of us think that we do, but we in actuality do not. We have formed an opinion of a person, put them in a pigeonhole, and are content to leave them there for the rest of their life. We classify someone as a type of a person and then treat them like that type regardless of how they may change. We do not see the whole person, but only part of them and the part of them that we see may be distorted by our own misperceptions and prejudices. We make all kinds of assumptions about them, assumptions which have little, if anything, with who they really are. Life is easier for us when we have placed everyone in their own small compartment.

When Jesus visited his hometown, he discovered that he had been pigeonholed. “He’s the son of the carpenter, the son of Mary. We know his brothers and his sisters.” The response of the town’s people to Jesus was one of unbelief and rejection. Nothing that he said or did convinced them that he did not fit in the small compartment in which they had placed him. In their minds carpenter’s sons do not become rabbis. They do not become miracle workers. Carpenters’ sons become carpenters like their fathers. They make pieces of furniture, storage chests, and whatever carpenters made when Jesus was on earth.

It did not enter their minds that God might be working in Jesus in a way that they had never experienced. The pigeonhole in which they had placed Jesus did allow for such possibility.

The Holy Spirit opened my eyes to the danger of pigeonholing people when I attended a Cursillo Weekend in the late 1980s-early 1990s. I believe that it was the Holy Spirit because the experience has influenced how I see people since that time. I cannot claim to have become a changed man right away, but the experience did make a significant difference in how I began to see people, a difference that has grown over time.

For those who are unfamiliar with Cursillo, it is a short course in Christian living. The purpose of Cursillo is to help practicing Christians to “renew and strengthen their love of Jesus;” “grow in faith, knowledge, and personal holiness;” and “bring Christian values to all environments and people with whom they come into contact and make those values the pattern for their own lives.” A Cursillo Weekend is a three-day weekend in which individuals participate in the course. A similar weekend is the three-day Walk to Emmaus weekend.

Early in the weekend I was quick to form an opinion of a fellow participant based upon several remarks that she made. I found a pigeonhole for her, and I put her in the pigeonhole. Later in the weekend she shared her testimony with those participating in the weekend. I was totally wrong in my assumptions about this young woman!

We are apt to pigeonhole people when we form our opinion of them on a few words that they have said and a few things that they have done. We may not have understood what they said, and we may have misinterpreted what they did. We do not allow ourselves time to form a better opinion of them but are quick to judge them. We jump to conclusions based upon the flimsiest of evidence. We let our misperceptions and prejudices filter out their positive attributes and we dwell on what we perceive as their negative attributes. We may not be seeing the actual person but a restricted image of the person that we have fabricated ourselves.

In the Parable of the Good Samaritan Jesus showed the Pharisees and the teachers of the Law how they were pigeonholing the Samaritans whom the Jews had come to regard as their hereditary enemies. It was Samaritan, not a priest or a Levite, who tended to the wounds of a Jewish man attacked by robbers and left for dead on the side of the road.

Indeed, Jesus’ eating with tax collectors and prostitutes were also his way of showing the Pharisees and the teachers of the Law how they were pigeonholing people. They viewed tax collectors and prostitutes as beyond redemption. Jesus drew to their attention that they were wrong in their assumptions.

Putting people in a pigeonhole may simplify our lives for us, but we are not treating the people whom we pigeonhole the way that we would wish to be treated. We would wish for people to see us for ourselves and not to respond to us as a type of a person.

Among the dangers of pigeonholing people is that we may no longer see them as human beings but as things. We may no longer see them as made in the image of God. “Thinging” people enables us to devalue them and their lives. Murderers come to regard their victims as things before they kill them. The Nazis saw as sub-humans, as things, the disabled and intellectual-impaired adults and children, they loaded into trucks designed to asphyxiate these adults and children with carbon dioxide fumes from the exhaust of the truck engine, much in the same way the local pound euthanizes stray and unwanted dogs and cats. Animal welfare laws require the cooling of the hot exhaust fumes in the euthanizing of dogs and cats. The Nazis did not bother with such niceties. The adults and children died in agony from the hot exhaust fumes. The Nazis saw as sub-humans, as things, the seven million Jews that they sent to the extermination camps, the seven million Jews whom they worked to death or stripped of their clothes and humanity and herded into the gas chambers, whose corpses they cremated in ovens and turned into fertilizer.

We may also end up demonizing people, seeing them as evil or wicked regardless of whether they are and therefore worthy of contempt and worse.

When we pigeonhole people, we deny the power of God to transform lives. We refuse to admit the existence of God’s holy influence by which God in his merciful kindness renews his image in us, an image that is marred by sin. We are essentially saying to those who we have pigeonholed, “this is where I have put you and this is where you must stay!” We deny them redemption and a new life.

Jesus, however taught us to love our neighbors, to love each other, and to love those who are unfriendly and even antagonistic toward us. This kind of love requires that we refrain from putting people in pigeonholes. It requires that we see them as God sees them. They are precious to God that he sent his only Son that all who believe in might not perish but have eternal life.

When we love someone, we hold them dear. We cherish them. We care for them and protect them. We seek their well-being. We try to understand them and the past experiences that may have shaped them. We help, encourage, and support them when we can. We are there for them when they need someone.

Love is not letting someone do whatever they please, even endanger or harm themselves or others or ourselves. Love offers a cautioning word or extends a restraining hand when it is needed.

Love may take the form of compassion, kindness, trust, respect, forgiveness, generosity, patience, gentleness, or self-sacrifice.

Love is not a transitory feeling. It is decision. We set our hearts on loving someone.

We may become infatuated with our own fabricated image of someone. When we love someone, however. we choose to hold the whole person dear, imperfections, flaws, insecurities, and all. We choose to treasure them as God treasures us.

Some people may be easier to love than others. When Jesus told his disciples to love others, he did not tell them to discriminate between those who are easy to love and those who are more difficult to love. He told us to love everybody. We cannot reserve our love for those who are responsive to our love or who may reciprocate it.

To some people we may take an instant liking. Our liking for them may be entirely unrelated to any quality or characteristic that they may exhibit, and which may be listed on a likeability scale. It may be unexplainable. Our liking for them may, at times, receive a pummeling but it never goes away. To others it may take us a while to warm. Jesus tells us that we must love the one no differently from the other. They are both precious to God. We must treat all people alike.

Our love of others does not come naturally. It is a work of God’s grace. We love, as the apostle John tells us, because God first loved us. God works invisibly in us, moving us to love our neighbor, each other, and those who are not friendly and well-disposed toward us, and enabling us to love them. For this reason, we should pray daily for God’s grace to love others and to keep on loving them no matter how they respond to our love. When we ask God for his grace to love others, we are aligning ourselves with God’s will for us. We are saying with Jesus, “Your will be done….” We should also pray that God will help us to not pigeonhole people but enable us to see each person as someone whom God treasures, as someone whom God holds dear.

Silence is kept.

The Gospel Canticle

Open this link in a new tab to hear Bernadette Farrell - Owen Alstott’s setting of the Magnificat, “My Soul Proclaims the Greatness of the Lord.”

My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord
My spirit sings to God, my saving God,
Who on this day above all others favored me
And raised me up, a light for all to see.

Through me great deeds will God make manifest,
And all the earth will come to call me blest.
Unbounded love and mercy sure will I proclaim
For all who know and praise God's holy name.

God's mighty arm, protector of the just,
Will guard the weak and raise them from the dust.
But mighty kings will swiftly fall from thrones corrupt.
The strong brought low, the lowly lifted up.

Soon will the poor and hungry of the earth
Be richly blest, be given greater worth.
And Israel, as once foretold to Abraham,
Will live in peace throughout the promised land.

All glory be to God, Creator blest,
To Jesus Christ, God's love made manifest,
And to the Holy Spirit, gentle Comforter,
All glory be, both now and ever more.

Intercessions

Let us complete our evening prayer to the Lord.
Lord have mercy.

For peace from on high and our salvation, let us pray to the Lord.
Lord have mercy.

For the welfare of all churches and for the unity of the human family, let us pray to the Lord.
Lord have mercy.

For (name), our bishop, and (name), our pastor, and for all ministers of the Gospel, let us pray to the Lord.
Lord have mercy.

For our nation, its government, and for all who serve and protect us, let us pray to the Lord.
Lord have mercy.

For this city (town, university, monastery…). For every city and community, and for all those living in them, let us pray to the Lord.
Lord have mercy.

For the good earth which God has given us and for the wisdom and will to conserve it, let us pray to the Lord.
Lord have mercy.

For the safety of travelers, the recovery of the sick, the care of the destitute and the release of prisoners, let us pray to the Lord.
Lord have mercy.

For an angel of peace to guide and protect us, let us pray to the Lord.
Lord have mercy.

For a peaceful evening and a night free from sin, let us pray to the Lord.
Lord have mercy.

For a Christian end to our lives and for all who have fallen asleep in Christ, let us pray to the Lord.
Lord have mercy.

In the communion of the Holy Spirit (and of all the saints), let us commend ourselves and one another to the living God through Christ our Lord.
To you, O Lord.

Free Prayer

In silent or spontaneous prayer all bring before God the concerns of the day.

The Collect

O Lord our God,
you are always more ready to bestow
your good gifts upon us
than we are to seek them;
and more willing to give than we desire or deserve:
in our every need,
grant us the first and best of all your gifts,
the Spirt who makes us your children.
We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God for ever and ever. Amen.

The Lord's Prayer

And now, as our Saviour has taught us,
we are bold to say,

Our Father, who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy name;
thy kingdom come;
thy will be done;
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation;
but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom,
the power, and the glory
for ever and ever.
Amen.

Dismissal

Open this link in a new tab to hear John Rutter’s choral arrangement of Lancelot Andrewes’s prayer, “Open Thou Mine Eyes.”

Open thou mine eyes and I shall see:
Incline my heart and I shall desire:
Order my steps and I shall walk
In the ways of thy commandments.

Open thou mine eyes and I shall see:
Incline my heart and I shall desire:
Order my steps and I shall walk
In the ways of thy commandments.

O Lord God, be thou to me a God
And beside thee let there be none else,
No other, naught else with thee.

Vouchsafe to me to worship thee and serve thee
According to thy commandments
In truth of spirit, in reverence of body,
In blessings of lips,
In private and in public.

Open thou mine eyes and I shall see:
Incline my heart and I shall desire:
Order my steps and I shall walk
In the ways of thy commandments.

The Lord be with you.
The Lord bless you.
Let us praise the Lord,
Thanks be to God.

May our Lord Jesus Christ, and God our Father,
comfort our hearts and establish them
In every good work and word. Amen