Collect for Evening Prayer - Saturday

Prayer for the week *

            O God our protector,
            by whose mercy the world turns safely into darkness
            and returns again to light:
            we give into your hands our unfinished tasks,
            our unsolved problems,
            and our unfulfilled hopes;
            for you alone are our sure defence
            and bring us lasting peace
            in Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

                                 from Comon Worship Daily Prayer

This prayer will be familiar to many from Evening Prayer for Saturday in Common Worship Daily Prayer.  It is adapted from The Book of Common Worship of the Church of South India (1963).  It serves as a Sabbath eve prayer of preparation.  It is time to stop now and focus on the Lord’s Day that is about to begin.  The same applies on Christmas Eve; it is time to stop so that we can worship and adore.

It begins with a gentle reminder that day follows night without our efforts!  There is a natural rhythm and not everything depends on us, however important we might feel we are.  There is in this opening remark a pricking of any pomposity that may be creeping in or a lack of perspective that the burden of responsibility may have developed.  As the new vicar was once reminded by an old boy standing in the graveyard: “See all these, vicar?  They all thought they were indispensable too”.

All clergy live with a pressing sense that there are things that they have left undone.  They are haunted by it, and sometimes others are very good at reminding them of their failings!  We could all spend our time fifty times over, so there is always something that we have not got round to.  It is time now to stop and let go of this burden, time to put down the diary which can be so oppressive.  It is time to be refreshed in God’s goodness.

There is an echo here of Simeon’s outburst in the temple when he sets eyes on the infant Jesus.  The Nunc Dimitis carries the notion of commending into God’s hands the untidy edges because Christ completes all our hopes and longings.  Some problems are unsolvable this side of the grave and the parousia.  Some hopes remain for the kingdom to come.  We can let go because the fulfilment has been glimpsed.

God alone being our sure defence reminds us that it is in God that our ultimate hope rests.  Lasting peace comes from God and in knowing that we have no purpose outside of God’s purposes.  This is the root of being blessed, to find ourselves in tune with the purposes of God at the heart of redeemed creation.

The root of redeemed creation is gift.  The gift comes from the God whose love is expressed in gift: gift of life, gift of himself in the Christ-child, gift of new life.  It is in God’s nature to give and this in turn inspires gracious living.  We can only tune into this if we allow the gift to be restored within us.  That only comes through stopping and celebrating the grace that holds us and is the ground on which we stand at all.

‘Working’ on Sundays and at Christmas can mean that those who make the services happen forget that this is what Sabbath and the festival are supposed to be for: to restore the gift within us.  Rather than being days of rest or spiritual renewal, they have become ones of frenetic activity.  So much busy-ness, be it from multiple services or the emotional rollercoaster that is the myriad of conversations around others’ lives, saps rather than refuels.  We therefore need the stillness of this prayer to be rightly focussed for the day that follows.  Rightly focussed on our reliance on God, on our hope in God, on our trust in God.  We need to be people who exude the gift which is at the root of grace, the gift we behold in the Christ-child.

© Ian Black 2006

* An edited version of this reflection was published in the Prayer for the Week column in the Church Times on 22^nd December 2006