Midweek Evening Prayer

On Wednesday evening at seven the lights in the nave come down, the candles are lit, and the congregation prays the day to its close. It’s a quieter service than Sunday morning, mostly sung, and it runs year round.

---

The service is Evening Prayer

Evening Prayer — Vespers, as the Church has called it for most of its history — comes to us in Lutheran Service Book largely as it came to Luther, who inherited it from a good many centuries before that. It opens with the lighting of the candles and an old Greek hymn to Christ the light. Then a psalm, a reading from Scripture, the Magnificat — Mary’s song, which the Church has sung at evening for some fifteen hundred years — the Kyrie, the Lord’s Prayer, and the collects.

Let my prayer be counted as incense before you, and the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice!

Psalm 141:2

If you’ve never been to Evening Prayer, you’ll find it easier to follow than you might expect. It’s printed in full, the tunes come back week after week until they’re yours, and nobody minds if you spend the first evening listening.

The catechism, a piece at a time

Outside Advent and Lent, the preaching at Evening Prayer works through Luther’s Small Catechism — one part at a time, in order, all the way through, and then around again:

• The Ten Commandments
• The Apostles’ Creed
• The Lord’s Prayer
• Holy Baptism
• Confession and Absolution
• The Sacrament of the Altar

It’s a small book. A child can memorize it in a year, and an adult can spend a lifetime failing to get to the bottom of it. That’s rather the point of taking it slowly. Whether the catechism is new to you, or something you learned at twelve and haven’t opened since, Wednesday evening is a good place to meet it again.

Advent and Lent

In Advent and in Lent the catechism steps aside and the preaching follows the season — toward the manger in December, toward the cross in the weeks before Easter.

Advent keeps Evening Prayer. In Lent the service is Vespers: the same evening office without the lighting of the candles, which suits a season that takes things away rather than adding to them.

In both seasons there’s also a shorter service at noon on Wednesday, for anyone whose evening is already spoken for. Holy Week is the exception; that week keeps its own shape. Times for each season are in the bulletin and on the calendar.

Ash Wednesday and Holy Week

Ash Wednesday opens Lent on a Wednesday like any other, though nothing else about it is ordinary. The two services that close Holy Week aren’t Wednesdays at all — but anyone reading this page in February is probably looking for them.

• Ash Wednesday — 7:00 PM, with the imposition of ashes and Holy Communion
• Maundy Thursday — 7:00 PM, with Holy Communion
• Good Friday — 7:00 PM, Tenebrae

Bring the children

Children are welcome, and Evening Prayer is a kind service to bring them to. It’s short, it’s mostly sung, and a darkened church with candles lit holds a small child’s attention better than almost anything else we do. There’s no separate program on Wednesday — they stay with you, which is where they learn it best.

If you can’t be here

Every midweek service is streamed live and kept in the archive, the same as Sunday morning. If work, weather or distance keeps you away, you can still pray it with us — or watch later in the week, which is its own kind of evening.

---