Choral Evensong for the Feast of Saint Michael and All Angels (St. Luke’s)

St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in downtown Jackson will be hosting a choral Evensong on Sunday, September 28th at 4:00pm.

The Feast of Saint Michael and All Angels, commonly known as Michaelmas, is celebrated around the world on September 29. Because it coincides with the start of the academic year in many places, it also lends its name to the fall term in the British educational system, which is known as Michaelmas Term. Traditionally, Michaelmas was also a harvest festival marking the beginning of autumn in the Northern Hemisphere. St. Michael the Archangel, for whom the feast is named, is one of only a few angels who are named in the scriptures. In scripture and the tradition of the Church, Michael is credited with defeating Satan and his host of fallen angels in the “great war in heaven” mentioned in the Book of Revelation.

The readings for the day are Bible stories of the angels, particularly of Saint Michael the Archangel. The hymns will celebrate the ministry of the angels as recorded in scripture, and the motet will be a beautiful setting of a paraphrase of the story of Michael in the Book of Revelation, Factum est silentium, by the late Tudor composer Richard Dering (c. 1580-1630), who spent most of his career working in the Spanish-ruled (Roman Catholic) Netherlands because he was a recusant Roman Catholic during this tumultuous era. The canticle settings are by the great English composer of the early twentieth century, Ralph Vaughan Williams. The organ voluntaries are from the English Baroque (Handel), twentieth century French (Marcel Dupré) and Edwardian English (Charles Hubert Hastings Parry) repetoire.