Choral Evensong – 17/05/2026

Added: 2026-05-18

[00:05:04]Jesus Christ.

[00:08:57]Heat. Heat.

[00:09:30]Heat. Heat.

[00:09:51]Heat.

[00:10:07]Heat.

[00:14:34]Father, Hallelujah.

[00:15:00]Hallelujah.

[00:15:07]Hallelujah.

[00:15:12]Hallelu Oh, he We all praise to the God of Christ and seated at the Father.

[00:16:25]For God in heaven is my angels and they see our changes are humanity.

[00:16:51]The flesh has the flesh of God and he I have strong.

[00:17:17]Oh sh to the Praise the Lord.

[00:18:10]Oh Lord, open thou lips.

[00:18:24]Oh God makes us.

[00:18:38]>> Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost.

[00:19:01]Praise the Lord.

[00:19:16]A good evening and a very warm welcome to Jesus Chapel and to this service of coral even song sung by the college choir. It's our delight to welcome as our speaker this evening Robert Short, fellow commoner at St. Edmund's College, Cambridge and a journalist and author to speak on the next of our address series with the title beyond materialism. We look forward to hearing from you Robert.

[00:19:36]For now, the choir continue our worship with Psalm 47. The congregation may sit down with the voice of melting for the Lord is high and truly the great king upon the earth and the nations and even the worship of Jacob.

[00:20:42]with Mary and the Lord with the sound of the trump is King of the earth.

[00:21:11]Sing praises with understand for God which is Very high exe.

[00:21:50]Glor to the father and to the son and to the holy ghost.

[00:22:02]As it in the beginning is now and ever.

[00:22:38]The first lesson is taken from the 30 37th chapter of Ezekiel, beginning to read at the first verse.

[00:22:47]The hand of the Lord was upon me and carried me out in the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones and caused me to pass by them round about.

[00:23:00]And behold, there were very many in the open valley, and lo, they were very dry.

[00:23:06]And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, Oh Lord God, thou knowest?

[00:23:17]Again he said unto me, prophesy upon these bones, and say unto them, Oh ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.

[00:23:26]Thus says thus sayth the Lord God unto these bones. Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live.

[00:23:34]And I will lay senus upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live, and ye shall know that I am the Lord.

[00:23:47]So I prophesied, as I was commanded. And as I prophesied, there was a noise, and behold, a shaking, and the bones came together, bone to his bone. And when I beheld, lo, the senus, and the flesh came up upon them, and the skin covered them above, but there was no breath in them. Then he said unto me, "Prophesy unto the wind. Prophesy, son of man, and say to the wind, "Thus seth the Lord God, come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live." So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army.

[00:24:36]Then he said unto me, "Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel.

[00:24:43]Behold, they say, our bones are dried, and our hope is lost. We are cut off for our parts.

[00:24:50]Therefore, prophesy and say unto them, thus sayth the Lord God, behold, oh my people, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel.

[00:25:04]And ye shall know that I am the Lord, when I have opened your graves, oh my people, and brought you up out of your graves, and shall put my spirit in you, and ye shall live, and I shall place you in your own land. Then shall ye know that I, the Lord, have spoken it, and performed it, seth the Lord.

[00:25:25]Here endeth the first lesson.

[00:25:54]My sword in God my savior. Savior and neighborhood.

[00:26:36]God is mighty and you glory.

[00:27:04]his name and his mercy is all He has shren.

[00:27:59]I'm exulting away.

[00:28:39]He Mary is mercy.

[00:28:58]He brought his father.

[00:29:17]forever.

[00:29:32]Glory be to the Father.

[00:29:37]to the Son and to the Holy Ghost.

[00:29:48]As it was in the beginning, Heat.

[00:30:05]Heat.

[00:30:33]The second lesson is taken from the 8th chapter of the letter of St. Paul to the Romans beginning to read at the 18th verse.

[00:30:43]For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed to us. For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God.

[00:30:57]For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope.

[00:31:06]because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groanth and travaleth in pain together until now. And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the first fruits of the spirit. Even we ourselves grown within ourselves, waiting for the adoption to wit the redemption of the body. For we are saved by hope. But hope that is seen is not hope. For what a man seeth, why doth he yet hopeful? But if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it? Likewise the spirit also helpeth our infirmities. For we know not what we should pray for as we ought. But the spirit itself maketh intercessions for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. And he that searchth the hearts knoweth what is in the mind of the spirit. Because he maketh intercessions for the saints according to the will of God. And we know that all things work together for good. To them that love God to them who are who are called according to his purpose. For them he did forno.

[00:32:24]He also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his son that he might be the firstborn among many brethren.

[00:32:33]Moreover, whom he did predestinate, them he also called. And whom he called, them he also justified. And whom he justified, them he is glorified.

[00:32:47]Here endeth the second lesson.

[00:33:38]Let us peace.

[00:34:00]to thy world.

[00:34:18]My eyes are See thousand Grae to be Hallelujah.

[00:35:21]Glory.

[00:35:50]Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost.

[00:36:06]As it was in the beginning, Sh.

[00:36:48]I believe in God the Father Almighty, m of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, his only son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontious Pilot, was crucified, dead, and buried. He descended into the third day he rose again from the dead. He ascended into he and sitth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty. From then he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.

[00:37:21]I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.

[00:37:33]Amen.

[00:37:42]>> The Lord be with you.

[00:37:54]Let us pray.

[00:38:12]Mercy upon us.

[00:38:27]Our father come as it is in us and forive us our tresasses as we forive them again.

[00:39:26]us to temp.

[00:40:01]Lord, show thy mercy upon us.

[00:40:16]Oh Lord, King Endure thy ministers with righteousness thy people.

[00:41:00]Give peace in our time because there is another fight for us.

[00:41:21]God make our hearts within us.

[00:41:49]Oh God, the king of glory, who hast exalted thine only son Jesus Christ.

[00:41:55]triumph unto thy kingdom in heaven. We beseech thee, leave us not comfortless, but send us thine holy ghost to comfort us and exalt us unto the same place with our savior Christ is gone before who liveth and reignth with thee and the same holy ghost, one god world without end.

[00:42:24]Oh God, from whom all holy desires, all good counselss, and all just works to proceed, give unto thy servants that peace which the world cannot give, that both our hearts may be set to obey thy commandments, and also that by thee we being defended from the fear of our enemies, may pass our time in arant of Jesus Christ our Light in our darkness, we beseech thee, oh Lord, and by thy great mercy, defend us from all perils and dangers of this night. For the love of thy only son, our savior Jesus Christ.

[00:44:08]Heat.

[00:44:16]Heat.

[00:44:26]is your triumphant shout.

[00:44:36]The Lord is trumpet.

[00:44:48]Praise praise.

[00:44:57]Sing praises out. Sing praise out. Sing praise.

[00:45:07]Sing praise.

[00:45:24]of your sing and bless the king of God.

[00:45:42]Sorry.

[00:46:13]I see.

[00:46:21]Glory.

[00:46:45]Sing taking every Sh.

[00:47:32]Hallelu.

[00:47:44]is the love will triumphant Come as sing praises.

[00:48:21]Sing praise to our king and bless the king Heat. Heat.

[00:49:00]Oh yeah.

[00:49:30]May the words of my lips and the meditations of all our hearts be ever acceptable to you, oh Lord, our strength and our redeemer.

[00:49:42]My topic today is beyond materialism.

[00:49:47]materialism not, I assume, in the conventional sense of fixating on the acquisition of stuff, but rather in the philosophical sense, namely the belief that there is nothing to our world beyond the material.

[00:50:05]Now, on the face of it, those of us in the anti-materialist or at least beyond materialist camp have our work cut out.

[00:50:15]When it comes to understanding ourselves and our significance, it might appear that religious conceptions on the one hand and on the other materialist models assumed to derive from science are fundamentally incompatible.

[00:50:32]Think about it. The Bible pictures us as made in the image of God and as standing a little lower than the angels to reference Genesis and the Psalms. While a Darwinian conception would appear to dethrone that vision by placing us firmly alongside other animals and life forms with DNA strikingly similar to that of our f fellow mammals and even to plants.

[00:51:01]Yet many well-qualified observers would maintain that it's precisely a scientific perspective in the broadest sense which can open a door to the spiritual.

[00:51:12]Consider for example what you could call the top soil of our experience including the fact that we bring understanding to our position in the world. A lump of coal is in contact with its environment but not conscious of it. A rose can react to external conditions but not to external objects.

[00:51:39]Non-human animals are aware of external objects but not of their place in the world as a whole.

[00:51:47]We though are sensitive not just to the way in which this or that entity affects us here and now but also to an entity's place in the wider scheme of things and its capacity to generate a response in language.

[00:52:04]Those with more appetite to justify the metaphysical vision to skeptics might develop these thoughts with some observations about human nature and what is implied about a self-examined life.

[00:52:18]They might echo the words of an eminent biologist such as Simon Conway Morris who writes that the unsolved puzzle of why human beings alone among creatures have language, music, cumulative technologies, laughter, morals, teaching, and come to think of it, religions, including atheism is the elephant in the Darwinian room.

[00:52:46]Or to put it another way, we are free, accountable, and objects of judgment in our own eyes and the eyes of others. We are motivated not only by desire and appetite, but by a vision of the good.

[00:53:02]We are not just objects in a world of objects, but also subjects relating to one another reciprocally.

[00:53:11]A figure such as Roger Scrutin, eminent graduate of this college, has summed things up with a dash of poetry.

[00:53:20]Quote, "Our form bears the marks of its peculiar destiny. It is capable of sanctity and liable to desecration, and in everything it is judged by a standard not of this world." unquote.

[00:53:38]This way of seeing ourselves does not point ineloptably towards a religious interpretation, he adds, but it deploys categories that are supplied by religion and to be obtained only with the greatest difficulty without it.

[00:53:58]My first main conclusion is that if you factor in all the dimensions of our experience and view them in the round, then a theistic interpretation provides the best fit for a fundamental and inclusive context of meaning.

[00:54:15]By contrast, the neodyarwinian paradigm, which is atheism's default setting, isn't just thin. It struggles to accommodate the rich textures and other layers of meaning that I've outlined.

[00:54:32]Belief that our world was created rather than being just a bizarre squilly into one accident is thus a valid inference of philosophical reasoning.

[00:54:46]The start of John's gospel famously tells us that in the beginning was the word and we do indeed live in a wordbased universe. Think of what is perhaps among the longest words in existence, the human genome. Think too that the authors of the modern scientific revolution, Capernicus, Galileo, Decart, Newton, Linets and others were impelled by a confidence in scientific laws because they also believed in a divine lawgiver.

[00:55:22]Side by side with what you might call muscular reasoning of this kind. I also want to commend an expanded model of sensemaking which includes intuition.

[00:55:36]In brief, models of reasoning in the west since the seven since the 17th and 18th centuries have often tended to be too linear and propositional.

[00:55:47]I'll always be grateful to one of my finest teachers, a philosopher of Christian allegiance, who said to me, "It isn't reasonable to suppose that only reason reveals the world to us. Our understanding is advanced by reason allied to our ethical and aesthetic impulses."

[00:56:12]Now, having listened to me so far, you may suspect that I'm in danger of commending a wistful halfbelief or at most a form of perennialism.

[00:56:23]Perennialism being essentially the thesis that there exists an eternal set of truths that are more or less equally rooted in a range of spiritual traditions that if you like that there's one mountain with many pathways leading to the uh the summit.

[00:56:43]But this is an act of Christian worship of course and the church teaches that God hasn't just made us but also redeemed us by speaking definitively through the life, death and resurrection of Christ and the descent of the spirit with worldchanging consequences.

[00:57:03]How then to frame the message in ways that are intellectually compelling and faithful to our doctrinal inheritance.

[00:57:13]One of the best brief answers I've heard can be drawn from the work of Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury. And since I've had the honor of writing his biography indeed of of having written two books about him, let me in the time remaining attempt to stitch together for you some of the core arguments he's voiced in multiple settings, including at gatherings of inquirers undertaking the Alpha course.

[00:57:44]They have a direct bearing on our theme this evening and don't just speak uh to me but for me.

[00:57:56]A major emphasis of Williams's work and preaching is that by listening to what Jesus says and by watching what he does, people's whole sense of their world changes. Reading the New Testament is like watching people feeling their way into the new landscape and seeing the light in it. Bit by bit, people put together a jigsaw and you end up with that really strange and mindbending notion that God lives in Jesus in an absolutely unique way.

[00:58:31]But how do we know it's true? Christians have never been able to come up with a simple answer to that. It's a bit like saying, "How do you know that your spouse or partner is lovable?" There's something about the knowing that is involved with your whole personality changing. But of course, Christians have always tried to make some sense of it and to put it into some kind of intellectual shape. Among the things they've said would be things like, "Does it never occur to you as rather strange that a random unintelligent process of evolution should have thrown up beings capable of understanding the process of evolution? Has it never occurred to you as a bit odd that a blind universal system working in its own regular but undirected ways should produce the questioning, agonizing, imagining, loving people that you are?

[00:59:33]Nobody, as William said on one particularly memorable occasion, can prove to you that human beings are not the result of blind chance and undirected process. But from time to time it's worth stopping and asking that question, doesn't it strike you as a bit odd?

[00:59:55]I sometimes feel, he added, that I'd like to ask that question of Richard Dawkins, a man who has devoted huge amounts of energy and tremendous intellectual sophistication into proving that there is no structural meaning to the process which he so elegantly, intelligently, and brilliantly outlines.

[01:00:15]The other thing Christians say is it's not just about mind. It's about love.

[01:00:23]Mind on its own powerful intelligence is never creative just by itself. Think of human relationships. Think of artists, even scientists at work. It's not intelligence alone. It's absorption, commitment, love, and the leak of imagination that goes with real love.

[01:00:47]Only love can make something completely different and rejoice in its difference.

[01:00:53]God is not just uh intelligence, but loving intelligence. And you can't pull them apart for a second. Our existence as intelligent creatures, loving, risking, questioning, somehow fits with the idea that God is a God of loving intelligence who loves what's different.

[01:01:16]There's no single knockdown argument for the truth of all this. If there was, we probably wouldn't need alpha courses or indeed anything else. Everybody would just sign up without asking any questions.

[01:01:33]If I had to sum up Williams's message, a message I I very much echo, it would be that a leap of faith is involved. Or what might better be called a leap of imagination. That sudden sense of yes, it all makes sense. I see how it fits.

[01:01:54]And the claim Christians make is that when you see how it fits, everything changes.

[01:02:02]To conclude, matter is actually pretty important for Christians. As a sacramental faith, Christianity is regularly described as the most materialistic of religions.

[01:02:19]But meaning matters even more.

[01:02:24]Amen.

[01:02:47]Let us pray.

[01:02:52]This night we pray for all who take counsel for the nations of the earth, for our local and global leaders, that they might recognize that which is good and pursue it.

[01:03:05]We pray for all with the capacity to influence and to bring about significant change that they might exercise their power wisely and be guided by love of justice, of mercy, and of humility.

[01:03:23]Almighty God, you have proclaimed your eternal truth by the voice of prophets and evangelists.

[01:03:30]Direct and bless we ask you those who in this our generation speak where many listen and write what many read that they may do their part in making the heart of the people wise, its mind sound and its will righteous to the honor of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

[01:03:52]As we celebrate Christ's ascension into heaven and look to the coming of his spirit at Pentecost, so we pray that we might grow in those imperishable fruits of the spirit, love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

[01:04:12]May God inspire in us a vision of that fullness of life to which we are all called and by Christ's spirit strengthen us in love of God and neighbor.

[01:04:25]Oh God in whom nothing can live but as it lives in love. Grant us the spirit of love which does not want to be rewarded but only to become the blessing and happiness of everything that wants it.

[01:04:38]Love which is the very joy of life and thine own goodness and truth within the soul. Who thyself art love and by love our redeemer from eternity to eternity.

[01:04:50]Lord in thy mercy. Here our prayer.

[01:04:56]We commend to God's safekeeping all in pain of body, mind or spirit. And we pray for all who love and care for them.

[01:05:04]And in the stillness of this holy place, we bring before God our own petitions and thanksgivings.

[01:05:24]Oh Almighty God, bless all thy people and all thy flock. Give thy peace, thy help, and thy love unto thy children, the sheep of thy fold, that we may be united in the bond of peace and love, one body and one spirit, in the one hope of our calling, in thy divine and boundless love.

[01:05:44]>> Lord, in thy mercy, >> here our prayer.

[01:05:48]We commend the prayers of our own hearts and all for whom we've prayed to Almighty God, saying as one the words of the grace.

[01:05:56]The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us all ever more. Amen.

[01:06:10]>> Being good to see you this evening. Uh as we go on our way, there will be a collection for the chapel charities uh this term. Cambridge women's aid and Christian aid. You can give by cash or card if you're able to. Then if you'd like to turn left around the cloysters, do join us for a drink in the prior's room. There's further details of other upcoming services and events at the back of your service sheet. Uh but one uh final notice for those who've not realized today is uh an important day in the life of the dasis of Elely as Bishop Sarah legally commence the office of the bishop of Elely and therefore visitor of this college and she being the first woman to be bishop of Elely uh we rejoice in this historic moment as she becomes also the first woman in this college's 530 years to be our visitor.

[01:06:53]Do hold her in your prayers as she answer as she uh assumes office and settles in Elely.

[01:07:00]We shall stand for our final hymn.

[01:07:27]I love his thro.

[01:07:48]I as a son who is the praise. is bring.

[01:08:23]Ro praise Oh, heat, heat.

[01:09:27]The God of peace, who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the eternal covenant, make you perfect in every good work to do his will, working in you that which is well pleasing in his sight. And the blessing of God Almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit be among you and remain with you always.

[01:09:47]Amen.

[01:10:00]Heat. Heat.

[01:10:38]Heat. Heat.

[01:11:14]Heat. Heat.

[01:11:49]Heat. Heat.

[01:11:57]Heat. Heat.

[01:13:08]Heat. Heat.

[01:13:11]Heat.

[01:13:27]Heat.

[01:13:42]Heat. Heat.

[01:13:52]Heat.

[01:14:11]Heat.