The church took Simeon's farewell and made it the song of every nightfall. In the Byzantine rite the canticle is sung toward the end of Vespers, and in the West it belongs to Compline, the last office of the day, where its logic is transparent, each night's sleep rehearsing the final dismissal, each singer asking to end the day as Simeon ended his life, in peace, having seen the light.
The Book of Common Prayer carried the custom into English by folding Vespers and Compline into Evensong, pairing the Nunc Dimittis with the Magnificat as the two fixed canticles of the evening office, and the Anglican choral tradition has produced settings of the pair continuously for five centuries, so that Evening Canticles in D or G name a whole musical genre. The canticle keeps two other stations in Christian life.
At Candlemas, the feast of the presentation forty days after Christmas, it is sung during the blessing and procession of candles, the light for revelation to the gentiles carried in wax and flame, and at funerals and deathbeds it is among the most used of all texts, spoken over lives that are being dismissed in peace. Luther's chorale paraphrase and the Latin chant tones alike have carried it, and its first line has become simply the way Christian speech says a good death.