The Parish Church of St John-at-Hampstead

Last week Handley reminded us how much of the Evensong service is taken directly from Holy Scripture, the canticles, the Psalm, the Bible readings, and sometimes even the words of the anthem itself.
But what exactly is the Bible?
And what do we gain from listening to these long extracts, whether sung or simply read?
What impact does it have on our daily lives, as we go out into the world to spread the Good News of God’s saving love?
Today, the majority of churchgoers would feel confident in asserting that the Old Testament contains stories from the history of the people of Israel, whilst the New Testament describes the life, ministry, death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
But our readings in Evensong remind us that there are so many sections we hear which do not appear to fit neatly into one of these categories, and which indeed, appear fairly mysterious when isolated and taken out of context.
In Confirmation classes, we often remind the candidates that the Bible is not one book, but a whole series of books, written over a period of hundreds of years.
The image most used in this context is that of the Bible bookcase, and a visual aid to help us imagine this might be to take a look at our own bookcases, and the jumble of different styles, genres, date of publication and purpose of the books assembled there.
This is unless, of course, you are like my husband, who takes great enjoyment in arranging his bookshelves according to genre, alphabetical order, and so on!
The Bible contains works of history, of philosophy, of law and of the closest they were able to come to scientific reflection in the centuries before Christ.
Within its pages we find love-poetry, hymns, sermons, letters and eye-witness accounts, all of which might be found on the bookshelves, or at least in the bookshops of today.
We may read texts of a kind we are unlikely to find on our own shelves:  visions and prophecies, but at the same time, we may find stories, as in each of our readings today, which reflect a great deal of good sense, and show an understanding of human temptations and weaknesses, as true and relevant today as they were two or three thousand years ago.
I was once taught that the unifying factor which draws together all the different books of the Bible is that each one, in its different way, tells us something of people who have experienced a passion for God.
Whether we are hearing their history, or listening to the different ways in which they reflected on that passion, this love for God, and the desire to understand him better, and to live a life worthy of him, comes up again and again.
Our psalm today was an extract from the very long Psalm 119, in which the psalmist reflects repeatedly on his longing to understand and to follow God’s commandments and his teaching throughout his own life.
Although in this evening’s excerpt, he acknowledges that life is not always easy, he continues to emphasis his willingness to study God’s law and act upon it.
God’s commandments, and his teaching for our lives are expressed in a variety of ways throughout the Bible, and we sometimes need to search quite deeply to understand what we might be being taught.
But today’s readings are much clearer than sometimes; they reflect aspects of human nature which we can all recognise, and they suggest wise ways to deal with them.
The story in our Old Testament reading, the story of Moses’ father-in-law reproaching him for trying to do everything himself, and wearing himself out, appears very regularly in books about Christian ministry, and in chapters on the need to delegate both practical tasks and responsibility.
Whilst clergy may be at particular risk of feeling the need to do it all themselves, and facing burnout in the process, our modern culture also encourages an atmosphere in which people in all types of work are driven to work longer and longer hours, whilst others are condemned to have no work at all.
My husband often tells me of the “jacket on the chair syndrome”, in which those in large city offices when they eventually go home in the evening, feel the need to leave their jacket hanging on the back of the chair, to create the impression they have just popped out briefly, and have every intention of working all night.
This is not a healthy way for a society to act, and all of us (and I include myself!) should take seriously the very practical advice of Moses’ father-in-law, that if we wear ourselves out, we are no good to anybody, and we limit our ability to serve God or our neighbour.
In meditating upon God’s precepts, as the Psalm puts it, we may encounter rigorous good sense, which will serve us well in daily life.
But our second reading combined a variety of different instructions for our lives, this time coming from the lips of Jesus himself.
“Do not judge, or you will be judged in the same way.”
It is so easy for all of us to fall into the very human trap of being judgmental.
And yet, this is the polar opposite of Jesus’s teaching that we should love our neighbours as ourselves.
Many of us may remember the characters in Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies, the lovely Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby, and the fearsome Mrs “Bedonebyasyoudid.”
The teaching in our New Testament reading surely reminds us that loving our neighbour as ourselves means quite literally that we should treat them as we would wish to be treated ourselves, and Jesus’ words involve a warning that those who constantly criticise and point out the faults of others without correcting their own faults, may “be done by as they did.”
Jesus’ teaching is summed up in the Prayer Book service in the very familiar words:  “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength;  and thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.”
This is often referred to as the Summary of the Law, and is understood to summarise both Jesus’ own teaching and that of the Ten Commandments received by Moses.
But it also provides a summary of the many different books, styles and reflections of the Bible; we see this summary of the law explained, demonstrated and pondered upon in many different ways, in law books, in stories, in hymns and letters.
I began by asking what effect hearing these chunks of Scripture during Evensong could have on our day-to-day lives.
The study of the Bible tells us above all that our lives will be more holy, more godly and more rounded if we can put our love and passion for God first in everything we do, and if we then seek in every way to love our neighbour and treat them with the respect, compassion and kindness which we would wish for ourselves.