Sermon: Life in abundance

Posted on April 29, 2023 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
Easter 4, 30th of April, 2023

Acts 2:42-47
Psalm 23
John 10:1-10

‘I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.’

The division of the Bible into chapters and lectionary readings does us a disservice today, because our gospel reading is the third act of a three-act drama. We saw the first two acts on the fourth Sunday of Lent. In Act One, a man born blind was miraculously healed by Jesus, who thus completed the creation that had been left incomplete at his birth. Act Two was the response of various groups of people to this healing. His neighbours were unsure whether he was the same man; his parents came close to disowning him; and the Pharisees at first tried to convince the man to describe Jesus as a sinner and then, when he refused to do so, drove him out of the community. Jesus then sought him out, introduced himself as the Son of Man, and the man born blind worshipped him. That second act ended with Jesus saying:

‘I came into this world for judgement so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.’ Some of the Pharisees near him heard this and said to him, ‘Surely we are not blind, are we?’ Jesus said to them, ‘If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, “We see”, your sin remains.’ (John 9:1-41)

Now, we are in Act Three, in which Jesus tries to explain what has just happened. Continue reading →

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Sermon: On not being terrified of eating and drinking with Jesus

Posted on April 22, 2023 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
Easter 3, 23 April 2023

Luke 24:13-35

You may have noticed that I read a lot of books. A six-year-old neighbour popped their head into my flat this week and was stunned by the sheer number of books I own. Among the stranger books that I enjoy reading are novels by a nineteenth-century anti-feminist English author, Charlotte M. Yonge. Miss Yonge is one of the most bigoted religious authors I have ever read; apparently for her the only true Church was the Church of England; to her Catholics and ‘Dissenters,’ Methodists and Congregationalists among others, were equally misguided. Despite this, I find reading her family stories relaxing, and I have just finished one that was first published in 1854 titled The Castle Builders, or, The Deferred Confirmation. It begins with two sixteen- and seventeen-year-old girls who have been approved as ready for Confirmation. But they are terrified of it, because when they are confirmed they will become eligible to receive Communion. As the younger says:

The priest “said if we were fit for Confirmation we were fit for the Sacrament,” said Kate; “but I can’t quite see how that can be. We promised all these things by our Godfathers and Godmothers, and are bound to do them now, so it does not seem so much to promise them for ourselves; but the other – it is a great deal too awful!”[1]

For almost 300 pages the two continue to avoid their Confirmation until it takes place on the book’s second-last page, and the second-last paragraph of the book says:

Sunday is come, and again Emmeline and Katherine kneel on that step, and now it is beside their sister, while their brother and uncle admit them to the partaking of that Meat and Drink indeed, which can preserve their souls to everlasting life.[2]

Miss Yonge has written an entire and entertaining book out of two teenagers being afraid of participating in the Eucharist. I would find that more amusing if my heritage were not Scottish Presbyterian, and I had not heard from my grandmother about Elders visiting church members to determine whether they were worthy to participate in the quarterly Communion, and giving them tokens to indicate their eligibility.

Black and white photo of the head and neck of a white woman looking towards the left of the viewer in an oval frame.

Charlotte M. Yonge

Continue reading →

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Sermon: Where, O death, is now your sting?

Posted on April 8, 2023 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
Easter Sunday, the 9th of April, 2023

Matthew 28:1-10.

Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!

I want to introduce you to what may be a new word, although I did use it in last year’s Easter Reflection: the word ‘eucatastrophe’. You will know of ‘catastrophe,’ which comes from the Greek words for ‘down’ and ‘turning’ and means great and usually sudden damage or suffering. Today’s new word, eucatastrophe, adds the Greek word for good or well to the beginning, the same Greek word we hear in eulogy – the good words we speak when someone has died. The word eucatastrophe was created by the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien. Writing about fairy tales, Tolkien said that all of them include a eucatastrophe, a good catastrophe, the sudden joy that comes amid despair, the moment of unexpected deliverance. The reason, Tolkien argued, that fantasy writers like him were able to offer their readers the Consolation of the Happy Ending is because the Creator had already given it to us:

The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy … There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many sceptical men have accepted as true on its own merits.[1]

Continue reading →

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Sermon: Our Only King

Posted on April 1, 2023 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
‘Palm’ Sunday, 2nd of April, 2023

Matthew 21:1-17

‘Look, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.’

Here we are at Palm Sunday. Jesus enters Jerusalem to choruses of praise and a crowd going wild. Rather than entering as most pilgrims do, on foot, Jesus enters riding a donkey. The people cut down branches and place them before him, spreading their cloaks on the road, as the people of Israel have traditionally acclaimed their kings. They greet him as the Son of David and the one who comes in the name of the Lord. They shout ‘Hosanna’, a special offering of respect to the one who saves. The people welcome Jesus with euphoria as a prophet and king. Continue reading →

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Why I stand with transgender, gender diverse, and non-binary people

Posted on March 30, 2023 by Avril Hannah-Jones

I am very grateful to be invited by the Revd Canon Dr Garry Deverell to speak at a vigil celebrating the kinship of trans people in Christ’s church on International Trans Day of Visibility.

This land is God’s land, and God’s Spirit dwells here. I acknowledge the Elders of the Wurundjeri People of the Kulin Nations, and that sovereignty was never ceded.

I turn fifty this year. One of the benefits of being this old is having lived through some history. One of the detriments, however, is having to watch the bad parts of that history again raise their ugly heads. Sadly, history does repeat, and I recognise the current anti-trans rhetoric.

I first came out as ‘not entirely heterosexual’ (bisexual) at a national Uniting Church meeting in 1997. At the time I was a Sunday School teacher in my local congregation, and I immediately checked with the parents to see if they were still okay with me teaching their children, since LGB people were then often portrayed as dangerous to children, because we were either going to abuse them or recruit them. (It was the Church of All Nations – they were fine.) During the 1990s and early 2000s I had people ask me why we wanted to allow openly LGB people into ministry, when we were simultaneously putting rules in place to prevent the sexual abuse of children by church leaders. For such people homosexuality and bisexuality were inseparable from paedophilia. Continue reading →

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Sermon: Death and Life

Posted on March 25, 2023 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
26th of March, 2023

John 11:1-45

Today, the fifth Sunday of Lent, we are again offered one of the beautifully symbolic stories from the Gospel according to John. It is a story about death and darkness and mourning; about life and light and rejoicing; a story that offers us comfort and hope.

Later this year Luise and I are going to offer a seminar on funerals that we currently jokingly title, ‘We are all going to die!’ That will not be its name by the time we start advertising it properly, but from Luise’s years in the funeral industry and aged care, and my years as a minister, we know it is true. Every life ends in death, and sadly that death does not always come peacefully after a long life. The funeral service used to contain the reminder that ‘in the midst of life we are in death,’ which apparently comes from a battle song by tenth-century monk Notker the Stammerer and, while that might strike our twenty-first-century ears as morbid, it is simply a fact. If we accept that, today’s reading can offer us comfort. Continue reading →

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Sermon: A man born blind

Posted on March 18, 2023 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
Fourth Sunday of Lent, 19 March 2023

John 9:1-41

‘You were born entirely in sins, and are you trying to teach us?’

Today, like last week, we hear a magnificent story from the Gospel according to John, a tale of light and sight and blindness, in which faith is born and faith is lost. The story begins with a question about God’s justice. Jews, and we Christians who follow them, believe that God created everything, that there has been no equivalent, evil, power interfering and marring God’s good creation. But if everything is made by a good God, why do bad things happen? How can any baby be born blind? One, false, explanation that has sometimes been offered is that such tragedies are the result of our sin. So the disciples ask Jesus when they see a man born blind: ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ Jesus says that it was neither, that ‘he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him’. We need to be careful that we do not take this and create another false explanation for tragedies; that they have come from God as teaching moments.  What Jesus now does could only have been done while he was walking the earth. Continue reading →

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Sermon: A woman at a well

Posted on March 11, 2023 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
Third Sunday of Lent, 12th of March 2023

John 4:5-42

Today’s story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well is one of my favourite stories in the entire Bible, with one of my favourite characters. I love it so much that I asked to have it as one of the Bible readings at my ordination, because I have long identified with this nameless Samaritan woman. I am, however, swimming against the tide of biblical interpretation, because throughout history this Samaritan woman has been defamed.

The story starts with Jesus sitting alone by a well, when a woman approaches to draw water. John tells us that it is about noon. Immediately we know that there is something wrong in this woman’s life. She is coming to the well in the heat of the day, rather than in the cool of the dawn or early evening. She is coming alone, rather than with the other women of the village. This woman is an outsider, isolated from her community. And yet Jesus, a Jewish man, asks her for a drink. Continue reading →

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Sermon: An imagined community

Posted on March 4, 2023 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
Second Sunday of Lent, 5th of March 2023

John 3:1-17

In today’s reading we are introduced to one of the most tantalising characters in the Bible – Nicodemus. He only appears three times in the Scriptures, all in the Gospel according to John, and we know nothing else about him. But in these three moments we see a journey from darkness to courage and love – a journey for us to imitate.

The reading starts with Nicodemus the Pharisee coming to visit Jesus by night. Why at night? Is he coming to visit a teacher in the quiet hours when Pharisees were advised to study without the distractions of the day? Will a night visit mean that his fellow scholars are unlikely to see him visiting someone as potentially disreputable as Jesus? Or is the ‘night’ from which Nicodemus emerges to question Jesus symbolic, representing the world of ignorance into which the light that is Jesus has come to shine? Given that we are reading a story written by John, who always likes his symbolism, probably all of these answers are right. Continue reading →

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Sermon: Chocolate, Milton, and Lent Event

Posted on February 25, 2023 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
First Sunday of Lent, 26th of February, 2023

Genesis 2:15-17 3:1-7
Matthew 4:1-11

I have given up chocolate for Lent. I do this at least every few years and I always feel a little ridiculous about it. Jesus is walking towards his death, the most humiliating, painful and lonely death the Roman Empire could impose, and to show my solidarity with his journey I am giving up a completely voluntary sweet treat. Shrove Tuesday is ‘pancake day’ because medieval Christians had to use up the milk, eggs, and fat that they could not eat during Lent before Ash Wednesday, and fasting from such staples can be respected. Giving up chocolate? Not so much. At the end of this Reflection I will explain why I am doing so, anyway. Continue reading →

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