Sermon: “Hello, my name is Paul and I’m a sinner”

Posted on July 8, 2023 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost, 9th of July 2023

Romans 7:15-25a
Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

Sometimes I read the writings of the Apostle Paul and all I can say in response to them is: ‘Yes!’ Sometimes Paul just gets it – and today is one of those days. When Paul writes: ‘I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate,’ and ‘For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do,’ all I can do is nod my head in sad agreement. Paul is right. And he was not alone in saying this. In this part of his letter to the Romans Paul is echoing something that was a commonplace in the ancient world. The Roman poet Ovid wrote the most famous version of it: ‘I see the better way and I approve it; but I follow the worse.’ It is just part of what it means to be human. We know what we should do; but we do not do it. We want to be good and obey God’s law, but we find that we fail. It is a universal problem. Continue reading →

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Sermon: In which Avril temporarily agrees with Richard Dawkins

Posted on July 1, 2023 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
2nd of July, 2023

Genesis 22:1-14

What on earth can we do with today’s reading from the Book of Genesis, the binding of Isaac? The Revised Common Lectionary, which leaves out other stories in Genesis like the rape of Dinah and the revenge taken by her brothers (Genesis 34:1-31), the attempt by the men of Sodom to rape two of God’s messengers (Genesis 19:1-11), and the incest between a drunken Lot and his two daughters that was the origin of the people of Moab and Ammon (Genesis 19:30-38), includes this passage of attempted child sacrifice for our instruction. The Bible has many stories that are distinctly unedifying, I am completely unsurprised that a parent tried to get it banned from a school in Utah as unsuitable for children, but the lectionary passes over most of them in silence, and we never hear them read out in church. Why is this story part of the lectionary? I would argue that child murder, even when prevented at the last minute, is at least as abhorrent as rape and incest. There is little on which I agree with celebrity atheist Richard Dawkins, but I do mostly agree with his comment in The God Delusion that: ‘this disgraceful story is an example simultaneously of child abuse, bullying in two asymmetrical power relationships, and the first recorded use of the Nuremberg defence: “I was only obeying orders”. Yet the legend is one of the great foundational myths of all three monotheistic religions.’ Where I differ from Dawkins is on the latter point. He suggests that Jews, Christians, and Muslims blithely read this story as foundational, thus accepting child abuse, bullying, and blind obedience as part of our faith. The absolute opposite is true. Continue reading →

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Sermon: Behaving so the world will believe

Posted on June 24, 2023 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
25th of June, 2023

Hebrews 13:1-8
John 17:20-26

‘I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.’

Today we celebrate the 46th anniversary of the Union of the Congregational Union of Australia, the Methodist Church of Australasia, and the Presbyterian Church of Australia, the birthday of the Uniting Church. Appropriately, the gospel reading suggested for today’s celebration is the ‘ecumenical prayer’ from Jesus’ Farewell Discourse in the Gospel according to John, which speaks of unity in the service of mission. The twentieth-century ecumenical movement, of which the Uniting Church is a product, developed from the missionary movement of the nineteenth century. Missionaries sent by European churches to various mission fields discovered that divisions between different churches were experienced by those to whom they preached as a scandal. How could people hearing about Jesus Christ for the first time believe the gospel when those proclaiming the good news were in competition with each other? How could Jesus Christ be ‘the same yesterday and today and for ever’ if there was a Catholic Christ, a Presbyterian Christ, an Anglican Christ, a Methodist Christ, a Congregationalist Christ? The 1910 Edinburgh Conference brought representatives of the missioning churches together to determine how far the churches could become one so that the world might believe. From that meeting came the modern ecumenical movement, the World Council of Churches, and, in 1977, the Uniting Church in Australia. Continue reading →

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Sermon: Even if we can’t raise the dead

Posted on June 17, 2023 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
18th of June, 2023

Genesis 18:1-15, 21:1-7
Matthew 9:35-10:8

‘Is anything too wonderful for the Lord?’ It is the question that the three visitors ask Abraham after his wife Sarah laughs at the promise that she and Abraham will have a son in their extreme old age. Today’s Scripture readings tells us that nothing is too wonderful for the Lord, not even the birth of a son to a woman and her husband who have grown old. Nothing is too wonderful for the Lord, but that does not mean that God’s actions and the coming of the kingdom of heaven will happen as we want them.

Jews, Christians and Muslims all claim to be the descendants of Abraham, the outstanding man of faith. Both he and his wife Sarah, at the command of God, leave their country and their family and their people and set out for an unknown land, because God has promised that they will become the parents of a great nation. Paul argues that Abraham is the ancestor of all those who believe in the promises of God, that Abraham believed God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness. (Romans 4:3) As the author of the Letter to the Hebrews writes:

By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance; and he set out, not knowing where he was going. By faith he stayed for a time in the land he had been promised, as in a foreign land, living in tents … By faith he received power of procreation, even though he was too old—and Sarah herself was barren—because he considered him faithful who had promised. Therefore from one person, and this one as good as dead, descendants were born, ‘as many as the stars of heaven and as the innumerable grains of sand by the seashore.’ (Hebrews 11:8-12)

Yet among the important stories we are told about these exemplary faithful ancestors is the one we hear today, a story of doubt and disbelief. Continue reading →

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Sermon: Social and Physical Health

Posted on June 10, 2023 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
11th of June, 2023

Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26

I was ten the first time I read Charlotte Bronte’s 1847 novel, Jane Eyre, and it traumatised me for life. It was not the madwoman in the attic who horrified me, but Jane’s life at the Lowood Institution, based on Bronte’s own experience at a Clergy Daughters’ School. I hated the Reverend Brocklehurst who oversaw the school and I have never forgotten the outrage I felt at his addresses to the teachers and his labelling of Jane as a liar. Upon discovering that ‘a lunch, consisting of bread and cheese’ has twice been served to the inmates of the Institution by a teacher because the breakfast was inedible, Brocklehurst intones:

You are aware that my plan in bringing up these girls is, not to accustom them to habits of luxury and indulgence, but to render them hardy, patient, self-denying. Should any little accidental disappointment of the appetite occur, such as the spoiling of a meal, the under or over dressing of a dish, the incident ought not to be neutralised by replacing with something more delicate the comfort lost, thus pampering the body and obviating the aim of this institution; it ought to be improved to the spiritual edification of the pupils, by encouraging them to evince fortitude under the temporary privation. A brief address on those occasions would not be mistimed, wherein a judicial instructor would take the opportunity of referring to the sufferings of the primitive Christians; to the torments of the martyrs; to the exhortations of our blessed Lord himself, calling upon his disciples to take up their cross and follow him; to his warnings that man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God; to his divine consolations, ‘if ye suffer hunger or thirst for my sake, happy are ye’. Oh, madam, when you put bread and cheese, instead of burnt porridge into these children’s mouths, you may indeed feed their vile bodies, but you little think how you starve their immortal souls![1]

Luckily my utter abhorrence of both Brocklehurst and his version of Christianity, though I did encounter them at an impressionable age, did not influence my later life choices. Continue reading →

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Sermon: Trinity Sunday

Posted on June 3, 2023 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
Trinity Sunday, 4th of June 2023

Genesis 1:1-2:4a
Matthew 28:16-20

Once again the church year has reached Trinity Sunday, the one Sunday that is named not after an event, Easter, Pentecost, the Baptism of Jesus, but after a doctrine. It is important to begin this Reflection by saying that anything I say today about the Trinity will be a heresy. Our human minds cannot understand, cannot encompass, and most definitely cannot explain, God. The Trinity is one of those aspects of God that we are never going to comprehend. We believe in One God who is also Three, which is why over the centuries people have mocked Christians as worshipping multiple gods. It sounds as though we do not know our own minds, or as though we are trying to do some weird mathematics. I tend to think of the doctrine of the Trinity as something like the square root of a negative number. The doctrine of the Trinity is impossible, and yet Christians believe it. Continue reading →

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Sermon: No longer hiding

Posted on May 27, 2023 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
Pentecost, 28th of May 2023

John 20:19-23

‘Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.’ We must not live our Christian lives behind closed doors. Faith is not something to express in private; it is something to be lived out in public. Pentecost is the anniversary of the Holy Spirit pushing the disciples out from behind a locked door, down from an upper room, and into the world. Pentecost is the birthday of the church because it celebrates the day that the Jesus movement went public. Continue reading →

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Sermon: We have not been left alone

Posted on May 20, 2023 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
The Seventh Sunday of Easter, 21st of May 2023

John 17:1-11
Acts 1:6-14

It is late in the evening. The meal is long over. Earlier, as the meal ended, Jesus knelt and washed his disciples’ feet. He then began to prepare them for life without him. He gave them the new commandment, that they love one another. He prepared them for the coming of the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, the Spirit of Truth. He shared with them the oneness of the Father and the Son. And he spoke of his betrayal and death.

Now, he turns from the disciples to his Father. The disciples become involuntary eavesdroppers on a prayer of communion, on an intimate meeting between the Father and the Son. But because they are listening, this prayer of communion is also a prayer of revelation. In this prayer, the theological heart of the Gospel of John is revealed. Continue reading →

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Sermon: With gentleness and reverence

Posted on May 13, 2023 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
The Sixth Sunday of Easter, 14th of May 2023

Acts 17:22-31

In these last few weeks following Easter the Book of Acts has drawn our attention to a series of sermons. Two weeks ago, we were shown the aftermath of Peter’s sermon at Pentecost; three thousand people were converted, and then baptised, after which they shared all things in common. (Acts 2:42-47) In case that made us feel inadequate, last week we saw that Stephen’s sermon preached to the Jewish Council ended with him being dragged out and stoned. You might remember that those doing the stoning ‘laid their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul’. (Acts 7:58) This week we have a third, and hugely different, sermon by the preacher who had once been that ‘young man named Saul’: the Apostle Paul. Paul has a reputation as something of a theological hard-liner, but here we see him speaking to the Athenians ‘with gentleness and reverence’. (1 Peter 3:16) Continue reading →

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Sermon: In death and life

Posted on May 6, 2023 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
Easter 5, 7th of May, 2023

Acts 7:55-60
John 14:1-14

A few years ago I drafted the statement on funerals for the Uniting Church’s Doctrine Working Group. It begins, ‘Everyone dies. It is one of the great truths of life – it comes to an end’. Today’s Bible readings are about two deaths, one as inevitable as our own, the other completely voluntary. In the reading from the Book of Acts Stephen, the first Christian martyr, is killed. In the reading from the Gospel according to John we hear Jesus comforting his friends after telling them that, despite being the Word that is with God, and the Word that is God, he too is going to die. Our own deaths and the deaths of all those we love are inevitable, but these two stories remind us that as Christians we do not approach death without hope. Continue reading →

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