Sermon: What is Jesus saying? (We don’t know!)

Posted on September 17, 2022 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
18th of September 2022

 Luke 16:1-13
1 Timothy 2:1-7

Oh, dear. With last week’s parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin I suggested that we were back in our biblical comfort zone. But Jesus does like to keep us on our toes. No one has any idea what today’s parable, the parable of the dishonest steward, is about. The Church Fathers ignored it; renowned contemporary commentators have declared it to be incomprehensible; and people have suggested that the author of the Gospel according to Luke himself had no idea of its meaning, and so just added a series of morals to the end of the story in the hope that they would make sense of it. Last week I said that Jesus told parables to leave his hearers with something over which to puzzle, and with today’s story Jesus has more than succeeded. Continue reading →

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Sermon: Thank goodness! We’re back to love!!!

Posted on September 10, 2022 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
11th of September 2022

Luke 15:1-10

Oh, thank goodness! After weeks of hard sayings from Jesus, during which preachers must remind congregations that Jesus is journeying to his death and so is understandably short with the crowds around him who just do not understand, we are back in what is definitely my comfort zone, and where I suspect many of you feel comfortable, too. We are in the heart of the Gospel according to Luke, hearing stories about the extravagant, overwhelming, love of God. These stories are only uncomfortable if we believe that we ourselves are perfect, with no need for God to seek us out. Continue reading →

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Sermon: Losing our lives

Posted on September 3, 2022 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
4th of September 2022

Luke 14:25-33

So many of my Reflections recently have started with me saying something along the lines of: What on earth can we do with today’s reading from the Gospel according to Luke? I’d hate to break that tradition now, so: What on earth are we to do with today’s reading from the Gospel according to Luke? One of the commentators I read this week said that preachers would be tempted to look at it and say, ‘Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. The Cost of Discipleship. Read.’[1] That is very tempting; you know that Dietrich Bonhoeffer is one of my heroes, and I will be quoting him later in this Reflection. But I cannot entirely outsource my preaching to him. Continue reading →

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Sermon: Jesus gets scary!

Posted on August 13, 2022 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
14th of August, 2022

Luke 12:49-56
Hebrews 11:29-12:2

‘Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.’

Last week I said that the two readings, from the prophecies of Isaiah and the Gospel according to Luke, were either encouraging or terrifying depending on where we sat as we heard them. This week’s reading from the Gospel according to Luke is, I think, simply terrifying. Although we are hearing it months after Good Friday we need to remember that today’s reading is something Jesus says on his journey to Jerusalem to be killed. It is his death to which Jesus refers when he says, ‘I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed!’ As I have said before, when we hear the anger in Jesus’ voice in this part of the Gospel, we need to remember that context. The day of judgement is at hand and time is running out, yet those around him cannot interpret the present time. Jesus has little patience for the merely curious and the hypocritical. At any moment their lives could be demanded of them, as his is about to be demanded of him. Continue reading →

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Sermon: Be afraid, very afraid – or reassured and encouraged

Posted on August 6, 2022 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
7th of August, 2022

Isaiah 1:1 10-20
Luke 12:32-40

‘Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.’

‘[I]f you refuse and rebel, you shall be devoured by the sword; for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.’

Today’s readings from the prophecies of Isaiah and the Gospel according to Luke are either encouraging and reassuring, or utterly terrifying, depending on where we sit as we listen to them. Are we among the ‘little flock’ who have no need to worry over what we are to eat, what we are to drink, and what we are to wear, because we know that we are of more value than the birds that God feeds and the grass that he clothes? Or are we among the rulers of Sodom and the people of Gomorrah, whose worship God refuses to hear because it is not accompanied by justice? Continue reading →

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Sermon: Being rich toward God

Posted on July 30, 2022 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
31st of July, 2022

Luke 12:13-21

‘You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you.’

I am sure you know that the three things about which we should not speak in polite company are religion, sex, and politics. In the days when it went without saying that ‘sex’ was not a topic for dinner party conversation, the forbidden three were religion, money, and politics. We know from the gospels that Jesus got invited to so many dinner parties that he was accused of being a glutton and drunkard, (Luke 7:34) but he does not seem to have read the right etiquette books. Jesus talked religion, money, and politics all the time. And not necessarily in ways that his audience would have found pleasant. Take, for instance, today’s parable about the Rich Fool. Continue reading →

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Sermon: The women in the Gospel according to Luke

Posted on July 16, 2022 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
17th of July, 2022

Luke 7:36-8:3 and 10:38-42

I am being a bit cheeky this morning. I looked at the four readings the Revised Common Lectionary offered us for today, and decided that only the very short reading from the Gospel according to Luke was in any way speaking to me. Possibly in three years’ time, when the other readings come round again, I will discover their value and be able to offer a helpful reflection from them, but this year they left me cold. So, since the timing of Easter this year meant that we did not hear Luke’s version of the anointing of Jesus, I decided to add that to today’s story of Martha and Mary, and think about the place of women in the Gospel according to Luke. But (shhh!) do not tell anyone I am playing with the Lectionary like this.

Commentators are completely divided on whether Luke’s version of the gospel of Jesus Christ is a positive one for women. At first glance, it would seem so. This gospel has the most references to women of any of the canonical gospels. Luke tells us the nativity story from the point of view of Mary, while Matthew tells it from Joseph’s perspective. (Luke 1:26-38) It is only in the Gospel according to Luke that we hear Mary sing the Magnificat (Luke 1:46-56) and we see the interactions between Mary and Elizabeth. (Luke 1:39-45) Luke’s telling often pairs the story of a man with the story of a woman, as in the parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin. (Luke 15:1-10). Luke tells us that the women who provided for Jesus out of their resources, ‘Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, and Joanna, the wife of Herod’s steward Chuza, and Susanna, and many others,’ accompanied Jesus to the very foot of the cross, and the empty tomb, making it clear that it is these women who provide the essential ‘chain of evidence’ for Christian claims of Jesus’ death and resurrection. Continue reading →

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Sermon: Laugh hard. Run fast. Be kind.

Posted on July 9, 2022 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
The Fifth Sunday After Pentecost, 10th of July, 2022

Luke 10:25-37
Colossians 1:1-14

It is hard to preach on a biblical story that has become a cliché. The story known as the ‘Parable of the Good Samaritan’ is possibly the most well-known of all Jesus’ parables, and so the name ‘Samaritan’ no longer means ‘enemy’ as it did for Jesus’ first hearers. In Australia, ‘Samaritan’ can refer to a community service agency that promotes mental health in Western Australia, or to an order of Benedictine sisters, or to an emergency relief agency in NSW. We need to forget all of that before we can even begin to hear this parable as Jesus told it.

Jesus is on the road toward his death. He has ‘set his face to go to Jerusalem,’ and because of this he has been rejected by a village of Samaritans who want nothing to do with a Jew headed to the ‘wrong’ Temple. This makes the disciples James and John so furious that they want to call down fire from heaven on the impious Samaritans, and Jesus rebukes them. (Luke 10:51-56) Before Jesus tells this story even Luke’s Roman readers would have been aware of the division between Jews and Samaritans.

The history of the division went back over seven hundred years. Samaria had been the capital of the northern kingdom of Israel before the Assyrian invasion in the eighth century BC. The Samaritans of Jesus’ day believed themselves to be the descendants of the Jews who had been left behind after the Assyrian deportation, but when the exiles from the southern kingdom of Judah with its capital at Jerusalem returned from Babylon in the sixth century BC, they claimed that the Samaritans were the descendants of the foreigners who had settled on the land after the Jewish population had been removed. We can have some sense of the division between Jews and Samaritans if we think of the present-day division between Jewish Israelis and Palestinians. Does the land belong to the people who have been living there for centuries, or the people whose ancestors were removed from it and who have now ‘returned’? There was no Separation Wall built in the Israel of Jesus’ day, but there might as well have been. As the author of the Gospel according to John explained when telling the story of the woman at the well, ‘Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans’. (John 4:9) Continue reading →

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Sermon: The Uniting Church ‘radicals in politics’

Posted on June 25, 2022 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
Celebrating the 45th Anniversary of Union, Sunday the 26th of June, 2022

John 15:1-8

Happy Birthday! Today we celebrate forty-five years of the Uniting Church. Forty-five years later it might not seem important to celebrate something which we now take for granted, but we need to remember that Union did not happen easily. If the reuniting of three previously-severed branches of the one holy catholic and apostolic Church had been easy, we would today be celebrating our one hundred and twentieth anniversary, because the question of Church Union was first raised by the Presbyterians in 1902. In subsequent decades a Joint Board of Christian Education was created; a United Church of Northern Australia was established in Darwin; and theological students from the three uniting denominations began to study together.[1] But it took another seventy-five years from the time the Presbyterians first suggested it for the Congregationalist, Methodist and Presbyterian churches to unite. This was partly because of the ecclesial and theological concerns, such as whether a Uniting Church should have bishops,[2] and partly because there were huge problems and in fact legal cases about money and property, particularly the division of church schools and colleges between the Presbyterian and Uniting churches.[3] With Joan Montgomery as a member of this congregation we are aware of how nasty those cases became.[4]

Black and white photo from 1977 of eight men and two women in clerical garb with Uniting Church Scarfs, holding service booklets and singing.

Back row: Ian Tanner (SA), Chris Mostert (TAS), Ron Allardice (VIC), Ron Wilson (WA); Middle Row: Lilian Wells (NSW), Graeme Bucknell (Northern), Rollie Busch (Qld), Front Row: Rupert Grove, Christine Gapes (Bible Reader), Phillip Potter (WCC)

Continue reading →

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Sermon: Trouble-making and scape-goating

Posted on June 18, 2022 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
Sunday, the 19th of June, 2022

Luke 8:26-39
Galatians 3:23-29

I have no idea why so many people seem to think that Christianity is a reactionary force on the side of the status quo. After all the Jesus we claim to follow was a lifelong troublemaker. In today’s gospel reading, for example, Jesus cures a man who is possessed by a legion of demons. The demoniac is a man unclean in location, religion, culture, mind, and spirit. He is a Gentile: living in a land in which unclean animals like pigs are raised. He lives among the tombs: sources of ritual uncleanliness for Jews. He is totally dehumanised: he roams naked and doesn’t live in a house. Without any fear that he might himself be infected by it, Jesus approaches this situation of utter uncleanness and heals the man. Jesus then sends the demons into a nearby herd of swine, and the demons, forces of destruction, drown the pigs and presumably themselves. Evil destroys itself. Continue reading →

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