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 →

Posted in Sermons | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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 →

Posted in Sermons | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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 →

Posted in Sermons | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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 →

Posted in Political Activism, Reflection, Sermons | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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 →

Posted in Sermons | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Sermon: Relying on Holy Wisdom

Posted on June 11, 2022 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
Trinity Sunday, 12th of June 2022

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31
Psalm 8

‘When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?’

Today is Trinity Sunday, the one Sunday in the church’s year when we focus explicitly on what is implicit in our worship on the other fifty-one or -two Sundays of the year; that the God Christians worship is a God in relationship, a God whose nature is community. On Trinity Sunday we give thanks that God’s very self is a community of love, a community of equality, in which Three exist so intimately with, for and in one another that they become One. As the theologian Leonard Boff says, ‘God is the lover, the beloved, and the love between them’. Continue reading →

Posted in Sermons | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Sermon: A quieter Pentecost

Posted on June 4, 2022 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
The Feast of Pentecost, 5th of June, 2022

John 14:8-17

‘Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling-places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.’ (John 14:1-3)

Today the church celebrates the Feast of Pentecost, the ‘birthday’ of the church, the day when the tiny Jesus Movement stopped hiding in upper rooms and took their message to the streets. Ordinarily, this is a day for loud and raucous celebration, with tongues of fire and rushing winds and people speaking in every language under the heavens. I had half-prepared a Reflection on the story of the tower of Babel, and how being ‘scattered … abroad over the face of all the earth’ might not actually be a punishment. But this week this community has experienced two significant losses in the deaths of Maurice Mathers and Enid Williamson, and so instead I want us to focus on the much quieter Pentecost reading we are given from the Gospel according to John. Continue reading →

Posted in Sermons | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Sermon: Salvation and Liberation

Posted on May 28, 2022 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
The Seventh Sunday of Easter, 29th of May, 2022

Acts 16:16-34
John 17:20-26

‘Sirs, what must I do to be saved?’

In today’s reading from the Book of the Acts of the Apostles Paul and Silas, and possibly the author Luke, are still in Macedonia, beginning their mission to Europe. Last week we heard the story of the first person they baptised in Macedonia, a dealer in purple cloth called Lydia. This week we hear of a further conversion and some baptisms, in a story that raises the questions: What does it mean to be saved? What are people being saved from or for?

At the beginning of today’s story, we are told that for many days Paul and Silas have been followed by a slave girl who has a spirit of prophecy that enables her to recognise them and who announces their identity to everyone around them. She is a slave to her masters and to the spirit that enables her to see the future. She recognises them as fellow slaves, but slaves to a higher spirit, the ‘Most High God’. She also recognises that, like her, they can proclaim a way of salvation to the people of Philippi. Undoubtedly many people who had sought the advice of the spirit within her had asked the very question that the jailer later asks Paul and Silas: ‘what must I do to be saved,’ and had been told how to avoid a difficult situation or to make the best of a promising one. The Spirit who guides Paul and Silas gives advice that is both similar and profoundly different. Continue reading →

Posted in Sermons | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Sermon: The Unexpected Lydia

Posted on May 21, 2022 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
The Sixth Sunday of Easter, 22nd of May 2022

Acts 16:9-15
John 14:23-39

‘Lord, how is it that you will reveal yourself to us, and not to the world?’ asks Judas, not Iscariot, of Jesus on Jesus’ last night with his disciples before his death. Judas may be still caught up in the idea of Jesus as the conventional messiah who will come into his kingdom through violence and might. Why has Jesus not rallied all those who are ready to rebel against Rome and claimed the kingship of Israel? By the time the author of John’s gospel writes about this night one answer would have been clear. Jesus had entered his messiahship through suffering and death, a humiliating failure that was paradoxically glorification. He was not the sort of messiah who would reveal himself to the world in power and panoply. But by the time John was writing the question would have a new relevance, as the members of the fledgling house churches were being excluded from the synagogues, rejected by their fellow Jews. Why could only some people accept Jesus as Messiah, while others not only rejected Jesus but rejected his followers? Continue reading →

Posted in Sermons | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Reflection: The Offering

Posted on May 18, 2022 by Avril Hannah-Jones

The Offering

A few years’ ago, I tried to give away a kidney in what is called an ‘altruistic donation’. It’s a strange name, because surely every donation of a kidney is altruistic; but the name just meant that I wanted to give away one of my kidneys without knowing to whom it would go, no one I loved needed it. I thought it would be relatively straight-forward, but it turns out that the medical system gets quite concerned when a healthy person wants to randomly remove an organ and give it away. After the blood tests that determined that I did have two functioning kidneys, I then had four meetings with a Royal Melbourne Hospital psychiatrist over the course of a year to determine whether I was thinking about doing this for psychologically healthy reasons. Continue reading →

Posted in Random Musings | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment