Sermon: Forgiveness and Repentance

Posted on October 29, 2022 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
30th of October, 2022

Luke 19:1-10

Warning: This Reflection refers to suicide and to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

Recently I have been thinking about forgiveness and repentance. As I have said before, forgiving those who have sinned against us is a requirement for Christians. It is in the prayer that Jesus taught us and that we say together every time we gather. (Matthew 6:12, Luke 11:4) It is at the core of Jesus’ teachings in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6:14-15) and the Sermon on the Plain. (Luke 6:37) We are to forgive other members of the church who sin against us not simply seven times, but seventy times seven (Matthew 18:21-2) or seven times a day if that is necessary. (Luke 17:4) We are to do all this in imitation of the God who forgives us.

We forgive because God forgives. We forgive as God forgives. We forgive by echoing God’s forgiveness. In Christ, God has forgiven the sin of all human beings, and from Christ, we receive the power and the willingness to forgive those who have sinned against us, as we ourselves have been forgiven. Continue reading →

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Sermon: God’s priorities, according to the Prophet Jeremiah

Posted on October 15, 2022 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
16th of October 2022

Jeremiah 31:27-34
Luke 18:1-8

Over the past few weeks, you may have noticed, there has been quite a bit of discussion among politicians and the media about the place of Christianity in Australia and the role Christians can play in public life. There are two things that I have found intensely frustrating about all this commentary. The first has been the contention that Christians are discriminated against in Australia. There are Christians being persecuted in the twenty-first century, it is not simply a historical phenomenon, but that persecution is not happening here. Here, unlike in Sri Lanka or Egypt, we do not have to worry about this building being bombed as we gather in it for worship. We do not risk death by identifying publicly as Christian, as our Christian siblings do in countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan. If we want to build churches here the government does not use the planning rules to prevent it, as happens in Indonesia and Israel. In Australia, unlike in Malaysia, Christians are not forbidden from evangelising and Muslims are not forbidden from converting to Christianity. Christianity may no longer be treated with the same respect that we could take for granted before the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, but that does not mean that Christians are now less safe. And I am worried that conflating criticism of churches and of elements of the Christian faith in Australia with the actual persecution of Christians in other countries might lead to the latter being taken less seriously. Continue reading →

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Sermon: The shalom of the city

Posted on October 8, 2022 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
9th of October 2022

Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7

As you will undoubtedly remember (because you have been chewing over it all week) I ended last week’s Reflection by saying:

The world is a place of inordinate beauty, filled with the grace of God. The world is also a place of terror, in which wars kill the innocent, children starve, refugees become fugitives and wanderers. The Scriptures do not speak only of the gentle, loving, sunny side of life; they are honest about violence and pain.

At the heart of both Judaism and Christianity are despair and hope, vulnerability and promise, exile and return, crucifixion and resurrection. Last week’s readings from the Book of Lamentations and the Psalter dwelt in the despair that came from God’s judgement on Jerusalem through the Babylonian Exile. We know that that exile was not the end of Israel’s story, any more than Jesus’ story ended on the cross. The exiles will return, the city and the temple will be rebuilt, just as Jesus was raised from the dead – but we are not there yet. With today’s reading from the prophecies of Jeremiah we find ourselves in the equivalent of Holy Saturday, a time of waiting, of dwelling in-between. The prophet Jeremiah has written a letter from Jerusalem to the remaining elders among the exiles, and to the priests, the prophets, and all the people, whom Nebuchadnezzar had taken into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon, to tell them how to live in the space between exile and return. Continue reading →

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What is Queer Theology?

Posted on October 7, 2022 by Avril Hannah-Jones

This is the first essay I wrote for the Queer Theology subject at Pilgrim Theological College of the University of Divinity. I only had 1000 words to work with, so it is not my best work, but I thought I’d put it here just in case it might be of interest to others.

“As with becoming Christian or woman, one is not born but becomes queer; one learns to live as a promise of the future.”[1]

God is queer. The original and ultimate “identity without an essence,”[2] God is radically unknowable; and yet Christianity believes that this radically transcendent God entered creation out of love. Jesus Christ is queer. A human man who is also God, he dies and returns to life, breastfeeds his followers with his flesh, marries avowed virgins, and gives birth to the church. The church, the multi-gendered Bride and Body of Christ, is queer. Its eyes on the eschaton, it problematises every human identity. Theology may be the queerest thing of all, because theology seeks to use human words, human lives, and human creativity to speak about the God who is utterly Other. Continue reading →

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Sermon: There is nothing we cannot say to God

Posted on October 1, 2022 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
2nd of October 2022

Lamentations 1:1-6
Psalm 137

‘Her foes have become the masters, her enemies prosper, because the Lord has made her suffer for the multitude of her transgressions; her children have gone away, captives before the foe.’

‘O daughter Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us! Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!’

I have recently talked about my biblical comfort zone: news of God’s astounding, overwhelming, inclusive love. Today’s two readings from the Hebrew Scriptures are as far from my comfort zone as it is possible to be. Do we worship a God who punishes God’s people for their sins with the complete destruction of their city and nation? Do we want words of hatred and revenge to be part of our liturgy? My answer to both those questions is an immediate and fervent NO!, but today’s readings are not only in the Bible, they are part of our lectionary. Why? Continue reading →

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Sermon: When Jesus is being all too clear

Posted on September 24, 2022 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
25th of September 2022

Luke 16:19-31
1 Timothy 6:6-19

On Monday this week a fund-raiser from Médecins Sans Frontières, Doctors without Borders, knocked on my door to ask me to financially support their work. I did a very quick mental calculation of my finances; agreed that, yes, I could give the monthly amount suggested; and signed up. Given that I knew what today’s gospel reading was, I did not feel that I had a choice. Last week’s parable of the dishonest manager might have puzzled Christians down the centuries; today’s parable is if anything too comprehensible.

The Gospel according to Luke is, as I have said repeatedly during this liturgical year, pre-eminently a gospel about and for the poor. In Luke’s version of the Beatitudes Jesus pairs the blessings with woes: ‘Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God’; ‘But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation’. (Luke 6:20-26) In today’s parable that beatitude and that warning are given shape in the story of Lazarus and the rich man. This parable is the only one of all the stories that Jesus told in which a character is given a name. In all Jesus’ other parables people are described by their wealth, occupation, or relationship: rich man; father; guest; shepherd; widow; poor woman. In this parable the poor man is called Lazarus. We are being told to truly see the sort of person from whom we would normally turn away. Continue reading →

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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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