Sermon: Putting Herod back into Christmas

Posted on December 28, 2019 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Sermon for Leopold Uniting Church
29 December 2019

Hebrews 2:10-18
Matthew 2:13-23

I spend way too much time on social media, particularly Twitter, time that I’m sure could be spent more productively elsewhere. But sometimes Twitter throws up fascinating conundrums. Before Christmas I became part of a discussion between people who were pondering why Jesus grew up poor, given that at his birth an unspecified number of magi from the east had brought him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Surely, the collective Twitter hive-mind thought, Joseph and Mary could have sold the frankincense and myrrh for vast sums and added those to the gold. They would have been rich! No need for Jesus to grow up the son of a carpenter in an obscure town in Galilee.

Wise Men

Continue reading →

Posted in Sermons | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Prayer for Epiphany

Posted on December 24, 2019 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Prayers of Intercession for Epiphany. If you would like to make use of them, please do.

Loving God,
today as we remember the magi,
who had the faith to follow the star that led them to you,
and the wisdom to recognise you and worship;
we also remember King Herod,
whose fear and anger led to slaughter and horror and despair.

Right in the middle of the Christmas Story is death;
hard on the heels of joy comes sorrow.

Flight into Egypt (2)

So today we pray for all those whose Christmases have been hard:
the sick, and those in mourning;
asylum seekers, refugees, and all who have fled their homes;
people locked up in camps and prisons;
those for whom Christmas Day was just another day of hunger and homelessness;
those who have lost houses, animals, livelihoods, or loved ones in the current fires;
those whose Christmas Day was spent in fear and danger;
those who were alone, without family, at Christmas;
and those whose experience of family has been abuse, rather than love.

Massacre of the Innocents Mariawald Abbey

Loving God,
the story of your birth contains both darkness and light,
both hatred and love,
both sorrow and joy;
and so we know that we can ask you to take it all,
all that darkness and hatred and sorrow,
and transform it into light and love and joy,
as you cradle us all in the palms of your hands.
Amen.

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

Prayer for the times: Climate Emergency and Bushfires

Posted on November 25, 2019 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Creator God,
you made a world of wonder and declared it ‘good’.
You provided everything that was needed for life to flourish;
creation rejoiced at the work of your hands.

Yet today your good creation is in crisis.
Oceans are rising: Pacific nations face salinity and inundation.
Temperatures are rising; the very old and very young are vulnerable.
Fires are burning out of control; people and properties, animals and birds, are at risk. Continue reading →

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

Sermon: Counter-culturally caring for creation

Posted on November 17, 2019 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Sermon for Richmond Uniting Church
17th of November 2019

Isaiah 65:17-25

What we are doing here this morning is profoundly counter-cultural. To begin with, we are gathering together in community in order to encounter God. I suspect that if we asked the majority of Australians where they encountered God, they would tell us that they found God by the sea, on the mountain, in the bush, or in the rugged red heart of the country. They might say that they encounter God in the love of family and friends; in the curl of a new-born baby’s hand around their finger; in the smile of a 90-year-old. Very few Australians would say that they encounter God when gathered with a motley crew of ordinary people in a suburban church on a Sunday morning. That is if they even believe there is a ‘God’ to be encountered at all.

Richmond Uniting

Good to preach at a church so welcoming that its sign is graffitied!

Continue reading →

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

Funeral Reflection for Howard James ‘Jim’ Learmonth

Posted on November 8, 2019 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Jim Learmonth was a delightful man, who died after a very long, rich, life at the age of 93. I was extremely honoured to be ask to take his funeral, and to give this eulogy as part of the service. ‘Eulogy’ is Greek for ‘good words’ and I hope that these are good words for a good man.

Psalm 121

Jim was born in 1926, the year of the ‘Canberra Florin’ coin, the son of Alexander Robert and Alice Learmonth. He had three brothers, Rus, Lyn, and James. His father worked at Massey Ferguson, as did John Twigg, who would become his father-in-law, and as Jim himself did later. Continue reading →

Posted in Reflection | Tagged | 1 Comment

Reflection: God our Rock

Posted on October 31, 2019 by Avril Hannah-Jones

‘There is no Holy One like the Lord,
no one besides you;
there is no Rock like our God.
Talk no more so very proudly,
let not arrogance come from your mouth;
for the Lord is a God of knowledge,
and by him actions are weighed.’ – 1 Samuel 2:2-3

Earlier this week The Spectator published a reflection on the closing of the Climb up Uluru by David Long. Although Mr Long is a ‘retired solicitor and economist’ he doesn’t appear to be interested in any legal or economic questions raised by the Climb’s end. Mr Long instead seems to be writing theology, and that drew my attention. I don’t want to give this article any more publicity than it has already received, but I can’t leave Mr Long’s errors unaddressed. Continue reading →

Posted in Reflection | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Sermon: The welfare of the city

Posted on October 13, 2019 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Sermon for Wesley Uniting Church
13th of October 2019

Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7

Today’s sermon is a sequel to that of last week. To understand the radicalness of Jeremiah’s prescription for the exiled people of Jerusalem, we need to remember the anger and pain and outrage we heard last week in psalm 137: ‘Happy shall they be who take [Babylon’s] little ones and dash them against the rock!’ Both the psalmist and the prophet Jeremiah are responding to the same event, the defeat of the Kingdom of Judah by the Babylonian Empire, which led to the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of its people. Today we are hearing ‘the words of the letter that the prophet Jeremiah sent 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’. So, some further context: Continue reading →

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

Sermon: A psalm of hate

Posted on October 6, 2019 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Sermon for Wesley Uniting Church
6th of October 2019

Psalm 137

I seldom have the chance to preach on today’s readings. They appear in the lectionary around St Francis’ Day, when Blessing of the Animals services mean that I tend not to preach. So today I’m taking the opportunity to look at Psalm 137 in detail. It’s a doozy! Most of it was made famous by Boney M. in the 1970s, but their version, as you may recall, does not include the final stanza. No babies’ heads are smashed in the pop song. Continue reading →

Posted in Sermons | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Sermon: A terrifyingly simple parable

Posted on September 29, 2019 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Sermon for Wesley Uniting Church
29th of September 2019

 Luke 16:1-13
1 Timothy 6:6-19

Last week, if you remember, I had to confess that I didn’t understand the parable of the dishonest manager; I have no idea why Jesus told a story about dishonesty that included apparent approval of it. I don’t feel too worried about my ignorance, though, because no one else seems to know either.

This week’s reading from the Gospel according to Luke is different. Today’s parable is equally hard. But not because it is in any way difficult to understand. If anything, today’s parable is too comprehensible. Continue reading →

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

Sermon: A complete puzzle of a parable

Posted on September 21, 2019 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Sermon for Wesley Uniting Church
22nd of September 2019

 Luke 16:1-13

Last week I said that when Jesus told parables he was not doing so to make his message easier to hear; that the story form was not the spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down. Parables were meant to leave Jesus’ hearers with something to chew on, something to puzzle over and argue against so that the parable became part of them. Well, if that was Jesus’ intention in telling his parables, complicating the issue so that his hearers were forced to reflect on his message, he certainly succeeded in the one we hear today. Almost no one has any idea what this story is really about. The Church Fathers tended to ignore it;[1] renowned biblical scholar Rudolf Bultmann apparently declared it to be incomprehensible;[2] and some commentators have suggested that Luke himself was baffled by Jesus’ story, and so added a series of morals to the end of the parable in the hope that they would make sense of an otherwise nonsensical tale.[3] It’s a parable that is ‘deeply unsettling to our sense of justice and fair play’;[4] and one that is often ignored.[5]  I know that the congregation here at Wesley can cope with wrestling with a difficult parable, so we won’t ignore it. But please make allowances for the confusion of what follows! Continue reading →

Posted in Sermons | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments