Prayer: Remembering Black Saturday

Posted on February 7, 2019 by Avril Hannah-Jones
CSIRO_ScienceImage_10345_The_Kinglake_National_Park-1200w

The Kinglake National Park after the Black Saturday bushfires, 2009. CSIRO

Loving God, today, ten years’ on, we remember the horrors of Black Saturday, 2009.

We know that just as your share our joys, so you also grieve with us in times of sorrow.

We ask you to especially bless those affected by the fires.

We remember those who lost loved ones, all those grieving for 173 irreplaceable lives.

We pray for those who lost their homes; towns that lost their community buildings; children who lost their schools.

We hold in our hearts before you the people of Kinglake, Strathewen, St Andrews, Steels Creek, Hazeldene, Humevale, Kinglake West, Flowerdale, Whittlesea, Marysville, Redesdale, Bendigo, and all the other places that suffered and were affected.

We pray for all those whose memories of past fires were stirred and reawakened by Black Saturday, and those whose memories of Black Saturday will be stirred and reawakened by this anniversary.

Loving God, we thank you for all those who fought the fires, and those who helped with the recovery and rebuilding.

We ask for your blessing on all our emergency services personnel, who so generously devote themselves to helping others. Keep them safe in times of danger; grant them courage when they are afraid; give them wisdom when they must make quick decisions; lend them your strength when they are weary; and let them know your love all their work.

When the need arises and they are called to aid both friend and stranger, let them faithfully serve you in their neighbour.

Encircle us all with your care, loving God.
Amen.

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

Sermon: A LOT of wine

Posted on January 26, 2019 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Sermon for Williamstown
27th of January, 2019

John 2:1-11

As I confessed last week, I’ve done some swapping around with Bible readings. Last week was the week that we were meant to hear the story of the wedding at Cana, and this week we were meant to have Jesus giving his manifesto at the synagogue of Nazareth. I swapped the two because I thought that the story of Jesus’ preaching at Nazareth fit better into the Sunday of Mourning than today’s incredible celebratory story with its gallons of wine. Both stories are establishing stories, tales of Jesus’ first actions after his baptism. In the gospel according to Luke, after Jesus has been baptised and tempted in the wilderness, he begins his Galilean ministry (as we heard last week) by reading from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah in the synagogue. In the gospel according to John, after Jesus has been baptised and called his first disciples, he begins his ministry with the miracle we hear about today. Luke shows us Jesus as the one who brings liberation, inaugurating the kingdom of God in which the hungry are fed and the imprisoned set free. John shows us Jesus as the one who does signs and wonders, revealing his glory and his identification with the Father who sent him. For both Luke and John, Jesus is the one who brings about a new world and a new way to live.

The miracle at the wedding at Cana is, according to John, the first of Jesus’ signs. As with all miracles, we can find ourselves impressed or puzzled or dismissive of the unlikeliness of what happened. But the miracle itself is not the point. Amazing as it is for water to become wine, the point of the story is that the wine is a sign. The question is: what exactly is it a sign of? Continue reading →

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

Sermon: Day of Mourning

Posted on January 19, 2019 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Sermon for Williamstown
Day of Mourning, 20th of January, 2019

Luke 4:14-21

I need to start today’s sermon by apologising. Those of you who follow the Lectionary might have realised that although we are in the Year of Luke the gospel reading we were meant to have heard today was the story of the wedding at Cana told in the Gospel according to John. Instead I’ve swapped two weeks around and today we heard the Gospel and Epistle readings from next week. (If you didn’t know that, and didn’t notice anything, please ignore this.) The Uniting Church has agreed to commemorate today, the Sunday before Australia Day, as a Day of Mourning. This acknowledges that while for most of us the colonisation of Australia was a very good thing – I for one am very glad that Australia welcomed ten-pound-Poms after the second world war – for the First Peoples of this country colonisation saw their land stolen from them and their culture almost destroyed in ways in which we are only beginning to confess. We cannot celebrate everything that Australia has become without acknowledging the shadow side of our history. This acknowledgement seems to me to be illuminated by the beginning of Jesus’ ministry in the Gospel according to Luke, the Nazareth manifesto. Continue reading →

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

Reflection: For Bill

Posted on January 17, 2019 by Avril Hannah-Jones

I’d like to thank Leanne, Rachel, Sarah and Tess for asking me to speak at Bill’s funeral. 

We are gathered here today to give thanks for the life of William Alan Beagley and to commend him to God.

Funerals are celebrations of life; we thank God and offer comfort to each other by sharing our memories of Bill. But as Bill himself said at funerals, while this service is one of celebration and thanksgiving it is also okay to be sad! Today is a day of mourning, as well as of celebration. We are acknowledging the end of Bill’s life, the end of his living presence among those who love him. We are gathered here to grieve, as well as to give thanks, and the sorrow we feel is a measure of our love for Bill.

It is also okay to be angry. Bill was only sixty-three when he died. In God’s perfect world, as described by the prophet Isaiah, ‘No more shall there be in it an infant that lives but a few days, or an old person who does not live out a lifetime; for one who dies at a hundred years will be considered a youth.’ I’m sure that if this world were as God intended it to be Bill would have grown old with Leanne, and would have enjoyed grand-fathering the children that Rachel, Sarah and Tess might have in the years to come. We do not live in that perfect world, and so people die too soon, and that is something to lament. I believe that as we grieve Bill’s too-early death today, God grieves with us. Continue reading →

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

Sermon: Loving ‘white supremacists’

Posted on January 12, 2019 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Sermon for Williamstown
13th of January, 2019

Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

Today we celebrate the Baptism of Jesus or, as I like to think of it, ‘Divine Solidarity’ Sunday. On this Sunday in previous years I have talked about the strangeness of Jesus coming to be baptised by John. In Advent we hear the beginning of today’s story, with John coming as the Prophet Isaiah foretold, ‘proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins’. Since Jesus, Emmanuel, God-with-us, lived his life in full relationship with God, he had no sins of which to repent. Sin is not primarily about what we do, or even about what we think or feel, but about separation from God, not living up to our potential to be the people God created us to be. Repentance is about turning around, returning to God, behaving like the prodigal son and going home to the Father who runs to meet us. But Jesus never turned his back on his Father. In the language of John’s Gospel, the Father and the Son were One. Jesus did not sin, and had no need to repent. Since John is baptising for repentance those who confess their sins Jesus had no need for baptism. Continue reading →

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

A statement by Bishop Philip Huggins, President of the National Council of Churches in Australia

Posted on January 9, 2019 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Listening is the key – 08 January 2019

In response to the acts of a minority group in St Kilda last Saturday, Bishop Philip Huggins has released a statement:

The conflict and the visual character of these recent events have ensured their wide publicity, here and overseas.

Accordingly, there will be more of the same. Continue reading →

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

Sermon: Be careful when choosing your lodestar

Posted on January 5, 2019 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Sermon for Williamstown Uniting Church
Epiphany 2019

As usual, in the lead-up to today’s celebration of the Epiphany, I have been thinking about stars. I have especially been considering the concept of the ‘lodestar’. A lodestar is a star used for navigation, typically the pole star, Polaris or Alpha Ursae Minoris, in the Northern Hemisphere. We don’t have a pole star in the south, but the Southern Cross is used in a similar way, with the help of the Pointer Stars. According to my Shorter Oxford English Dictionary the use of the word ‘lodestar’ in navigation comes from Middle English, 1150-1349, and the use of ‘lodestar’ as a metaphor, meaning ‘the person or thing on which one’s attention or hopes are fixed’ is late Middle English, 1350-1469.  So we’ve been talking about metaphorical lodestars for centuries now. Continue reading →

Posted in Sermons, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

So, what just happened? (An Explainer, Updated)

Posted on January 5, 2019 by Avril Hannah-Jones

John Squires explains what the somewhat confusing process of the Uniting Church mean for marriage equality.

John T Squires's avatarAn Informed Faith

The last six months in the Uniting Church has been something of an intense roller-coaster, revolving around the issue of marriage. Our processes are somewhat idiosyncratic and, as events unfolded, matters came down to a rather arcane provision in the UCA Constitution.

I offered An Explainer about this process some months back. In light of more recent events, here is An Updated Explainer.

1A. On 13 July 2018, the 15th Assembly decided that Uniting Church ministers are able to conduct the weddings of people of the same gender. Assembly did have a proposal before it at that time, declaring that changing our understanding of marriage was a matter that was “vital to the life of the church”. This drew on aprovision in the ConstitutioninClause 39(a), which provides that On matters which, by a two thirds majority vote, the Assembly deems to be vital to the life of the Church…

View original post 1,031 more words

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

An astonishingly gracious suggestion: ‘we were wrong’

Posted on January 1, 2019 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Mark Wingfield, associate pastor at Wilshire Baptist Church in Dallas, suggests seven areas where the church needs to say “we were wrong”. The Uniting Church in Australia has done a little of this, for example in the apology we made as part of the Covenant between the Assembly and the Uniting Aboriginal and Islander Christian Congress in 1994, that said in part:

We lament that our people took your land from you as if it were land belonging to nobody, and often responded with great violence to the resistance of your people; our people took from you your means of livelihood, and desecrated many sacred places. Our justice system discriminated against you, and the high incarceration rate of your people and the number of Black deaths in custody show that the denial of justice continues today.

Your people were prevented from caring for this land as you believe God required of you, and our failure to care for the land appropriately has brought many problems for all of us.

We regret that our churches cooperated with governments in implementing racist and paternalistic policies. By providing foster-homes for Aboriginal children, our churches in reality lent their support to the government practice of taking children from their mothers and families, causing great suffering and loss of cultural identity. Our churches cooperated with governments in moving people away from their land and resettling them in other places without their agreement.

I apologise on behalf of the Assembly for all those wrongs done knowingly or unknowingly to your people by the Church, and seek your forgiveness. I ask you to help us discover ways to make amends.

In what other areas do we need to say “we were wrong”?

Source: 3 words for the church in 2019: ‘we were wrong’

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

Sermon: Christmas Day

Posted on December 24, 2018 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Sermon for Williamstown Uniting Church
Christmas Day 2018

Isaiah 9:2-7
Luke 2:1-20

Today is Christmas Day, the third most important day in the Church’s calendar and possibly the most widely-celebrated Australian public holiday (although I suspect it jostles with ANZAC Day for top spot). As I mentioned last year, Christmas has never been an exclusively Christian festival, and it most definitely isn’t here in Australia. Australians of other faiths, as well as those of ‘no faith,’ often join in the Christmas gift-giving and feasting, sharing the love and peace and joy of the day. Sadly, Christmas can also look like ‘just another day’. The story of the Christmas Day Truce during World War One, when men in the trenches on both sides sang and played football together, is amazing and beautiful – and profoundly unusual. Wars don’t usually stop for Christmas. Death and hunger and sorrow and pain do not suddenly disappear because we are celebrating the birth of Christ. Natural disasters don’t care about the liturgical calendar.

But Christmas reminds us that the world is not just made up of war and famine, death and destruction. We recognize beauty and hope. We speak and hear of joy and peace. We experience the love that is at the core of creation. We see the light shine in the darkness, and know that the dark cannot overcome it. Christmas reminds us to pause where we are, here and now, and celebrate the coming of the light. Continue reading →

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