Sermon: Dedicated to Arlo, Aimee and Alistair

Posted on January 29, 2017 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Sermon for Williamstown
29th of January 2017

Micah 6:1-8
Matthew 5:1-12

This morning, with great joy, we’re baptising Arlo Conate. Baptism is many things: a cleansing bath; a symbolic death; an anointing; an initiation. Today I want to focus on that last. We’re making Arlo a member of Christ’s body the church. In today’s service Arlo is becoming brother to every Christian in the world. This week I’ve been thinking about what that will mean for Arlo as he grows; what that means for all of us who are identified by the sign of the cross on our foreheads as belonging to Jesus. Is being brother or sister to everyone who bears Jesus’ name a good thing?

I’ve been thinking about this because this past week was the first week of Donald Trump’s presidency, a week in which the American President did many frightening things. I won’t bother listing them now – Waleed Ali did an excellent job of that on The Project and you can easily find that video for yourself. But I will quote from an essay that Australian historian and speechwriter Don Watson wrote before Trump was elected. In it, Watson describes a visit Trump made to a lobby group called ‘The Faith and Freedom Coalition’. Trump tells his audience of Christians that he himself is Presbyterian, to applause. He attacks Hillary Clinton, calling her ‘Crooked Hillary,’ and says that she wants a 500 per cent increase in Syrian refugees. The audience boos. At this point, Watson writes:

A young woman stands and shouts “Refugees are welcome here,” and goes on shouting while three bull-necked bouncers haul her out of the room, and the faithful chant, “USA! USA! USA!” Then two more women stand and shout over the chant, “Build bridges not walls!” They too are dragged out as Trump says, “What’s happened in our country is so sad. We are so divided … By the way, these are professional agitators, folks. They’re sent here by the other party.”[1] Continue reading →

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Sermon: In which Avril is chastised by the Apostle Paul

Posted on January 22, 2017 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Sermon for Williamstown
22nd of January, 2017

1 Corinthians 1:10-18

Corinth was, according to Homer, a city known for its riches – ‘wealthy Corinth’. Geographically it was in a fabulous position to take advantage of trade routes on both land and sea and it took that advantage, taxing those who passed through it. Like all rich cities, Corinth revered wealth and the wealthy, which makes it a somewhat unlikely place in which Paul could preach Jesus. I wonder whether Paul took the gospel to Corinth on the basis that if he could make it there, he could make it anywhere.

Whatever the reason, Paul spent eighteen months in Corinth creating house churches with Timothy and Silvanus, Prisca and Aquila, and Phoebe. After the church had been established, Paul moved on to Ephesus. Not surprisingly, in Paul’s absence things started to go wrong.  Continue reading →

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A prayer for our beloved city

Posted on January 21, 2017 by Avril Hannah-Jones

We pray for our beloved city, Melbourne.

We give you thanks, O God,
for its beauty, history, diversity, friendliness, vitality,
its commitment to art and sport and café-culture.

We rejoice that, although it is far from perfect,
people from all around the world have found in Melbourne
a home where they can live and love and thrive.

public-purse

The Public Purse: Our beautiful, funny, friendly city

Loving God, we pray for the people murdered in Bourke Street,
knowing that you have already received them with love,
and that as the whole city grieves their shocking and untimely deaths
you are holding them safely in your welcoming arms.

Continue reading →

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Sermon: We are the New Testament Church

Posted on January 15, 2017 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Sermon for Williamstown Uniting Church
15th of January 2017

Isaiah 49:1-7
1 Corinthians 1:1-9
John 1:29-42

This is my first sermon for 2017, given that I spent most of Sunday the first of January in my pyjamas reading a murder mystery just because I could and that last week I read you the beautiful children’s story The Greatest Gift instead of preaching. So I’m glad that today’s readings, on this third Sunday of the calendar year, still have a very ‘beginning’ feeling to them. We have Jesus calling his first disciples, two of whom were initially disciples of John the Baptist, and the third of whom was Simon, renamed Peter by Jesus, that emotional, committed, brave, cowardly, wonderfully human disciple of whom we will hear so much more in this year of Matthew. This is the beginning of his story. We also have our first reading from Paul’s magnificent first letter to the church at Corinth. Continue reading →

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Sermon: Be loved.

Posted on December 25, 2016 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Sermon for Williamstown Uniting Church
Christmas Day, 2016

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

‘I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people’.

hallelujah

Over the past month I’ve been ear-wormed by Christmas carols. As I’ve walked or washed the dishes or photocopied colouring sheets, I’ve had an internal soundtrack playing; occasionally I’ve even broken into song. If I worked in retail, and the carols I found myself singing were ‘Rocking around the Christmas Tree’ or ‘Jingle Bells,’ this could have ended very badly, maybe with me gibbering in a corner. Luckily, the carols my subconscious decided I needed were the ones that I sang as a child and that the children here have been learning: ‘Away in a Manger’; ‘Once in royal David’s city’; O little town of Bethlehem’ – and I’m still relatively sane. Continue reading →

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Sermon: The greater righteousness (2)

Posted on December 18, 2016 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Sermon for Williamstown Uniting Church

18th of December, 2016

Matthew 1:18-25

Two weeks’ ago, in a somewhat R-rated sermon, I talked about four rather badly-behaved women other women included by Matthew in Jesus’ genealogy: Tamar; Rahab; Ruth and Bathsheba. They were women who behaved in ways that I’m going to politely describe as ‘sexually adventurous’. They were women who were either themselves Gentiles or who were married to Gentiles. And they were women who themselves or, in the case of the wife of Uriah, through their husbands, broke the law in the service of greater righteousness. It’s important to remember their stories as today we hear the conclusion of Matthew’s version of Jesus’ genealogy. Their scandalous stories prepare Matthew’s readers and us for the scandal we hear today. Our idealisation of the story of the birth of Jesus, shown in the cuteness of many Nativity plays, distracts us from the fact that Jesus’ mother Mary became pregnant out of wedlock in a time when that was definitely not acceptable. Continue reading →

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Sermon: The greater righteousness (1)

Posted on December 4, 2016 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Sermon for Williamstown
4th of December 2016

Matthew 1:1-25

This is a repeat sermon, so if as you listen it seems familiar to you, there’s a logical reason. You haven’t suddenly developed the psychic power to predict my preaching. I did preach a very similar version of this sermon three years’ ago, when we were last in the Year of Matthew. It may seem surprising that I’ve chosen to repeat a sermon on a passage of the Gospel that is so dull that it isn’t even in the lectionary, but I have very good reasons for it. I must apologise to Celia, who this week worried that she didn’t know how to read Jesus’ genealogy so as to make it interesting. It’s a bit mean of a minister to give the Bible reader a reading designed to make a congregation drift off and start thinking about Christmas shopping, but that’s what I’ve done today. Continue reading →

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The Joy of Giving at Christmas (and I’m serious about that title)

Posted on December 1, 2016 by Avril Hannah-Jones

It is that time of year. Not ‘the most wonderful time of the year’ (to quote a popular 1963 song) but the time of the year when I turn into a Scrooge and/or a Grinch (A Scrinch? A Grooge?) and start muttering about the commercialisation of Christmas.

Too much consumption!, I cry. Christmas has been captured by this consumer society of ours. It has become a season in which people are emotionally manipulated into spending more than they can afford on unnecessary gifts. I glance through the advertising supplements in the weekend papers, aghast at the suggestion that I spend hundreds of dollars on jewellery from Tiffany or shoes from David Jones. (And David Jones, calling your catalogue a Christmas Book isn’t fooling anyone.) Continue reading →

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Sermon: ‘Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise’

Posted on November 27, 2016 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Sermon for Williamstown
27th of November 2016

Isaiah 2:1-5
Romans 13:11-14
Matthew 24:36-44

In 1990, when I was sixteen years old, I became obsessed with Les Misérables – first the musical by Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schonberg, and then the book by Victor Hugo on which it’s based. It began when my aunt gave my parents and siblings and me tickets to the musical for Christmas. While watching it I started crying when Fantine died, in the first half of the first act, and I didn’t stop crying until about half an hour after I left the theatre. I was so moved by the show that I insisted that some of my closest friends had to come and see it with me, and I wagged school one lunchtime to go and buy the tickets. I talked about it so incessantly with my friends that one of them bought me a copy of the novel, and although it’s over a thousand pages long, and I was doing Year Twelve and should have been focusing on maths and physics, I read it from cover to cover in a couple of weeks. I still reread it every five years or so. Continue reading →

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Sermon: Responding to the American Presidential Election

Posted on November 12, 2016 by Avril Hannah-Jones

Sermon for Williamstown

13th of November, 2016

Isaiah 65:17-25

Today I’m going to do something I’ve never done before and talk about party politics from the pulpit. I talk about politics all the time: about the treatment of asylum seekers; and about the way the poor and dispossessed are often ignored by the rich and entitled; and about the need for Christians to oppose all forms of racism and discrimination because every single human being is a beloved child of God. I don’t think there’s any doubt that talking about those sorts of issues is appropriate for the followers of Jesus of Nazareth. But what I have never done before is talked about a particular politician. That’s the line I’m crossing today. Today I’m going to talk about the election of Donald Trump as the next President of the United States. Continue reading →

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