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Trinity Sunday, Year C 2025: Proverbs 8:1-4,22-31

Both of my daughters have “churchy” names: Ruth and Sophia. I once commented to my husband about how I “got away with” two bible-named kids and he didn’t even try for a Zelda or any type of gaming-related names, and he said “yeah, well, we still gave our kids pretty normal names.” Which is fair, I didn’t try for a Jael. Ruth is a fairly straightforward biblical tie-in, with Ruth being one of four women to have books of the Bible named after them - the others being Esther and the apocryphal Judith and Susanna. But for Sophia, you have to look a little deeper than the table of contents, because there isn’t a person in the Bible named Sophia. But she’s there - so much so that, as a parent, I think I put far more pressure on Sophia than on Ruth, because sophia is the Greek word for wisdom. The same wisdom that today’s beautiful poem from Proverbs is about. While it is true that Proverbs is written in Hebrew, where the word for wisdom is chakam , in the Greek translation of the Old Testamen...
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Ascension Day Year C 2025

One of my favorite hymns is Hail thee, festival day! It is fun, a little silly, so complicated it doesn’t work very well for congregational singing, and it just makes me smile. It has a repeating refrain, but then the verses go back and forth between two entirely different tunes and rhythms. On top of that, the text is an older English translation of the Latin salve festa dies, so singing it makes me feel posh. If you have sung Hail thee, festival day! , you most likely did so on Easter. But there are three different versions of Hail thee, festival day! in our hymnal: one for Easter, one for Pentecost, and one for Ascension Day. Before I went to seminary, I had only sung it on Easter, not knowing about the other versions, so imagine my delight when I arrived to chapel on Ascension Day, which, due to its place in the calendar 40 days after Easter (and 10 days before Pentecost), always places it on a Thursday, to begin with the familiar strains of Ralph Vaughan Williams echoing through...
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Easter 6 Year C 2025: John 14:23-29

My middler, or second, year in seminary, I was pregnant with my first daughter. I was a member of the schola cantorum , the advanced vocal group, and a section leader in the regular seminary choir. The schola was officially a student group, so it wasn’t led by a faculty member. Therefore there wasn’t the coordination of repertoire you might expect. So in the fall, the schola sang Thomas Tallis’ “If Ye Love Me”. Then in the spring, the seminary choir also sang Thomas Tallis’ “If Ye Love Me”. AND THEN, toward the end of spring semester I was in class for Liturgical Music. And the professor played a classical example of Reformation era compositional style: Thomas Tallis’ “If Ye Love Me”. And my daughter had apparently heard it enough. She kicked so hard that other classmates saw my stomach move and our poor professor, who had no idea what had happened, was perplexed by what was so funny about Tallis. But that year of Tallis might have been accidentally making a theological point in our li...
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Easter 5 Year C 2025: Revelation 21:1-6

It is en vogue in mainline protestant Christianity these days to rebrand funerals as “celebrations of life”. We are very uncomfortable talking about - and admitting to - death. With all of the advances in modern medicine, we find it easy to forget that we all will someday die. We use euphemisms to avoid saying that someone died - I still remember getting the call from my grandmother saying, “we lost Grandpa”. If I didn’t know that my grandfather was sick, I might have been tempted to ask Grandma where they’d looked for him. I was in conversation with some clergy friends about “celebrations of life” and one friend bluntly said, “you know what’s going on the bulletin at my funeral? The Burial of the Dead: Rite Two,” as it says in the Book of Common Prayer. Many of my colleagues have their funerals planned. We plan enough funerals, see enough families struggle to do what their loved one, who didn’t leave any instructions behind, would have wanted in a service, and we have enough opinions...
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Easter 3 Year C 2025: John 21:1-19

In your senior year at Virginia Seminary, every Master in Divinity student has the opportunity to preach at Chapel. It’s a rite of passage to give your “senior sermon”. And it’s fun to see all your classmates preach. It’s really the only opportunity to do so, since Sunday mornings everyone is spread out in their various parishes across the DC Metro. After my senior sermon, my friend Stephen gave me perhaps the best compliment he could’ve given: that I had done a Greek word study and it did not make him want to end our friendship; I had made it interesting. Perhaps I took the compliment too much to heart, because I quite possibly have used it as an excuse to talk about translation a bit too much. My husband has said that if there was a Claire Sermon Bingo, it would certainly include a square labeled “if you look at the Greek…” But I haven’t spent all of that time declining nouns and conjugating verbs and comparing Greek commentaries as an exercise in enjoying my own cleverness. It is on...
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Easter 2 Year C 2025: Acts 5:27-32

There is a type of extremist who identify themselves as Sovereign Citizens. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, sovereign citizens believe they are not under the jurisdiction of the federal government and consider themselves exempt from U.S. law. They use a variety of conspiracy theories and falsehoods to justify their beliefs and their activities, some of which are illegal or violent. Their rejection of legal documentation such as Social Security Numbers, drivers’ licenses, vehicle registration, and other forms of government identification lead to frequent interactions with law enforcement. As you might imagine, if you insist you don’t need to register your vehicle you might get pulled over. And then if you insist you don’t need a driver’s license, you now have additional legal problems. Sovereign citizens tend to be aggressive and combative to law enforcement when they do interact, and then as soon as they’re in the legal system they file incoherent motion after incoherent ...
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Easter Day 2025

One of the things I forgot about when moving back to Southeastern Nebraska was the spring fires. While fire evacuations are very much a present concern in Colorado Springs, where we lived last Easter, those situations are more in your face than the fires in Kansas, blowing smoke north, causing hazy skies, sore throats, and sometimes the faint smell of burning in the air. I’ve been paranoid all week that my sore throat is the result of a pending illness, not of the air quality alert that my weather app has been constantly warning me about. I watch a lot of cooking shows, and one of my favorite programs is The Pioneer Woman , a tongue-in-cheek title claimed by “accidental country girl” Ree Drummond who married a cattle rancher in rural Oklahoma. The opening title of each episode ends with her saying, “here’s what’s happening on the ranch.” So if you watch enough Pioneer Woman, you not only learn how to make Easter dinner for 30 people or a steak befitting a cattle rancher, but you also l...
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