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Advent 2 Year A 2025: Isaiah 11:1-10 and Romans 15:4-13

Growing up, the Saturday after Thanksgiving was Christmas decoration day. We’d pull out all of the storage bins from the closet under the basement stairs and bring them upstairs where we’d sort the contents into whatever room they belonged. All of the Christmas-y things, the decorating, the baking, and the music have always been an important part of my Advent preparations. Some of it comes from those family of origin practices, and some from being raised by a musician and being a musician myself. You have to begin preparing your Christmas music during Advent and your Easter music during Lent. So while it is excessive that local radio stations switch from Christmas music back to regular programming at midnight on Christmas Day, I enjoy that secular Christmas helps to create the environment that enhances my Advent preparation. On Sunday evening, when the final miscellaneous knick knacks whose location we couldn’t remember from last year had been placed, we would sit down to the Advent wr...
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Advent 1 Year A 2025: Matthew 24:36-44

In 2019, the musical Hadestown opened on Broadway. Hadestown is a retelling of the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, the story of Eurydice, who goes to work in a hellish industrial version of the Greek underworld to escape poverty and the cold, and her poor singer-songwriter lover Orpheus, who comes to rescue her. Orpheus fails - Hades gives them a chance to walk out but they must do so single-file, and Orpheus is not allowed to look back at Eurydice. Just as they are about to complete the test, doubt causes Orpheus to turn around, condemning Eurydice to return to the underworld. The audience knows it ends badly from the beginning - even if you don’t know the original story of Orpheus and Eurydice, the opening song lets the audience know it's a sad song. But the story is told so well that it still breaks your heart when Orpheus fails - there is oftentimes an audible gasp from the audience when he turns around. But the story ends with Hermes, who functions in the story as ...
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Proper 28 Year C 2025: 2 Thessalonians 3:6-18

In my mother’s hall closet there’s a heavy, bright red case. In it is her collection of vinyl records. I love to lug that case out from the closet to the record player and slowly flip through each one like I haven’t done so countless times and carefully consider which record I will drop the needle on first. One of my favorites received its first trip to the turntable simply because I thought the concept was hilarious: Willie Nelson sings Kris Kristofferson, with background vocals by Kris Kristofferson. But the words of one of those songs continue to speak to me. The title of the track is “Why Me,” sometimes also called, “Why Me, Lord.” And if you know anything about country music, you might make some assumptions about the direction in which the song will be going. Especially as the music starts slowly and you hear those first two lines: “why me, Lord what have I ever done/to deserve even one” and I was ready for a dramatic country recitation of troubles, but Kris Kristofferson is a bet...
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Proper 27 Year C 2025: Job 19:23-27a

Growing up, my brother and I fed our love of watching baseball from the nationally broadcast local networks. We got WGN out of Chicago and TBS out of Atlanta. Of course, we couldn’t make it easy on our parents and choose the same team to follow - I chose the north side Cubs and my brother the Atlanta Braves. And I’ve loved baseball as long as I can remember. Not just the game itself - and, for the record, I love the pitch clock, hate the ghost runner, love the universal DH, and hate regular season interleague play - but I love baseball culture as well. There’s just a different kind of vibe for an everyday sport. I’ve heard it said that baseball is the game you go to when you want to have a conversation with the person you’re with. Major League Baseball’s regular season lasts 162 games, and one of my favorite sayings about the season is, “everyone’s going to win 54 and lose 54, it’s what you do with the last 54 that counts.” I listen to a baseball podcast that wraps up every season with...
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All Saints, Year C 2025: Luke 6:20-31

Monday’s child is fair of face, Tuesday’s child is full of grace, Wednesday’s child is full of woe, Thursday’s child has far to go. Friday’s child is loving and giving, Saturday’s child works hard for a living. But the child that is born on Sabbath day, Is bonny and blithe, good and gay. “Monday’s child”, first printed in 1836, is one of many fortune-telling songs, popular as nursery rhymes for children. It is supposed to tell a child’s character or future from their day of birth and to help young children remember the days of the week. I think I prefer the version taught to my kids at day care, which sets the days of the week to the theme of The Addams Family . But the poem “Monday’s child” received a bit of a resurgence with its use in the Netflix show Wednesday. It was where Charles Addams found the inspiration for his character Wednesday’s name in the  Addams Family  comic strip, and the show leaned into the linkage, with every episode title being a play on words with “woe...
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Proper 25 Year C 2025: Luke 18:9-14

I can be an obnoxious person to watch movies with. I have…questions. I look for inconsistencies and plot holes. But I also find joy in spotting any of those things. The more it might seem like I hate a movie, the more I probably like it. I’ve decided I no longer believe in guilty pleasures. I vocally enjoy things that might be objectively bad. One consequence of this is that the more times I’ve seen a movie, the more thoughts I have on it. Because I have two young children, I have watched many children’s movies many times. At one point when watching The Lion King I found myself wondering if a lion could live off of bugs. I was about to Google it when I reminded myself, “Claire, they’re talking lions and you’re having issues with the biology?” One of the nagging issues I have is in Frozen 2 . Elsa is on a journey of self discovery and when she’s receiving answers in the song “Show Yourself”, one of the lines the spirit sings to her is “you are the one you’ve been waiting for”. You are...
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Proper 23 Year C 2025: Luke 17:11-19

One of my closest friends has been bald since he was nine years old. He has a condition called alopecia, where you lose all of your hair. He’ll get a little bit of peach fuzz, but nothing else. No eyelashes, eyebrows, nothing. He was also raised Pentecostal, with a belief in faith healing. So he believed that if he just prayed hard enough, his condition would change - and, worse, that the loss of his hair was a sign that he did not have enough faith. My heart breaks when I think of that 9-year-old boy, praying so hard, firmly believing that his hair loss was his own fault. Jesus’ statement at the end of today’s Gospel lesson, “your faith has made you well”, seems to affirm this theology. But Jesus certainly doesn’t say anything like this every time he heals. Back in Luke chapter 9 Jesus seems to say the opposite. “A man from the crowd shouted, ‘Teacher, I beg you to look at my son…I begged your disciples to cast (the spirit) out, but they could not.’ Jesus answered, ‘You faithless and ...
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