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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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Proper 22 Year C 2025: Luke 17:5-10

On Friday, the new Archbishop of Canterbury was announced. The Rt. Rev. Sarah Mullally, the current Bishop of London, will be the first woman to hold the seat since its establishment in 597. I wonder how Bishop Mullally feels. Does she feel completely equal to her new situation? Does she feel a weight in being the first woman to hold the position when there are many within the Anglican Communion who vocally believe that her gender should be disqualifying? Although she was the first woman to serve as  Bishop of London, it would be naive to think there aren’t massive differences between being Bishop of London and Archbishop of Canterbury. Does she feel anxious about what former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams called the expectation that the archbishop have an opinion on everything? We all know there’s a difference between theoretically knowing how to do something and being in the driver’s seat. The first time I had to change a flat tire on my car, I knew how to do it: jack ...
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Proper 21 Year C 2025: Luke 16:19-31

An Egyptian in Amente, the realm of the dead, was allowed to return to earth in order to deal with an Ethiopian magician who was proving too powerful for the magicians of Egypt. He was reincarnated as the miraculous child of a childless couple, Setme and his wife, and called Si-Osiris. When he reached the age of twelve he vanquished the Ethiopian magician and returned to Amente. But before this there was an occasion when father and son observed two funerals, one of a rich man buried in sumptuous clothing and with much mourning, the other of a poor man buried without ceremony or mourning. The father declared he would rather have the lot of the rich man than the pauper, but his son expressed the wish that his father’s fate in Amente would be that of the pauper rather than that of the rich man. In order to justify his wish and demonstrate the reversal of fortunes in the afterlife, he took his father on a tour of the seven halls of Amente. The account of the first three halls is lost. In t...
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Feast of St. Matthew, 2025: St. Matthew's Centennial

One of the biggest decisions a parent has to make before the birth of their child is on a name. We put a lot of pressure on ourselves to choose the perfect name to set our children up for success. After all, would a rose by any other name smell so sweet? That question is explored in the 2005 book Freakonomics , which discusses naming of children and questions such as the correlation between the number of books in the home and educational accomplishment of children. It turns out, neither the child’s name or quantity of books have the power in and of themselves to create little well-adjusted geniuses. The important thing is what these things say about the parents - if you have a ton of books in the house, you are likely well-educated, have the money and resources to spend on books, and to allow you to spend time reading those books to your children. Same with children’s names - it is what the name tells us about the parents moreso than what it predicts about any child. A friend from high...
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Proper 19, Year C 2025: Luke 15:1-10

There’s an old hymn that begins “there were ninety and nine that safely lay / In the shelter of the fold / But one was out on the hills away / Far off from the gates of gold / Away on the mountains wild and bare / Away from the tender Shepherd’s care.” It’s a lovely sentiment. Unfortunately, it is inaccurate. The song ignores an important word and therefore tames the text so much that it takes most of the risk out of what the shepherd does. Luke and Matthew both contain this story about a shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine behind to find the single lost sheep. But they aren’t left behind in gates of gold, or safely in the shelter of the fold. Matthew has the sheep “on the mountain”. Luke is even more stark in where the ninety-nine are: “in the wilderness”. So, unlike the song suggests, it isn’t just the one sheep who is on the “on the mountains wild and bare”, it’s the ninety-nine as well. Today we read the first two in a series of three parables about finding something that was lost....
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Proper 18 Year C 2025: Luke 14:25-33

As parents, one of the life skills my husband and I are teaching our kids is how to proportionally react to things. That it’s ok to feel disappointed, but maybe sitting down and screaming isn’t the best way to express those feelings. It’s ok to be angry, but hitting is not an acceptable way to express that anger. It’s ok to be sad that we’re leaving the park, but running away and hiding is not an option. Even as we learn to self-regulate as we grow up, we don’t always react to things appropriately. We overreact or underreact all the time, just usually not by sitting down and screaming. But we do the adult equivalent. We push away people we love. We inappropriately use substances. We pretend problems don’t exist - the adult equivalent of when my kids pretend not to hear me when I have something to say that they don’t want to hear. Today, in eight short verses, Luke gives us two opportunities to overreact and one to underreact. We start out strong with an overreaction. Jesus says, “whoev...
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