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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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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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