Mother Claire's Sermons

John Calvin was a French theologian, pastor, and reformer in Geneva during the Protestant Reformation. He was a principal figure in the development of the system of Christian theology later called Calvinism, including its doctrines of predestination and of God’s absolute sovereignty in the salvation of the human soul. Various Congregational, Reformed, and Presbyterian churches throughout the world today trace their roots back to Calvin. In addition to his most influential work Institutes of the Christian Religion, John Calvin wrote commentaries on most books of the Bible, confessional documents, and various other theological treatises. His Biblical commentaries are noted for their pastoral nature, as their material often originated from lectures to students and ministers that he then re-worked for publication. Calvin wrote commentaries on the entire New Testament with the exceptions of the brief 2nd and 3rd letters of John, which total 28 verses between the two, and the Revelation to J

Before graduate school, my husband Stefan was a high school math teacher. I asked him if he ever taught a class where he ended up saying, “if you only get one thing out of this whole day of teaching, let it be this”. And he said, “of course. Especially when the kids have totally lost the plot and I’m trying to salvage the lesson.” Like how sometimes the class would get all hung up on details which, while good to know, end up with them lost in the weeds so they’re missing the wider point of the lesson. If you’re taking Calculus, for example, a large part of the errors you might make are Algebra. But if you focus too much on the Algebra, you won’t actually learn how to do the Calculus. When I took Introduction to the New Testament , we spent a week on each Gospel. When we made it to Mark 10, our professor, Dr. Yieh drew our attention to 10:45: “For the son of man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom to many.” This, according to Dr. Yieh, is the thesis of M

In the 90s, I was a Sunday School student here at St. Matthew’s. As some of you may remember, Sunday School was during the 10:30 service. Come the offertory, all of us Sunday School kids would be brought in for communion but then we wouldn’t go back to our parents. We would walk in, single-file by class, file into a pew, receive communion, and sprint from the rail back to our classrooms to await our parents. Now the first day we got ready to join the rest of the congregation, we did what kids do: clamored to be first in line. To be fair, this is what grown-ups do too. If you need an example, next time you’re at the airport look at boarding group 3 when boarding group 1 is called. But as we filed into the pew, the person at the front of the line and the person at the end of the line realized something: if you were first in line and first in the pew, you were last out of the pew and last to get back to the classroom to play. All of a sudden, we had a very real application of “the first w

When I was a hospital chaplain intern, I worked at Mary Washington Hospital in Fredericksburg, VA. 45 minutes - without traffic - South of Washington, DC, this Episcopalian was firmly in Baptist country. Therefore, every so often, I was asked what my favorite Bible verse was. I liked to answer John 3:17. Not 3:16, 3:17. Most people who ask you what your favorite Bible verse is know John 3:16: For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, so that everyone who believes in Him may not perish but may have eternal life. The problem is, that verse gets used in a pretty aggressive way to try and scare people away from perishing into eternal life by believing. One of my favorite quips is, “I can do all things through a single verse taken out of context.” Which brings me back to John 3:17: Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Maybe 3:16 is about more than being afraid of death. Maybe, with some more

  My husband and I like to play video games together. When I say “we” play them, we’ve tried to play cooperative games, but what works best for us is that he plays a game and I backseat game - like backseat driving, but far less annoying, or so I hope. A couple of years ago “we” played a game called Immortality . In this game, you solve the mystery of a missing actress through “found footage” from three of her unreleased movies. Each movie has its own storyline, but in it are other storylines applicable to your investigation, so each clip from these unreleased movies are doubly interesting: for what they say in the context of the story the movie is telling and how they speak to you as the detective searching through the footage. Our lesson from Numbers today does the same thing: several stories about humanity hidden within the larger story. While the story told throughout the Pentateuch is one unified story of how Israel became established as God’s people, from Creation to arrival at t

Emmy winning comedy writer Michael Jamin has written for several well-known shows over the past 30 years, beginning with Just Shoot Me and continuing with King of the Hill and Rules of Engagement . When production slowed during Covid, he built a strong social media following with his videos on Tik Tok and Instagram. Sometimes he shares screenwriting tips, sometimes he opens residual checks, the payment writers receive when shows they’ve worked on rerun, where he’ll tell his audience “I don’t know why this works out to 41 cents, I’m just opening the check”, and sometimes he’ll share insider “tricks of the trade”. One of his videos that I found really interesting was on laugh tracks. People claim to hate laugh tracks. If you survey people on their opinions on laugh tracks, they will almost unanimously claim to have an unfavorable view of laugh tracks. However, there’s a reason they continue to be put in shows: because we are wrong. When sitcoms are audience tested with and without lau