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Independence Day 2025

On December 8, 1950 my grandfather received a letter. As he would tell the story, it began this way, “Greeting: Having submitted yourself to a Local Board composed of your neighbors for the purpose of determining your availability for training and service in the armed forces of the United States, you are hereby notified that you have now been selected for training and service in the Army.” Family story has it that Grandpa’s response to this draft notice was, “I need better neighbors.” Grandpa spent two years in Korea. He commented that he’d never been colder in his life - which is saying something coming from a farm boy from Waverly. The episode of MASH where they’re all fighting over a pair of long johns would have been true to the freezing Korea experience. But better neighbors and frigid winters aside, Grandpa was always proud of his service. Although he was not enthusiastic to report, he had military honors at his funeral. My grandpa’s relationship with the Army was complicated, as...
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Proper 8 Year C 2025: Luke 9:51-62

A 22-year-old Chicago White Sox fan was banned indefinitely from all Major League Baseball ballparks on Wednesday after he heckled Arizona Diamondbacks second baseman Ketel Marte so cruelly that he brought Marte to tears, yelling derogatory comments about his mother who died in a car accident. News sources are not reporting on what, exactly, was said. Which is good. We don’t need a direct quote to know that his actions were unacceptable. Ketel Marte is 31 years old. He’s a grown man. He has been in the league for 11 years. So he’s been heckled. He’s heard trash talk. Especially in baseball, where there are quiet enough moments to make out a single voice from the crowd, you don’t make it that far if you don’t have some pretty thick skin. My heart breaks to think about how awful that fan must have been to bring him to tears. Marte’s teammates and manager responded by showing their love for him. His manager told him, “I love you and I’m with you and we’re all together and you’re not alone...
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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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