Mother Claire's Sermons

  When I was a tween, the TV show 7th Heaven was popular among my peers. It’s a show about a generically protestant pastor’s family - there was an afternoon when I was in seminary and my classmates and I spent an inordinate amount of time discussing what denomination the family was, and we didn’t come to a satisfying conclusion. At one point in the show, their oldest son marries a Jewish woman and so his parents have hers over for dinner. And they’re having some kind of meat dish and her mother asks his mother something about the sauce. And she commented that to smooth it out she added a little bit of cream. And her Jewish mother freaks out and runs off like she’s going to be sick. I knew probably just as much as the writers did about eating Kosher - that you can’t mix meat and dairy - which his mother, as a minister’s wife for 25 years at this point, should have known. But they apparently didn’t go any deeper than that, because now I know it’s not that simple. There’s more to it ...

One July, we were visiting family for our summer vacation. And I had had it. I was getting more and more annoyed and my pot of anger was about to boil over. And I didn’t want to let it boil over. Partially because losing it would accomplish nothing but to make me instantly the bad guy and partially because that wasn’t the person who I wanted to be, the one who gets mad and explodes. So I found the Episcopal church in town and I went to church. Saturday night rolled around and I said to my husband, “I need to go to church tomorrow.” Not “I’d like to”. Not “it would be really nice if I could”. “I need to”. Because I did. I needed to go into a church building surrounded by my siblings in Christ, kneel on a kneeler, take a deep breath, and pray for these people who I loved but who were infuriating me. And so I did. And when I made it back, they hadn’t changed. But I had. And the pot was no longer in danger of boiling over. In today’s Gospel, Jesus gives steps to follow “if another member o...

  When I worked at St. Mary’s in Arlington, Virginia, we did a “three hours” service on Good Friday. It is what it sounds like - a Good Friday liturgy that lasts three hours, to commemorate the last three hours of Jesus’ life on the cross. People come and go throughout that time, and there is a lot of meditative silence. Every church I’ve been at does veneration of the cross as part of their Good Friday liturgy - where some kind of cross is brought forward and placed before the congregation for prayer and contemplation. But at St. Mary’s we had a life-size cross that was brought out and carried all the way around the block that St. Mary’s occupied - after all, we had three hours. I believe we took turns, but since I was 30 weeks pregnant all I know for sure is that I was not offered a turn. And while we carried a full cross, and that is usually what Jesus is carrying in artwork of his passion, that probably wasn’t how it went, historically. Most likely, Jesus was carrying the cross...

When I was pregnant with my first child, folks liked to ask my mom what my children would call her. She would just slowly respond…”Grandma”? There’s a newer phenomenon with my generation’s parents where grandparents do a bunch of discerning to decide what they want their grandkids to call them. Which sometimes works. But sometimes, kids who are learning to talk have ideas of their own. My husband calls his maternal grandma, “Ghee”. She didn’t decide on that name, it just happened. And now everyone just kind of calls her that. My youngest has started calling my mom, “Grammy”. We didn’t tell her to. She just does. And in so doing, she has accidentally tied several generations together. My mother’s great grandma was lovingly called “Grammy Owen”. And the only time my paternal grandma went by “Grammy” was when she was tucking us into bed at night. She’d give us a kiss and say, “God bless you. Grammy loves you.” But we overthink names. We overthink grandparent names; we overthink our kids...

Last week, my husband and I took our kids to Raising Cane’s for dinner for an LPS Foundation fundraiser. The kids love eating “inside the restaurant” so we got a corner booth and they were in seventh heaven. There are a bunch of old movie posters framed on the wall, and right above our table was a life sized photo of Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman. As my seven year old looked up in awe at Wonder Woman, she asked me, “mom, is she real?” Which is a hard question to answer for a live action character. Because Lynda Carter is absolutely a real person. But, of course, Wonder Woman is a character. So I told her, “she’s a real person, but she’s acting; she’s playing a character.” And my daughter looked at me with skepticism. Like that wasn’t quite good enough of an answer. Which is fair, because Wonder Woman looks so real. This isn’t a perfect metaphor for our Gospel text, because while I’m certain that Wonder Woman is not a real person, I’m not certain about whether or not Jesus literally and ...

One of the things I appreciate the most about our theology as Episcopalians is how acceptable it is to feel multiple feelings at the same time. We are encouraged to cry out to God with whatever we are feeling, whatever we are experiencing, and nothing is off limits. We can hope in God while sitting in the darkness. Through our prayers and our liturgies, we can weep and hope simultaneously - as we say in our funeral liturgy, “even at the grave we make our song: alleluia, alleluia, alleluia!” That doesn’t mean that at the grave we talk ourselves out of being sad. It means that at the grave we recognize the hope for “the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.” Nothing has been “fixed” but everything has been redeemed. We are left at the same place as the writer of psalm 17 is at the end of their psalm. Psalm 17, which we prayed the bookends of this morning, is directed to Yahweh - to the personal name of God. At the time the psalms were written, it wasn’t enough to just say “g...