Mother Claire's Sermons

As a priest, when you move from a parish you’re not really supposed to have contact with laypeople from that parish for a year. The point is to help the priest move on to their next call and the people transition to whoever the new pastoral leader is in their parish. This is a rule I followed when leaving Grace and St. Stephen’s to come to St. Matthew’s with one exception: Dan. He’s the exception not only because we’re in a fantasy baseball league together, but because Dan is a postulant for holy orders. In three years he will be a priest, and we will officially be colleagues. So he and I text from time to time, and this past week we were texting about preaching. The next Sunday Dan is scheduled to preach contains the story of Jesus feeding the 5000. And Dan texted me - after bemoaning a bad add/drop in fantasy baseball - “I’m trying really hard to resist the first-semester-seminarian impulse to say something “new” about (the feeding of the 5000)”. But to be fair to Dan, and to all fir...

My six-year-old daughter really wants to be a grown up. And from her perspective, I can see the appeal. Grown-ups make all the rules. We get to stay up later. And we are constantly telling her to enjoy being six. But it’s hard for her to wait. And, the bad news for her, is that waiting won’t get easier when she does become a “grown up”, whenever that happens. But we also remind her that she has so much cool stuff to do in the meantime. So many fun games to play, so much to learn, so many books to read. While she has to wait, there is so much activity in her life. I googled “songs about waiting” this week and got countless results across time and genres, from Phil Collins to Jennifer Lopez, the Beach Boys to Cindy Lauper, No Doubt to Tom Petty. There’s even a song in Hamilton called “Wait For It”. But in none of these songs are they simply sitting still - even if they aren’t physically doing anything, they become songs less about waiting and more about anticipation. We practice waiting,...

Every Memorial Day, it is a tradition in my family to go to the graves of our loved ones. We go as far back as my mother’s great great grandmother who died in 1934. Sometimes as a shorthand we’ll talk about how we’re “visiting” them. Like “let’s start with Aid and Clydia, then go by Grammy Owen and then Howard, etc.” It sounds like in high school when you’re planning your graduation party circuit. The day that Lincoln Memorial got rid of the water spigot that was our landmark to find Grammy Owen was a family crisis. We talk like we’re visiting living people; going to see them. We plan when we’re going to go to Waverly “for Grandpa Hennecke”. But we know they don’t live there. What does live there are our memories. And those names on the stones cause the memories to come back to life. They give us opportunities to talk about the people we still love although we don’t get to see them anymore. About the time my brother played tag in the back yard with our great grandmother who was in her ...

In 1993 the Christian band Audio Adrenaline released perhaps the most 90s song with their interpretation of John 14:2. The song’s called “Big House” - does anyone know it? It was a huge Contemporary Christian Music hit - it reached #1 on Christian Radio and was named song of the decade by CCM Magazine . The chorus goes, “it’s a big big house / with lots and lots of room / a big big table / with lots and lots of food / a big big yard / where we can play football / a big big house / it’s my Father’s house”. I don’t know how I feel about that song. It somehow seems to do some great 90s youth group exegesis while simultaneously minimizing Jesus’ comforting words about his return by hearing in those words a promise about playing football on the lawn. But I would be lying if I said I didn’t watch the music video this week and enjoy every second of it and have the song stuck in my head for several days. Because not everything has to be high art. If you weren’t here last week, to recap, Jesus ...

The other day, I was commenting to my husband how excited I was about the prospect of getting a real sheep to St. Matthew’s for Vacation Bible School. The theme for VBS this year is Psalm 23, which we read today, and there is so much sheep and shepherd imagery throughout scripture to explain to the ancient near east’s agrarian society the relationship between God and His people using terms that were familiar to them. I said it would be good for all these city slicker kids - my own included - to see what an actual sheep looks like. I told my husband it shouldn’t be that difficult to find someone with a sheep nearby, since my stepmom’s parents had a farm out by Mead where they farmed sheep. And he, as the grandson and nephew of actual farmers, turned to me with a look of incredulity and said, “speaking of city slickers, you don’t farm sheep, you raise sheep”. So I might not be the target demographic of all of the sheep metaphors in scripture. In my clergy text chain, one colleague sent t...

This year’s Lent Madness winners were Constance and her companions, also known as the Martyrs of Memphis. In August of 1878, yellow fever invaded the city of Memphis, Tennessee, for the third time in ten years. By the month’s end, the disease had become epidemic and a quarantine was ordered. While more than 25,000 citizens had fled in terror, nearly 20,000 more remained to face the pestilence. As cases multiplied, the death toll averaged 200 people per day. When the worst was over, ninety percent of the people who remained had contracted the fever and more than 5,000 people had died. In that time of panic and flight, many brave men and women, both lay and ordained, remained at their posts of duty or came as volunteers to assist in spite of the terrible risk. Notable among these heroes were four Episcopal sisters from the Community of Saint Mary, and two of their clergy colleagues, all of whom died while tending to the sick. The Sisters had come to Memphis in 1873, at the bishop’s reque...