Mother Claire's Sermons

I love a list. I always have. I can never have too many notepads. My school-issued planner got me through junior high and high school and I bought one every year of college and seminary. I currently have an app on my phone that has 13 separate lists, some shared with my husband and some just for me. We have lists of movies to watch and housework. Three separate lists called “groceries”, “Target”, and “shopping”, all of which are different. And I have one called “work” and one called “announcements”, which you will hear me read from after the peace. But I’m not unique in my love of lists. The human brain likes lists because they turn chaotic information into simple, bite-sized pieces that require less energy to process. Many of the articles on the psychology of lists were in listicle format: 7 reasons the human brain likes lists. Lists save energy, reduce our mental load, and give us a sense of control. But the simplicity of lists can also be their downfall. In my husband and my shared ...

  Last June, my head was in a constant state of fog. Nothing I did would make the fog lift. I tried everything. The internet suggested an ice cold shower, which I tried despite my preferred shower temperature being so hot that my husband likes to say we could put some pasta in there with me and have dinner when I get out. Nothing worked. On top of the constant fogginess, I was having debilitating panic attacks, even in the middle of the night. I would look back on my Fitbit the next morning and you could see on the heart rate monitor where it jumped to 120 from a dead sleep. When I brought it up to my therapist, I felt like a failure. People have been existing forever in much higher stress situations than mine. Why couldn’t I fix this myself? No matter how many times I say “we’re not meant to do this alone”, I expected myself to do it alone. When I went to the doctor, I described my symptoms and he immediately had a plan. He said, “if there was something wrong with your leg, we’d f...

  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...