Mother Claire's Sermons

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...

In 2003, 27-year-old Army Private First Class Robert Shrode was gravely wounded when an Iraqi rocket propelled grenade struck his vehicle. The blast tore through his body, resulting in the amputation of most of his right arm just below the elbow. His face and body were extensively scarred and heavily embedded with shrapnel fragments. Like many blast survivors, Shrode returned home “honeycombed” with shrapnel. He faced ongoing health challenges from the RPG. Part of his treatment plan included periodic surgery to remove shrapnel that had worked its way to the surface through normal body movement and the passage of time. His choices were to live with the uncertainty of where that shrapnel might make its way to inside his body or the temporary pain to harvest the shrapnel and provide him relief and healing. This week’s parable is similar in format to last week’s. You might notice that there are missing verses; this week we are missing five verses between the parable and Jesus’ explanation...

My three-year-old LOVES the capitol building. I can not overemphasize how much she loves that building. Every time she sees it, she will yell “CAPITOL!” and she’s always on the lookout for it, even when I have assured her that she will not be able to see the capitol from 48th and Old Cheney. Her enthusiasm makes it impossible to go “familiarity blind” to the capitol, as I had gone. While it was always nice to see the capitol driving into town when I would come back for a visit, I quickly would go back to not noticing it again when driving around town. Because I grew up in Lincoln. Every time I wanted to go from my house to the university campus or downtown I had to drive by the capitol building - a building I would eventually work in. I was a Cornhusker Girls State citizen the summer after my sophomore year in high school and we were given a ton of time to explore the capitol - something I might have loved if I was from a different part of the state or didn’t have a mother who made it ...

I like to joke that there are five things that make me the most patriotic: air shows, the Olympics, leaving the country and coming back, salads that involve no lettuce but copious amounts of mayonnaise, and Rocky IV. As I was reflecting on that list - all of which are true - I tried to discern what all of those items have in common. And as much as an air show and mayonnaise might not seem related, they are in how they engender an emotional response in me. When I was interviewing for my first job out of seminary, looking at moving to Colorado after five years in Virginia, the folks at Grace and St. Stephen’s took my family to a restaurant across the street from the church for lunch. When we sat down, we got water in those big plastic Pepsi cups - if you’ve lived in the Midwest for any amount of time, you know which ones I’m talking about. And my husband saw those cups and said to me, “I’m home.” It’s not that those cups are any better. It’s the emotional threads that they tie together. ...

My husband plays a lot of video games. One of his favorites is actually called The Binding of Isaac . The game takes the raw, harrowing themes of the biblical narrative we read today from Genesis and uses them to construct a dark allegory about religious trauma, childhood isolation, and guilt. The game mirrors the structure of the biblical text perfectly in its opening, only to subvert its meaning entirely to reveal a tragic reality. It’s a game that you can play all the way through in about half an hour, once you know what you’re doing, so I have heard the opening line, “Isaac and his mother” about a million times. The game’s cinematic intro directly references Genesis 22, mapping the biblical figures onto a broken, modern household where Isaac and his mother live alone in a small house on a hill. Isaac draws pictures and plays with toys while Mom watches Christian broadcasts on television. A voice from above (implied to be God, mimicking the test of Abraham) speaks to Mom, demanding ...