Mother Claire's Sermons

  On Youth Sunday this year, I was briskly walking through the grocery store with a dozen donuts. I had told our high school senior preacher that I was not above bribery to encourage her to preach at both services. To her credit, she said she’d do it without the bribe to which I responded, “Lara, accept the bribe. Let me bring you breakfast. What do you want?” She wanted a chocolate donut, which led me out of the bakery section that morning with enough donuts for everyone, because if there’s one thing I remember about being a teen, it's that donuts and pizza make things happen. I noticed something, that morning: the handful of other people in the store. Not only because it was 7:00 in the morning and I couldn’t fathom why you would choose 7am as your grocery shopping hour. But I was struck with a sadness, as those people stood as stand-ins for all of the people for whom that Sunday was just another day. A day to wrap up tasks and get ready for another work week. Because as much as ...

At the end of the summer after your first year in seminary, it’s common to go on some kind of vacation. Usually that’s because you’ve spent the ten weeks before that vacation completing a chaplaincy internship known as CPE, or clinical pastoral education. My CPE was ten weeks working 60 hours a week at a hospital in Fredericksburg, VA. After graduation from CPE, my husband Stefan and I went on a long awaited trip to Germany. One day we rented a car and drove into the Black Forest, where we visited a farm/museum that had some historical exhibits of what life would have been like for the people who had originally worked the farm in the early 17th century. There was kitchen equipment, an organ, children’s toys, and a room of religious items. It was the caption in the room of religious items that…set me off a bit. It essentially said that these people lived such hard, miserable lives that they needed the promise of something better after death to keep them hanging on.  This is, at its ...

Studying for her doctorate in medicine, Martha Jones was inside Royal Hope Hospital when it was transported to the moon. Showing great bravery in the face of alien invaders, Martha was invited to join the Doctor in traveling through space and time. After some time traveling together, the Doctor was captured. Using what she had learned during their time together, Martha traveled the world telling the story of the Doctor, his resistance, and all he had done to help the people of Earth in his more than 900 years of life. The telling and retelling of the story generated psychic energy which led to the Doctor’s release and his foe’s defeat. Now this is, of course, a story of science fiction. But in it is an important truth about the power of storytelling. Martha Jones’s around-the-world storytelling tour created a powerful hope in the people to which she told it. That kind of hope is real and it is true. It’s why dictators throughout time and across cultures have tried to control stories, i...

  There used to be a podcast called “Musical Splaining”. The idea was that one person who loves musicals and one who hates them watch live productions together and then talk about them. During Covid, they had to switch to recordings or movie adaptations, so they pretty quickly decided they’d watch one of the greatest movie adaptations of all time: The Sound of Music . They made it to the scene where the nuns disabled the Nazis’ car, helping the von Trapps’ escape which led the podcast hosts to try to figure out nuns. And the question presented was, “what do nuns do?” Now, nuns knowing how cars work made for a great moment of levity during the pretty heavy second act of The Sound of Music, but the broader question of “what do nuns do?” was puzzling these hosts. If you’ve seen The Sound of Music, you know that these are cloistered nuns - that is, they keep away from the outside world. And so the podcast hosts could not figure out what they do with their time. And the answer I offer i...