Mother Claire's Sermons

  In the 2008 movie The Dark Knight , District Attorney Harvey Dent delivers the iconic line, “You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” That line has been used countless times since the movie's debut, serving to represent several different kinds of situations, relating to wealthy people that forgot the causes that mattered to them after getting rich, athletes who fell from grace after reaching the top, and more. Harvey Dent’s line is impactful because it can affect everyone, as people always risk the chance of becoming corrupted and losing themselves in their quest for power or as a result of having attained power. The Bible, like all of human history, is a story about power. Who has power. Who wants power. What is power. How we respond to those who have power. And how to use the power we have.  I was teaching a class where we were talking about the Torah, and someone in the class asked, genuinely wanting to understand, about the necessity...

One Sunday during my seminary field education at St. Mary’s in Arlington, VA, I was “helping”, code for being another adult in the room in case of a riot, with Children's Chapel. I don’t remember what the Gospel lesson was that week, but there was one boy who took issue with the fact that he’d heard that one before. Let’s be real, that wasn’t his actual problem. I think he was just annoyed to be in Children’s Chapel and decided he’d take it out on the Gospel lesson. Because we love stories we’ve heard before. Not just children, who are notorious for wanting to watch the same exact thing over and over and over again - I bet if I’d told that kid from Children’s Chapel’s parents that he’d complained he’d heard that story before, they would instantly say something like, “that’s interesting, because he’s watched this one movie every day this week.” But adults have favorite movies we could almost single handedly recreate, dialogue and all. We go to concerts to hear the same songs. While ...

 My husband and I have a running joke. Whenever he says something particularly nerdy, I tell him I'm going to shut him in a locker. If you've seen my husband, he's got a good 10 inches on me, which is really what makes the joke work. It’d take some real effort to get him in a locker. But then I saw the lessons for today and thought, “Amos is my favorite minor prophet” and then I thought, “Oh no, that’s such a nerdy thing to say that now I have to shut myself in a locker.”  But Amos is my favorite minor prophet. What makes Amos a “minor” prophet isn’t the importance of what he wrote, just the length. The Book of Amos is only nine chapters long, but those nine chapters appear seven times in our lectionary, so I feel very affirmed in my choice. One reason why Amos appears so often is that he is so direct. Amos’ words here are hardly the first time he has warned of the coming judgment. The first two chapters in the book contain seven similar prophecies against foreign nations f...

  During our training, all priests take classes in liturgy. Some history of liturgy, some theory surrounding liturgy, and some practical coursework to help our ability to plan worship in the wild. And every so often in these classes, someone would ask the professor about one thing or another and he would say something like, “no, you absolutely should not do that…but I’m going to teach you how to do it so that when you do it anyway it won’t be that bad.” So hopefully, my professor would agree with me that my transfer of a non-transferrable feast falls under the umbrella of “not that bad”. There are only two feasts that you can both transfer from the day it falls on to a Sunday and have it “take precedence” over a Sunday, meaning their readings and prayers take the place of what was originally “scheduled” by the church calendar: All Saints, which is November 1st, is celebrated on the following Sunday, and the feast of the parish’s patron. So for us, St Matthew’s Day is September 21 b...