Mother Claire's Sermons

  My husband and I like to play video games together. When I say “we” play them, we’ve tried to play cooperative games, but what works best for us is that he plays a game and I backseat game - like backseat driving, but far less annoying, or so I hope. A couple of years ago “we” played a game called Immortality . In this game, you solve the mystery of a missing actress through “found footage” from three of her unreleased movies. Each movie has its own storyline, but in it are other storylines applicable to your investigation, so each clip from these unreleased movies are doubly interesting: for what they say in the context of the story the movie is telling and how they speak to you as the detective searching through the footage. Our lesson from Numbers today does the same thing: several stories about humanity hidden within the larger story. While the story told throughout the Pentateuch is one unified story of how Israel became established as God’s people, from Creation to arrival ...

Emmy winning comedy writer Michael Jamin has written for several well-known shows over the past 30 years, beginning with Just Shoot Me and continuing with King of the Hill and Rules of Engagement . When production slowed during Covid, he built a strong social media following with his videos on Tik Tok and Instagram. Sometimes he shares screenwriting tips, sometimes he opens residual checks, the payment writers receive when shows they’ve worked on rerun, where he’ll tell his audience “I don’t know why this works out to 41 cents, I’m just opening the check”, and sometimes he’ll share insider “tricks of the trade”. One of his videos that I found really interesting was on laugh tracks. People claim to hate laugh tracks. If you survey people on their opinions on laugh tracks, they will almost unanimously claim to have an unfavorable view of laugh tracks. However, there’s a reason they continue to be put in shows: because we are wrong. When sitcoms are audience tested with and without lau...

  Dr. Amy-Jill Levine is a well respected New Testament scholar. She wrote an article in March of 2021 entitled Holy Week and the hatred of the Jews: How to avoid anti-Judaism this Easter . In the article, Dr. Levine notes that while in modernity, interfaith dialogue has made tremendous progress in the way in which the passion narratives are interpreted by mainline Christian denominations, we still have to deal with our past and acknowledge that every time the passion narratives resurface, the threat of anti-Judaism reemerges.  In her article, Dr. Levine is particularly focused on passion narratives, but there are troubling texts throughout the New Testament and the Hebrew Bible. Dr. Levine acknowledges that people of all faiths have troubling texts in their canons. She lists, in order from least to most  useful, six strategies for dealing with those troubling texts. She begins with excision, or cutting the text out and pretending it isn’t there - what Dr. Levine consider...

I was in a parish discussion group where the beginning prompt for the day was “what is a prayer practice that is meaningful to you?” Responses varied, ranging from more structured practices like praying the daily office and using Anglican prayer beads to more freeform practices like breath prayer and centering prayer. One of the great things about there being such a wide variety of prayer practices available to us is that we can adjust for what we want to talk about with God, where we are emotionally at any time, or even, simply, how we feel like praying at that moment. There are so many ways in which we have connected with God in the past and we can look to any one of them when we’re entering into a time of prayer. Every Sunday in our Eucharistic liturgy we spend most of our time in prayer together - we just mix up the ways in which we pray so that it tricks us out of feeling like we’re spending the better part of an hour in prayer together. Just this morning so far, we began with a h...