Mother Claire's Sermons

Before graduate school, my husband Stefan was a high school math teacher. I asked him if he ever taught a class where he ended up saying, “if you only get one thing out of this whole day of teaching, let it be this”. And he said, “of course. Especially when the kids have totally lost the plot and I’m trying to salvage the lesson.” Like how sometimes the class would get all hung up on details which, while good to know, end up with them lost in the weeds so they’re missing the wider point of the lesson. If you’re taking Calculus, for example, a large part of the errors you might make are Algebra. But if you focus too much on the Algebra, you won’t actually learn how to do the Calculus. When I took Introduction to the New Testament , we spent a week on each Gospel. When we made it to Mark 10, our professor, Dr. Yieh drew our attention to 10:45: “For the son of man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom to many.” This, according to Dr. Yieh, is the thesis of M...

In the 90s, I was a Sunday School student here at St. Matthew’s. As some of you may remember, Sunday School was during the 10:30 service. Come the offertory, all of us Sunday School kids would be brought in for communion but then we wouldn’t go back to our parents. We would walk in, single-file by class, file into a pew, receive communion, and sprint from the rail back to our classrooms to await our parents. Now the first day we got ready to join the rest of the congregation, we did what kids do: clamored to be first in line. To be fair, this is what grown-ups do too. If you need an example, next time you’re at the airport look at boarding group 3 when boarding group 1 is called. But as we filed into the pew, the person at the front of the line and the person at the end of the line realized something: if you were first in line and first in the pew, you were last out of the pew and last to get back to the classroom to play. All of a sudden, we had a very real application of “the first w...

When I was a hospital chaplain intern, I worked at Mary Washington Hospital in Fredericksburg, VA. 45 minutes - without traffic - South of Washington, DC, this Episcopalian was firmly in Baptist country. Therefore, every so often, I was asked what my favorite Bible verse was. I liked to answer John 3:17. Not 3:16, 3:17. Most people who ask you what your favorite Bible verse is know John 3:16: For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, so that everyone who believes in Him may not perish but may have eternal life. The problem is, that verse gets used in a pretty aggressive way to try and scare people away from perishing into eternal life by believing. One of my favorite quips is, “I can do all things through a single verse taken out of context.” Which brings me back to John 3:17: Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Maybe 3:16 is about more than being afraid of death. Maybe, with some more...