Mother Claire's Sermons

Sitting on the desk in my office is a glass bottle of water. There’s a little bit of sediment on the bottom that you can see if you pick it up or just look at it from the right angle, but otherwise, it just looks like a bottle of water. But, as you might guess by virtue of my telling you about this bottle, it isn’t just ordinary water. My friend Mother Angela was on a trip to the Holy Land where she dipped that bottle into the Jordan River and brought it back to me in Colorado. The original intention of that water was to add a bit to baptismal waters every time there’s a baptism, thereby physically linking it to the River Jordan, where today we celebrate the occurrence of Christ’s baptism. Due to the spooky looking sediment in the bottle, I’m a bit hesitant to add it to water that will be poured onto people. Even without adding some of the Jordan River water to our baptismal water, you can still appreciate the symbolism. Long before people had a word for diffusion, it was a well unders...

The British motoring show Top Gear aired a Christmas special in 2010 ostensibly recreating the Wise Men’s journey from Iraq to Bethlehem. The three presenters each had £3500 to buy a car with which to make their journey. The film crew encountered, alongside the typical mechanical problems that the budgets for the cars almost ensures will arise, food poisoning, land mines, and border controls. They had to take a roundabout way when Iran wouldn’t let them cross the border from Iraq due to the production being run by the BBC, and negotiations were done to ensure border crossing from Jordan into Israel. The presenters were each assigned one of the three traditional gifts of the Magi - gold, frankincense, and myrrh - to bring to the baby Jesus at the end of their journey. The gifts they ended up delivering to Bethlehem were a gold relief medallion, a bottle of shampoo labeled “frankincense”, and in lieu of myrrh a Nintendo DS. Oftentimes, Bible stories will have elements to them that becom...