Mother Claire's Sermons

When I was a seminarian, there were two times in those three years when I was applying for church jobs at the same time as my entire class of fellow seminarians. The first time was toward the end of my first year, when we were all “church shopping” for our field education sites. In this process, there’s one particular “bid day” where supervising clergy are to call and offer you their seminarian “job”. It’s meant to make it more fair - it helps keep positions from “filling up” because supervisors can’t just hire the first seminarian they interview, but it can make the waiting feel like it lasts forever. The second time was at the end of my last year, when everyone was applying for their first jobs out of seminary. These times are stressful for two reasons: first, it feels like all of your friends have now become your competitors. Although this is not entirely true since we all bring different gifts, perform liturgy differently, and will be better fits for different parishes, it still fe...

I love going to weddings. While it might be en vogue to complain about them, I’m on the positive end of the complaining spectrum. Even when the couple has made choices that I wouldn’t have made, or that I think they’ll cringe a little bit about some of those choices when they look back on the day in a few years, I always have a great time. There’s a special kind of optimism at weddings that permeates the space. It’s an opportunity to get together, get dressed up, and to celebrate a love that everyone at that event intends on being everlasting. And in the Episcopal marriage liturgy, everyone witnessing the marriage is asked, “Will all of you witnessing these promises do all in your power to uphold these two persons in their marriage?” to which the people respond, “we will”. Everyone in attendance makes a promise to be a community, a support system, for this newly formed family. And there’s something exciting about  that joy and optimism. Like a small child’s birthday party: an even...

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...