Mother Claire's Sermons

We watch a lot of Sesame Street in my house. I have a two-year-old who is all about putting her coat on “the Elmo way” and a five-year-old who is personally offended by litterbugs. Sesame Street’s method of teaching the three R’s - reduce, reuse, recycle - calls upon the help of Redusa the Recycling Fairy, who helps everyone on Sesame Street transform their trash into something new to help keep the earth green and beautiful - much to the chagrin of Oscar the Grouch, who sees his beloved trash vanishing. Redusa repairs her relationship with Oscar by turning a broken ice cream maker into a mud maker so Oscar can make mud pies. We have our own three R’s in the Church - remorse, repentance, and reconciliation. Jesus calls us to repentance in a bit of a roundabout way. Jesus recalls two instances of suffering: the Galileans whose blood Pilate mixed with their sacrifices and the people killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them. Jesus’ reflection on both of these events flies in the face o...

The Tuesday afternoon Lenten book group is reading Entering the Passion of Jesus . In the book’s introduction the author, Amy-Jill Levine, a New Testament professor at Vanderbilt Divinity School, was explaining her perspective on the text, as she is a practicing Jew. She told a story about when her children were little and they would have divinity students babysit. At times, the children’s favorite babysitters were unavailable because of field education placements. They may have been on a mission trip, or they were working at Nashville’s “Room In The Inn” homelessness program. The children would say “they can’t come because they are being Christian.” Their parents thought that was a “splendid” definition of the term “Christian”.  Paul wants the Philippian Christians to be like those divinity students: shining as lights amid a crooked and wayward generation and holding fast to the word of life, so that he will know that he has not run the race in vain. Paul reminds us that we are ca...

In November of 1856, the chief cashier of Dublin’s Broadstone railway terminal was murdered. Through a bungled police investigation, including an open crime scene where the public came by to check it out and to take souvenirs - far more common of a practice than you would think - the culprit was never brought to justice. But there was one person who was convinced that he could prove the identity of the killer, using a revolutionary new scientific method that would leave no room for doubt. His name was Frederick Bridges, and he was a phrenologist. Phrenology was a discipline which became enormously popular for a period in the nineteenth century. Phrenologists believed that the shape of a person's brain gave an indication of their personality and talents. They claimed that simply by examining a client's head, by feeling the pattern of bumps and ridges unique to each skull, they could provide a detailed account of an individual's mental abilities and character. Bridges wanted ...

When I was in college, I took a class called Human Rights in Theory and Practice . In that class, we had a discussion about where our rights come from. And the consensus in the class was essentially that they come from being human; they are intrinsic. I would add that they come from God. After class on the day of that discussion, I was talking about it with my stepdad, who taught civics. I posed the question to him and his response was “from the government”. When I pushed back with the answer my class had discerned, his reaction was, “well that’s nice, but who is enforcing it?” And I see his point. But I still think my class of potentially overly-idealistic undergrads was right. Just because a community is unable to act on the rights which are given by God does not mean that they don’t deserve those rights. There have been plenty of times throughout history when people’s knowledge that they should have the rights that their government is withholding from them call those whose rights ar...