Mother Claire's Sermons

There is a type of extremist who identify themselves as Sovereign Citizens. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, sovereign citizens believe they are not under the jurisdiction of the federal government and consider themselves exempt from U.S. law. They use a variety of conspiracy theories and falsehoods to justify their beliefs and their activities, some of which are illegal or violent. Their rejection of legal documentation such as Social Security Numbers, drivers’ licenses, vehicle registration, and other forms of government identification lead to frequent interactions with law enforcement. As you might imagine, if you insist you don’t need to register your vehicle you might get pulled over. And then if you insist you don’t need a driver’s license, you now have additional legal problems. Sovereign citizens tend to be aggressive and combative to law enforcement when they do interact, and then as soon as they’re in the legal system they file incoherent motion after incoherent ...

One of the things I forgot about when moving back to Southeastern Nebraska was the spring fires. While fire evacuations are very much a present concern in Colorado Springs, where we lived last Easter, those situations are more in your face than the fires in Kansas, blowing smoke north, causing hazy skies, sore throats, and sometimes the faint smell of burning in the air. I’ve been paranoid all week that my sore throat is the result of a pending illness, not of the air quality alert that my weather app has been constantly warning me about. I watch a lot of cooking shows, and one of my favorite programs is The Pioneer Woman , a tongue-in-cheek title claimed by “accidental country girl” Ree Drummond who married a cattle rancher in rural Oklahoma. The opening title of each episode ends with her saying, “here’s what’s happening on the ranch.” So if you watch enough Pioneer Woman, you not only learn how to make Easter dinner for 30 people or a steak befitting a cattle rancher, but you also l...

I remember my first early morning Easter Vigil. I was in seminary, and at the parish in which I was serving, everyone serving at the Vigil was forbidden from turning on any of the overhead lights in the building. We did our best to recreate the experience of approaching the tomb in the darkness of early morning before the 5:30am start. On Good Friday, we stashed our vestments in the office we thought would get the most light from the streetlights, giving thanks for the senior associate rector’s office’s location right up next to the sidewalk. We cheated with our cell phone flashlights as little as possible; most clergy, as well as most people who wear eucharistic vestments often, can fasten them better without a mirror than with one anyway. I don’t remember seeing the fire lit, but I remember following close behind the junior associate, the paschal candle lighting the way through the crowd of worshippers, their candles slowly sharing that new flame with one another, creating light in t...

As Christians, one of the temptations we have when we read our Gospel texts is to try to harmonize them. That is, we try to put them all together like a puzzle, like if we do so just right they’ll work as one story. But we should resist that urge. Each evangelist, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, have their own distinct style, their own distinct audiences, and their own distinct theology that makes each story more meaningful and more powerful if we let them stand on their own. After all, they made the cut for our canon of scripture by being meaningful all on their own. There is one seemingly practical point, which is actually a theological point, about which John disagrees with the other three Gospels: whether or not the Last Supper was a Passover meal. The way in which we calculate the date of Easter in modern times means that it doesn’t always line up with the date of Passover, although it does this year. The ways in which Jews celebrate Passover have changed over the past 2000 years, ...

One of my favorite things to do is watch objectively bad movies. If someone asks me my favorite movie, I have a good and a bad answer - my favorite bad movie is the Jean-Claude Van Damme classic Hard Target . There is a podcast called How Did This Get Made? which is dedicated to watching, mostly enjoying, and discussing these bad movies. One of the complaints they consistently have about the movies they discussed are poorly managed tonal shifts. A change in the emotional atmosphere that, when well-done, can be really powerful but when done poorly leaves the audience confused about what the film is trying to communicate. Palm Sunday is the Sunday of crazy tonal shifts in our liturgy. There’s all sorts of great Palm Sunday music that focuses on the triumphant entry of Jesus into Jerusalem, but by the Gospel lesson the crowd is already shouting, “crucify him!” There’s even an option to stop in the middle of the jubilant palm procession to pray the following prayer, which is traditionally ...

My oldest daughter is currently learning to read and write. It’s one of her favorite things about kindergarten. And her spelling is a little…suspect. It’s not fair to expect kindergartners to learn to write English, where the rules are inconsistent and can feel arbitrary - she’s offended by the “e” at the end of “love” which I understand. So when she writes things, it sometimes takes some deciphering to figure out what she means. But, more often than not, I can figure it out because she and I both speak the same language, more or less fluently. Not just English, but a very specific English - 21st century American Midwestern English. And if someone - anyone - were to write, say, a sentence with no spaces between the words in 21st century American English, most of us here could at least figure out what they meant, even if we couldn’t get all of the words completely deciphered. In the oldest manuscripts of any of our New Testament texts that have been discovered, there are a number of tra...