Mother Claire's Sermons

My middler, or second, year in seminary, I was pregnant with my first daughter. I was a member of the schola cantorum , the advanced vocal group, and a section leader in the regular seminary choir. The schola was officially a student group, so it wasn’t led by a faculty member. Therefore there wasn’t the coordination of repertoire you might expect. So in the fall, the schola sang Thomas Tallis’ “If Ye Love Me”. Then in the spring, the seminary choir also sang Thomas Tallis’ “If Ye Love Me”. AND THEN, toward the end of spring semester I was in class for Liturgical Music. And the professor played a classical example of Reformation era compositional style: Thomas Tallis’ “If Ye Love Me”. And my daughter had apparently heard it enough. She kicked so hard that other classmates saw my stomach move and our poor professor, who had no idea what had happened, was perplexed by what was so funny about Tallis. But that year of Tallis might have been accidentally making a theological point in our li...

It is en vogue in mainline protestant Christianity these days to rebrand funerals as “celebrations of life”. We are very uncomfortable talking about - and admitting to - death. With all of the advances in modern medicine, we find it easy to forget that we all will someday die. We use euphemisms to avoid saying that someone died - I still remember getting the call from my grandmother saying, “we lost Grandpa”. If I didn’t know that my grandfather was sick, I might have been tempted to ask Grandma where they’d looked for him. I was in conversation with some clergy friends about “celebrations of life” and one friend bluntly said, “you know what’s going on the bulletin at my funeral? The Burial of the Dead: Rite Two,” as it says in the Book of Common Prayer. Many of my colleagues have their funerals planned. We plan enough funerals, see enough families struggle to do what their loved one, who didn’t leave any instructions behind, would have wanted in a service, and we have enough opinions...

In your senior year at Virginia Seminary, every Master in Divinity student has the opportunity to preach at Chapel. It’s a rite of passage to give your “senior sermon”. And it’s fun to see all your classmates preach. It’s really the only opportunity to do so, since Sunday mornings everyone is spread out in their various parishes across the DC Metro. After my senior sermon, my friend Stephen gave me perhaps the best compliment he could’ve given: that I had done a Greek word study and it did not make him want to end our friendship; I had made it interesting. Perhaps I took the compliment too much to heart, because I quite possibly have used it as an excuse to talk about translation a bit too much. My husband has said that if there was a Claire Sermon Bingo, it would certainly include a square labeled “if you look at the Greek…” But I haven’t spent all of that time declining nouns and conjugating verbs and comparing Greek commentaries as an exercise in enjoying my own cleverness. It is on...