Mother Claire's Sermons

Both of my daughters have “churchy” names: Ruth and Sophia. I once commented to my husband about how I “got away with” two bible-named kids and he didn’t even try for a Zelda or any type of gaming-related names, and he said “yeah, well, we still gave our kids pretty normal names.” Which is fair, I didn’t try for a Jael. Ruth is a fairly straightforward biblical tie-in, with Ruth being one of four women to have books of the Bible named after them - the others being Esther and the apocryphal Judith and Susanna. But for Sophia, you have to look a little deeper than the table of contents, because there isn’t a person in the Bible named Sophia. But she’s there - so much so that, as a parent, I think I put far more pressure on Sophia than on Ruth, because sophia is the Greek word for wisdom. The same wisdom that today’s beautiful poem from Proverbs is about. While it is true that Proverbs is written in Hebrew, where the word for wisdom is chakam , in the Greek translation of the Old Testamen...

One of my favorite hymns is Hail thee, festival day! It is fun, a little silly, so complicated it doesn’t work very well for congregational singing, and it just makes me smile. It has a repeating refrain, but then the verses go back and forth between two entirely different tunes and rhythms. On top of that, the text is an older English translation of the Latin salve festa dies, so singing it makes me feel posh. If you have sung Hail thee, festival day! , you most likely did so on Easter. But there are three different versions of Hail thee, festival day! in our hymnal: one for Easter, one for Pentecost, and one for Ascension Day. Before I went to seminary, I had only sung it on Easter, not knowing about the other versions, so imagine my delight when I arrived to chapel on Ascension Day, which, due to its place in the calendar 40 days after Easter (and 10 days before Pentecost), always places it on a Thursday, to begin with the familiar strains of Ralph Vaughan Williams echoing through...