Mother Claire's Sermons

I can be an obnoxious person to watch movies with. I have…questions. I look for inconsistencies and plot holes. But I also find joy in spotting any of those things. The more it might seem like I hate a movie, the more I probably like it. I’ve decided I no longer believe in guilty pleasures. I vocally enjoy things that might be objectively bad. One consequence of this is that the more times I’ve seen a movie, the more thoughts I have on it. Because I have two young children, I have watched many children’s movies many times. At one point when watching The Lion King I found myself wondering if a lion could live off of bugs. I was about to Google it when I reminded myself, “Claire, they’re talking lions and you’re having issues with the biology?” One of the nagging issues I have is in Frozen 2 . Elsa is on a journey of self discovery and when she’s receiving answers in the song “Show Yourself”, one of the lines the spirit sings to her is “you are the one you’ve been waiting for”. You are...

One of my closest friends has been bald since he was nine years old. He has a condition called alopecia, where you lose all of your hair. He’ll get a little bit of peach fuzz, but nothing else. No eyelashes, eyebrows, nothing. He was also raised Pentecostal, with a belief in faith healing. So he believed that if he just prayed hard enough, his condition would change - and, worse, that the loss of his hair was a sign that he did not have enough faith. My heart breaks when I think of that 9-year-old boy, praying so hard, firmly believing that his hair loss was his own fault. Jesus’ statement at the end of today’s Gospel lesson, “your faith has made you well”, seems to affirm this theology. But Jesus certainly doesn’t say anything like this every time he heals. Back in Luke chapter 9 Jesus seems to say the opposite. “A man from the crowd shouted, ‘Teacher, I beg you to look at my son…I begged your disciples to cast (the spirit) out, but they could not.’ Jesus answered, ‘You faithless and ...

On Friday, the new Archbishop of Canterbury was announced. The Rt. Rev. Sarah Mullally, the current Bishop of London, will be the first woman to hold the seat since its establishment in 597. I wonder how Bishop Mullally feels. Does she feel completely equal to her new situation? Does she feel a weight in being the first woman to hold the position when there are many within the Anglican Communion who vocally believe that her gender should be disqualifying? Although she was the first woman to serve as  Bishop of London, it would be naive to think there aren’t massive differences between being Bishop of London and Archbishop of Canterbury. Does she feel anxious about what former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams called the expectation that the archbishop have an opinion on everything? We all know there’s a difference between theoretically knowing how to do something and being in the driver’s seat. The first time I had to change a flat tire on my car, I knew how to do it: jack ...