Mother Claire's Sermons

A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to teach children’s Sunday School. I decided I’d take the opportunity to…crowdsource…my Christmas Eve sermon. Kids will every so often just throw out something that is really profound. So I asked the kids what I should talk about on Christmas Eve. Their suggestion? Dinosaurs. There was a part of me that wanted to try and take their advice. But the amount of mental and theological gymnastics I would have to do to come up with a Christmas message on Dinosaurs would result in something no one would want to hear. So my apologies to the Sunday School from the Second Sunday in Advent, even though the Flintstones and Dino the dinosaur do celebrate Christmas (which makes no sense because they predate Jesus), this will not be a dinosaur homily. Just plain old God incarnate. We start with Mary and Joseph traveling the 90 miles from Nazareth to Bethlehem. This would have been about a four-day journey on foot. I’ve wondered why Mary was travelling with ...

My great grandfather’s name was Burdette Gunn. I love old timey names, and Burdette is about as old timey Midwest as they get. The way the family story goes is that Burdette died at age 39 in 1948 after being hit by a train. My mother never met her grandfather, but remembers many kind stories about him. It is a tradition in my family to visit all the local graves of our loved ones around Memorial Day and to tell stories about their pasts. For some reason, this year I decided to Google Burdette to see if I could find anything about the train collision that killed him. That’s where I found the obituary and the wrongful death lawsuit stating that he died in a head-on collision, most certainly not hit by a train. A car crash. He wasn’t doing anything he shouldn’t have been doing, the other driver simply crossed the center line and hit him head-on. My mom and I don’t know when or why the story changed. And now, everyone who would know is dead, so we’ll never know. My mother reeled for a whi...

I saw a satirical headline from The Onion this week which read, “Nation Just Wants To Be Safe, Happy, Rich, Comfortable, Entertained At All Times”. Like all good satire, it works because of that kernel of truth. This “headline” speaks to how we want to be all good things all the time, and the “just” in there speaks to how impatient we get when things aren’t going 100% our way. When I struggle with feeling the way that headline suggests, I remember some words of wisdom from my mom when I was struggling as a new mom with having to send my daughter to day care: you can have it all, just not at the same time. Which reminds me that life is a balance, and to live in the joys of each moment. To have gratitude that there are folks whose callings are to care for children, because my calling is not to be a stay-at-home parent. And to have patience in my times of waiting. My oldest was a terrible sleeper, and as I walked around and around her room, trying to get her to go to sleep, my mantra was,...

Growing up, the Saturday after Thanksgiving was Christmas decoration day. We’d pull out all of the storage bins from the closet under the basement stairs and bring them upstairs where we’d sort the contents into whatever room they belonged. All of the Christmas-y things, the decorating, the baking, and the music have always been an important part of my Advent preparations. Some of it comes from those family of origin practices, and some from being raised by a musician and being a musician myself. You have to begin preparing your Christmas music during Advent and your Easter music during Lent. So while it is excessive that local radio stations switch from Christmas music back to regular programming at midnight on Christmas Day, I enjoy that secular Christmas helps to create the environment that enhances my Advent preparation. On Sunday evening, when the final miscellaneous knick knacks whose location we couldn’t remember from last year had been placed, we would sit down to the Advent wr...