Mother Claire's Sermons

During my first year in seminary, our Intro to New Testament class was assigned formal debates. We were given topics addressed in Pauls’ Epistle to the Corinthians and prepared a pro or con position. Judges were brought in from outside the class to decide whether our arguments for or against eating food sacrificed to idols were more convincing. My team won that debate. I brought up this story in a text thread of classmates as we were all writing our sermons this week. The group text includes a member of the opposing team who is apparently still salty about the “lack of imagination” in the judging panel. The first letter of Paul to the Corinthians was written in around the year 54 to a congregation he had founded several years earlier. Corinth was a large and prospering urban center with an ethnically, culturally, and religiously diverse population. Paul writes from Ephesus, where he intends to stay for a while before traveling to Macedonia and then on to Corinth. The congregation of th...

“In his book, The Souls of Black Folk , W.E.B. Dubois discusses ‘sorrow songs,’ music created by African captives, exiled in America. The songs are laments, prayers sung to God as a form of protest and supplication, looking for justice from a righteous God. The original American music conveys ‘soul-hunger’ and ‘restlessness’, ‘unvoiced longing toward a truer world’. The music also carries ‘hope - a faith in the final justice of things’. In the sorrow songs we have a window into the identities of an oppressed people and their belief in a God who saw them and would remember them. In their music they wrestled with ‘good and evil, suffering and pain.’ Their laments, like those in the psalms, created sacred space, a sanctuary for the soul.” (Fentress-Williams, 144) The psalms are typically sorted into certain types or genres that reflect their usage in various contexts, especially in the worship life of ancient Israel. There are thanksgiving psalms, hymns, wisdom psalms, creation psalms, li...