Mother Claire's Sermons

  If you drive east on Interstate 80, you will eventually pass my hometown of Lincoln, Nebraska. Whether you go through or around the town, day or night you will see the state capitol building. There’s a city ordinance keeping the heights of surrounding buildings from blocking the view of the 400 foot tall building, and at night you can see the blinking red light on top of the dome to make sure aircraft don’t hit it. Above the light is the 19 ½ foot tall, 9 ½ ton bronze sower. He is sowing grain in the traditional method of hand sowing. Standing on a 12 ½ foot tall pedestal of shocks of wheat and corn, the sower is meant as a symbol of the importance of agriculture to the development of civilization and its importance in Nebraska. From the ground, the sower doesn’t seem quite so massive. Every so often there’s a story in local news about the person who has to climb up the dome to change out the red light bulb, but most of the time the sower is just up there, looking down over the...

In the movie Dogma, the main character Bethany is sent on a mission from God. Bethany does not want this mission. And as she tells her story of why she isn’t interested in what God wants from her - even as she is on the mission she continues to resist  - she shares her grievances. To combine a couple of exchanges for clarity, she asks, “when the doctor botched my procedure leaving me unable to have children, where was God? And when my husband decided he didn’t want to be with a woman who couldn’t carry his children, where was God?” and while she was going through her divorce, her mother said to her, “Bethany, God has a plan,” to which she responded, “What about my plans? Weren’t my plans good enough for God?” It’s been many years since I last watched Dogma, but that scene has stuck with me. Not because her mother’s response, while intended to comfort, ended up causing her more pain - something we have all experienced as both the well-intended giver and receiver. What struck me is h...

  One of the most difficult things for native English speakers who are learning other languages is grammatical genders. For us, almost everything is a neutral “it”. The refrigerator, the window, the bag. I took German in college, and learned that in German, the refrigerator is masculine, the window is neuter, and the bag is feminine. It can be difficult to wrap one’s head around the knowledge that the language isn’t making an anthropological statement about the refrigerator being a man. When you aren’t used to grammatical genders, it’s easy to both laugh at cheese being “him” and then feel a little offended that god is also “him”. And at the same time, knowing that cheese and god are under the same grammatical umbrella might take the sting out of it all a bit. Sometimes the offense is merited. For example, in Koine Greek, the language of the New Testament, a group of 100 women is the feminine gunay. A group of 99 women and one man? Switches to the masculine anthropos. It’s hard...

  We are currently in the middle of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, celebrated between January 18 and January 25 - or between the feasts of the Confession of St Peter and the Conversion of St Paul. During this week, Christians around the world are invited to pray for the unity of all Christians, to reflect on scripture together, to participate in jointly-organized ecumenical services, and to share fellowship. I’m struggling this year with where we are in our quest for Christian Unity. If we’ve even left the station. If we have any idea what Unity looks like among us and our siblings in Christ who have a very different experience of society. The Week of Prayer falls during an interesting time in our church and civic calendars. In the church calendar, our lectionary brings us Paul pleading with the church in Corinth to stop identifying themselves with who baptized them, asking “Has Christ been divided? Was Paul crucified for you?” In our Gospel lesson we have Christ calli...

  When I was in seminary, a classmate had a practice of making memes out of our professors. He did it in the safest way possible: by putting direct quotes of theirs over their pictures. Although entirely out of the context of the lectures, it led to such gems as our theology professor saying, “we’re the jellyfish of grace; just supine and flopping around unable to assist in anything.” Or our preaching professor saying, “It’s kind of unprofitable to sin by yourself.” Or our history professor saying, “and then he sold out the peasants.” I was also in all of those classes and don’t remember the context of any of these quotes. I’m sure our professors had larger points. But my favorite, and one you’ve probably heard me quote surrounding Holy Week and Easter, comes from our liturgy professor: “Jesus is not a groundhog.” I do remember the context of that. In celebrating Holy Week and Easter, Christians often need the reminder that Jesus doesn’t die and rise again every year. Unlike Puxata...