Mother Claire's Sermons

  “There’s always next year.” The famous last words of sports fans throughout the world. A simple google search will quickly claim it as the motto of the Dallas Cowboys, the Toronto Maple Leafs, the Chicago Cubs, and the Cleveland Browns, to name a few, before you even have to scroll down. Sometimes it’s in solidarity and sometimes it’s a taunt, but to be fair, for most teams you do have to look to next year. And sometimes that’s a lot of “next years”. Similar to how the Israelites in today’s lesson from Deuteronomy have been wandering for 40 years, the Chicago Cubs waited 108 years between World Series wins. There were stories of people visiting the graves of grandparents who didn’t live to see a Cubs’ World Series victory, either leaving memorabilia after Game 7 or setting up grills and listening to the radio broadcast graveside. Israel couldn’t have a graveside barbecue with Moses. The text tells us we don’t know where he’s buried. Moses goes up the mountain, as Moses does, ...

  If you’ve been through the Road to Emmaus class here at Grace, you might know that I have opinions about Bible translations. Because translation is interpretation. This isn’t a judging statement: it simply is, because the meanings of words change over time. And translating is hard. Especially if you’ve ever tried to translate an idiom from one language to another, you know that you have to do more work than just straight up finding the words for “let the cat out of the bag” or “kill two birds with one stone”. If you don’t understand the culture, it sounds insane. You pick up on what phrases like these mean by living in the language. The Gospels were written in Greek, but Jesus would likely have been teaching in Aramaic, which makes me wonder what kinds of linguistic gymnastics the authors had to make to begin writing in the first place. This brings us to the King James Version. I have much more patience with the King James Version than I have with many modern translations. I’...

One of my favorite things about knowing both of a child’s parents is seeing both of them in their child. It’s like a multicolored dress, where if you wear it with the red sweater all of the red pops, but if you wear it with the blue sweater, you see all of the blue in the pattern and not so much of the red - it’s is still there, you just can’t see it as clearly. That’s the way it is with my 4-year-old. If you see her next to her dad, she looks so much like him. If you see her next to me, she is very clearly my child. We see the same kind of thing with the dual natures of Jesus: that he is at the same time fully human and fully divine. We see both of these natures throughout Matthew chapter 14. It begins with an account of the beheading of John the Baptist and of John’s disciples telling Jesus the news. After hearing the news, Jesus wants to do the very human act of mourning his friend out of the public eye. But the crowds followed him. He cured their sick, and then tried to send the ...

  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...