From Rev. Talitha – I hope you will join us this week for Celebration. This week Rev. Ben has been away on vacation so you get to see plenty of me… plus a special guest. I will be on vacation the weekend of Halloween so I decided to bring out my Halloween costume early. With great thanks to the Yule Feast Closet…

Dear Church Family, We are living through strange times, and this week’s celebration hopes to give some tools for spiritual strength for these strange days. Here is a link to the celebration play list: You can submit comments and prayer requests via our Comments Form at mpcfamily.org/comments . We’d love to hear from you! If you are visiting today, we hope you’ll fill out…

From Rev Talitha: Dear Church Family, Happy World Communion Sunday! This church holiday was started by Presbyterians in 1933 and is a time when we focus on our goal of unity across the church worldwide. This week’s Celebration is brought to you by a good number of the 68 congregations that make up the Presbytery of San Francisco. It includes portions in…

From Rev Ben: We have officially passed the Fall equinox, which means it’s fall. 2020, with all of its craziness is 75% gone, though it seems like there cannot yet remain a quarter of the year. Our community continues to worship each Sunday because we know that by being faithful in our celebrations we bear witness to those things that endure in…

From Rev Ben: A week after we started sheltering in place for COVID-19 we were supposed to have had a Sunday celebration featuring four writers from our congregation sharing work they had done in response to climate change. I was really looking forward to the worship service, and was disappointed when the writers were displaced by the pandemic. But six months into…

From Rev Talitha: Please join us for Celebration! This week’s online celebration is truly one of a kind; never before have so many stuffed animals come to church. As I mentioned in this week’s Contact, it is a chance for us adults to try to follow Jesus’ mysterious challenge: “change and become like children.” During such apocalyptic times it is important to…

From Rev Ben: If the weather forecasters have forecast correctly, by the time you read this we will be in a heat wave, a weather pattern already anticipated in this week’s celebration. I filmed my sermon in the sanctuary, while wearing a tweed sports coat. The next day I filmed the charge and benediction wearing a short sleeved linen shirt, all of…

From Rev Ben: It is hard to believe that we have reached the end of August, but here we are. The air alternates between pure bay-breeze and smelling like the inside of one of the pipes I used to smoke in Seminary, while wearing patches on the sleeves of my tweed sportscoats. It has been hot and chilly and, like a lot…

From Rev Ben: I’m writing this note on Friday morning, looking out of my dining room window at the smoky sky and, to be honest, I’m feeling a bit anxious. Fires scare me and smoke keeps me from exercising. Besides it’s hot, and the COVID-19 pandemic certainly hasn’t packed its bags and vacated the premises of our common existence. True confession: in…

From Rev Ben: For celebration this week we worked a bit of Magic. For months now, John Lochner of Dallas, Texas, has been attending Montclair Presbyterian Church’s online celebrations. This week he is leading us in a call to Celebration and, magically, we have Dallas-like weather in Oakland (actually, on Friday when I wrote this, it was fifteen degrees hotter in Dallas…