Friends, In lieu of a Contact  article this week, I want to share a statement on the Trump Administration’s ban on Muslim refugees and immigrants. Our friends at the Islamic Cultural Center of Northern California generated this statement a couple of weeks ago and the Faith Trio adopted as well. In these difficult and confusing times, I am happy to be part…

Friends, If, as the early 20th century California politician Hiram Johnson once noted[1], truth is the first casualty in war, then the first step in working for peace must surely be telling the truth, especially at the beginning when war is just a distant rumble and a whispered rumor, for that is the season when the powers of institutionalized violence start sniping…

Wendell Berry is a farmer, lay theologian, essayist, environmentalist, and poet from Kentucky; for years I have turned to Berry’s writing while trying to understand the world around me, and in the last couple of weeks, as the nation seems to become unhinged, I’ve found myself reflecting on what probably is Berry’s shortest published poem, “The Mad Farmer’s Love Song”, which, in…

Friends, After enduring California’s worst drought in 500 years, I find myself a little surprised to be longing for sunshine, reciting under my breath a certain child’s rhyme about sending precipitation to the Iberian peninsula, but who knows? Maybe after so many years without meaningful rainfall, we all have earned the right to grouse about the weather, just a little. What I…

Friends, I want very much to thank you for braving the cold in our Sanctuary first on Sunday and then, the next day, at Marge Nicholson’s memorial service. For those of you who may not know what I’m talking about, we detected a leak in one of our gas lines last Thursday and we had to shut off the gas, which meant…

Friends, At the church’s January Session meeting (our church council of ruling elders) I submitted a “Senior Pastor’s Report” which, rather than give a summary of what I had been doing, provided some thoughts on how privileged I feel to be part of the MPC family. At the suggestion of several of the Session members, I’m publishing it in the Contact this…

Dear Friends, Thanks to the way the Sundays fell this year, we passed quickly over the Epiphany story, squeezing it in on New Year’s Day, and missing a chance to dwell deeply in it. But I’ve always liked the story of the Magi following a star as it leads them to Bethlehem. It is a story that affirms the place of foreigners…

Friends, This week, as I settled down to write my Contact piece, writing didn’t come easy for me. The axle in my bicycle’s rear hub snapped on Monday and on Tuesday (my regular Contact writing day), I was scrambling, trying to find a bike shop that would either a) fix my hub or b) get my backup wheels up and running. The…

Friends, Like most people in Oakland—and like a lot of people around the globe—I have been unable to stop thinking about the Ghost Ship fire.  I am heartsick over the loss of life. I am pained by the complex economic realities that force the Bay Area’s low-income people into dangerous and unhealthy living situations, a condition shared by artists, students, the elderly,…

Friends, With all that has been going on relative to the election, Thanksgiving, and the start of Advent, it turns out that I never wrote, in a formal way, to update the congregation on the cleaning service we have engaged to keep our facilities tidy. A couple of years ago, our congregation entered into a covenant with a family of Honduran asylum-seekers.…