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…

From Rev Ben: This week I have been on a “mission un-trip” with the youth of the church. With grief over the fact that we were not able to travel to Mexico, and with lots of appropriate covid restrictions, we still managed to put some programming together and have a good time. Please join us for a service of worship that brings…

From Rev. Ben: This Sunday begins a week during which it seems particularly important to reflect upon the United States’ nuclear strikes against Japan, which happened 75 years ago, on August 6th and 9th, 1945. During our online celebration we will remember these events in preaching, prayer and in music. This week’s celebration looks at some really difficult issues. It’s hard sometimes…

From Rev. Ben: In preparation for my sermon this week I walked around my garden with my camera, taking macro photos of various flowers, leaves and fruit. I’m not sure what is stranger—the fact that my sermon preparation now includes my camera, or that it felt so natural to be preparing for a sermon by thinking about things like aperture, shutter speed…

From Rev. Ben: According to my calculations, of this Sunday, July 19, we will have been doing online celebrations for four months, which is a third of a year. I won’t say it’s gotten any easier to do online celebration, but I do think we have gotten better at it. This week’s video play list can be found below. View July 19th…

From Rev. Ben: After taking a week to join with Presbyterians from across the denomination in a worship that took us around the world, this week we will be returning to our regular (by which I suppose I mean “regular”) practice of doing celebration using a YouTube video play list, which can be found here: View July 12th Celebration online You can…

A note from Rev. Ben: For celebration this week we will be joining Presbyterians from across our denomination and around the world in a worship service produced by the Presbytery of Boston. The worship service is led by The Rev. Cindy Kohmann, one of the outgoing co-moderators of the General Assembly. Elder Vilmarie Cintrón-Olivieri, the other outgoing co-moderator, also makes an appearance in…

From Rev Ben: For celebration this week, I have been trying to improve my post-production video skills using Apple’s iMovie software, and I’m having fun—maybe too much fun—as I learn to edit. The link to Celebration, with all of its splicing and fading and subtitles, is below. This week, Talitha has been ably representing the Presbytery of San Francisco at our denomination’s…

For our online celebration this week we will joining with a wide diversity of American Christians in observing Juneteenth, which is a day set aside to remember when the last community of enslaved Americans learned of their emancipation. Given all of the conversations around race and white supremacy that are happening in our congregation, in our communities, in our nation and in…