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.…

Dear Friends, Diversity is an interesting thing. A couple of weeks ago I spent time in Louisiana, about an hour north of New Orleans, where I ate alligator sausage for dinner and grits for breakfast. Plus there was okra, and gumbo, and coffee with chicory. Out in the pine forest where we were staying I saw oyster shell fossils and spiders as…

Dear Friends, In this week’s edition of Contact both of your pastors will share a single column. It is important for us to speak in one voice in these days of anxious division. In response to a Presidential election whose results we found to be gut-wrenchingly awful, we found ourselves considering what the Church can be, indeed what the church must be,…

Dear Friends, On October 31, while most Americans celebrate Halloween, a few of us who are church nerds will be observing quietly the 499th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, for it was on the eve of All Saints Day in 1517, that a German monk and scholar named Martin Luther, published a list of 95 theological propositions about the theology and conduct…