This coming Sunday marks the beginning of Advent, the season when we prepare our hearts and souls for the celebration of Jesus’ birth. This will be my 22nd Advent as a pastor and in all of those years, I doubt a December has ever come and gone without someone asking why we, in the Church, cannot get along with the early celebration…

Ben will return next week.

Friends, I hope you will forgive me if, in my Contact space this week, I take another celebratory rhetorical victory lap in response to the music we had in celebration last Sunday. It was amazing. We are blessed. After church on Sunday, I got to thinking about the connection between social justice and the use of beautiful music in worship, and it…

It’s been a long drought, but deep in the repository of my memories there is archived a recollection that during wet years, which is to say those years when the rainfall was normal or better than average, the winter’s first precipitation comes on Halloween or thereabout. This may be more of a superstition than a precise record of actual fact — like…

Last week I spent the better part of four days in Knoxville, Tennessee, at a national gathering of Presbyterians on the campus of the University of Tennessee. We held meetings in university classrooms, we ate in one of the university’s dining halls and we worshiped in the shadow of Neyland Stadium, home of the UT Volunteers football team, a structure impressive for…

I’ve spent most of the last three weeks on vacation, eight days of which I was in Hawaii. My family stayed on Maui, just north of Lahaina where life centers around and caters to the needs of tourists, but one day I slipped out of vacation mode, and took a day of study leave. I caught an early-morning ferry to the Island…

Since last fall’s Black Lives Matter protests here in Oakland I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about race. In particular, I have found those voices within the African American community, who are asking White Americans to have a conversation about race to be moving and compelling, and so, as part of an ongoing conversation about race, I’d like to offer…

The beginning of June is an interesting time of year. School is not yet out, but all the academic learning pretty much is wrapped up (at least for the children who live at my house). The apricots, peaches and nectarines look beautiful, and they’re starting to smell good, too, but they’re still hard and sour. The weather cannot decide if it’s a…

This week instead of writing something new for Contact, I’m going to publish the homily I preached at my sister’s wedding in Mendocino last Saturday. I’m doing this both because I’m still on a high from the loveliness of the day and because the homily itself is a product of our congregation’s participation in the Faith Trio, and, as such, I think…

And it came to pass in these latter days that both of the Pastor’s cars needed the healing attention of a body shop at the same time (in fact the Pastor wrote these very words while sitting in a rented Fiat 500L as he waited for his spouse who was finishing up her work day; a second rental car had yet to…