Pentecost is one of my favorite days on the Church calendar. On Pentecost we remember the story of the birth of the Church, when the Holy Spirit came upon the followers of Jesus with a mighty wind and in tongues of fire, and when, having been filled with the Spirit, those same disciples went out into Jerusalem to preach with power in…

“Some Thoughts on Bicycle Races, Machines and the Self (Without Too Much of an Apology to Robert M. Pirsig, Whose Book on Motorcycles, the Machine and the Self, I Didn’t Understand Enough to Like Much)” Note: sometimes I use my space in Contact as a way of writing about important issues in the life of the church. This is not one of…

Friends, Last year a few of you noticed something that often has confused members of the churches I’ve served: as a pastor I don’t make a big deal about Mothers’ Day. I know that my approach to the second Sunday of May can cause disappointment, in fact, one of the very few times anyone at MPC has been angry with me was…

Rather than write a Contact article this week, I’d like to pass along—in written form—a radio spot I heard while driving my kids to school this week. The journalist who wrote the piece is named Zaidee Stavely. Zaidee’s mother was my kindergarten teacher, my mother is Zaidee’s God-mother, and Zaidee and my sister, Anna were best friends growing up. So naturally, I’m…

I took a vacation last week. I didn’t leave Oakland because my kids still were in school, but the school where Anne teaches was in spring break, so I decided to take a few days off so that the two of us could do things together that the kids might not have wanted to do. So, for example, we rode our tandem…

Friends, For the most part I tell people I grew up in Mendocino, and there’s some truth to that. Mendocino is where I went to school and church, and Mendocino is where I spent all of my allowance money on candy bars and coin-operated video games. My childhood home, however, was in the hills above Little River, a place so small I…

Friends, There are places in this world that are beautiful because God made them beautiful—think Yosemite, or an unspoiled Caribbean beach. There also are buildings made by humans that are wonderful—and would be wonderful regardless of where they were set, and here I’ll mention the Eiffel Tower and the Montclair branch of the Oakland Public Library because they both share a birthday…

Last week, for the first time ever, I un-friended someone on Facebook. Some of you who follow me on social media may know this guy—his name is David and he’s someone I knew in college. When we lived across the hall from one another during our freshmen year, we had an almost constant debate running. He came from a theologically fundamentalist and…

True story: in the first congregation I served, there was a prominent family which always sat in the same pew, which happened to be the back pew on the side opposite the pulpit–as far away from the preacher as possible. It is a fact that the floor of the sanctuary sloped down to the corner where they sat, as if the cumulative…

Dear Friends, My favorite bike has been in the shop for the last few weeks. I blew out my freewheel for the second time in as many months, and the folks at my bike shop were kind enough to replace the broken part for free, but—typical of warrantee work—my wheel was somewhat low on their list of priorities, so it took a…