Friends, As I was in the process of trying to figure out what to write in Contact this week, someone asked me what I thought a positive outcome for the war in Ukraine would look like, and while I suspect the person asking may have been looking for something more geopolitical in scope, I had to say that my most basic prayer…

In Judaism there is a three part formula for righteousness: doing justice, praying, and repenting. That latter piece trips up a lot of people especially in a society where we try to stay away from criticism, focusing on positive reinforcement, affirming words, and no judgment. But I think we get confused here between the idea of repentance as an act of being…

Friends, Four years ago, my wife, Anne, gave me an olive tree which I planted in the back yard of the manse, and I waited to see if any fruit would set on the branches. The first year there were no olives. I believe I harvested 28 olives in the second year. The third year my yield was maybe twelve olives. This…

Joy I have a question.  How can I experience joy when my life isn’t joyful?  For the past two years, my husband has been dealing with aggressive metastatic prostate cancer.  My heart breaks when I see him in pain.  Our lives are turned upside down not only by Covid, but by cancer.  We’ve canceled four trips, we’ve had up to eight doctor…

Dear Friends, Starting in September, I am planning to lead MPC folks on four retreats, one for each season of the year. The purpose of these retreats is to create a spiritual space in which folks form across the MPC family can deepen our connections to God, to one another, to the earth and to the world, and to explore what that…

Friends, Ordinarily, I’d use this space—my column in the last Contact issue before Christmas, to share a few ideas and insights that, for whatever reason, didn’t make it into my Christmas sermon. This year, I’m writing to exhort you to be careful as you celebrate Christmas. A year ago, we had our Christmas Eve services on YouTube, and the service was really…

Friends, I have been feeling melancholy recently. I’m not entirely sure why: it may be that the stress and uncertainty of the COVID era are finally getting the upper hand in the emotional mix that is my inner life; it could be that I’m still grieving as the anniversary of my father’s passing approaches, or maybe I’m just becoming someone whose eyes…

Why are you so full of heaviness, O my soul, and why are you so disquieted within me? Put your trust in God, for I yet give thanks to the one who is my help and my God. Psalm 43:5 Having now come through our second Thanksgiving of Covid we may well be feeling continued heaviness and disquiet. Certainly things are better…

Friends, Let me start with a word of gratitude. I am grateful for all that you have done, and continue to do, to make our return to indoor, in person, celebration a reality. So far, we’ve had three worship services in the sanctuary, and each service has been better attended and more smoothly executed than the one before it. Certainly, we are…

Interested in America’s Relationship with Russia??  The City of Oakland has an official Sister City (and Sister Port) relationship with a port city in the Russian Far East: Nakhodka, not far from Vladivostok.  The agreements were signed in 1972 as a result of the Nixon Brezhnev détente, when 4 other US cities were paired with 4 other Soviet Cities.  In the mid-1970s…