A weblog by Rev. Talitha G Phillips, Associate Pastor and Coordinator for Children, Youth, and Family Life
My favorite magazine, Sojourners, greeted me this week with a set of challenges. “Welcome to a season of holy resistance,” it began, and continued to exhort all the justice-minded preachers, leaders, and church members who make up its readership to “be of good courage” facing 2017, and to “get busy.” As the year begins and the inauguration approaches, those of us who…
Happy New Year! How were your holidays, this year? I find the last holiday of the year to be an awkward and artificial one. I’m awful at staying up until midnight, and I dislike the social pressure that points so many people toward binge-drinking and shallow connections at parties. But the first holiday of the year I do enjoy, as a time…
This week, though some of us are scattering for holiday travels, many of us will gather on Sunday morning for the annual MPC Christmas pageant. This year we are trying a new thing. We will be having a Godly Play pageant, using the Christmas story as it is told in our children’s classrooms. It will be told by a combination of children,…
A favorite science fiction character of mine always warns the reader: love is a debt, and you pay in grief. This person is a traveler to a distant planet in the Mary Doria Russell books “The Sparrow” and “Children of God,” about whom I ought not to say more, for fear of being a spoiler of these excellent novels. This person usually…
Michael and I have had a lot of “firsts” in the last two weeks, with a first night in our new home, first Thanksgiving hosted at our new place… the “firsts” are getting less exciting as we keep going, and I have started looking forward to the “lasts”; the last box unpacked will be a great moment! But this morning was our…
It’s a big week for the Aho family! Michael and I moved into the middle manse on Saturday, ably assisted by a crowd of MPC people, especially the youth and their parents. Together we moved boxes and furniture in the rain, organized dishes in the kitchen, broke down boxes, and tried to fix the oven. Fingers are crossed that the fix stays…
When I was a chaplain, we were all assigned to create “toolkits” for our work. Many of my peers created more virtual boxes – verbal or intellectual – or binders, in fact, rather than boxes, full of words and ideas appropriate to the various tasks of a chaplain. I may be a little too literal sometimes, but I made a tangible kit…
The Youth Group returned from a successful Fall Retreat at Camp Cazadero. We looked at food justice, fasted in solidarity with those who must go hungry, built a “wall” of the obstacles that keep people stuck in hunger and poverty, and had a “hunger banquet” where we represented the global population and the unfairness of food access globally. And we celebrated Communion…
Today, though the day is young, each of your pastors took a turn shocking the other, and in each case, the thing that caused the shock was some good music. I shocked Ben by not knowing who Waylon Jennings was (apparently, a country musician), and he shocked me by asking what “Seasons of Love” was (525,600 minutes! How do you measure a…
Three seminary classmates of mine were always up to no good. Challenging the academic powers-that-be, calling for change, generally shaking things up in the best possible “no good” way. And they’ve kept at it. Though they scattered to different areas of the country, they kept blogging together and even ended up writing a book together. And it’s a world-rocking kind of book,…