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How will you reach in love this Thanksgiving?  Run To Feed The Hungry.  Join us!  Run, Walk, Cheer, Dance… 5265 H Street 8:15 a.m. Thanksgiving morning.

Some among our community plan to participate in Run To Feed The Hungry.   This annual Thanksgiving run in Sacramento is in support of the Sacramento Food Bank and Family Services and the finish line is up the street from the church.  Some of us will run, some will walk, some of us will stay at the church and cheer for 30,000 people as they reach in love for their neighbor.  This year we are taking a free photograph of anyone who…

There are many ways to study scripture.  One way is to simple “be in the presence” of a passage and to note what words or phrases stay with you as you read through it.   Word clouds are created to by giving prominence to the frequency of words in a text. This is a Word Cloud of our passage for Sunday.  Read Mark 13.1-8 silently to yourself and jot the words down that you recall.  Read it again out loud to…

Jesus doesn’t seem concerned about traveling light in the passage from Mark for this week. He orders the disciples to “take nothing for the journey”.  I would have argued. Because I am a working mother pastor, I would have argued.  I would have said “You just don’t like to plan, you just don’t get what is required to travel and clearly you don’t have children.”  Or I might have said “You don’t really want to include me do you?  Because I…

We are studying the Gospel of Mark  and have encouraged folks to read the whole Gospel in one sitting.  If you do this you may notice a tone of urgency about the writing.  Frederick Buechner in his book “Peculiar Treasures” says this about Mark’s gospel: He was a man in a hurry, out of breath, with no time to lose because that’s how the people were he was writing for too.  The authorities were out for their blood, and they…

  Remembrance Words by Andrew Pratt The “crimson poppies” in the opening line recall the red poppies that bloomed all across the worst World War I battlefields in Flanders and that grew in abundance over the graves of fallen soldiers, made famous in the 1915 poem “In Flanders Field” by Canadian physician and Lt. Col. John MacCrae. Once crimson poppies bloomed out in a foreign field, each memory reminds where brutal death was sealed. The crimson petals flutter down, still…

  Anne Lamott writes of Grace in this way:  “I do not understand the mystery of Grace – only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us.”  Gospel accounts of the life and teaching of Jesus are candidates for Grace if we will allow it.  Try reading the whole Gospel of Mark today.  There might be a word or a phrase or a story there just for you.  Really.

  Mark is the only New Testament book which calls itself a gospel.  Right from the start, bold:  “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God” (Mark 1.1)  It is as though this is a title.  “We can demonstrate the importance of the message about salvation by reminding people that the word gospel originally meant ‘proclamation’ or ‘good news.’  Christianity did not begin with a new book.  Its Scripture was that of the Jewish people.  Christianity…

  While our nation turns its attention to the outcome of the presidential election, we will gather around the table to Heal the Heart of Democracy – on a day so often given over to polarization – we will remember that we are “all in this together” and raise our voices in prayer and song. On Tuesday evening Nov. 6 at 7:00 p.m., make a choice to gather at The Table. We will break bread and tell God’s story of…

Dear Ones, “The human heart, the vital core of the human self, holds the power to destroy democracy or to make it whole.”  (from Parker Palmer, Healing the Heart of Democracy p. 35)  Over the last 5 weeks we have been hard at work cultivating the Habits of the Heart that support political wholeness.  As you prepare to vote tomorrow, take time to remind yourself of these habits and allow your heart to break open: The understanding that we are…