Our guest preacher this Sunday was Jean Jeffress. She holds a Master’s of Divinity from the American Baptist Seminary of the West at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. She is a Member-in-Discernment with the Northern California Nevada Conference of the United Church of Christ. In this sermon, Jean examines the sibling rivalry between Jacob and…
This was Pastor Tracy Barnowe’s farewell sermon as she left us to take up her new life in Southern California. In it, she shared her memories of a dozen moments in FCC San Rafael that she treasures and which, in her mind, illustrate what makes us special as a church family. (Scripture: Psalm 98)
On her next-to-last Sunday with us, Pastor Tracy took up the Parable of The Sower as a message central to the future of any congregation. She found a parallel between in a small but very meaningful triumph in back yard baseball, and what members of a church can do to improve their “batting average” in hearing and understanding…
With only three weeks left with us before she leaves for her new life in southern California, Pastor Tracy chose to address one of the nuggets of bad “bumper-sticker theology” that she believes create a barrier that prevents many good people from becoming involved with the church. (Scripture Matthew 11:6-19 & 25-30)
Rev. Parrish is a member and and Itinerant Minister at Eden United Church of Christ in Hayward. In addition to serving in leadership and ministerial positions at Eden, he serves on the Bay Association Executive Board, and on the Finance Committee of the Northern California Nevada Conference of the UCC. In this Fathers’ Day sermon, Rev. Parrish…
Religio-centrism — the idea that one set of beliefs or practices is uniquely the “right” one, and all others are “wrong” — has probably caused more human misery over the centuries than any other. And, sadly, Christianity has much to answer for in this regard. In this sermon Pastor Tracy looks at one of the…
On Ascension Sunday, Pastor Tracy examines the actions of the disciples during their last meeting with Jesus (Acts 1:1-11) and finds they have a shortcoming familiar to all of us today: an inability to see a truly new possibility when it appears . . . a failure of imagination. Despite having witnessed the profound drama of the…
On Mothers Day, Pastor Tracy examined one of the oldest descriptions of the early Church (John 14: 15-31.) The constant use of family words was not metaphorical: To many of the slaves and outcasts drawn to Jesus’s message, that early Church was the only family they had, and the mother/father love they found there is what sustains the…
Doubt is not the opposite of faith; it is one element of faith. Paul Tillich On the first Sunday after Easter, Pastor Tracy preached on the traditional text, the story of Doubting Thomas. However, she held Thomas’s doubts up to us as a positive model to emulate. She notes that all the players in the Easter story had…
As we settled into the self-examination of Lent, Pastor Tracy examined a concept in scripture that generates a lot of confusion: the idea of “justified by works.” (Romans 4:1-5 & 13-17.) It has been used over the centuries to support theologies of reward and punishment by God, but those theories are in direct conflict with the core idea…