PASTOR’S WEEKLY BLOG

January 21, 2026

Dear MBPPC,

Our vision is to be a congregation in which we “actively engage in spiritual friendships. We do this by praying for and with each other, studying scripture, and going into the world as disciples of Jesus Christ.” This week we look at Jesus’ call to the first disciples (Matthew 4:12-23 if you want to look ahead). As Jesus is walking by the Sea of Galilee, he sees two brothers fishing and calls to them “follow me.” The text tells us that they immediately left their nets and followed him

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January 14, 2026

Dear Mt. Baker Park Church,

This Sunday the Rev. Keith Tanis will preach on Hebrews 13:2. His sermon is titled “An Unexpected Visit.” Keith was the Executive Presbyter of the Olympia Presbytery from 2013-2016. He served as the bridge pastor for Westside Presbyterian Church in 2018 before they called the Rev. Laurie Brenner. He currently leads a protestant worship service once a month in a Catholic nursing home. He is a graduate of San Francisco Theological Seminary and I am sure you will enjoy hearing from him.

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January 7, 2026

Dear Mt. Baker Park Church,

The lectionary jumps from Jesus’ birth (the magi and the stable) to Jesus’ baptism (Matthew 3:13-17). At first glance this might seem strange, what happened to everything between birth and adulthood? But upon further reflection it makes sense. Baptism enacts a kind of rebirth of sorts. When we baptize someone in the Presbyterian church there is a part of the service called Thanksgiving Over the Water.

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January 1, 2026

Happy New Year MBPPC! The New Year can bring mixed feelings, processing family interactions that happened at Christmas, the rush of getting back into daily routines of work, and glimmers of hope that this year things could be different. I could start that exercise routine, mend that broken relationship…

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December 25, 2025

You don’t get to control the time of birth. It’s one of the things that even those of us control freaks cannot manufacture. You can walk around the block, eat ginger, get in water, or any of the other “techniques” to speed up the arrival, but the baby comes when the baby comes. Today we remember and celebrate that in a moment in history, God broke into our mess in the form of a baby. We didn’t get to pick the time, God came as Thomas Merton says “uninvited.”

“Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for Him at all, Christ has come uninvited.” - Thomas Merton

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“Blessed is the season which engages the whole world in a conspiracy of love!”

-Hamilton Wright Mabie (My Study Fire)

We are in the final week of Advent, a week focused on Love. At the same time, we are approaching winter solstice, the longest night of the year (Dec. 21). This is the time of year that the church often recognizes the reality that as wonderful as this time of the year is, there is often also a heightened sense of sadness, depression, and grief (recognized in the Longest Night service).

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Tsh Oxenreider in her Advent devotional Shadow and Light writes “When we start driving a new-to-us car, it isn’t long before it seems like the make and model of our car has multiplied. We see it everywhere - in parking lots across from our spot and in traffic jams the next land over. We are made aware of our car’s existence elsewhere in our surroundings, we see it where we didn’t see it before.”

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Happy Thanksgiving, Mt. Baker Park Church! This Thanksgiving, I am thankful for each one of you. It’s time to get up those Christmas trees, pull out the candles and lights and start preparing for Christmas, but in between we have a very intentional season in our church calendar, Advent.

According to Kate Bowler (Professor of Religious History at Duke University), “Advent is a season of expectancy and preparation - and, perhaps surprisingly, the beginning of the Christian calendar.

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This week we are wrapping up the 8 week series on The Lord’s Prayer. My hope for this series has been to deepen our understanding of a prayer we say together every week and for you to both cherish praying it communally and perhaps discover the power of praying it personally.

We end this week with “for thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever and ever” which is not in the earliest manuscripts of the gospel of Matthew. This doxology is found in some later manuscripts but was added on by the early church because in Jewish culture it was unfathomable that they would end simply with “deliver us from the evil one.”

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