St. Brendan Catholic Church - San Francisco, CA

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Pastor's Blog

Continuing The Healing

4/28/2019

 
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Way back in September, our parish began a year of reflection on the healing power of Christ and our need for spiritual wellness. Through our various message series and bulletin articles, we’ve tried to offer support and advice to help you assess and increase your spiritual health quotient. All through this year since early September, we’ve been working together on spiritual healing and improving our overall sense of well-being through faith.
 
We began the year with a message series called Holy Triage. There, we looked at our need for healing by considering a number of spiritual problem areas that can fester in our lives. Then, we looked at ways that we can bring God’s healing, light, and love to our own neighbors and neighborhoods in a series we called, Next Door: The Art of Neighboring.
 
During the Christmas season we talked about how to bring comfort and healing to our families during the holidays in a series called, Family Matters: Bring Home The Hygge. We kicked off the New Year on a positive note with a series called, Spiritual Life Hacks, where we examined simple spiritual tweaks that could improve our everyday lives.
 
In our series just before Lent called, Spin Doctoring, we thought about how to work through life’s setbacks in a healthy and constructive way by turning our negatives into positives. Our Lenten series, Bare Necessities, helped us to cut back, trim down, simplify, and de-stress our lives by learning to be satisfied with what God already provides us.
 
Now in this final series of the regular preaching season, that we’ve been calling, To Be Continued: Fearless Evangelization, we’ll be learning how to keep the ball rolling by doing what so many Christians dread to do—hand on the healing power of faith to others. Our desire is to show you how marshaling the strengths you already have can be an incredibly effective way of bringing the message of Christ to the world. The point of the series is to help you continue the healing that hopefully you have experienced in your life over the course of this year by passing it on to others.
 
In last week’s message, we told you that the most honest, straightforward, and effective way of communicating the message of Christ to other people is by living your own life truthfully, sincerely, authentically. When others see the happiness and freedom you enjoy when you become the true you God envisioned, his glory will be manifest and others will be drawn to do the same.
 
This week, we consider a rather unexpected way of evangelizing others. It’s a method that will reap incredible fruit, not only for those who hear the message but for you personally. Listen live at church on Sunday or online by scrolling to the top of this page to discover this unique and powerful tool for spreading the message of Christ.
 
--Father Roger Gustafson, Pastor

Easter Sunday:  New Message Series Begins Today!

4/21/2019

 
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Easter Sunday marks the beginning of our brand new message series that we’re calling, To Be Continued: Fearless Evangelization. In this Year of Healing and Spiritual Wellness at Saint Brendan, we’ve been reflecting on the healing power of Christ. Through our various message series and bulletin articles, we’ve tried to offer support and advice to help you assess and increase your spiritual health quotient and overall sense of well-being.
 
As Easter begins, we now want you to think about bringing to the wider world whatever healing and growth in wellness you have experienced this year. Like the Apostles after the resurrection of Christ, we want to help you “continue” those spiritual health-giving effects in the lives of your loved ones and other people around you. In this new series, we’ll be learning how to keep the ball rolling by doing what so many Christians dread to do—hand on the healing power of faith.
 
No need to pump your brakes here. Whether you’re a lover, a socialite, a tortured introvert, a forgiving and understanding individual, or all-around holy person, this series is for you. In fact, we’ll be learning how to marshall all of those strengths to bring the message of Christ to the world and use words only if absolutely necessary! You will learn how to fearlessly evangelize, but to do it from your own comfort zone.
 
Check out our homily guide on the next page for the first episode. If you missed our live message, you always can listen to it at www.stbrendanparish.org.
 
We’re also going to encourage you again to consider trying out a small group. There’s no safer place to test drive how it feels to share your faith and pass it on to other people. As Catholics, we too often believe that only a priest or religious sister or brother has anything of spiritual value to offer. But in truth, all of us can learn from each other.
 
Faith is not exclusively—or even mostly—about dogmas and doctrine. Spirituality is a lived experience, and we all live it differently. In fact, that’s the very definition of discipleship: faith put into action. Hearing stories of how other people are impacted by the message of Jesus can help you continue that message yourself. You’ll never be put on the spot or asked to speak in a small group. But over time, you’ll begin to trust your other small group members and feel comfortable sharing. We have almost twenty active, thriving groups meeting regularly. From bible studies, to the fundamentals of the Christian faith, to Marian devotions, there’s a group for every type of person.
 
Lives are being changed in our small groups. Be fearless and check it out. There’s never an obligation to continue in a group, only to continue the faith!
 
--Father Roger Gustafson, Pastor

The Bare Necessities:  We Need to Strengthen Others

4/14/2019

 
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Over the last five weeks of our Lenten message series that we have been calling, Bare Necessities: Getting Back To Basics, we’ve been exploring how God provides for us and his providence, whatever that turns out to be in our lives, is truly enough for us. The series has been about cutting back, slowing down, simplifying, and relaxing with the assurance that God ultimately takes care of us and gives us everything we need.

 
Each week, we discovered a new gift that God provides us free of charge:
 
  • Week #1: Tempted in the desert, Jesus showed us all we really need is God. When we believe that he protects, feeds, restores and forgives us, then we will always have enough.
 
  • Week #2: God renews and restores us by allowing time and space for “sacred sleep.” We should make more time to rest in him.
 
  • Week #3: Like the Israelites who were led through the desert by a cloud or a gardener who carefully cultivates a precious plant, God’s love protects and helps us get through trials we otherwise could not, when we trust in him.
 
  • Week #4: God feeds us with physical and spiritual food. When we feel depleted and God seems distant, we can cope by renewing our trust in him and turning back and clinging to God, with the confidence that another blessing is just around the corner.
  • Week #5: Like the Israelites led out of slavery through the mighty seas or the woman caught in adultery Jesus refused to condemn, God gives us new beginnings and second chances by his forgiveness.
 
Today on Palm Sunday, Christians around the world reflect on Christ’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem, followed all too soon by his public arrest, humiliation, and crucifixion. In the course of those events, the disciples were fed and promptly fell asleep! They were protected from the worst of the atrocities, while in his darkest hour Jesus clung to his Father, who three days later led him to the dawn of a new beginning for all humanity. The bare necessities were enough for Jesus and his followers.
 
As his disciples, we can strengthen others by offering them these same gifts on behalf of God:
 
  1. We can give other people rest by:  _________________________________________.  
  2. We can protect others by:  ________________________________________________.  
  3. We can feed others by:  ___________________________________________________.​  
  4. We can lead people to new beginnings by: ________________________________.
 
Listen to our weekend message to fill in the blanks!
 
--Father Roger Gustafson, Pastor

The Bare Necessities:  God Makes All Things New

4/7/2019

 
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In this week of our message series, the Bare Necessities: Getting Back To Basics, we shall look at how God makes all things new for His faithful Children.
 
As the prophet Isaiah wrote: “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland” (43:18-19).
 
Sometimes God wants to do something “new,” and yet we are still stuck in the “old.” It is hard at times to let go of what is familiar, and what we know. It seems easier to stay comfortable to just keep going with the flow, not to mess anything up.
 
For those who like change, “new” is mostly exciting. For those who don’t like change, “new” is mostly stressful. But here is what I love about God. He thinks and works outside our own box of
thinking. He doesn’t always work in the ways that we would have chosen for our “new.” God sees the big picture. He knows what He is doing. He works behind the scenes of our life that unfold our everyday in the places where we can’t always see or understand all the “why’s.”
 
People move, life happens, decisions are made, many change jobs, kids grow up, and there are times we might go through some really tough struggles. We may even start to feel cheated, like life is unfair. But it still breathes the truth: God is not finished with our lives yet. You are still here and He has great purpose in all that you walk through, even in every life change and season.
 
New is one of God’s promises to us, and we know that all of his promises are fulfilled in Jesus Christ (See 2 Corinthians 1:20). As believers, our hope ultimately rests in the promise that Christ will come back for us one day and make all things new.
 
God makes things new because:
 
  1. God restores us to a right relationship with Him through the gift of forgiveness and justification. He is able to restore earthly relationships. And He can even restore days and years that have been lost to the effects of sin. Jesus restored the spirituality of the woman in the gospel by forgiving her. He also restored her to society by saving her life.​
  2. God gives us new names. Names carry a lot of significance in Scripture. When we were baptized, many of us received new names and identities to symbolize the newness of God in our lives. God renames you when he changes a negative situation in your life like He did in Hosea 1-2, when he changed the names of the Children of Hosea. 
  3. God raises from the dead. God makes dead things alive again. He has power over death in every sense. As Saint Paul writes in Romans 8:11, “As believers we have that same power dwelling in us. It is what gives life to our dead souls.”
 
Listen to our weekend message to fill in the blanks and believe that God will do something new when we get back to the basics of our lives.
 
--Father Celestine Tyowua, Pastor

    Father Roger Gustafson

    Pastor,
    ​St. Brendan's Catholic Church

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LOCATION
MASS TIMES
CALENDAR
St. Brendan the Navigator
29 Rockaway Ave.
San Francisco CA 94127
In the Archdiocese of San Francisco


415.681.4225
OFFICE HOURS

Regular Hours
Sunday 9:00 am - 1:00 pm
Monday - Thursday  8:30 am - 4:00 pm


Holidays
The rectory office is closed on Independence Day,
​Labor Day, and other official holidays.

Weekday Mass Schedule
Monday-Friday   6:30 am & 8:15 am

Weekend Mass Schedule
Saturday   8:15 am & 5:00 pm Vigil Mass

Sunday 7:30 AM, 9:30 AM, 11:30 AM & 5:00 PM

Holy Days of Obligation and Ash Wednesday
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Wednesday  
7:15 pm - 7:45 pm
Saturday   4:15 pm - 4:45 pm
Sunday 7-7:30, 8:30-9:30, 10:30-11:30 am

By appointment with any priest.

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Every 3rd Saturday at 10 a.m.
4th Sunday of January, April, August & December (during Mass)

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Wednesday  7:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Saturday  4:00 pm - 5:00pm
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