All Saints Church Pasadena

Reflecting on 21 years as All Saints' Director of Communications, Holeman argues that the church's calling is to move beyond mere inclusion, which implies a gatekeeper, toward radical belonging where dignity is extended to everyone without exception, sustained by a stubborn hope in what cannot yet be seen.

In this Q&A sermon, Tim Rich argues that our relationship with God is often strained because we project human, transactional, and judgmental patterns onto God, and calls the church instead to imagine God as boundless love and to "work through" rather than "work around" difficult inherited traditions like the Nicene Creed's patriarchy and virgin-birth language.

On Pride Sunday, thirty years after weeping over the church's exclusion of LGBTQ people, the preacher argues that real biblical peace (shalom) is not the false comfort of hiding who you are but the wholehearted belonging offered by God, and that facing hard truths about injustice; like Jeremiah did against the false prophet Hananiah; is the path to genuine transformation rather than a false 'return to normal.'

Preaching from the Exodus 17 'grumbling' story rather than the gospel, the preacher argues that our angry, doubting, grumbling cries toward God amid present-day suffering and injustice are themselves a form of prayer that God does not turn away from, and that God has already equipped the gathered community with the memory, voice, and power to endure and act.

Biblical literalism is a trap that blinds people of good faith to the transformative work of the Spirit, feeding Christian nationalism and injustice, but Nicodemus's journey from a literalist question to courageous discipleship shows that Jesus patiently leads people beyond the letter into the Spirit's ongoing work of change.

The temptation of Jesus in the wilderness reveals how evil works precisely at our points of hunger, loneliness, and longing for control; and this same pattern of temptation is at work in our present cultural moment, yet God sends angels to sustain us even in the wilderness.

The Transfiguration is not only a revelation of who Jesus is but a preview of what his followers are being made into through their own ongoing metamorphosis, and no suffering or oppressive power can unmake the belovedness and brilliance God has placed in them.

Being salt and light is not a task to achieve but an identity already given by Jesus; small, seemingly insignificant acts; like a teenager refusing to give up her bus seat; can flow from that identity to resist empire and injustice.

In a time when ordinary people feel crushed by the 'rapacious power' of an uncaring state, God's answer is not retribution or complexity but the simple, costly call of Micah 6:8; to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with God; which is the same vision embodied in the Beatitudes' blessing of the powerless.

Loving our enemies in 2026 is not naive because our historical ancestors; from Jesus' Rome to Jim Crow to apartheid; already faced comparable enemies, and their whispered wisdom plus the resurrection power of Christ frees us from fear so we can resist evil without becoming it.

Baptism is not a private transaction that makes us more beloved by God, but an entry into a gathered community and a baptismal covenant that must be lived out as active resistance to injustice happening right now; in immigration raids, political violence, and funding cuts; not just spoken as words.

Because God clothes us in righteousness rather than making us earn it, our words become the visible garment of that righteousness; so speaking life, blessing, and forgiveness rather than curses and vengeance is how we testify to the light of Christ in a world that mistakes cruelty for strength.

Epiphany reveals that healing and faith are not about arriving at certainty or wholeness but about following the light we're given; one step at a time; trusting that God meets us in vulnerability rather than demanding we have it all figured out.

Every character in the nativity story; shepherds, innkeeper, Joseph, and Mary; had to make a journey from faith to action, and Christmas calls us to recast ourselves into that same story and turn our own faith into action in the world.