All Saints Church Pasadena Podcast

From the All Saints Archives: This sermon preached by George Regas on April 9, 1995, lifts up the core Christian value of nonviolence. "In a world of violence, Jesus was peaceful. In a world that depended on brute force, Jesus depended on nothing but the love of God expressed in human life. Jesus lived a nonviolent life in a world of vicious violence -- and he sent out his disciples ... and us ......

From the All Saints Archives: This sermon preached by George Regas on February 25, 1990, calls the church to be "religion at its best" -- putting people in connection with God and with each other. "I believe more than any other human problem loneliness -- the absence of meaningful human connections -- drains the joy and purpose from life. And at its essence, religion is what binds us together and...

From the All Saints Archives: This sermon was preached by George Regas on February 10, 1991 uses prophet Elijah to preach about burnout, depletion and finding healing in the work. "Everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics ... and that's not Regas: that is the biblical material!" Follow All Saints Church on Twitter @ASCpas. Like us on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/AllSaintsPasaden...

From the All Saints Archives: This sermon preached by George Regas on July 16, 1989, affirmed All Saints Church as a prayerfully pro-choice church. "We come together to talk about such a fiercely divisive issue in a community of faith that says love is strong enough to allow people to live together even though there is very radical disagreement. And so in this place we can listen, we can explore,...

From the All Saints Archives: This sermon, preached by George Regas on October 11,1990 opened the way for the blessing of the covenants of same-sex couples at All Saints Church and paved the way for marriage equity in the Episcopal Church decades later. "I believe God is calling this great parish into a new place ...The blessing of a same sex covenant is the clearest symbol the church can send tha...

"It has been nine months since the annunciation of stay at home. Nine months. And as the days shorten, the nights lengthen and we prepare for the nine months of Mary's pregnancy to end in the joy of Christmas, we are being told that our isolation, that the hospitalizations, the overflowing ICUs, the death tolls, jobs lost, anxiety, separation, loneliness, talking with each other only online and th...

"Who is the God of your envisioning? Does your God see you? Does your God know you? Does your God love you? Or does your God tell you that you are not enough? That the way you were made is insufficient. Does your God cut off the possibility of your thriving and flourishing as who you were created to be? Does your God call you to deny essential components of who you are? Does your God dwell with yo...

"As we celebrate the Feast of Mary Magdalene – the apostle to the apostles whose story could not be erased from history no matter how hard they tried – let us commit to continue to claim the indestructible power of God's inexhaustible love as we go about the work we have been given to do." Sermon by Susan Russell from the Virtual 11:15 a.m. Worship at All Saints Church, Pasadena, on Feast of St. M...

"A question for us today is how do we become the kind of soil that allows the seeds of love God has sown in us to take root and grow in our souls." Sermon by Alfredo Feregrino from the Virtual 11:15 a.m. Worship at All Saints Church, Pasadena, on Sunday, July 12, 2020. Readings: Isaiah 55:10-13 and Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23. For video of the service with the sermon, visit our website: https://allsaint...

"To be a Christian and an American means that we will always stand in this peculiar tension between the already and the not yet … Our nation can and will approach the vision we pursue only when we, its citizens, personally and collectively commit ourselves to realizing Jesus' values in the lives of actual human beings." Sermon by Gary Hall from the Virtual 11:15 a.m. Worship at All Saints Church,...

"There is perhaps no greater example of how we have weaponized the teachings of Jesus to create our own Apartheids of separation and domination than what has been done to John 3:16. We've all heard it. Beautiful people of many faiths and questioning journeys have been condemned by it. Many of us in this very room have been wounded by it. The using of John 3:16 to proclaim the ultimate Apartheid: C...

"We are all scholars of our own story and of other stories we learn through love. We are striving to share what we know -- the power of God's love, justice and compassion and what we value -- radical inclusion, courageous justice, joyful spirituality, ethical stewardship -- in a news cycle dominated by another story: a story of exclusion, judgment and condemnation and the values of greed, graft an...

"Jesus during this miraculous event, is teaching us that the glory, the wonder, is not only on the mountaintop. It is also what happens next. The glory is revealed when Jesus came down from the top of the mountain to heal all those in need, to be in the company of sinners and the destitute. This is the real transfirguration. This is where the real glory and wonder is." Sermon by Alfredo Feregrino...

"I'm starting to understand that I'm in need of liberation. And that when I do this work, when I do anti-racism work, when I do reconciliation work with indigenous communities, it's not for them. It can't be for them. It's because I cannot be whole, I cannot be human, if I'm not doing this work." Sermon by Jordan Cantwell at All Saints Church, Pasadena, on Sunday, February 16, 2020. Readings: Deut...

"Weeks like this, I find myself searching for that wisdom of endurance, of tenacity, the wisdom that will soften my heart even as I feel it hardening. That will give us as a church, as a nation what we need not only to survive but to thrive for such a time as this." Sermon by Mike Kinman at All Saints Church, Pasadena, on Sunday, February 9, 2020. (with Maya Angelou reading by Lynndi Scott ) Readi...

"There is a gift when things are so broken we can no longer pretend they are whole, because then we can admit they have been broken for a long time. Then we can admit that we have been broken for a long time. There is a gift to knowing we are broken because then we can begin to heal. Do not fear the cracks in our nation, the cracks in our church, the cracks in ourselves. That's how the light gets...

"I don't have to tell you that we live in a throw away, disposable culture. For almost everything from clothing to tech toys seems to be made for obsolescence. And part of the problem is that many things are made so that you can't even try to fix them. They're not even made to be repaired. And part of the problem is that we're not just talking about throw away things, we live in a culture of throw...

"...It's those women [in Nazi Germany] who stood outside of Rosenstrasse in the cold, demanding to be reunited with their husbands. It's their husbands, defying the orders that they must ignore their wives. It's the soldiers putting down their guns and saying, 'I'm not firing on a bunch of unarmed women!' That's the power we have -- to confront the demands of an unjust society. To cause a scene th...

"In the delusion of separateness, everything divides into opposition and binaries. Baptism is a sacrament that wakes us up to the reality that God is for everyone everywhere. We can no longer separate or exclude anybody or anything from grace. Especially under the guise of religion." Sermon by Sally Howard at All Saints Church, Pasadena, on Sunday, January 12, 2020. Readings: Isaiah 42:1-9 and Mat...

"We can be healed. Each of us and all of us. And … we can only be healed together. For it is the love of God poured into and through us in community that is the ultimate power, the power that can heal every wound, the power that can make each of us and all of us whole. It is the love of God poured into and through us in community that is the power that is never used to dominate or manipulate but a...

"It's time for a new narrative that recognizes that God loves us, that God dwells with us and in us not in spite of our humanity but because of it. That it is what we see as the most ordinary about ourselves that is the most extraordinary, the most sacred. A new narrative that says that Mary is worthy of being revered because she was a woman who lived a hard life with grace and power and raised a...

"Afeni and I bonded over birthing sons who had been gossiped about, misunderstood, and had experienced violent deaths as young adult men. Now, as mothers we did not parent in any Polyanna-ish way. Both of us had deliberately prepared our children for the pushback from those representing the Empire. For instance, I disclosed to Jesus when he was very young about how me and his father had to escape...

"The original word for repent is the Greek word 'metanoia' which literally means to 'change your mind, to change direction' … and this word has nothing to do with guilt or shame. So, John the Baptist calls his audience to a thorough change of heart and mind. Repentance in this context literally means 'turning around,' 'moving in an opposite direction.' Repentance for John is an action and it is no...

"Jesus showed us by how he lived and died and lived again on the other side of death that nothing is too big, too much, too hard for God, that human dignity and flourishing are God's dream for us no matter under what oppressive systems we find ourselves. The Jesus who allied himself with the poor and disenfranchised by becoming poor and disenfranchised will not abandon us to a world that does not...

"The world is crying out for a different way. And here we are as All Saints Church committed to walk with a revolutionary Jesus. I wish I could stand here and tell you exactly what that looks like for us. I wish I had a five-point plan with metrics for success and funders in place. But revolutions of love don't begin that way. Here's how they do begin: They begin by us first imagining … just imagi...