All Saints Anglican Church

Psalm 150 doesn't begin anything — it joins something. The praise already filling the heavens was always happening; you are simply arriving late to an eternal party. But to understand what you're arriving to — and why you are invited —requires going back to the very first psalm, because the Psalter has an arc, a Cross-shaped biography running through all 150 chapters, a biography, it turns out, that contains yours. 

What Pentecost answers is a longing that goes all the way back to Genesis 3. Babel tried to close the gap from below and failed. Sinai brought God closer, but only as close as the top of the mountain. Something else was always necessary and Acts 2 gives us the picture of that something else.

It is, admittedly, not a great name for a Sunday. But this in-between space—between Ascension and Pentecost—marks something the early church gradually understood. Namely, that the he Ascension wasn't primarily a departure, but rather an enthronement. And that waiting in the upper room is not liturgical dead time. Rather, it is, as Chrysostom says, a pedagogy of longing.

Paul is standing in Athens, the birthplace of philosophy, surrounded by idols. However, one altar catches his eye, the one inscribed "To the Unknown God." As it turns out, for Paul, that’s the most theologically honest thing around: a confession that all human seeking eventually reaches its limits. Paul then tells the Athenians who that unknown God is, and how near he actually has become for us.

Peter opens 1 Peter 2 with an identity claim so sweeping it's easy to skim past: chosen race, royal priesthood, holy nation. Those words come from Exodus, but Peter then says they describe something made not at Sinai, but at Golgotha. 

It's Good Shepherd Sunday, and instead of John 10, we're in First Peter 2, exploring submission to unjust human authority. No, that's not a mistake. Peter has one Greek word for what Christ's passion is to us — hypogrammos — that reframes what Christian suffering actually means. And the final verse contains a single grammatical detail that changes everything.

Isaiah 42 reveals how judgment is not enough to change the human heart. God burns Israel up, yet she still doesn't take it to heart. But then Isaiah 43 opens with what may be the two most beautiful words in all of Scripture—“But now”—and what follows is not a call to do better, but rather something entirely from God's side.

Seminarian Joel Hesse from Trinity Anglican Seminarian explores the story of the Flood from Genesis. Redemption, as it turns out, is new creation. And the raven, the dove, the olive branch, and the rainbow each point somewhere you might not expect.

The Halleluias don't always come naturally. Easter can feel too triumphant, too disconnected from the trenches of ordinary life. But Paul says something in Colossians 3 that doesn't demand triumphalism, just honesty: the truth that our real life is hidden with Christ in God. That distinction turns out to change everything about what Easter actually promises.

John 8 was the traditional Gospel for Passiontide for centuries, and for good reason. The crowd's blindness to who Jesus is is all about the blindness of people who prefer a God who stays in his lane. The question is: how much does that describe us?

Paul's teaching on sexual ethics in Ephesians 5 is not primarily about morality. Instead, it's about metaphysics. And Aragorn of Gondor turns out to be surprisingly relevant for understanding why. What does it mean to "walk as children of light" when you have forgotten who you are? An ancient baptismal hymn buried at the end of the reading might be Paul's most urgent word to us.

Every morning in Morning Prayer, Psalm 95 invites us to worship, and then stops to warn us. As it turns out, Israel's thirst in the wilderness wasn't just for water. It was a complaint, a complaint directed at God. But God’s reply is rock that Moses strikes, which Paul says points somewhere you might not expect.

God doesn't work with the mostly dead — He raises the completely dead, and in Romans 4, Paul reaches back through Abraham to a God who calls things into existence out of nothing. Lent, as it turns out, isn't about climbing toward God. It's about recognizing that you're Lazarus.

What do Frodo, Aragorn, and Gandalf have to do with Adam and Christ? More than you might think. Paul's reading of Adam in Romans 5 turns out to be surprisingly Tolkienian (or Tolkien's work is surprsingly Pauline?), and understanding why reshapes not just how we read the Old Testament, but how we read the story of our own lives.

It’s easy to find yourself hiding from God, emotionally worn out by seemingly unanswered prayers and afraid to hope. Through the story of Sarah laughing behind Abraham and a tent door, we explore what it looks like to lose faith in God’s promises after years of disappointed hoping … and what God does about it all anyway. As Lent begins, it is worth asking the question that Sarah wasn’t yet prepared to answer — is anything too wonderful for God? — and see the answer to that found in a name, Jesus.

The Parable of the Sower. The usual question this parable poses is: What kind of soil is your heart? However, is this the right question. In this sermon we explore why making this parable all about us might be the very thing that is getting in the way of things. What might it look like to receive the Word of God as pure gift rather than as personal achievement, and to understand Jesus as the hero of this story, not us.

Explore how Adam’s sin wasn’t just eating the forbidden fruit, but listening to the voice of his wife over God’s, but also how his naming of her as Eve, “Life”—in the face of the curse and death—reveals his faith in God’s Word of redemption in Christ.

A couple of uneducated fisherman stood before the religious elite of Jerusalem, and yet what stood out was the astonishing boldness and authority with which they spoke. The key? They had been with Jesus. Discover how ordinary people become extraordinary rocks of faith, not through credentials of cleavverness, but simply by walking with Jesus and letting His Spirit do the rest.

What drives us to seek out familiar places that feel like home? Explore how the journey of the Magi reveals a deeper truth about the pilgrimage we're all on—a search for the home for which we long and to which we are heading, a search that ultimately leads us to Christ, who traveled an even greater distance to reach us first.

We explore how God reveals Christ to the world in different “languages”—through words to those inside the covenant, and through signs in creation to those outside—and the surprising paradox is … that it’s the outsiders who often recognize Him first. As insiders, how do we all (re-)embrace having been brought inside from that outside.

We all want to understand what is happening when things are not easy, because we believe that understanding will bring us some kind of peace. But Mary in Luke’s Gospel offers us a picture of a different kind of peace and trust, a paradigm of humility in faithfulness, treasuring what we cannot be understood so as to trust God through confusion and heartbreak. Ultimately, her life as a Christ-bearer, like ours, is about embracing the Cross-shaped pattern of the Christian life that leads ultimately to resurrection. 

We explore Matthew's haunting account of Herod's slaughter and how the star that led wise men to Christ also triggered the murder of children—showing us that the Light entering the darkness of our world always seems to force a response from the darkness. How does true joy and hope come not without tears but rather through them?

Why does God work in silence while the world fills itself with noise? Ignatius of Antioch remarked that the three greatest mysteries of the Christian faith—the Annunciation, the Nativity, and the Crucifixion—were all accomplished quietly, hidden from a world too distracted to notice that reality had just broken through. How might we reflect on that this Christmas Eve?

Why does Luke mention the manger three times in the Christmas story, and what do the animals in every nativity scene really mean? Explore how a single detail from Luke's Gospel—borrowed from Isaiah—asks us the most important question: Do you recognize your Lord when He comes down to meet you in the mess?

Why is St. Joseph considered one of the most demanding figures to emulate in Christian spirituality? We explore this idea and how Matthew's Gospel subtly paints Joseph as both a new Abraham and a new Adam—showing us what it looks like when our old stories get rewritten and absorbed into the new story of Jesus Christ.

What does John the Baptist's question from prison—"Are you the one?"—reveal about the nature of Christian hope? This sermon explores how Jesus's answer, drawing from Isaiah 35, shows that God's promises don't bypass judgment and suffering, but meet us on the other side of them through the Cross and Resurrection.

Discover why biblical hope isn't naive optimism, but something far deeper—"optimism with a broken heart,” as Nick Cave puts it. Explore explores how Isaiah's prophecy of the Messiah emerging from a dead stump reveals that Christian hope is always found through suffering, but suffering that leads to resurrection and new life.

We begin our Advent Vespers homily series by looking at John 8:25 as an echo of John 1:1, “In the beginning was the Word.”

We explore how Advent isn’t just about the past or the future or even just the present, but about the God who is ordering all history towards Himself and how our baptisms fold our past, present and futures into Christ, who has stepped into our time.

On Christ the King Sunday, Seminarian Cale Baker examines the Cross as the seat of Christ's Kingship. Discover how the curse of Adam is overturned by the penitent thief's confession and Christ's promise of Paradise.

We look at what Jesus is getting at about the destruction of the Temple. Above all the mess of the world and the false hopes and promises it puts forward is the Christian witness to the Cross that truly and completely fulfills the meaning of that Temple.

The cynical Sadducees attempt to trap Jesus with a trick question on marriage in the afterlife, and Jesus brilliantly reverses things, demonstrating how they have misunderstood Scripture and the very character of God Himself, shattering their dead, vapid view of God, as well as this age and the age to come.

We explore one of Paul’s more mystical passages and the radical notion of the Church — all the saints — as Christ’s “fullness” and His glorious, predestined inheritance.

The Pharisee vs. the Tax Collector. Most read this as a parable about arrogance vs. humility, but it runs deeper than that. It’s a parable about the sin of self-justification and how true hope is found only and entirely in throwing yourself on the mercy of God, seen above all else in the Cross of Jesus Christ.

St. Luke, the regular ol' physician turned evangelist, portrays Jesus as the Great Physician, proclaiming Himself as the New Adam of the ultimate Jubilee come to heal humanity and bring them back to Paradise “today.”

Ten lepers healed and only one turns back to thank Jesus. We explore the real miracle that takes place in this story — the true healing of the human heart shown in genuine gratitude for the gifts of God — and why this often takes place in the “no man’s lands” of our lives.

Beginning with the way we crave and cry over goofy animal videos, we explore the tension between Creation’s “very good” beauty and its groamning, finding the answer to that tension in the Cross of Jesus Christ. 

Explore how the Christ and His Cross are the real Jacob’s ladder, the Incarnational “Gate of Heaven,” wherein Christ the Bridegroom wins His Bride, the Church, to the rejoicing of His friends, all the angels.

Matthew the tax collector and King Solomon the complicatedly unfaithful king show us why Proverbs 3 is the ultimate call to “follow me” to every forgetful sinner. 

On Holy Cross Day, we examine the “knife edge” of the Gospel: the brutal, counter-intuitive reality that God’s glory is most radiantly found in his descending into this world’s ugliness. Discover how Isaiah 53 and Philippians 2 reveal the Cross-shaped work of Christ that produces hope more real than our fears and turns the tragedies of the world into the comedy of God’s unstoppable promise.

Why did God command Israel to “choose life” and then promise them they would fail and go into exile. In this sermon, we look at how the Law was ultimately not about moralism, but mercy, unpacking how Christ and the Cross fulfill the Law, turning the threat of death into a hopeful promise of rescue, return and life. 

Examining Luke 14:7-14 (and a little bit of Ecclesiasticus 10), we look at the problem of the arrogant pride of the self-righteous—whether ancient Pharisees or us today—and see how God's love and redemption are for sinners and all those who simply admit they cannot earn His grace.

We explore how Bartholomew—despite having only his name recorded in Scripture—personifies in the absence of his own story the dying to self and living wholly for Christ that is the mark of a faithful disciple.

We explore how this one faithful Jewish teenage girl somehow becomes the embodiment in Luke for the “restoration of Zion” in and as “the fullness of time,” when salvation is born of her, a woman, and how she is—in that— the first Christian and a figure of all Christians.

We conclude our sermon series on Colossians by exploring how Paul understands family and household relationships as our mirror of our life in Christ, calling us all—husbands, wives, children, slaves, and masters—to serve one another with Christ-like love and self-sacrificial obedience, reflecting the greater household of God, the Church. 

Our sermon series continues into Colossians 3, exploring what Paul means when he says that our old selves have died and our true new lives are hidden with Christ in God. How does that make us want to live differently now in light of the day coming when that new life will be fully revealed.

Our sermon series continues into Colossians 2, looking at Paul’s warning against mistaking religious practices and philosophies—the “shadows”—for the true “substance,” which is Christ Himself. 

We begin a short sermon series on Colossians, looking at how Paul in the first chapter sees creation and redemption blurring together in Christ, through whom all is reconciled to God.

The Rev. Dr. Canon Bill Henry, Canon to the Ordinary of the ACNA Diocese of Pittsburgh, explores the ramifications of Galatians 6.

We explore Peter and Paul as two faces of the Cross-shaped Christian life: Peter embodying failure met with forgiveness and a restored following of Christ; Paul exemplifying the life poured out as a witness to Christ’s sacrifice.