Sermons & Such - Haven Berkeley Faith Community

What does it mean to use power well, especially in communities where power has too often been used to harm? In this teaching from Haven’s All Things New series, Leah explores Jesus’ challenge to familiar ideas about greatness and leadership. Drawing on community organizing, her own experience as a pastor, and the example of Jesus, she considers why naming power dynamics, building accountability, and sharing power are essential to communities shaped by justice and care. Rather than retreating into powerlessness, what might it look like to use power in service of liberation, healing, and one another?

Review Leah’s notes here and listen to or watch the teaching below.

What does it mean to follow Jesus, not just in what we believe, but in how we live? Drawing on his own experience of religious harm and his search for a more life-giving relationship with faith/religion, luca reflects on the difference between performing a faith and practising it. The Good Samaritan invites us to look beyond familiar ideas of goodness and respectability, towards the people who actually stop, tend wounds, and help care continue.

As part of the All Things New series, this teaching asks us to reconsider who we see, who we make room for, and where our responsibility begin. What if following Jesus is less about getting our beliefs right and more about learning, again and again, to become a neighbor?

Review luca’s notes here and listen to or watch the teaching below.

What does it mean to being again without having to erase where we’ve been? In the opening teaching of Haven’s All Things New series, the story of Nicodemus becomes an invitation to consider renewal as a process of becoming curious again, letting go of what no longer serves us, and making room for the Spirit’s mysterious work. Nicodemus moves from a cautious nighttime encounter with Jesus to challenging his own religious establishment and eventually honoring Jesus through an extravagant act of care. The teaching also reflects on Haven’s own post-evangelical identity, asking what it might mean to reclaim some things from our spiritual heritage while leaving other things behind. Ultimately, renewal is presented not as something we can control, but as an invitation to being again and trust that the Spirit is still making all things new.

Review Leah’s notes here and listen to or watch the teaching below.

What does it take to speak when everyone around you is saying something else? In this teaching from Haven’s recurring Everyday Heroes series, we meet Micaiah, a little-known prophet who refuses to echo the 400 voices telling King Ahab what he wants to hear. His story becomes a way of exploring the pressure we all face to conform, whether that pressure comes from political leaders, workplace hierarchies, social media, or the expectations of the people around us. This teaching calls us to become people who can speak sacred truth, listen when others speak it, and participate in the repair and renewal that becomes possible when we refuse to let fear or conformity have the final word.

Review Leah’s notes here and listen to or watch the teaching below.

As the Collective Care in Uncaring Times series comes to a close, this teaching invites us to consider what collective care looks like when we look beyond the immediate moment. Reflecting on Corinthians and Revelation, we explore the idea that we are invited to collaborate with the Divine in building communities and a world that can outlast us. Even when disappointment, loss, and uncertainty make it difficult to imagine a hopeful future, we can continue the work of nurturing, repairing, and renewing what has been entrusted to us. Looking ahead, then, becomes an act of hope, humility, and collective care.

Review Leah’s notes here and listen to or watch the teaching below.

Teaching Team Speaker Sylvia Williams continues Haven’s Collective Care in Uncaring Times series by exploring Jesus’ command to “love one another and asking what it looks like for a church to become known by its love. Drawing from the stories of John and the Book of Ruth, Sylvia reflects on the power of accompaniment, generosity, hospitality, and community across differences. Drawing from her own experiences of finding belonging in small group community and practical examples from Haven’s own life together, she reminds us that love is most visible in the everyday ways we show up for one another.

Review Sylvia’s notes here and listen to or watch the teaching below.

Continuing Haven’s series, Collective Care in Uncaring Times, Leah explores what it means to pursue repair in a world increasingly shaped by disconnection and relationship rupture. Drawing from the story of Zacchaeus in Luke, she reflects on how Jesus models a path toward healing that moves beyond forgiveness alone and into accountability, restitution, and restored relationship. Through stories of personal, communal, and societal repair, this teaching reminds uas that while rupture may be part of being human, repair is sacred work. In uncaring times, communities of faith are called to become communities that keep returning to one another.

Review Leah’s notes here and listen to or watch the teaching below.

In this teaching, Leah continues Haven’s series, Collective Care in Uncaring Times, exploring how truth-telling is an essential act of collective care. Drawing from Jesus’ sharp critiques of religious hypocrisy in Gospel of Matthew, she reflects on the dangers of hypocrisy, the importance of remembering history honestly, and the role of lament in responding to injustice. Rather than avoiding harsh truths, this teaching invites us to become communities courageous enough to name reality with both honesty and compassion. Because honesty creates the possibility for repair, and lament keeps our hearts open instead of growing numb. In uncaring times, telling the truth is one of the most loving things a community can do.

Review Leah’s notes here and listen to or watch the teaching below.

Continuing this season’s series, Collective Care in Uncaring Times, Leah explores what Jesus meant when he spoke of God as Abba, a nurturing parent whose character is defined by compassion, generosity, and care. Drawing from Jesus’ teachings, the parable of the Prodigal Son, and contemporary theology, Leah challenges authoritarian images of God that often shape our faith and politics. Instead, she invites us to imagine the Kin-dom of God as a community rooted in nurture, collective care, and radical belonging. In uncaring times, this message reminds us that God’s love is something we are meant not only to receive, but also to embody for one another.

Review Leah’s notes here and listen to or watch the teaching below.

In this compelling Pride Sunday teaching, speaker Jenny Kwan explores the intersection of psychology, spirituality, and social exclusion through the provocative claim that “disgust is not the voice of God.” Beginning with the story of the hemorrhaging woman in Gospel of Mark, Jenny examines how disgust functions as an evolutionary response to contamination, but can also be socially conditioned and weaponized against entire groups of people.

This message challenges us to reconsider the assumptions we baptize as truth and invites us to follow Jesus’ example of moving toward those whom society pushes away. Ultimately, it is a call to reject shame, embrace belonging, and cultivate communities of healing and solidarity.

Review Jenny’s notes here and listen to or watch the teaching below.