Sermons from Pastor Steven Canfield

What if the biggest barrier to sharing good news isn't courage but language? Pastor Steven compares the church's familiar phrases to Pittsburgh-ese, the regional dialect where "Jeet yet?" means "Did you eat yet?" and "Kennywood's open" means your fly is down. If you're not from there, you're lost. And that's exactly what happens when the church talks to people using insider vocabulary no one outside these walls can parse. The evangelist's real gift isn't running through a script. It's building a pathway between the cosmic reality of what Jesus has done and the broken, ordinary life right in front of someone, and doing it in words that actually land.

Paul's vision in Ephesians is cosmic — Jesus filling all things, a new humanity growing up into his glory. But how does that massive vision land in a local church on a Sunday morning? Pastor Steven turns to the second of the fivefold gifts: the prophetic impulse. Prophets are the ones who walk up to the rest of us, tap us on the shoulder, and say, "Come look at it from this side." It's an impulse rooted in urgency, truth-telling, compassion, and imagination — the kind of gut-level response that rises when something is broken and someone needs to say so. And it doesn't end with the call-out. The prophet casts a new vision of what life could look like if we actually followed the way of Jesus.

Paul's letter to the Ephesians carries a dream so big it's cosmic — all things gathered up in Christ, the kindness of Jesus on display for ages to come. But Pastor Steven doesn't leave us staring at the sky. He brings us to the image of a victorious king riding through the streets, throwing out gifts — not candy at a parade, but gifts that transform the way you live. That's what Jesus does as he ascends: he looks at each of us and hands us something to carry. This week launches a new five-week series exploring the fivefold ministry gifts of the church — Apostle, Prophet, Evangelist, Shepherd, Teacher — and the unique part each of us plays in helping the church grow up into the fullness of who Jesus is.

In John's telling of the resurrection, every detail is a symbol. The tomb is fit for royalty. The setting is a garden — an echo of the very first place God walked with his people. And when Mary mistakes Jesus for the gardener, she's wrong — but she's also right.Pastor Steven walks us through the rich imagery John layers into this moment, all building toward one repeated question: Why are you weeping? It's the question the angels ask Mary, and then Jesus asks her, too. But unlike when we ask it — searching for information, trying to help — Jesus asks it as someone who has already changed the answer. He's standing in the overlap between our broken present and God's good future, and he's pulling that future into now.It's an invitation to see something that changes the meaning of our tears.

Palm Sunday is one of the most confusing celebrations in the church calendar — and if you're not yet confused, Steven suggests you don't actually understand it yet. Between the triumphal entry and the cross lies a week of riddles, symbolic actions, and a weeping king heading toward suffering. Drawing on the historical echo of Judah Maccabee's military triumph 150 years earlier, Steven shows how Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a donkey to announce something nobody expected: a kingdom flipped upside down, and a king who lays down his life for broken, messy people.Art by Jozef Sedmak

Anger might be the most complicated monster of all — because unlike the others, it isn't always wrong. It's wired into us as a response to threat and injustice, and it can move in either direction: toward bitterness and rage, or toward something that looks a lot like peacemaking.This week, as the series closes and Palm Sunday approaches, a question from the book of Jonah becomes the lens: Is it good for you to be angry? It's an invitation to slow down, get honest, and ask where our anger is actually headed — and whether we're willing to let it be aimed somewhere better.Because at the cross, Jesus takes the hostility and brokenness of the world and channels it into the ultimate act of peace. That, pastor Steven suggests, is the pattern we're invited into.

Most of us aren't short on passion — we have plenty of it for coffee, sports, music, the small pleasures that light us up without much effort. The question this week is why that same energy so rarely finds its way toward God.The monster of apathy doesn't cause chaos by anything it does — but by everything it doesn't. It's the quiet cold that settles into the heart and makes the pursuit of God feel like something we'll get to eventually.The antidote comes from a striking image: David, running for his life through a wilderness with literally no water, writing — my soul thirsts for you. Not for rescue. For God.

Excessiveness vs. the Art of Balance & the Beauty of BelongingSome monsters are loud and obvious. These three are often overlooked — not because they're rare, but because they've become so familiar we've stopped noticing them.This week covers gluttony, greed, and lust together, not as a moral checklist, but as expressions of the same restless human impulse: the drive to take more than we need. A birthright traded for a bowl of stew. A man who keeps building bigger barns. A powerful figure undone by desire that overrode everything else.What holds all three together — and what begins to undo them — is a surprisingly simple idea from the Sermon on the Mount: that we are not the center of the story. When we know we belong to God, and to our neighbor, something in the relentless grasping starts to loosen.

Of all the monsters lurking in the human heart, envy may be the most hidden — and the most corrosive. It starts as a familiar ache: I want what they have. But it can quietly slide into something darker: I want them not to have it.From King Saul's spiraling jealousy of David, to the older brother seething outside the prodigal son's welcome-home party, scripture keeps returning to this particular monster — the one that takes another person's good fortune as a personal insult.This week, we look honestly at the ways envy hides in us — in our scrolling, our comparing, our quiet celebrations when someone else stumbles — and at the surprising antidote scripture offers: not willpower, but the life-giving forces of gratitude, contentment, and love.

We kick off Monsters of the Heart — a Lenten journey through the seven deadly sins — with the monster that underlies them all: pride. But this isn't a lecture on bad behavior. It's an invitation to look honestly at something quietly lurking in every human heart: the deep, subtle sense that we don't really need God.From the garden of Eden to a powerful Syrian general asked to humble himself in a muddy river, the stories of scripture keep returning to the same question — whose play are we living in? Our own, or something much bigger?This week, pastor Steven introduces the series and explores what it might mean to "open the windows" and catch a glimpse of the larger story God is telling — and how that glimpse is the very thing that begins to loosen pride's grip on us.