Holy Trinity Silicon Valley - Homilies & Sermons

Holy Trinity Silicon Valley

Holy Trinity Church is a growing Anglican church in the heart of Silicon Valley, California. We value being an inter-generational community formed around Scripture, Spirit, and Sacrament, the foundation of Anglican spirituality. This podcast allows you to join us each week for our Homilies and Sermons, where we explore life in Christ together. 🌐 Learn more about Holy Trinity: https://www.holytrinitysv.org 📷 Instagram: @HolyTrinitySV

  1. 2h ago

    "Struggling to Forgive?" - Rev. John Gorin

    Peter asked Jesus how many times he must forgive, and offered a generous answer: seven. Jesus' reply, "seventy-seven times," moves forgiveness beyond anything we can count. In this sermon from Holy Trinity Silicon Valley, the Rev. John Gorin looks at the parable of the unmerciful servant (Matthew 18:21–35). He calls it both comforting and disturbing. It is comforting because it shows the scale of God's mercy toward us. It is disturbing because it makes clear that forgiving others is not optional. In this episode: Why we have a God-given "justice reflex," and why staying there blocks our path like a mudslide on Highway 1 through Big Sur How unresolved offenses spread through workplaces, families, and churches, including a medieval dispute over communion bread during the East–West split The unpayable debt: what the king's mercy cost, and what Christ's mercy cost The link between receiving God's forgiveness and extending it (Matthew 6:14–15) A practical step: naming the offense and declaring forgiveness in the name of Jesus, even before our emotions catch up Insights from Lewis Smedes' The Art of Forgiving on relapses, lingering anger, and patience with the healing process Why "mercy triumphs over judgment" (James 2:13) Scripture: Matthew 18:21–35; Matthew 6:9–15; James 2:13 Resource mentioned: Lewis B. Smedes, The Art of Forgiving: When You Need to Forgive and Don't Know How About Holy Trinity Silicon Valley Holy Trinity Silicon Valley is an Anglican church in Palo Alto, California, part of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) and the Diocese of Christ Our Hope (C4SO). We are a liturgical, sacramental community rooted in ancient tradition and engaged with the life of Silicon Valley. Learn more and join us on Sunday at https://www.holytrinitysv.org.

  2. Sep 8

    "The Season of the In-Between" - Deacon Cindy Miller

    Summer's over but autumn hasn't shown up yet. Deacon Cindy Miller notices that we're living in that same gap spiritually: the Kingdom of God is here, and it also isn't here yet. She'll tell you she doesn't usually bother titling her sermons. This one she did, because the week leading up to it was one of the hardest she's had, and the in-between is where she found herself sitting with some genuinely difficult scriptures. Ezekiel gets called as a watchman. Matthew hands the church an uncomfortable process for what to do when someone sins against you. Paul, in Romans 12, says your love has to be sincere, then keeps going: bless the people who persecute you, mourn with those who mourn, live in harmony. The question Cindy keeps returning to is why. Why does God ask us to do the hard thing and go to the person who hurt us? Her answer is that he's teaching us how to love the way he loves, and that's a lifetime of formation rather than a switch that flips. Keep short accounts. Go to people in a way that's loving and respectful, because you have no idea what kind of week they've had. And when someone won't hear it, you don't write them off forever, you just move them out of your close circle and keep leaving the door open. She lands on three things from Romans 12:12 to carry into the week. Be joyful in hope. Be patient in affliction. Stay faithful in prayer. One line worth the whole sermon: love is an action, not an adjective. Anyone who's been married a long time already knows that. Holy Trinity is an Anglican church (ACNA / C4SO) in Palo Alto. Sermons are posted weekly.

  3. Sep 8

    "Help, Lord. I'm Conflicted." - Rev. John Gorin

    Every team has conflict. Most of us just hope nobody brings it up. Rev. John Gorin starts this week with Patrick Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions of a Team and its second dysfunction, the fear of conflict, before turning to a much older one in Matthew 16. Jesus tells his disciples that whoever wants to save their life will lose it, and whoever loses it for his sake will find it. Every disciple has to decide which life they're actually trying to keep. From there John looks at why the alternatives have such a pull on us. Money, power, sex, and the applause of other people were good gifts in the garden before they got bent, and they still promise a security they can't deliver. Peter finds this out the hard way. He's just been called the rock, he takes Jesus aside to talk him out of the cross, and he gets one of the sharpest rebukes in the Gospels. Not because he's malicious, but because well-meant advice can still come from the wrong place. The last stretch is practical. John calls them "little habits": bookending the day with Morning Prayer and Compline, being honest about the conflicts you'd rather deny, and giving thanks in all circumstances even when you don't like how things are going. Small things, done for years, by saints who never faced anything as dramatic as Calvary. Also in this one: Romans 7, Tim Keller on counterfeit gods, Bruner on what self-denial is and isn't, and a Supertramp reference that will land for about a third of the room. Holy Trinity is an Anglican church (ACNA / C4SO) in Palo Alto. Sermons are posted weekly.

  4. Aug 18

    "Boundaries and Borders" - Elliot Haught

    Elliot Haught opens with a fence. A redwood one, built in his Oakland front yard with a few friends after the contractor quotes came back way too high. It's a good fence. It marks where the private yard ends and the public sidewalk begins, and the gate works like a portal between the two. Boundaries do that. They're useful, and they're deeply human. They're also how we decide who's in and who's out — and that's where this sermon goes. The readings for the day all circle the same question. Isaiah tells foreigners and eunuchs, the outsiders of ancient Israel, that they get a name in God's house that outlasts sons and daughters. Psalm 67 says "all nations" and "peoples" twelve times in seven verses, which Elliot admits is almost obnoxious. Paul warns the Gentiles in Rome not to get smug about being grafted into someone else's olive tree. And then there's the Canaanite woman in Matthew 15 — an enemy of Israel, by the standards of the day — who asks Jesus to heal her daughter and doesn't take his first answer for a final one. Her faith is desperate, persistent, humble, and, Elliot argues, genuinely playful. She's the one who brings up the crumbs under the table. Fifteen centuries later, the church put her words in the Prayer of Humble Access. An outsider's line became the prayer we say right before we come to the table. As Elliot puts it: that's very much like God. Recorded August 16, 2026 at Holy Trinity Silicon Valley. Readings: Isaiah 56:1, 6–8 · Psalm 67 · Romans 11:1–2a, 29–32 · Matthew 15:21–28 More: holytrinitysv.org

  5. Jul 28

    “God Knows When We Don't” - Rev. John Gorin

    Interested in checking out Holy Trinity Silicon Valley? Head to https://www.holytrinitysv.org The night before D-Day, General Eisenhower had two meteorologists telling him opposite things, a hundred thousand troops waiting, and no way to push the decision onto anyone else. Most of us will never carry a choice that size. But we know the feeling of standing in front of a decision we don't feel qualified to make. This week we sit with the question of discernment. When Solomon became king, he had every option available to him and asked God for one thing: a listening heart. Not wealth, not a long life, not victory over his enemies. Just the ability to tell the difference between what is right and what only looks right. We talk about the pots currently on your stove. The relational rift you keep circling back to. The next step in your career, and the worry that you're either too late or too early. The self-care you keep putting off because accomplishment feels more urgent. And we look honestly at what makes discernment hard, from our habit of gathering one more data point to the quiet bias that wants a certain answer before we ever start praying. Then Romans 8 does what Romans 8 does. God is working all of it for good, and that good has a shape: becoming more like His Son. Gregory of Nyssa pictured our souls as silver mirrors slowly being polished clean. Every decision, every setback, every joy is part of that polishing. And while we wait for clarity, the Holy Spirit is already groaning on our behalf, praying a prayer beyond prayer. If God is for us, who can be against us? Scripture: 1 Kings 3:5-12, Romans 8:26-32

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Holy Trinity Church is a growing Anglican church in the heart of Silicon Valley, California. We value being an inter-generational community formed around Scripture, Spirit, and Sacrament, the foundation of Anglican spirituality. This podcast allows you to join us each week for our Homilies and Sermons, where we explore life in Christ together. 🌐 Learn more about Holy Trinity: https://www.holytrinitysv.org 📷 Instagram: @HolyTrinitySV