Holy Trinity Silicon Valley - Homilies & Sermons

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 2:13Resource mentioned: Lewis B. Smedes, The Art of Forgiving: When You Need to Forgive and Don't Know How
About Holy Trinity Silicon ValleyHoly 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.

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.

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.

For two thousand years, Christians have practiced their faith by gathering weekly as a church. So it may come as a surprise that Jesus mentions the church only three times in Matthew's Gospel. In one of them, He tells us almost everything we need to know about what the church is for.
In this sermon, Rev. John Gorin turns to Peter's confession at Caesarea Philippi: "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God". John then asks what the church looks like when it is at its best. He offers three marks: a church with Jesus at its center, answering rightly the question of who He is; a church engaged in the mission it has been given, breathing the Lord's life into strained relationships, offenses, and the ordinary demands of a week; and a church rooted and grounded in love, honest that none of us has arrived.
Along the way, he takes up the long-contested question of what Jesus meant by "this rock". Rev. John explains how Catholic, Reformation, and Anglican readings differ and offers a corrective on the gates of Hades: gates are defensive, not offensive. The church is not bracing for attack. It is advancing with an offer of life.
Holy Trinity Silicon Valley is an Anglican parish (ACNA / C4SO) in the heart of the Bay Area.

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

The best soccer players in the world aren't set apart by their touch. They're set apart by how often they lift their heads — scanning the field every few seconds, because the picture decays that fast.
In this sermon from Ordinary Time, Mayo Adigun suggests the life of faith works much the same way. We have been given a true picture of the field: a God who reigns over chaos and is even now making all things whole. But the picture fades. The winds pick up, we look away, and within seconds we've lost it.
Tracing three scenes — Jonah singing thanksgiving from the belly of the fish, the Lord enthroned above the storm in Psalm 29, and Jesus walking out onto the water in Matthew 14 — this message lands on a simple claim: chaos does not reign. And when Peter sinks, the hand reaches him before a single word about his faith.
For anyone in a season where the shalom you walked in a moment ago is hard to remember, this one is for you.
Texts: Jonah 2, Psalm 29, Matthew 14:22–33
Holy Trinity Silicon Valley is an Anglican church (ACNA / C4SO) in Palo Alto, California — a liturgical community for those drawn to beauty, depth, and historic Christian worship. Join us Sundays, or find more info at https://www.Holytrinitysv.org

We know how to bring God our catastrophes. The harder question is what to do with the ordinary friction of being a person. Maybe that's the missed meal, the runny nose, the car that cuts us off, or the small things that quietly keep us from prayer and from our neighbors.
Preaching from Matthew 14:13–21, Romans 8:35–39, and Nehemiah 9:16–21, Kate Lucky begins with two children's Bibles and the story of Christ feeding the Five Thousand. From there she turns to the passage that insists nothing in creation can separate us from the love of God.
Her answer is not lower expectations but a wider view of mercy: the God who sustained Israel in the wilderness attended to the smallest details. He is present in the tedium of living in a body, and the capacity he builds in us is meant to be turned outward, toward other people's hunger, insecurity, and ridiculous humanity.
Recorded August 2, 2026, at Holy Trinity Silicon Valley — an Anglican church in Palo Alto (ACNA / Diocese of Churches for the Sake of Others).
To learn more about Holy Trinity Silicon Valley head to:
https://www.holytrinitysv.org

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

What if the weeds in the field look exactly like the wheat?
In this sermon on the parable of the wheat and the weeds (Matthew 13), David McGaw digs into a detail most of us miss: the "weed" Jesus names is darnel, a toxic false wheat that is nearly indistinguishable from the real thing until harvest. Its roots entangle with the wheat, which means you cannot rip it out without destroying the good crop alongside it.
That single agricultural fact reframes the whole parable. The field is the world, not the church. The call is not to purify the field ourselves, or to spend our lives wondering
To find out more about Holy Trinity Silicon Valley head to:
https://www.holytrinitysv.org

Somewhere around thirty-five, our bodies start to slow down. Life in the Spirit works the other way. The older we get, the more vibrant and consequential our life in Christ is meant to become.
In this sermon from Romans 8, Rev. John Gorin looks at three things the Holy Spirit does for us. He assures us of a future secured by the risen Christ. He helps us today, in the middle of the stubborn habits and old ways of thinking that are so hard to pull out by the roots. And he reminds us that we belong to God the Father, adopted as his children, able to call him "Abba."
If you've been fighting the same battle for a long time, or quietly wondering whether any of this holds up, this one is for you. Outwardly we are wasting away. Inwardly we are being renewed day by day.
To find out more about Holy Trinity Silicon Valley Anglican church head to:
https://www.holytrinitysv.org