The Palace of Versailles was built to keep everyone asking one question: where do I stand? We may laugh at blue coats and red heels, but Silicon Valley has its own ladder. It just has closer rungs.

In this sermon, David McGaw looks at Paul's letter to the church in Philippi, a Roman colony of army veterans where life was organized around rank and privilege. Paul calls the church to regard one another as better than themselves and to take on the mind of Christ, who emptied himself (kenosis) and came down to serve.

Drawing on N.T. Wright's translation and Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Life Together, this message asks what humility looks like when something feels scarce, especially our time. Bonhoeffer's answer starts with listening and with letting God interrupt our plans through the people around us. Christ stepped down from the ladder, and he invites us to step off it too.

In this episode:

• Why status-seeking survives even in "egalitarian" cultures like ours
• Humility in abundance versus humility in scarcity
• Listening as the first service we owe one another
• The hymn of Philippians 2 as a model to follow, not just a theological artifact

Scripture (Proper 21, Year A): Ezekiel 18:1–4, 25–32; Philippians 2:1–13; Matthew 21:23–32 Preached Sunday, September 27, 2026

Holy Trinity Silicon Valley is an Anglican church in the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) and the Diocese of Churches for the Sake of Others (C4SO). We serve Palo Alto, Mountain View, and the wider Stanford and Silicon Valley community. We're rooted in ancient liturgy and practice, and we gather to worship, listen, and serve together. Learn more at holytrinitysv.org.

What does it actually mean to be spiritually mature? Drawing on years of hospital chaplaincy with people facing the end of life, Deacon Cindy Miller reflects on Paul's letter to the Philippians and the difference between achieving success and pressing on toward Christ.

In a place where it is easy to measure our lives by money, status, and who we know, Paul offers a countercultural vision: maturity isn't a status we reach, but a daily, humble reliance on God. Cindy explores how we can keep turning back when we drift, why this life isn't meant to be lived alone, and why we don't have to wait until the end to reorder what matters most.

Scripture: Philippians 3; Isaiah 5:1–7; Matthew 21:33–46 Preacher: Deacon Cindy Miller Recorded: Sunday, October 4, 2026

Holy Trinity Silicon Valley is an Anglican church (ACNA / C4SO) gathering in the heart of Silicon Valley. Learn more and join us on Sunday: https://holytrinitysv.org

How do you stop worrying in an age of anxiety? In the final sermon of our Philippians series, Rector John Gorin preaches on Philippians 4:4–7: “Do not be anxious about anything.”

Paul wrote this letter of joy while under house arrest in Rome, and in it he gives a simple pattern for anxious people:

1. Give your worries to God, through prayer, specific petition, and thanksgiving.
2. Receive God’s peace in return, the peace that “transcends all understanding” and guards your heart and mind like a detachment of soldiers.
3. Leave it in God’s hands, without picking it back up or putting God on a timer.

Along the way, Fr. John speaks to the anxieties of life in Silicon Valley right now: uncertainty about AI, a tense news cycle, and the private worries we carry about family, health, and friends. He also shares how Holy Trinity’s lease renewal came through after a season of prayer when a move seemed likely.

Scripture: Philippians 4:4–7; Matthew 6:25–34; John 11

Holy Trinity Silicon Valley is an Anglican church in Palo Alto (ACNA, Diocese of C4SO). We are a liturgical community at 3373 Middlefield Road, serving Palo Alto, Stanford, Mountain View, Menlo Park, and the wider Bay Area. Visitors are always welcome.

🌐 holytrinitysv.org 📍 3373 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto, CA 94306

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.

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