Christ Our Hope Sermons

Christ Our Hope Sermons collects the Sunday preaching of Christ Our Hope Anglican Church in Fort Collins, Colorado. It is a sizable archive. Each episode carries a date, a liturgical marker such as Epiphany II, Lent V or Eastertide II, a sermon title and the preacher's name, so the church year is legible from the episode list alone. The recent sermons in view span Epiphany, Lent and Eastertide. A brief recorded introduction names the church and says it hopes the listener can join it at the table soon, and each message closes with a pointer to worship in person or online. During Lent the introduction changes to note the season. Fr. Jeromie Rand preaches most of the sermons in the recent window; Fr. Jason Bowman is credited on 'Repentance Means Living Differently' from Epiphany III. The preaching has a recognisable shape. It starts with something concrete and often secular, then walks into the scripture reading and stays there. A childhood memory of pressing two vending-machine buttons rather than choosing one becomes the way into 'Faith That Holds', a sermon on Thomas that argues he already had evidence and was really asking for a certainty he could not be given. Steve Jobs announcing the iPhone in 2007 sets up a message about fishermen with rough hands being asked to give up their trade, and the claim that repentance always costs something. Henry Scott Holland's 1910 sermon 'The King of Terrors', preached in St. Paul's Cathedral after the death of King Edward VII, opens 'Death is Not a Part of Life', which grieves openly, cites 1 Thessalonians and Lazarus, and refuses to treat death as natural. 'The Crisis of Our Age vs. The Hope of Christ' begins with news headlines and a locker-room conversation before turning to sin, God's law and the image of God. 'Beholding the Lamb of God' reads the Gospel of John as something like an ancient movie, a story meant to be heard aloud in a single sitting, and asks for attention to be given to Jesus before anything else. On Easter Sunday the children stay in the service and are recruited to help with the sermon. That Easter message also folds in Peter's early preaching on what the resurrection means. The tone is warm and patient, more teaching than performance, and the illustrations do real work rather than decorating. What a listener gets is expository preaching that takes its texts seriously and keeps returning to one conviction: hope is real because Christ is risen, and death, sin and the anxieties of the present age do not get the last word. This is sermon audio start to finish rather than an interview or discussion show. A natural entry point is the Easter Sunday message, 'Hope Did Not Die', where that central claim is stated most directly.