Just before this passage, Jesus tells a story about a man who leaves ninety-nine sheep on a hillside and goes into the dark after the one that wandered off. Then he turns to the disciples and hands them the shepherd's own word: If your brother sins, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone.

Go.

Matthew 18 is usually read as a procedure — the fine print on church discipline. It is something else. It is a search, and the one who sends us searching has just said he does not intend to lose anybody.

This sermon looks at what Jesus actually asks: the private conversation before the public one, the dignity left to the person who is in the wrong, and the uncomfortable fact that the one who must go is not the rector or the wardens but whoever happened to notice. It takes seriously the hardest sentence in the passage — let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector — and asks why the Lord who ate with tax collectors would use those words at all, and what the distance is finally for.

And it rests on the promise underneath the whole thing: where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them. Not a consolation at the end of a hard passage, but the reason underneath every word of it.

Scripture
Matthew 18:15–20 (ESV). Appointed lessons: Ezekiel 33:1–11 · Psalm 119:33–48 · Romans 12:9–21.

Series
Now and Not Yet: A Summer in Matthew — eleven Sundays through Matthew 10–18, Proper 8 to Proper 18, on the Kingdom of God as both present and still to come.

Preached by the Rev. Dr. Devin Hunt at Eternal Hope Anglican Church, Carleton Place, Ontario, on Sunday, 6 September 2026 — Proper 18, the eleventh and final Sunday of Now and Not Yet: A Summer in Matthew.

Eternal Hope is a small Anglican parish in Carleton Place, Ontario, in the Anglican Diocese of the Ottawa Valley (ACNA), worshipping from the 2019 Book of Common Prayer. Visitors are always welcome.

Full services are livestreamed each Sunday. Subscribe for weekly sermons.

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A note before you begin: the audio on this recording is uneven in places. We're a small parish still working out our recording setup, and we're sorry for the rough patches. The manuscript is available if anything is hard to make out — just ask.

A week ago, Peter said the truest thing anyone says in Matthew's Gospel: You are the Christ, the Son of the living God. Jesus called him blessed. He named him the rock. He gave him the keys.

Three verses later, Jesus calls him Satan.

What changed in between was not that Peter stopped loving his Lord. It was that he loved him, and could not bear what he had just been heard to say — that the road ran through Jerusalem, and through a cross.

This sermon asks what happens when the thing standing between us and God is not a sin we can name, but a good hope held too tightly. And it ends where the reading ends: with a Judge who is also the Saviour, and a road that has already been walked.

Preached at Morning Prayer, Sunday 30 August 2026
Eternal Hope Anglican Church, Carleton Place, Ontario

Readings
Jeremiah 15:15–21 · Psalm 26 · Matthew 16:21–27

Collect of the Day
O Lord, we pray that your grace may always precede and follow after us, that we may continually be given to good works; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version. Liturgical texts from the Book of Common Prayer 2019, Anglican Church in North America.

Eternal Hope is an ACNA parish in Carleton Place, Ontario. All are welcome.

#Anglican #ACNA #Sermon #Matthew #BCP2019 #Discipleship #CarletonPlace

Jesus takes his disciples twenty-five miles north — past the top of Galilee, out to a place called Caesarea Philippi. A pagan city. A shrine to the god Pan. A cliff face carved with niches, a statue of a god standing in every hollow, and at the foot of it a cave the ancients believed opened into the world of the dead.

And it is there, of all places, that he turns and asks them who he is.

He asks twice. The first question is easy — who do people say that the Son of Man is? Anyone can answer that one, and the answers that come back are generous ones. A prophet. Elijah returned. One of the greats. Every one of them a compliment, and every one of them able to be said from a distance.

Then he asks it again, differently. And Simon Peter answers.

What comes out the other side is not an opinion, and not a private feeling. It is the Church.

This sermon looks at what Peter's confession actually produced — an assembly, built by Christ on a man who would deny him, holding keys that were only ever lent, and carrying a promise that has nothing to do with our strength and everything to do with the grave.

Preached at Eternal Hope Anglican Church, Carleton Place, Ontario
Proper 16 · The Twelfth Sunday after Trinity · 23 August 2026

Part of the summer preaching series Now and Not Yet: A Summer in Matthew — following the King who has come and is coming.

Text: Matthew 16:13–20 (ESV)
Also read: Isaiah 51:1–6 · Psalm 138 · Romans 11:33–12:8