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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