What were you made to become?

Paul admits he isn't there yet, and tells us why he keeps running anyway: because Christ Jesus has already made him his own. In this sermon on Philippians 3:12–4:1, we follow Paul toward a prize that does not wilt, discover what it means to be a citizen of heaven, and hear the promise at the very centre of our inheritance: the risen Lord will transform our lowly bodies to be like his glorious body.

Along the way: a crown of wild celery, an acorn and an oak, one small Greek word (telos) that runs through the whole passage, and the difference between heaven as where we are going and heaven as where our King is coming from.

"Held for Glory"
The Rev. Dr. Devin Hunt
Eternal Hope Anglican Church (ACNA), Carleton Place, Ontario
The Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity · 4 October 2026
Part of our autumn series, "How Great an Inheritance"

PRAYER
If something behind you will not let go, you don't have to carry it alone. To arrange a time for private prayer, contact the Rector: rector@eternalhopechurch.org · (613) 324-8126

Join us Sundays at 10:30 a.m. for Holy Eucharist.
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Paul says that Jesus "emptied himself." Of what? Many of us assume he set
his divinity aside for a while and picked it up again at the ascension.
Paul says nothing of the kind — and what he does say is stranger, and far
better.

In this sermon on Philippians 2:1–13, we ask what God looks like when he
is most himself. Philippi assumed the answer was upward: power, conquest,
glory — a god who looked like Alexander, or Augustus, only larger. Paul's
answer is downward. And the descent to a slave's cross turns out not to be
an interruption of God's majesty, but the fullest disclosure of it.

Along the way:

- What "he emptied himself" (ekenosen) does and does not mean — and why
Calvin's "concealed, not lessened" matters
- Why Paul begins with four gifts before he asks for anything
- Which name is "the name above every name" — and why Paul's quotation of
Isaiah 45:23 is the boldest thing in the letter
- What "work out your own salvation with fear and trembling" actually
asks of you, and why it is not works-righteousness
- "It is God who works in you, both to will and to work" — hope for those
praying for family who do not yet believe

Readings: Philippians 2:1–13 · Isaiah 45:22–23 · Matthew 21:23–32 ·
Isaiah 25:6–9

Preached by the Rev. Dr. Devin Hunt at Eternal Hope Anglican Church
(ACNA), Carleton Place, Ontario — Trinity 17, 27 September 2026.
Part of our autumn series, "How Great an Inheritance."

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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.

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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

A Canaanite woman comes out into a road and asks Israel's King for a mercy she has no claim to. What she meets first is silence. Then a wall. Then a saying so hard that the Church has spent two thousand years trying to soften it.

And then she says something that may be the most remarkable sentence anyone speaks in the Gospels.

Matthew reaches back centuries for the word he uses to name her — Canaanite, the old word for the peoples Israel was commanded to drive out, a word nobody in the first century used of a living person. That is what he wants us to see standing in the road: the ancient enemy, asking for mercy. And she is not standing there as a representative of anything. She is a mother with a daughter she cannot help.

This sermon does not try to make the passage easier than it is. It asks what Jesus is doing in the silence, why he says what he says about the children's bread, and what exactly the woman understood that a great many people inside the covenant had forgotten. Along the way it goes to Isaiah 56 and the promise of a house of prayer for all peoples — and to a court in the Jerusalem temple where that promise was quietly built over with market stalls.

Preached at Eternal Hope Anglican Church, Carleton Place, Ontario, on the Eleventh Sunday after Trinity, as part of our summer series Now and Not Yet: A Summer in Matthew — following the King who has come and is coming.

📖 Readings: Isaiah 56:1–8 · Psalm 67 · Matthew 15:21–28
🌐 Website: eternalhopechurch.org
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About Eternal Hope Anglican Church
We are a congregation of ordinary people in Carleton Place, Ontario — drawn together by the resurrection of Jesus and the hope it sets loose in the world (Phil. 3:10). We belong to the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA), serving Carleton Place and the wider Ottawa Valley. Here you'll find biblically faithful preaching, historic Anglican liturgy, and a community learning — slowly and together — what it means to follow Jesus.

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Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible, copyright © 2001 by Crossway.

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Matthew never says the disciples were afraid of the storm.

They had rowed all night against a contrary wind, and the shore was no closer at three in the morning than it had been at sunset. Matthew records no fear at all — until a figure comes toward them across the water. Fear enters the account only when Jesus arrives.

This sermon looks at the disconnect at the heart of that night: what they knew was true, and their eyes were not lying to them, and the two could not be made to fit. They were not looking at a stranger. They were looking at the one who had fed them at sunset, and what they saw was the thing that had come to kill them. Nobody rebukes them for it.

And when Peter goes down, the order of what happens next carries the whole of the Christian faith. The hand comes first. The question comes afterward, asked of a man who has already been caught.

Preached at Eternal Hope Anglican Church, Carleton Place, Ontario, on Sunday 9 August 2026 — the seventh sermon in our summer series, Now and Not Yet: A Summer in Matthew.

Preacher: The Rev. Devin Hunt

Jesus hears that John the Baptist has been executed. He gets into a boat and goes off by himself. He does not get to stay by himself — the crowds find him, thousands of them, and Matthew tells us that when he saw them his heart broke for them.

What follows is the feeding of the five thousand: a passage most of us think we know. But the miracle begins with twelve men telling our Lord plainly that they have nothing. Five loaves and two fish — not enough for their own supper, let alone anyone else's. And he does not tell them to look harder. He says: bring me what you have.

This sermon is for anyone who has been giving for a long time and has run low. For those caring for a parent, a spouse, a child, a person who cannot manage without them. And for anyone who has quietly begun to wonder whether God's compassion runs on the same limited supply as their own.

We look at the Greek word Matthew uses for compassion, at the strange arithmetic by which Matthew makes the supply smaller than Elisha's rather than larger, and at what it means that the disciples fed thousands with bread not one crumb of which was theirs.

"He Gave Them Something to Eat" — Matthew 14:13–21
Preached by The Rev. Devin Hunt at Eternal Hope Anglican Church, Carleton Place, Ontario
Sunday, 2 August — the Ninth Sunday after Trinity (Proper 13)

Sixth in our summer series Now and Not Yet: A Summer in Matthew.

Readings: Nehemiah 9:16–21 · Psalm 78:(1–13) 14–26 · Romans 8:35–39 · Matthew 14:13–21
Scripture from the ESV. Worship from the Book of Common Prayer (2019).

▶️ Full service: https://www.youtube.com/live/J_5lW8IHObc?si=l6uJOAVao6rQvNTl
📍 Eternal Hope Anglican Church, Carleton Place
🌐 https://eternalhopechurch.org/

Eternal Hope is a parish of the Anglican Church in North America.

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