Monday Prep — 19th Sunday in Ordinary Time, 16th August 2026

What Richard Actually Preached

Preached Sunday 16th August 2026. This summary was revised after listening back to the recording — the first version was written from the manuscript, and the sermon in the room differed from it in several places worth keeping on the record.

The set reading was Genesis 39:1-20, but Richard used it as a doorway rather than a room — the sermon ran the whole Joseph novella (37, 39–50), on the grounds that these smaller stories only mean much inside the meta-narrative they were compiled into. Mark 10 he left alone entirely. He named the form himself, early on: “a big reading with jokes.”

The thesis arrived in the first minutes rather than the last. Coming out of the centring music — Lior’s “Avinu Malkeinu (Hymn of Compassion)” — Richard went back to the song, noted that it opens a prayer, and drew the line the rest of the service hung on: compassion is the path to liberation. He turned it immediately toward compassion for oneself (“some of us have quite negative self-talk”) before the story had properly started. The manuscript holds that frame back for its final page; preached, it opened the sermon and returned at the end.

The spine was Joseph’s queerness, and the text does most of the work. The coat is the same garment worn by exactly one other person in the whole Hebrew Bible — King David’s daughter Tamar, where it is described as what a king’s virgin daughter wears. Then “well-built and handsome” in Genesis 39 translates a phrase used of exactly one other person: Rachel, Joseph’s mother. Richard offered “beautiful of form and beautiful in appearance” as the better rendering — the translators weren’t wrong, but they made a choice, and they reached for the masculine-coded word. He grounded that point in a congregation member’s doctoral work on rare words and the translation decisions they force. Joseph doesn’t fit the binary; the picture the text builds is of someone gender-expansive. He also named, in passing, that the only woman in this stretch is unnamed and cast as the temptress — not a one-off in the canon, and worth saying out loud even while racing past it.

Where it landed was the three weepings. Joseph overhears his brothers turning on each other, and has to leave the room. Then again with Benjamin. Then a third time — and here the sermon went somewhere the manuscript doesn’t, asking whether Joseph has the courage to name himself, to come out, to reveal himself, or whether he stays hidden. He weeps so loudly Pharaoh’s whole household hears it through the walls, and falls on the necks of the men who threw him in a pit. Compassion is the only thing strong enough to break a cycle that has been repeating since chapter three; in choosing it, Joseph “sets himself free — free from the pain, free from the separation, and free to be himself.”

How the prep held up: a mixed result, and the misses are the interesting part.

The opening riff went straight in. Section 1’s “biblical marriage has never once meant one man, one woman, forever for more than about four verses at a time” turned up in the sermon nearly intact. So did the Genesis 31 callback flagged in section 3 — the mad dash for freedom, “we had that story a few weeks ago.”
The prep’s actual angle on Genesis 39 went unused. Section 4 led with Working Preacher reading Joseph’s refusal as resistance to sexual coercion, parallel to Vashti and Hagar, and section 6 backed it with two articles on coercion and church silence. Reasonable, well-sourced, and not the sermon Richard preached — he glanced at it in one line and went elsewhere.
The spine of the sermon came from outside the prep entirely. Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg on the Joseph/Rachel wording and the ketonet passim/Tamar parallel, and Rev. Laurel Dykstra on the queer-coded reading — neither appears anywhere in this post. The prep had feminist readings covered and queer readings not at all, which is a real gap given where the sermon went.
The prep’s warning about Alter turned out to be right. Section 3 noted Richard’s own flag that Alter was “likely spent for a while” after Genesis 24. The manuscript named him anyway — but in the room Richard cut him, doing the two-block shape of Genesis without the citation, and dropping the source-criticism aside with it.
The reference log has a hole in it. Section 3 said flatly that this was the first time preaching Genesis 39. From the pulpit: “we’ve talked about this coat before, last year, during Pride month.” The log indexes by passage, so sermons filed by occasion rather than by text can go missing from it.
Songs: section 7 suggested Blessed Be Children (to Bunessan) and, as an edgier second option, Do Justice; section 9’s piece of music was Meghan Trainor’s “No.” None were used. The music that actually did the work was Lior, from the centring — which the prep never saw, because it lives in the liturgy rather than in the lectionary. “No” had been pitched at the refusal scene, and the refusal scene turned out not to be the point.
The frame opened and never closed. The manuscript ends by setting Odysseus’s war crimes against Joseph’s bitterness, bookending the Odyssey opener. In delivery that closing comparison is gone, so the opening — a show of hands the seating largely defeated — is left hanging.
Forward note: when the set reading sits inside a larger narrative unit, the prep should say so and cover the unit, not just the pericope; queer readings want to be a standing search alongside the feminist ones; and where the week’s music and liturgy are already known, the prep should be looking for the seam between them and the reading, because that is where this sermon actually started.

1. Hello, Richard

Well, here we are again — another Monday, another go at wrestling something preachable out of Genesis, and this week Genesis has handed you Potiphar’s wife and a somewhat cornered Joseph. Honestly, between this and the divorce question in Mark, it’s a big week for “biblical marriage” — which, as you’ve pointed out from the pulpit before, has never once meant “one man, one woman, forever” for more than about four verses at a time. Consistent record-keeping, 10/10.

Two things to smile about this week: Catherine Booth turns up in the commemorations below, and she spent her whole ministry arguing — successfully — that women had just as much right to preach as men did. A reminder that “well-behaved women” complaining loudly to church leadership has a long and frankly excellent track record. And somewhere out there this week, may an errant apostrophe be fixed, a General Assembly minute be read all the way to the end, and your washing machine complete a full cycle without incident.

2. This Week’s Readings

Old Testament: Genesis 39:1-20 — Potiphar’s Wife Read on Bible Gateway (NRSVue)

New Testament: Mark 10:2-16 — Divorce, and the blessing of the children (vv. 13-16) Read on Bible Gateway (NRSVue)

No notes attached to this week’s row in the lectionary spreadsheet, and the Preacher field is blank — worth a quick check that it’s you.

(Excerpt — full text via the link above; NRSVue quoted here within standard permission limits for short liturgical/non-commercial use, with attribution: Scripture quotations from the New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition. Copyright © 2021 National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America.)

“Joseph was handsome and good-looking. And after a time his master’s wife cast her eyes on Joseph and said, ‘Lie with me.’ But he refused… ‘How then could I do this great wickedness and sin against God?’” (Gen 39:6-9, abridged)

“Then little children were being brought to him in order that he might touch them, and the disciples spoke sternly to them. But when Jesus saw this, he was indignant and said to them, ‘Let the little children come to me; do not stop them, for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs.’” (Mark 10:13-14)

3. What Have I Done Before

No prior sermon in your reference log covers Genesis 39 or Mark 10:2-16 directly — first time preaching either passage.

(Added after the fact: not quite. You’d preached the coat before, during Pride month last year — it just isn’t in the log, because the log indexes by passage and that one was filed by occasion.)

From the Book of Genesis (since this reading isn’t a Gospel, here’s the wider book):

Genesis 31:14-35 — Rachel steals the household gods (preached 02.08.26, two weeks before this one). Illustration: nephew Nathaniel / matchbox-car story. Source cited: Bertrand Russell.
Genesis 24 — Rebekah at the well (preached twice, 12.07.26). Sources cited: Robert Alter, AJ Levine. Your own notes flag this one as “likely spent for a while.”
Genesis 18:1-15 — Abraham & Sarah’s hospitality (21.06.25). Outback road-trip reflections, Aboriginal camping protocol.

Worth noticing: your recurring “women who resist power” thread (Vashti, Hagar, and others per your voice profile) applies neatly here too — Working Preacher’s commentary below draws that same line explicitly. Could be a natural callback rather than a fresh theme.

4. Commentary & Reflection Links

Genesis 39 — Potiphar’s Wife

Working Preacher — Commentary on Genesis 39:1-23 — reads Joseph’s refusal as resistance to sexual coercion, explicitly parallels Vashti and Hagar, connects to modern trafficking and wrongful incarceration.

Mark 10:2-16 — Divorce

Working Preacher — Commentary on Mark 10:2-16 (Matt Skinner) — Jesus reframes the divorce question toward protecting vulnerable women, reads it as continuous with the blessing of the children that follows.
Bill Loader — “Mark Time 10” — frames the divorce teaching around compassion over legalism (notes Paul later applied it flexibly, e.g. in abuse situations), and reads the children pericope as a rebuke of the disciples’ dismissiveness.

One important thing I found while building this: your Women’s Lectionary doesn’t track the standard RCL, so most of the commentary sites on your “Websites I use” page (which are mostly RCL-organised — Vanderbilt, Laughing Bird, Sacredise, Howard Wallace, Rex Hunt, Journey With Jesus, Montreal Cathedral) had nothing indexed for this specific date. I searched each by passage reference rather than date, which is the only way to catch anything on them — worth knowing for future weeks, some will come up empty through no fault of the search.

5. From My Library

Genesis 39 — Joseph / Potiphar’s Wife

Reading Genesis — Marilynne Robinson. General thematic match (sustained close reading of the Joseph narrative); no specific page reference confirmed.
Genesis: An Introduction and Commentary — Derek Kidner (Tyndale OT Commentaries). Standard verse-by-verse coverage of chapter 39.

Mark 10:2-16 — Divorce and the blessing of children

The Children of Divorce: The Loss of Family as the Loss of Being — Andrew Root. Specific angle: Root argues a child’s sense of being is bound up in the parents’ relationship, and that the church should become a surrogate “being-with” community for children of divorce — a genuinely nice bridge between the two halves of this reading.
Mark (Wisdom Commentary, vol. 42) — Warren Carter. Feminist commentary series, covers 10:2-16 directly.

Fiction pairings

All the Pretty Horses — Cormac McCarthy (pairs with Genesis 39). John Grady Cole is falsely accused, imprisoned, and nearly killed in Saltillo — a genuine unjust-accusation/imprisonment echo of Joseph.
The Riders — Tim Winton (pairs with Mark 10). Fred Scully’s wife leaves the family; his young daughter Billie arrives alone and traumatised, and the novel follows their search for her mother across Europe — a wrenching, very Australian treatment of marital rupture and its cost to a child.

6. From My Articles

“Terror in the Bible: Rhetoric, Gender, and Violence” — Monica Jyotsna Melanchthon & Robyn J. Whitaker (eds.) — direct fit for reading Potiphar’s wife’s coercion and Joseph’s false accusation critically.
“When Women Speak: Domestic Violence in Australian Churches” — St Mark’s Review, no. 243 (2018) — contemporary companion piece connecting the ancient story to church silence around coercion/violence today.
“Women First? On the Legacy of ‘Primitive Communism’” — Roland Boer, JSOT 30/1 (2005) — a “strange” but usable feminist-Marxist lens on power in the Joseph narrative.

Nothing in your articles catalogue speaks to Mark 10 directly — flagging honestly rather than forcing a weak match.

7. Liturgical Resources

Direct hit: Spill the Beans has a resource built for these exact two readings — file Genesis 39-1-20 & Mark 10-2-16.pdf, in Women’s Lectionary/Pentecost (originally from the 13 August 2023 issue). Worth pulling for all-age material.

Song recommendation: Blessed Be Children (tune Bunessan, same tune as “Morning Has Broken,” TiS 156) — ties directly to the blessing of the children in Mark 10:13-16. A second option if you want something with more edge: Do Justice, which sits well against Joseph’s resistance to coercion in Genesis 39. (I couldn’t find confident, verifiably-matching weblinks for the two specific song texts themselves — only the shared tune above — so I haven’t linked them rather than risk pointing you at the wrong song. If you have a go-to source for the CotT song list, let me know and I’ll use it.)

8. Coming Up: Other Commemorations

From the Calendar of Other Commemorations, three for this coming week:

18 August — Helena, mother of Constantine (faithful servant)
20 August — Bernard of Clairvaux (person of prayer)
20 August — William & Catherine Booth (reformers of the Church, founders of the Salvation Army) — Catherine Booth is worth a specific mention: she argued, against real resistance, that women had an equal right to preach, and shaped much of the Army’s early theology before her death in 1890.

9. A Piece of Music

“No” — Meghan Trainor (pop, 2016). A clean, radio-friendly refusal anthem, built entirely around plainly, repeatedly saying no — echoes Joseph’s own repeated refusal of Potiphar’s wife rather better than most hymnody manages. Confirmed no profanity in the lyrics.

10. In the News

I checked abc.net.au for anything resonant with coercion, false accusation, or family-law/divorce themes this week and came up empty-handed on anything current and clearly ABC-sourced — I’d rather tell you that plainly than force a weak connection. Worth a look yourself closer to Sunday in case something breaks.

11. Just for You

“We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.” — Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness