Monday Prep — 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time, 23rd August 2026

1. Hello, Richard

This week two midwives lie straight to Pharaoh’s face and get away with it, which feels like as good a moment as any to say: civil disobedience has always had excellent references. Shiphrah and Puah answer to a higher power than a genocidal king, and if that’s not a two-thousand-year head start on “nevertheless, she persisted,” I don’t know what is. Bonus points to the lectionary for pairing them with Hagar and Sarah in the same week — two women Paul turns into an allegory, neither of whom got much say in the matter, which is its own sermon if you want it.

Preacher field’s blank again this week — worth a quick check that it’s landed on your desk and not fallen through a gap in the roster.

Update (17 August): the Current Worship Season liturgy for this Sunday is now drafted, and it names Susy as preacher — not you. Worship leader is Sue, Bible reader is Trevor, and musicians are Stephen & Claire, Lynne & Lachie. Worth confirming this with Susy and the roster before you put any more work into this one — the songs aren’t chosen yet either, so there’s nothing in the liturgy yet to connect back to the reading, but it’s worth another look nearer the time in case that changes.

2. This Week’s Readings

Old Testament: Exodus 1:8-2:10 — Shiphrah and Puah Read on Bible Gateway (NRSVue)

New Testament: Galatians 4:21-30 — Hagar and Sarah Read on Bible Gateway (NRSVue)

“But the midwives feared God; they did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but they let the boys live… So God dealt well with the midwives.” (Exod 1:17,20, abridged)

Where this sits: Exodus 1:8–2:10 is the opening movement of the Exodus liberation narrative — the new king, the midwives’ defiance, and Moses drawn from the water all belong to one continuous sequence running to the burning bush in chapter 3. If you’d rather preach the arc than the pericope, that’s the unit.

3. What Have I Done Before

Last week (16 August, Genesis 39): you used Potiphar’s house as a doorway into the whole Joseph novella, built the sermon around Joseph’s queerness — the ketonet passim shared with Tamar, and “beautiful of form and beautiful in appearance” being his mother Rachel’s own wording — and landed on compassion as the path to liberation. Mark 10 went unpreached.

No prior sermon in your reference log covers Exodus 1-2 or Galatians 4 directly.

From the Book of Exodus: this is the first Exodus text you’ve preached in the tracked period — no chapter-level overlap to flag.

From the Book of Galatians: none tracked either. Since Galatians isn’t a Gospel, that rule doesn’t add anything new here, but worth noting for your own memory that this is fresh ground on both fronts.

Worth noticing: the “women who resist power” thread continues — Shiphrah and Puah slot in neatly alongside Vashti and Hagar as recurring company. This is also technically Hagar’s second appearance in your preaching (briefly present in the Genesis 21 sermon two years back, per the log’s date range, though that predates your tracked reference period in detail) — worth a light callback if it still resonates.

4. Commentary & Reflection Links

Exodus 1:8-2:10 — Shiphrah and Puah

Working Preacher — Cameron B.R. Howard — the midwives’ allegiance to God over Pharaoh sets the pattern for Israel belonging to God over earthly power.
Howard Wallace — reads the midwives (and Pharaoh’s daughter) as “faithful subversion,” God working through people of “low estate” against power and death.
Old Testament Lectionary (UCA) — notes the midwives are unusually named and individuated for the genre; calls their defiance explicit civil disobedience.

Galatians 4:21-30 — Hagar and Sarah

This one is genuinely thin — it’s not in the standard RCL, so most of your sites (which are RCL-organised) have nothing indexed for it. Nothing usable turned up this week; flagging honestly rather than padding it out.

A useful coincidence: 23 Aug 2026 happens to line up with the standard RCL’s own Exodus 1:8-2:10 reading (Proper 16A), so that passage got unusually good coverage this week — Galatians 4:21-30 wasn’t so lucky.

Queer readings

Queer Theology — “A Holy Ruckus: Exodus 1:8-2:10” (Brian G. Murphy) — the strongest match this week. Reads the midwives’ deception, humour and campiness as queer survival tactics under hostile power, notes that all four women in the story are named while Pharaoh never is, and insists the story is about getting out rather than transforming Egypt from within. Cites Bayard Rustin on being “a good troublemaker.”
Binary-Breaking Worship — “Queering Hagar’s Story” (Avery Arden) — on Genesis 21 rather than Paul’s allegory, but it’s the same figure and it transfers. Reads Hagar as the only person in scripture who names God, her lack of bodily autonomy alongside queer and trans experience, and Sarah’s alarm at Ishmael’s “play” alongside the way people now read menace into drag and gender-expansive kids. Sharp against Paul’s later dismissal of Hagar’s son.
Queer Theology — “Holy Discomfort and Scriptural Allegory: Galatians, Chapter 4” — covers the right chapter and makes something of Paul explicitly flagging his own reading as allegory rather than literal. I could only see the show notes, not a transcript, so I can’t confirm how much it says about Hagar and Sarah themselves.

Also worth knowing: your own copy of Torah Queeries has a chapter on this parashah (see section 5). I could confirm it exists — “Making Noise for Social Change,” pp. 75-79 — but it’s paywalled online and I couldn’t find out what it actually argues, so that one’s a shelf job rather than a link.

5. From My Library

Exodus 1-2 — the midwives, resistance to unjust power

The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary — Robert Alter. Verse-by-verse literary commentary covering this chapter directly, including the etymology of Moses’s name and the midwives’ “fear of God.”
Torah Queeries — Gregg Drinkwater et al. Specific reference: Chapter 13, “Making Noise for Social Change: Parashat Shemot (Exodus 1:1–6:1),” pp. 75-79 — a queer reading of exactly this text.
Atheism in Christianity — Ernst Bloch. Reads Exodus as scripture’s “counter-blow against the oppressor,” citing Thomas Müntzer’s “Let my people go” as a liberation-theology template.

Galatians 4 — covenant theology

Covenant and Creation — William Dumbrell, and The God of Covenant — Grant & Wilson. Both direct background for Paul’s covenant allegory, though neither engages Hagar/Sarah by name specifically.

Fiction pairing

Animal Farm — George Orwell. Double fit: subject-tagged “Allegories” (echoing Paul’s allegorical move in Galatians 4), and its plot is a textbook resistance-to-unjust-authority arc — pairs naturally with Shiphrah and Puah too.

6. From My Articles

Yoder — “The Christian’s Declaration of Independence” — the most direct hit on civil disobedience against unjust civil authority.
Boer — “Women First? On the Legacy of ‘Primitive Communism’” (JSOT, 2005) — a feminist-Marxist lens on power, useful for the midwives.
Your own conference paper, “Solidarity and Resistance in New Creation Communities,” — worth a re-read for this week.

Nothing in the catalogue speaks to Hagar/Sarah or Galatians 4 specifically.

7. Liturgical Resources

Direct hit: Spill the Beans has a resource for these exact readings — file Exodus 1-8-2-10 & Galatians 4-21-30.pdf, in Women’s Lectionary/Pentecost (from the 20 August 2023 issue).

Song recommendation: God of Freedom, God of Justice — a clean thematic fit for the midwives’ defiance. If you want something more overtly liberationist, Freedom is Coming (ATOK 355) is the other strong option.

8. Coming Up: Other Commemorations

Nothing falls in the 23–29 August window from the Calendar of Other Commemorations beyond two entries with no biographical note attached in the source document: 24 August — Bartholomew (apostle) and 28 August — Augustine of Hippo (Christian thinker — one of the most significant figures in Western Christian thought; author of the Confessions and City of God, died as the Vandals besieged Hippo in 430).

9. A Piece of Music

“Do You Hear the People Sing?” from Les Misérables (Schönberg/Kretzmer). A rousing call to rise against unjust authority and protect the vulnerable — musical-theatre lyrics, confirmed clean of profanity.

10. In the News

Nothing solid and clearly ABC-sourced turned up this week connecting to civil disobedience or refugee themes — there’s a broader immigration story circulating from non-ABC outlets, but I couldn’t confirm ABC coverage of it, so I’m not passing it on as verified.

11. Just for You

“I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.” — Theodore Parker (1810–1860), Unitarian minister, Ten Sermons of Religion (1853). This is his actual original wording — the shorter, more famous version (“the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”) is Martin Luther King Jr.’s later paraphrase of it, not a direct quote of Parker.