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

Rebuilt Wednesday 19th August 2026. The readings for this Sunday changed after the original prep was written — a guest preacher is with us and has brought her own texts. Everything below is on the new readings.

1. Hello, Richard

You’re not preaching this week, which means this prep is a gift rather than a homework assignment — read it in the bath. Susy is preaching, Sue is leading, and Trevor is reading. Susy has brought her own readings: Romans 12:1-8 and Matthew 16:13-20, which are the standard Year A texts for this Sunday rather than anything from the Women’s Lectionary.

Here is the part I enjoyed finding. The last time these two readings came round on a Sunday you were in the pulpit — 27 August 2023 — you looked at Romans 12 and Matthew 16, and preached neither. You went to Matthew 13 and the pearl of great price, and told the congregation that “the worst thing a church can do is be sensible.” Which is, on any fair reading, a Romans 12:1-2 sermon wearing a different text as a disguise. Do not be conformed to this world; do not be viable; do not be achievable. You had the argument. You just declined the verse.

Susy, for her part, has form here. In January she preached Baptism of the Lord on 1 Corinthians 12 — the body-with-many-members parallel to this week’s epistle — and read it from The Inclusive Bible. So the congregation is about to get the body-and-gifts material from someone who has already thought about it, which is a nicer position than most guest Sundays.

If you want an opening — bank this for the next time Year A comes round, or hand it to Susy, whichever is more fun. Open by asking the room to finish the sentence “I am not the kind of person who…”, and point out that every single one of us thinks we are the non-conformist; the culture warrior and the anarchist quote Romans 12:2 at each other with equal conviction. Pay it off at the end with: Paul never asks whether you conform. He asks what to. And then he spends six verses telling you: a body that has stopped ranking its members. Warning, and you know this one already — the seating at CotT has defeated a show-of-hands opener before, so make it a sentence people finish in their heads, not with their arms.

2. This Week’s Readings

Epistle — Romans 12:1-8 — the living sacrifice, and gifts differing
Paul turns the corner from eleven chapters of argument into what the argument is actually for: present your bodies, be transformed by the renewing of your minds, and then — immediately, in the same breath — stop thinking of yourself more highly than you ought, because you are one body with many members and the gifts differ.
Read the full passage on Bible Gateway (NRSVUE)

“I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice… Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds… For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ.” (Romans 12:1-5, abridged)

Gospel — Matthew 16:13-20 — Peter’s confession at Caesarea Philippi
Jesus asks who people say he is, gets a list of dead prophets, then asks the harder question. Peter answers. Jesus responds not with a doctrine but with a name, and with keys.
Read the full passage on Bible Gateway (NRSVUE)

“He said to them, ‘But who do you say that I am?’ Simon Peter answered, ‘You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.’… ‘And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.’” (Matthew 16:15-18, abridged)

Where these sit, and where the lectionary cuts them. Two seams worth noticing, both of which are exactly the kind of thing you interrogate out loud.

Romans 12 opens on “therefore.” It is the hinge of the whole letter — everything from chapter 1 to chapter 11 is the “mercies of God” being appealed to. And the reading stops dead at verse 8, one verse before “let love be genuine.” You read verses 9-21 to this congregation on 28 June, so they have heard the second half of the chapter and not the first. The chapter is warm, not cold.
Matthew 16:20 is the most consequential full stop in the lectionary. Verse 21 is the first passion prediction, and by verse 23 Peter has gone from rock to get behind me, Satan, you are a stumbling block. Five verses. The lectionary hands you the coronation and withholds the collapse, and any sermon that stops where the reading stops is preaching half a scene.

3. What Have I Done Before

The honest headline: neither Romans 12:1-8 nor Matthew 16:13-20 appears in the Documented Readings column of any of the five sermon logs, and no sermon PDF in the folder is titled or indexed to either. But the logs index by reference, and you have a documented history of preaching this material under other texts and on other occasions — so “never preached” would be flatly wrong. Here is what is actually there.

27 August 2023 — these exact two readings, and you preached Matthew 13 instead. The log row is blank (an Apple Pages conversion failure, not an absence); the sermon is 2023-08-27 — Matthew 13 — the treasure and the pearl of great worth.pdf. Your own words that week:

“The worst thing a church can do is be sensible. To make sensible decisions. The Gospel is wild, foolish, and all-consuming. There are no ‘half-measures’ of the Gospel.”

“We become transformed into Christ’s likeness, and in doing so, we love wildly.”

“Let us not be sensible in our dreaming. Let us not be achievable or viable.”

Kierkegaard on the merchant’s paradox, preached into a season of discernment. That is Romans 12:1-2 without the verse.

28 June 2026 — Romans 12:9-21 read aloud. Acts 16 was the sermon (Lydia, and the enslaved girl who is the first person to preach in Europe); Romans 12’s back half was read but not preached. Songs included the first outing of Christopher Grundy’s Leaning In: A Prayer of Intention.

12 September 2021 — Peter’s confession, in Mark. Mark 8:27-38 alongside James 3:1-12, under the heading “Speaking Words of Wisdom.” You have preached this scene. The manuscript does not survive — only the order of service — so what you actually said is unrecoverable. The service closed with a three-way commissioning naming listening, speaking with care, and acting with compassionate grace. Songs included Community of Christ (TiS 473) and Take My Life and Let It Be, which is the living-sacrifice hymn.

10 September 2023 — binding and loosing, from Matthew 18. The near-verbatim doublet of Matthew 16:19, and your only treatment of it. 2023-09-10 — Matthew 18 — sin, conflict and care for the little ones.pdf:

“We have the whatever you bind on earth verse. What if, and this is a what if, we flip it. I.e. whatever is bound in Heaven shall be bound on earth. It starts to sound like the Lord’s Prayer.”

“The word Church here is the word Ecclesia. Which means closer to the family of Christ, the people… not necessarily the structure.”

“…or, importantly for the UCA, saying it’s complex and allowing those who cause harm to the weaker ones to remain in leadership. How do you feel about that line? What happened in here when I said that?”

The 1 Corinthians 12 seam — you have preached the body-and-gifts material at least six times. This is the richest vein by a distance, and most of it is filed under an occasion rather than under a text:

17 November 2024 — the Pride “Feast Service,” 1 Cor 12:14-26. Filed as Pride, not as body-of-Christ. Your line: “The Body of Christ is incomplete without us.” Pipe cleaners, a rainbow Christ candle with everyone’s fingerprints in the wax, and “fearfully, wonderfully, and fabulously made.” That line is a ready-made callback for Romans 12:4-5.
19 January 2025 — 1 Cor 12:1-11 and John 2. Gifts “for the common good” that go unrecognised until someone calls them out; closed on notice, believe, encourage. The nearest thing you have to a Romans 12:6-8 sermon.
26 January 2025 and 23 January 2022 — Day of Mourning, both on 1 Cor 12:12-31a: if no part of the body is less honourable, does the church actually treat Aboriginal people as part of the body of Christ?
15 September 2024 — Church Council commissioning on 1 Cor 12:4ff and the Basis of Union, alongside Mark 8:27-38. The log records the sermon only as “Short one – All have gifts etc.”
14 February 2021 — Transfiguration, Mark 9 landing in the body-with-many-parts. And 4 June 2017 — Pentecost, where the newsletter set the UCA’s dove against the Celtic wild goose.
11 January 2026 — Susy on 1 Cor 12 and Matthew 3, both from The Inclusive Bible. Songs: One Body, One Spirit (ATOK 388) and the first outing of Mikali Anagnostis’s Your Body Made Mine.

Peter as a character runs right through the archive: Acts 10 and “ever been wrong?” (5 May 2024, your farewell framing — “the biggest change is in Simon/Peter… the so-called experts!”); the beach restoration in John 21 (4 May 2025), where you took it as reassurance rather than rebuke and went as far as the Vatican; “Peter who would deny him” at the table (7 June 2026); Rhoda at the gate insisting Peter is free (18 June 2023); and Mark 9’s second call to discipleship (19 September 2021), which is your best power-and-authority material and sits in the verses immediately after the confession.

One to handle carefully. Martha’s confession — 15 March 2026, John 11, “the great confession comes not from a priest, a scholar, or a male disciple, but from a grieving woman outside her brother’s tomb.” It is the obvious thing to reach for here and it is only five months old. If anyone goes to “the unexpected confessor,” it will read as a repeat.

Voice Profile threads that genuinely apply: “why this reading, where does it start, where does it end” (Romans 12 stopping at verse 8 is built for it); reading the whole chapter aloud as method; ending on an open question rather than a resolution, which “who do you say that I am” demands; and “Christ not Caesar,” already established with this congregation on Reign of Christ 2024 and not yet used on a text set in a town named for Caesar.

The limits, stated plainly. Two of the most relevant Sundays in the whole archive (27 August and 10 September 2023) had completely blank Theme and Summary columns and were only recoverable from the sermon folder — other blank rows may be hiding more. The two closest hits have lost manuscripts. And the Sermon Reference Log covers 23 sermons against 122 PDFs. Nothing new has landed on Drive that isn’t already in a log.

4. Commentary & Reflection Links

Romans 12:1-8

Working Preacher has five, filed under “Ordinary 21.” Mary Hinkle Shore is the one to read first: sin as a personified power, “the bully on the playground,” which commandeers bodies as much as souls — so liberation has to be bodily and communal. She then turns it on clergy, who habitually assume superiority while claiming to prize diverse gifts. David McCabe is the sharpest politically: Greco-Roman “body politic” rhetoric was invented to justify aristocratic dominance, and Paul inverts it toward those with less honour or status. Elizabeth Shively argues “present your bodies” is explicitly not mystical devotion — temple worship redistributed into weekday moral conduct. Frank Crouch gives you “church is a verb, not a noun,” and names what’s being conformed to as consumer capitalism.
Bill Loader — “present your bodies” as the whole person, not body-versus-soul, and the renewed mind as relationship-based rather than rule-based. He reckons Paul “would be highly amused” at the industry of turning his illustrations into rigid spiritual-gift categories.
Journey with Jesus — Dan Clendenin on “Transformed Nonconformity”, built on King’s Strength to Love sermon on this text: most Christians are thermometers recording the temperature of majority opinion, not thermostats transforming it.
Laughing Bird — and note the URL: Nathan Nettleton has a page for this exact date. His paraphrase renders the gift list as prophets, ministers, teachers, encouragers, resource people, advocates and aid-workers, which quietly de-clericalises the whole thing.
Pilgrim UCA — Sandy Boyce, COCU53A — liturgical rather than exegetical, and confirmed as the 23 August entry.
John Squires (not on your list, but UCA) — the clearest treatment of logikē latreia: “spiritual” is a misleading translation; the word is built on logos, so Paul means reasoned, deliberate worship, pointedly not Corinthian ecstasy.

Matthew 16:13-20

Mitzi J. Smith is the best single thing anywhere this week. She dismantles the Petrine reading on grammatical grounds — petra is feminine, and refers either to the place where Jesus was correctly named or to the revelation itself, not to the man. Then she reads binding and loosing as public accountability: the heavens are witnesses when we imprison justice by reserving it for the powerful.
Eric Barreto — “Caesar’s name and the city he built hovers over the scene.” Identity here is formation, not definition; discipleship, not doctrine.
Marilyn Salmon — first-century Judaism had no single “messiah” concept, so Peter’s right answer settles almost nothing. Her overlooked observation: the crowd’s answers all name dead figures.
Bill Loader (here and here) — his distinctive claim is that Matthew has converted Mark’s story about recognising Jesus into a story about what the church is. Keys and binding/loosing are technical language for interpretive authority over Torah, and where the scribes used it to shut people out, this community is to be inclusive. Then: “the church has always been in danger of becoming one of the powers which we are called to confront.”
Rex Hunt — Pentecost 13A — Inclusive Text gospel, identity and pilgrimage, “Creativity God / Liberator God / Love-maker God,” with O’Donohue, Bruce Prewer’s “Like the Wind,” and Gretta Vosper pressing lived faith over belief.
Andrew Prior, One Man’s Web — Adelaide UCA, and honest about his own resistance (“immediately my heart rebels”). Notes the deliberate contrast between “Simon son of Jonah” and “Son of the living God,” and stresses that Matthew 18:18 hands the same authority to the whole congregation, not a hierarchy.
Sacredise — John van de Laar — the question as allegiance, not doctrinal correctness. Partly paywalled; only the free excerpt was read.
Clendenin again — opens with Sallman’s 1940 Head of Christ domesticating a man Rome executed, and argues everyone recreates Jesus in their own image. And SALT sets the confession against the temple to Rome and Augustus at Caesarea Philippi, where Augustus held the title “Son of the Divine.”

A queer reading — searched separately, as always

Lopsided this week, and worth knowing which way: Romans 12 has real queer scholarship behind it; Matthew 16’s queer seam is liturgical rather than exegetical — and the liturgical one is the better find.

Jimmy Hoke, “Who Wants to Conform?: On Normativities, Pride Flags, and Romans 12:2” — the standout. Hoke is a queer Pauline scholar and this cuts against the easy progressive use of the verse. Paul’s ancient audience would have found “do not be conformed” unremarkable, because everyone already claimed to be non-conforming. He then shows the verse doing opposite work in the marriage-equality debate: anti-assimilationist queers used it to warn that marriage equality would breed complacency, and conservatives used identical logic against cultural accommodation. His conclusion — the verse is “too versatile,” and the honest question is not whether you conform but to what. He then confesses softening his own scholarship while preaching in a moderate church that feared division, which is why pride flags matter: they signal whether people can bring their whole selves, which is the precondition of the transformation Paul is after. It is a sermon, not just a source. His monograph is Feminism, Queerness, Affect, and Romans: Under God? (SBL, 2021).
Queer Theology — “Put Your Body On the Line” (Romans 12:1-7) — Brian Murphy and Shannon Kearns read “present your bodies” as bodily presence as resistance: sacrifice as showing up. The topical hook is 2014 and dated; the hermeneutic isn’t.
Queer Theology — “Called to Treason” (Matthew 14-16) — Peter’s “you are the Messiah” as a treasonous political statement: calling Jesus Lord unseats Caesar, and is sedition punishable by death. They connect it to ACT UP’s organising and argue for “holy trouble” over respectable engagement.
The naming seam — and this is where Matthew 16 genuinely delivers. The Episcopal Church’s Service of Renaming (Book of Occasional Services 2018) explicitly invokes “Sarai, who became Sarah; Jacob, who became Israel; and Simon called Peter” as the warrant for affirming a trans person’s chosen name against deadnaming (reported here). See also New Ways Ministry on a 2023 Baltimore renaming liturgy, where birth names were written on dissolving rice paper and chosen names on stones — a detail that is a gift to “you are Peter, and on this rock” — and Nadia Bolz-Weber’s naming rite. This text has been doing liturgical work for trans Christians for years while the commentaries haven’t noticed.
Peter Carlson (ed.), A Queer Lectionary: (Im)proper Readings from the Margins — Year A (Church Publishing, 2025) — covers the Sundays of Year A with contributors from TEC, UCC, AME, ELCA and MCC. By design it should cover this Sunday, but no preview is online and its Proper 16 content could not be verified. Probably worth buying regardless.

Where the queer hunt came up empty, said plainly. Danya Ruttenberg has nothing on either text — her Hebrew Bible focus holds, and while there is a real latent link (“binding and loosing” is rabbinic halakhic language for permitting and forbidding, which is Loader’s point), she doesn’t make it and it would be dishonest to cite her as if she had. Laurel Dykstra: nothing on these passages. Q Christian Fellowship and the Institute for Welcoming Resources: thematic and denominational only, no lectionary work. The Queer Bible Commentary: could not be verified for either passage — every secondary discussion of its Romans chapter is preoccupied with Romans 1. And a specific steer: Caesarea Philippi sat at the grotto of Pan, which looks like an open door, but no credible commentator — queer or otherwise — builds anything on it. Barreto, Loader, Prior, van de Laar and SALT all take the setting in an imperial direction. The Pan angle is available to be made, but it would be the preacher’s own construction, not a supported reading.

A feminist reading

Mitzi Smith (above) is the genuine hit, and a substantive one: the grammatical argument that petra is feminine and denotes the revelation rather than the man dismantles the exegetical foundation of an all-male chain of authority without a word of polemic. Mary Hinkle Shore supplies the feminist edge on Romans, and Hoke is doing feminist and queer work simultaneously — his book is about how queer women inhabited the assemblies receiving this letter. Honest gap: no accessible feminist commentary on Matthew 16:13-20 specifically could be found. Miranda Pillay’s open-access feminist reading of Matthew doesn’t touch chapter 16 at all, which is itself telling about where feminist Matthean scholarship has gone. And Wil Gafney’s Women’s Lectionary constructs its own readings, so it gives no parallel entry here.

Two ways in

Lead angle — “conformed to what?” Take Hoke’s uncomfortable observation as the engine: everybody thinks they’re the non-conformist. The verse alone doesn’t tell you what to refuse — but the next six verses do. The renewed mind is tested by whether the body it belongs to stops ranking its members, which is exactly where Shore turns it back on leaders who profess to honour diverse gifts while reflexively assuming superiority, and where McCabe’s point lands: Paul stole a metaphor invented to justify aristocracy and inverted it toward those with less honour. Crouch’s “church is a verb” is the landing.

Live alternative — being correctly named. Jesus asks the identity question and answers it with a name. Simon bar-Jonah is told who he is, and the naming is the blessing. Set that against Smith’s demolition of the Petrine reading and the sermon becomes: the church was never founded on one correctly-credentialed individual, but on the moment someone was seen and named truly. The keys then land where Smith and Loader put them — authority the scribes used to shut people out, given to a community meant to open. Barreto’s instruction to go looking for where liberation is actually emerging is the send-off. Genuinely different from the first, and it stands alone on the gospel.

5. From My Library

All six catalogue parts searched.

For Romans 12 — Paul Achtemeier, Romans (Interpretation) is the workhorse; Marcus Borg, The First Paul for the radical-visionary framing. For “do not be conformed,” the shelf is unusually well stocked: Hauerwas, Resident Aliens and Walter Wink, The Powers That Be, plus Volf’s Exclusion and Embrace on identity and otherness. On the church as body: Küng’s Church, Moltmann’s The Open Church, and — pleasingly — the Joint Commission on Church Union’s own The Church, its nature, function and ordering alongside Geoff Thompson’s two Basis of Union books.

For Matthew 16 — Warren Carter, Matthew and the Margins is the obvious first stop for a sociopolitical reading, with Hare’s Matthew (Interpretation) and Malina’s Social-Science Commentary behind it. For “who do you say that I am”: Borg’s The Meaning of Jesus, James Alison’s Knowing Jesus, and — for a livelier week — Elizabeth-Anne Stewart’s Jesus The Holy Fool. On naming and identity: Willimon’s Remember Who You Are, Stan Grant’s On Identity, and Peter Rollins’ Insurrection. On who gets to hold the keys: Elizabeth Gillan Muir’s A Women’s History of the Christian Church and Going to Heaven: The Life and Election of Bishop Gene Robinson.

The queer shelf, and it earns its place this week. Two with real chapter-level detail:

Michael Bernard Kelly, The Erotic Contemplative — six lectures structured on Evelyn Underhill’s mystical stages, mapped onto gay and lesbian development. One lecture, “The Road from Emmaus,” rereads Luke 24 as Jesus appearing to a couple the apostles had rejected: the people the church pushes out are the ones who recognise him. That is a direct and unusual angle on “who do you say that I am,” and the eros-and-body frame is the route into “present your bodies.”
Joy Ladin, The Soul of the Stranger — reading God and Torah from a transgender perspective. Her line about childhood — that God never mistook her for the body that others saw — is a preachable hinge between “who do people say that I am” and “flesh and blood has not revealed this to you.”
Also there: Austen Hartke’s Transforming (general description confirmed only — I could not verify whether it has a dedicated chapter on renaming, so check the contents page before citing that), Mx Chris Paige’s OtherWise Christian 1 and 2, and Shannon Kearns’ In the Margins.

The fiction pairing — Christos Tsiolkas, Damascus (you have two copies). A novel about the author of Romans, told through the bodies of the people around him, in seven sections: four of Saul, then “Hope” narrated by Lydia, “Faith” by a Roman jailer, “Love” by Timothy — the three theological virtues as chapter titles. Three reasons it fits. Tsiolkas is a harsh poet of the body, insistent on keeping flesh and blood to the fore, which is exactly the register of present your bodies: a congregation that has only ever heard “living sacrifice” as metaphor gets it back as meat. Second, his Thomas — Jesus’s apocryphal twin — trusts only flesh and blood, which sets two opposite epistemologies of “who do you say that I am” in the same first-century room, and Matthew 16:17 says flesh and blood is precisely what did not reveal it. Third, the book’s structure is a body of mismatched members with wildly differing gifts, none able to see the whole, and its refrain — the first will be last — is Romans 12:3 in narrative form.

If you’d rather something closer to home, Emma Batchelor’s Now That I See You (2021 Vogel winner) is the Matthew 16 question inverted — a narrator discovering her partner “is not who she thought he was,” structured Us / Them / Me. And for verse 2 specifically, Murata’s Convenience Store Woman is the sharpest statement of “do not be conformed” read against the grain: Keiko is perfectly conformed, assembling an acceptable self from borrowed speech and the employee manual, and it is monstrous. (Plot detail on that one is general rather than scene-level — verify before quoting.)

Gaps worth knowing: no monograph on Peter anywhere on the shelf, nothing under a spiritual-gifts heading, and no Romans volume of the Wisdom Commentary despite eight other volumes being there. Alter isn’t needed this week, which is just as well.

6. From My Articles

These are pointers built from titles and topic keywords — the PDFs live on your Mac at Claudes Sorted/Articles/ and cannot be read from here, so nothing below is a summary of a paper I’ve actually read.

The one to open first is your own. Solidarity and Resistance in New Creation Communities — keyworded to solidarity, resistance, new creation, community, political theology, Uniting Church. On keyword evidence it sits directly on this reading. Claudes Sorted/Articles/

Romans 12:2 — nonconformity is the strongest cluster in the whole index:

Yoder, John Howard — Nonconformity and the Nation; also The Christian’s Declaration of Independence and the three Things That Are Caesar’s parts (those are keyed to Romans 13, but they’re next door).
Tilsen, Julie et al. — Resisting Normativity: Queer Musings on Politics, Identity, and the Performance of Therapy. A dual hit: conformity for Romans 12:2, identity for Matthew 16.
Ledgerwood, Elaine — Subverting the System (Chapter Seven); Weaver, J. Denny — The Gospel Confronts the Powers.
Gondarra, Djiniyini — Overcoming the Captivities of the Western Church Context, in From Dean/. On keywords, the sharpest First Nations statement of Romans 12:2 in the index: the church’s captivity to a conforming pattern. His Let My People Go is in the same folder, as is Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr’s Dadirri — deep listening as the posture in which “who do you say that I am” could actually be answered.

Body, sacrifice and community: Kotsko’s The Sermon on Mount Moriah (Derrida, Genesis 22, sacrifice); Lee’s ‘Shaping Communities’ as a Christian Practice; Renton’s Finding a Home in the Uniting Church and A Pilgrim People: Forty Years On, both in Unread (Study Leave)/. Queer and gender: Abraham’s ‘On the Doorstep of the Work’: Ricoeurian Hermeneutics, Queer Hermeneutics, and Scripture; Sanders’ Feral Hope for Futurist Leaders; Talbot’s LGBTIQA+ Communities and the Uniting Church’s Prophetic Voice.

One pastoral flag. When Women Speak: Domestic Violence in Australian Churches is in the index, and it is worth a look before anyone preaches “present your bodies as a living sacrifice” to a congregation. The phrase does different work in different ears.

Honest gap: there is no article on Matthew 16 and none on Romans 12 anywhere in the 214 rows. The Matthew articles are all chapter 13 or chapters 23-25; the Romans ones are all chapter 13. This is a genuine hole in the collection rather than a failed search.

7. Liturgical Resources

Words for Worship has an exact match, and it is the single best resource for this Sunday:

wfw-Year A - 2023 - Pentecost 13 - Exodus 1.8-2.10; Psalm 124; Romans 12.1-8; Matthew 16.13-20.pdf — same lectionary year, same week label, all four readings. Also present as a .doc. In Words for Worship › Year A Words for Worship.
wfw-Year A - 2020 - Pentecost 12 - Exodus 1.8-2.10; Psalm 124; Romans 12.1-8; Matthew 16.13-20.doc — the same readings from 2020, labelled Pentecost 12 that year.
For continuity, next week’s exists too: wfw-Year A - 2023 - Pentecost 14 - … Romans 12.9-21; Matthew 16.21-28.pdf.

Spill the Beans has nothing — the collection holds only Year B, Year C and Women’s Lectionary material, with no Year A RCL at all. L3 has nothing either, for the same reason (Year B and C only). And a warning worth acting on: the 23.08.26 folder currently contains a LINK – Spill the Beans – Women’s Lectionary – Midwives of Mercy doc, which points at the Exodus 1:8-2:10 / Galatians 4:21-30 material. That is the old track, not what we’re using. Someone opening that link on Saturday night will get a lovely resource about Shiphrah and Puah and no help at all.

Numbering note, since it will trip someone up: the Women’s Lectionary track calls 23 August “Pentecost 12”; Words for Worship and the RCL convention call it “Pentecost 13.” Same Sunday, two numbers.

What the service is already doing — and where the music meets the reading

The Liturgy - 23.08.26 doc is essentially complete. Susy preaching, Sue leading, Trevor reading, Stephen and Claire plus Lynne and Lachie on music. The Call to Worship is already written straight out of Romans 12 — “we come seeking transformation and the renewing of our minds… we share in the ministry of being one body with differing gifts.” The prayers for others are written and topical. And the offering prayer already reaches for the keys: “may they unlock doors of love and generosity… and open the doors of abundant life for all.” Somebody has read Matthew 16:19 and heard it as an opening device rather than a gatekeeping one, which is precisely where Loader and Mitzi Smith end up.

The music, already locked in: ATW 459 God. Version 1.0 (Robin Mann), For Everyone Born, a Place at the Table (Shirley Murray, revised version), a recorded centring piece — Who Do You Say, Paul Colman Trio — then Ground and Source, which Susy will play and lead herself, and Blessing Song (Alison Campbell Rate, WaO p.104).

The seam is right there in the first two. Robin Mann’s God. Version 1.0 opens by listing the God the singer doesn’t believe in — it is a negative confession, an Adelaide song that clears the ground by naming everything Jesus isn’t. And then, later in the service, a recorded track literally titled Who Do You Say puts Jesus’s question to the room before anybody has preached a word on it. The service asks the gospel’s question twice, in two directions, before the sermon arrives. Whoever built that liturgy did the theology already; if Susy hasn’t noticed it yet, it’s worth telling her.

If more is wanted, all of these are held as actual sheet music: Take This Moment (ATOK 414, Iona) is the best single fit for verse 1 — hymnary; Community of Christ (TiS 473) for the body — hymnary; The Summons (ATOK 413) for what follows a confession — hymnary; All Are Welcome (ATFG 515), a house built on rock of faith, which chimes with the offering prayer — hymnary; and if anyone wants the counterweight, Sydney Carter’s Bitter Was the Night (ATA 135) on Peter’s denial — hymnary. Ground and Source is in neither the Songs Log nor the CotT Song List and I couldn’t verify it online — Susy is bringing it herself.

Sung before? Not for these readings — there is no record. But Community of Christ (TiS 473) has been sung on both of the Sundays this congregation heard Peter’s confession in Mark (12 September 2021) and the body-and-gifts text from 1 Corinthians (15 September 2024). It is, in practice, already this congregation’s song for this material.

Themes emerging. Put the whole pile together and it lands in one place: a body that stops ranking its members, and a person who is correctly named. Your own history bears that out — the Pride Feast Service’s “the Body of Christ is incomplete without us,” the Day of Mourning question about whether the church treats Aboriginal people as part of the body, “notice, believe, encourage.” Susy’s own January sermon on 1 Corinthians 12 was baptism as being baptised into one body where no member is dispensable. This week’s liturgy asks who Jesus is twice before the sermon, and then prays that the keys open doors. Every strand is pulling the same way, and none of it needs the sermon to do the heavy lifting.

8. Coming Up: Other Commemorations

Two in the seven days from Sunday, and one just outside that is better than both.

24 August — Bartholomew, apostle. In the index, but the calendar carries no biographical note for him — the notes are explicitly a work in progress, so that’s a gap in the document rather than a quiet Sunday.
28 August — Augustine of Hippo. Born Thagaste, North Africa, 354; lived only five of his seventy-six years outside North Africa. Cicero’s Hortensius set him after Truth at eighteen, the same year his father died and his son Adeodatus was born. Ambrose, Neoplatonism, the garden in Milan; ordained at Hippo effectively by force. The Confessions, De Trinitate, De Civitate Dei — and, late in life, the Retractationes, in which he amended and in places dismissed his own earlier views, which is a rarer and better thing than any of the rest of it. Died 430 as the Vandals besieged the city; when they burned Hippo they left his cathedral and his library standing.
31 August — Liyapidiny Marika O.A.M. One day outside the window and worth stretching for, because she is a Romans 12 sermon in a single life: the first Yolngu woman ordained a Minister of the Word in the Uniting Church. Born Yirrkala 1945, Health Worker from 1970, O.A.M. in 1981, trained at Nungalinya, ordained September 1991, died 31 August 1998. The calendar notes that her ministry “was not always accepted” but that “her gifts were recognised by the wider church” — gifts differing, and a body slow to admit it. Her theme song was Bind Us Together, Lord.

Nothing at all on 23, 25, 26, 27, 29 or 30 August.

9. A Piece of Music

James Blake — “Say What You Will”. This one goes with the lead angle. It’s a man working out what he’s worth once he stops measuring himself against everyone doing better — he describes having been both taken in and pushed to the edges, and then arrives somewhere settled, content to be the smaller unglamorous thing rather than the spectacular one. That is Romans 12 almost line for line: gifts differing, members who are not the same member, and the instruction not to think of yourself more highly than you ought. The shrug at other people’s verdicts is also the Caesarea Philippi question turned inside out — the crowd has opinions about who you are, and at some point you stop letting the poll decide. Warm, unhurried, squarely in your Blake territory. Lyrics checked: clean throughout.

Phosphorescent’s “Song for Zula” also fits, and fits the second angle better — but it’s already gone into this week’s Sunday Toolkit, so the two would double up.

10. In the News

The one a UCA minister most needs on the radar: the revised Code of Ethics and Ministry Practice takes effect 1 January 2027, across congregations, schools, chaplaincies, aged care and community services. Built from forty submissions, it adds guidance on technology, social media and AI, expands Safe Church and cultural safety expectations, plain-Englishes the language, and strengthens the emphasis on the covenant with the UAICC. Andrew Johnson: “the Code is about the kind of community we are called to be.” Which is this week’s epistle, in governance prose.

Also: Season of Creation 2026 starts the Sunday after next — 1 September to 4 October, theme “Living Water” from Ezekiel 47, with the resource guide, PowerPoint template and orders of service already out. Worth flagging to whoever is planning. And a farewell to Rev Pita Qasevakatini and Tupou, returning to Fiji after five years on placement in Sydney — the article’s line, “the Church is always larger than one congregation or one nation,” is a clean one-body hook.

From the ABC: the parliamentary inquiry into racism, hate and violence against First Nations people has concluded, with Olympic boxer Marissa Williamson-Pohlman testifying that “institutions celebrate Blak excellence when it is convenient, but abandon us when it matters most” — and dozens of invited politicians and officials simply not turning up, so the empty chairs became the story. The ACT has created Australia’s first Minister for Disability, Autism and Neurodiversity, welcomed cautiously; therapist Jacqueline Gibb: “our community is really exhausted from all this constant having to advocate for ourselves and not being listened to.” And a piece on refugees with disabilities finding sustainable work — Suhail, 54, placed as a baggage screener at Sydney Airport — where a provider notes refugees with disabilities had previously been “put in the too-hard basket.” Gifts differing, and what a society does with them.

11. Just for You

“…for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

George Eliot, the Finale of Middlemarch — the last sentence of the novel, published in parts between December 1871 and December 1872. Checked word for word against two independent full-text transcriptions of the novel itself rather than any quote site.

A benediction on unnoticed faithfulness, which is what most of the job actually is. Enjoy the pew.