Monday Prep — 21st Sunday in Ordinary Time, 30th August 2026

Rebuilt Wednesday 19th August 2026. The congregation is using the Revised Common Lectionary for this Sunday rather than the Women’s Lectionary, and a guest is preaching. Everything below is on the RCL readings.

1. Hello, Richard

Second guest Sunday in a row, and a fifth Sunday, so your tradition holds. Adrian is preaching, Greg is leading, Lachlan is reading, and Leigh, Graham, Claire and Val are on music. We’re on the RCL this week: Exodus 3:1-15, Romans 12:9-21, Matthew 16:21-28.

Here is the accident that makes this week worth your attention. Susy took the RCL last Sunday and Adrian is taking it this Sunday, and the RCL being what it is, the two Sundays run straight on from each other. Romans 12:1-8 becomes 12:9-21. Matthew 16:13-20 becomes 16:21-28. Two guest preachers who almost certainly haven’t spoken to each other have between them delivered a two-part series, and the second part is the one that hurts: last week Peter got the keys and the new name, and this week, five verses later, he is get behind me, Satan, you are a stumbling block to me. The congregation heard the coronation. Now they get the collapse.

And a small delight for the lectionary pedant in you: the Women’s Lectionary would have given you Exodus 4:18-26 this week, Zipporah and the bridegroom of blood. The RCL gives you Exodus 3. So the two lectionaries are running consecutive halves of the same call narrative — the switch didn’t change the subject, it just wound the tape back a chapter. You get the bush; you don’t get the flint knife. Given what you’d written about the bridegroom of blood, that may be a mercy or a disappointment depending on the day.

If you want an opening — banked, or pass it to Adrian. Start with the observation that God’s answer to “who shall I say sent me?” is not a name so much as a refusal to be pinned: I will be what I will be. Then pay it off at the end with the other half — that the God who won’t be defined is nonetheless perfectly specific about having seen, and heard, and come down. The mystery is not evasion. It has an address in Egypt.

2. This Week’s Readings

Old Testament — Exodus 3:1-15 — the burning bush (with Psalm 105:1-6, 23-26, 45b)
Moses, a fugitive working his father-in-law’s sheep, turns aside to look at something impossible, and is met, named, argued with, and sent.
Read the full passage on Bible Gateway (NRSVUE)

“Then Moses said to God, ‘If I come to the Israelites and say to them, “The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,” and they ask me, “What is his name?” what shall I say to them?’ God said to Moses, ‘I am who I am.’” (Exodus 3:13-14, abridged)

Epistle — Romans 12:9-21 — let love be genuine
The back half of the chapter Susy opened last week: a stacked list of imperatives that turns, halfway through, into something much harder than good manners.
Read the full passage on Bible Gateway (NRSVUE)

“Let love be genuine… Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them… Do not repay anyone evil for evil… Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” (Romans 12:9-21, abridged)

Gospel — Matthew 16:21-28 — the rebuke, and the cross
The first passion prediction, Peter’s objection, and the hardest sentence in the Gospel to preach responsibly.
Read the full passage on Bible Gateway (NRSVUE)

“And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, ‘God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.’ But he turned and said to Peter, ‘Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me.’” (Matthew 16:22-23, abridged)

Where these sit, and where the lectionary cuts them.

Exodus 3:1-15 is the opening of a call narrative that runs to 4:17, and the reading stops before the argument really starts. Moses raises five objections in all; the lectionary gives you the first two and withholds the rest — including 4:10, “I am slow of speech and slow of tongue”. If anyone wants the reluctance, it is one verse past the edge of the page, and that verse has a serious literature attached to it (see section 4).
Matthew 16:21 is a hinge and the lectionary put the hinge between two Sundays. “From that time on” is Matthew announcing a turn. Last week ended at v.20 with the keys; this week opens at v.21 with the passion. Whoever splits it that way has given you a genuine cliffhanger, but also two half-scenes — worth naming out loud if Adrian doesn’t.
Romans 12:9-21 finishes what 12:1-8 started, and it is worth knowing that this congregation heard it read aloud on 28 June while you preached Acts 16. So they have had the words in the room this year already, unpreached, twice over.

3. What Have I Done Before

Last week (23 August): Susy was in the pulpit, not you — she brought her own readings, Romans 12:1-8 and Matthew 16:13-20, rather than anything from the Women’s Lectionary track, so there is no sermon of yours to report back on this week. The one thing worth carrying forward: two guest Sundays running (Susy’s and, this week, Adrian’s) have turned out to be a continuous two-part series on Peter — the coronation, then the collapse — which section 1 above already catches.

The honest headline: no sermon in the archive works from Exodus 3 or Matthew 16:21-28, and Romans 12:9-21 has been read but never preached. But two of those negatives are holes in the record rather than established absences, and one of them is a real loss.

The missing sermon that matters most. 25 February 2024, Lent 2B, was Mark 8:31-38 — the exact synoptic parallel to this week’s gospel. There is no row for it in the log at all (Year B jumps 18 February straight to 3 March) and no PDF in the Sermons folder. We know you preached it because the following week’s summary refers back to it: on 3 March you tied “the previous week’s ‘take up your cross’ theme to this week’s table-turning as two sides of costly discipleship.” So you have preached this material, within the last two and a half years, and the manuscript is gone.

3 September 2023 is a second hole. That was Proper 17 Year A — these exact readings, last cycle. The Year A log jumps 27 August straight to 10 September, and there is no sermon file. The congregation was heading into the Season of Creation (10 September was Land Sunday), so it was plausibly filed under a creation theme rather than a text. Either way: this is not evidence you’ve never preached Exodus 3.

28 June 2026 — Romans 12:9-21, read aloud. The sermon was Acts 16 — Lydia, and the enslaved girl who is the first person to preach in Europe, whom the RCL cuts off before. You made a point that week of naming exactly that editorial decision, which is a nice rhyme with this week’s two cut edges. Songs included the first outing of Christopher Grundy’s Leaning In: A Prayer of Intention. One thing sitting unused in that folder: Audre Lorde’s “A Litany for Survival”, filed with the note “a voiceless voice from the edge asking what it means to be heard” — never slotted into an order of service. It is still available, and it would sit well against Exodus 3:7.

The enemy-love vein is the richest thing you have, and it is well developed.

23 February 2025 — love your enemies and the lie of redemptive violence (Genesis 45; Luke 6:27-38). The direct precedent for Romans 12:14-21. You argued enemy-love as active non-violent resistance, then flagged its misuse hard: cited to pressure survivors of intimate partner violence into “forgiving” abusers, and twisted by prosperity preachers into a fundraising pitch on v.38 — “a perversion of the text and blasphemy against a loving God.” Traced redemptive violence from action films to police funding to “a theology that frames Jesus’ death as payment for sin rather than execution by an unjust empire.” Then Joseph: naming what his brothers did “without letting them off the hook, yet choosing restoration over revenge.” Applied to the Synod’s treatment of queer people.
20 February 2022 — same lectionary slot, preparation notes only. “Forgiveness can’t be commanded”, and the striking move of asking whether a minister could compel a congregation to forgive him by quoting scripture at them — stating plainly that being told “you must forgive me” is a form of spiritual abuse. The notes break off before reaching Luke 6.
2 March 2022, Ash Wednesday — A Lament for Refugees and Asylum Seekers. Matthew 5:43-48 read and deliberately left without closing comment. A torn loaf, an overturned chalice, weeping cloths; a litany moving through grief, anger, confession of complicity and despair. That “read it and say nothing” move is a proven option for Romans 12:14-21.

On rebuking a friend — 10 September 2023, Matthew 18:15-20. The nearest thing you have to Peter being told he is a stumbling block. Opens with being pushed in front of at Lucia’s (“As we all know, I’m perfect, so the other person is to blame”), then turns: “…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?”

On the second call to discipleship — 19 September 2021, Mark 9:30-37. Two full drafts survive and this is your best power material. Ched Myers’ frame: “the first call was to leave behind livelihood and place, the second is to leave behind your assumptions.” Draft 1 uses Hilarion’s letter from a Cairo rubbish dump, 18 June 1 BC — “if it is a boy, let it be, if it is a girl cast it out” — and lands on children in immigration detention. Draft 2 uses Loomer and Cobb on unilateral versus relational power, and closes: “relinquishing power is harder in church than at work because church deals with who I am.” It sits three chapters downstream of this week’s gospel and is the same argument.

On Exodus — 24 September 2023, Exodus 16:2-15. Recovered from the Sermons folder; the log row is blank and gives no hint it exists. Your best Exodus sermon. “What’s happening in Exodus at this point? They’ve left Egypt. Slavery. The people have been crying out, and God has listened.” You insisted the complaints are “right… are justified” — “So often in the church, we look back on them and laugh or vilify them for their complaints. But it is a hard spot.” Contrasted with Numbers: “In Numbers, God responds with anger… In Exodus, God responds with care.” Written partly at Parachilna Gorge. Also there: 19 March 2017 on Exodus 17:1-7 (the water bottle object lesson), and 17 September 2023, Exodus 14, with Vicki Balabanski preaching and you leading.

On being called and not wanting it — 14 January 2024, 1 Samuel 3. The closest structural analogue to Moses at the bush. You told your own vocation story: going silent rather than singing “here I am, is it I, Lord?” as a kid, for fear God might actually answer. “Somewhere along the way, I changed from Samuel to Eli… I found a grey hair the other day!!” Included a first-person letter from Samuel to Hannah. And Hineini is already a recurring liturgical device here — Lent 1 2023 was built around it.

On the burning bush specifically — two light touches. 4 August 2024 (John 6) connected Jesus’ “I AM” back to Moses at the bush, in a single line. And 25 January 2026, Day of Mourning gave you the frame that would carry Exodus 3 best: that the God of scripture is never abstract, always somewhere — “a garden, a mountain, a burning bush, a desert, a womb” — and that “to say God was here from the beginning is to reject the myth that God arrived with the ships,” immediately followed by your own warning not to “rush to baptise it.” Holy ground on unceded Kaurna country is the obvious landing, and you have already set both the warrant and the limit.

And the counterweight to “get behind me, Satan” is on your shelf already: 4 May 2025, John 21, where you read Jesus’ threefold questioning of Peter “not as rebuke but as reassurance following Peter’s earlier denial.” Same disciple, opposite tone, and the two readings together are a sermon.

Voice Profile threads that apply: interrogating why a reading starts and stops where it does — live twice this week; ending on an open question rather than resolution; anaphora closings, which Romans 12:9-21 is structurally built for, being itself a stacked list. Rotation warning: Ched Myers is not on the formal over-used list but appears in at least five sermons and is the obvious reach for a passion-prediction text. Alter, AJ Levine and Borg/Crossan are already flagged.

The limits, stated plainly. Three of the most relevant Sundays here are blank or absent in the log (25 Feb 2024, 3 Sept 2023, and the recovered 24 Sept 2023). Three encounters with the Markan parallel — September 2021, February 2024, September 2024 — have produced zero surviving manuscripts. Nothing new has landed on Drive since the folder was assembled on 15 August.

4. Commentary & Reflection Links

Unusually good week: the 2026 Working Preacher commentaries for this Sunday are already live, and Howard Wallace’s site finally has something, because for once the Old Testament reading is the main event.

Exodus 3:1-15

Cameron B.R. Howard (Luther, dated 30 August 2026) — identity all the way down. Moses’ “who am I?” is answered not with a CV but with “I will be with you”; God’s own identity is given relationally, as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob — while Pharaoh is never named, only titled, which makes him replaceable. She rather deflates the bush: an attention-getting device, not the point.
Kimberly D. Russaw (Pittsburgh) — the womanist reading, built on the Hebrew of 3:7 where the infinitive absolute intensifies the seeing: God really sees, deliberately and over time, not in sudden surprise. Uses “From a Distance” as a foil and asks what would change in policy and resource allocation if we took that seeing seriously.
Anathea Portier-Young (Duke) — the best “holy ground” piece. Sandals in ancient Egypt signified status, property and contractual obligation, so removing them is Moses releasing “himself from every claim so that he can accept the claim God makes upon him.”
Dennis Olson — “I WILL BE WHO I WILL BE” as deliberately unfinished, unfolding across the whole book: justice and jealousy at Exodus 20, mercy and forgiveness after the golden calf at 33-34, so that God’s character emerges primarily as love.
Anna Grant-Henderson (Old Testament Lectionary, UCA) — notes the possible wordplay between seneh (bush) and Sinai, reads the Name as making God more accessible rather than less, and stresses that the call form permits objection: God allows argument, “one doesn’t get zapped.” Her preaching suggestion is to invite the congregation to take their shoes off.
Howard Wallace — makes God’s noticing the engine of the whole exodus, lays the commissioning form alongside Judges and Jeremiah, and is deliberately unresolved on the Name: Moses’ quest “leads only to further mystery.” Grace before law — deliverance happens before Sinai.
Dan Clendenin, “Exodus and Exile” — sets the dramatic-deliverance model against Jeremiah telling the exiles to build houses and seek Babylon’s welfare. Both Moses and Jeremiah reluctant, both opposed, both given the same sentence: I will be with you. (Note: Journey with Jesus has not yet published its 2026 essay for this Sunday.)

Romans 12:9-21

Nancy Lammers Gross (Princeton, dated 30 August 2026) — the single most useful detail of the week. “Heaping burning coals” is not punitive: it reflects carrying live coals from a neighbour’s hearth to restart your own fire, so feeding your enemy is an act of mercy that makes repentance possible. She also frames vv.9-21 as supplying the disposition the gifts of vv.3-8 require — which stitches this week directly onto last week.
Bill Loader — grounds the ethics in “God values each one of us,” which removes the need for rivalry; blessing adversaries preserves their dignity without condoning their actions and breaks the cycle. He explicitly rejects reading burning coals as manipulative shaming.
David McCabe — translates hē agapē anypokritos as “Love is (to be) unpretentious!” and turns it on curated moral self-presentation and “self-congratulating indulgence.” Includes those harmed by fellow church members as the test case.
Laughing Bird — again with a page for this exact date. Full paraphrase set, a eucharistic preface pairing liberation from Egypt with Christ’s suffering, and seven sermons including Nettleton’s “Burning Identity Questions” on Exodus 3 and Matthew 16 together.
Pilgrim UCA — Sandy Boyce, COCU54A — liturgy rather than exegesis, and rich: two calls to worship, a Ted Dodd prayer response on Romans 12:9-18, and three Andrea Skevington poems — “Moses and the Burning Bush,” “Holy Ground, Barefoot,” “On Fire, but Not Burned.”

Matthew 16:21-28

Eugene L. Gibson Jr. (dated 30 August 2026) — defuses “Satan” usefully: not demonic possession but being an adversary to God’s will. Then names what makes self-denial hard for Western Christianity specifically — that it has been “corrupted by capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy” — and closes on Bonhoeffer.
Bill Loader — pastorally the best thing on the list. Self-denial means abandoning the constructed self — image-management, power, manipulation — not the rejection of one’s worth. He warns against “inverse hypocrisy,” people falsely claiming worthlessness, and tells preachers to go gently, because “threatened, shrivelled people” may need support alongside preaching. Worth reading before writing a word.
Richard Ward — Crown versus Cross, via Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, and he states outright that authentic cross-bearing does not mean accepting abuse. A citable guard-rail sentence from a homiletics professor.
Mitzi J. Smith — back again after last week, and this is the one that keeps “deny yourself” political rather than psychological. Jesus as revolutionary; the chief priests kill him because he threatens their share of colonial privilege; “religion has never been free of political intrigue and violence”; Peter’s rebuke diagnosed as incomplete revolutionary commitment, not theological error.
Rex Hunt — Creative.Pentecost14A.2022 — Matthew as a storyteller looking back fifty years, reshaping events into community instruction rather than recording a prediction. His claim is blunt: Jesus died because he refused to compromise his vision of a reimagined society, not because of a cosmic divine plan or redemptive bloodshed. Offers the choice between being “reactors” and “actors.”
Andrew Prior, “Of Burning Bushes and Messiahs” — Adelaide UCA, and he reads Exodus 3 and Matthew 16 together, which almost nobody does. A religious experience that stays an experience decays into irrelevance: Moses didn’t linger at the bush, he went back to Egypt where there was a price on his head. His second piece reads “Son of God” against Roman imperial titles and draws on his own conscientious objection in Vietnam-era Australia.

A queer reading — searched separately, as always

A much better week than last: Exodus 3 delivers properly, Romans 12 has one strong piece, and Matthew 16:21-28 has essentially nothing — which is worth saying out loud rather than papering over.

Casey Aldridge, “Order Built on (Queer) Sand: A Communist Reading of the Queer Name of God in Exodus 3” — the find of the week. Reads ehyeh asher ehyeh through Muñoz’s “queerness is not yet here”: the Name is queer precisely because it refuses fixed meaning and orients toward a liberated future. He works the translation instability deliberately — “I am who I am” / “I will be what I will be” / Dick Boer’s “I will be there, as he who I will be there” — and calls YHWH “being in becoming.” Two lines to steal: “the name is quite literally a sigh that reflects and mimics the sigh of the Israelites in bondage,” and, of the moment marginalised people claim their own naming, “God comes out as well.”
Danya Ruttenberg, “The Call from Pure Being” — she does deliver this week, unlike last. Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh holds past, present and future at once, and “is also the sound of breathing.” Reads Moses’ resistance as the residue of prior failure — his earlier attempt to help got him exiled — and pairs it with Dr King’s kitchen-table crisis: courage is not fearlessness, “it’s that, despite all of these things, they stepped up.”
Ruttenberg, “On True Names” — not on Exodus 3, and I’ll say so, but it is the pairing. From Genesis 17 and Brachot 13a — “anyone who calls Abraham ‘Abram’ transgresses a positive commandment” — she argues that refusing someone’s chosen name is a violation in Jewish law, and applies it directly: “Deadnaming is violence. Deadnaming is a sin.” Put beside a God whose name refuses to be a handle, that is a sermon.
Queer Theology ep. 344, “The Power of Queer Community — Romans 12:9-21” — recorded 30 August 2020, i.e. this exact Sunday last cycle. Burning coals read as tactical rather than vengeful; “rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep” read against the queer community’s long practice of collective care through crisis.
Jay Michaelson, “Exodus,” in The Queer Bible Commentary (2nd ed., SCM 2022) — four approaches of escalating radicalism, ending in an invitation to “stand again at Sinai.” Honest note: the chapter does not treat the bush or the Name. Cite it for the frame, not the passage.

Where it’s thin, said plainly. Matthew 16:21-28 has no substantial queer reading I could find — not on Queer Theology, not at qspirit, not in the accessible literature; searches on “get behind me Satan” and queer return nothing on topic. The nearest are Elizabeth Edman’s Queer Virtue on coming out as a dying-and-rising pattern, and Patrick Cheng’s Radical Love on queer models of atonement — books you’d apply, not links you’d cite. Laurel Dykstra preached Exodus 1:8–2:10 in the last cycle but nothing on chapter 3. And A Queer Lectionary Year A certainly has a Proper 17 entry but nothing is previewable.

An adjacent seam worth chasing — disability, not queerness. Moses’ “heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue” sits just past the lection at 4:10, and Emilie Amar-Zifkin’s “Moses and the Disappearing Disability” argues the biblical text accommodates the impairment (Aaron as spokesperson) while Rashi, Rashbam and Gersonides progressively explain it away — revealing discomfort with a disabled prophet remaining central to prophetic authority.

A feminist and womanist reading — and this week it is the most important section

“If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross” has a body count. Any sermon on Matthew 16:24 that doesn’t know that is a sermon waiting to hurt someone, and the congregation almost certainly contains people for whom this verse has already been used as a weapon.

Susanne Guenther Loewen, “Can the Cross Be ‘Good News’ for Women?” — the best single entry point; it surveys the whole argument readably. Delores Williams: “there is nothing divine in the blood of the cross.” Rita Nakashima Brock: refusing any claim “that any person’s tragic, painful death is divinely willed or necessary for others to be saved.” Joanne Carlson Brown and Rebecca Parker: the cross as “divine child abuse.” Loewen’s own answer is that the cross is good news only as divine solidarity with the oppressed, never as a warrant for enduring abuse.
Delores Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness — and the constructive half preachers usually drop, well laid out by Eboni Marshall Turman: Williams objects to redemptive suffering because it glorifies surrogacy, and Black women have historically been the surrogates. Her replacement is Jesus’ life and “ministerial vision” as the locus of salvation, modelled on Hagar — an enslaved woman who resists, survives, and names God for herself. Which lands, rather beautifully, straight back on Exodus 3.
Barbara E. Reid OP, Taking Up the Cross — a whole book named for this verse, testing five frameworks against the voices of women in Mexico, Bolivia and Peru. Her finding is two-sided and honest: identifying their suffering with Christ’s passion “has sometimes given them strength, but has also led to a harmful acceptance of unjust suffering.” Her alternative centre of gravity is birthing imagery — bringing about new life rather than focusing on the suffering.
Ivone Gebara’s observation, via Amy Chapman, is the sharpest thing here for preaching: male suffering gets public recognition and redemptive value; female suffering stays private and non-redemptive.

And note that the guard-rails are available from inside Richard’s own commentary list, not only from the critics: Richard Ward says cross-bearing does not mean accepting abuse, Bill Loader redefines self-denial as abandoning the constructed self and warns against inverse hypocrisy, and Rex Hunt says flatly that Jesus died for refusing to compromise, not for redemptive bloodshed.

Two ways in

Lead angle — the Name that won’t hold still, and the people who name themselves. Preach Exodus 3:13-15 as a God who answers a demand for a definition by refusing one. Aldridge gives the queer frame — the Name is a breath, an echo of the enslaved people’s sigh, being-in-becoming; Ruttenberg gives the same instinct from inside Jewish tradition; Wallace and Grant-Henderson insist from mainstream UCA scholarship that the Name yields only further mystery. Then turn it: Ruttenberg’s “On True Names” makes self-naming a commandment, and Williams’ Hagar is the enslaved woman who survives by naming God for herself. Howard keeps it pastoral — Moses’ identity, like ours, rests on “I will be with you,” not on credentials.

Live alternative — whose cross? Preaching Matthew 16:24 without doing harm. Take the gospel head-on and say from the pulpit that this verse has been used to keep people in danger. Williams, Brock, Brown and Parker, Reid and Gebara give you the critique with specifics rather than sentiment. Then rebuild with Ward, Loader, Mitzi Smith and Rex Hunt: the cross as the cost of threatening empire, not the sanctification of pain. Williams’ constructive move — salvation in Jesus’ ministerial vision rather than his blood — is the landing.

5. From My Library

All six catalogue parts searched.

For Exodus 3 — the lead is Ernst Bloch, Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom. The subtitle is the sermon. Bloch reads Exodus 3:14 not as static being but as futurity — the God of the not-yet, the anti-idol against every fixed deity — and his own phrase is “adherence to the Exodus-figure called ‘I will be what I will be.’” Alongside it: Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation, where Exodus is handled in chapter 2 under “Creation and Salvation” — “the exodus is the creation of God’s people,” salvation and creation as one act. And for holy ground on invaded land, Chris Budden, Following Jesus in Invaded Space: a Second Peoples theology arguing that Australian theology must be done as theology on land belonging to someone else. Moses, note, is a fugitive standing on Midianite ground, not his own.

Also worth pulling: Melissa Florer-Bixler, Fire by Night — chapters titled “God of Memory,” “God of the Vulnerable,” “God of Friendship.” I could not confirm a burning-bush chapter, but the “God of Memory” chapter works Amalek and vengeance and is actually a better fit for Romans 12:19 than for Exodus.

The honest note on Alter: The Five Books of Moses is genuinely the right tool for the Hebrew of ehyeh asher ehyeh and his note on it is famous. He is also the flagged over-used author. Use him for the philology in a footnote and lead with Bloch.

For Romans 12:9-21 — Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace, and specifically its founding moment: Moltmann asking Volf, a Croat, after a lecture, can you embrace a četnik? — and Volf’s answer, “No, I cannot — but as a follower of Christ I think I should be able to.” That single exchange is the whole sermon on blessing those who persecute you, and it comes from a man whose own countrymen were doing the killing. His practical method is “double vision” — letting the enemy’s perspective resonate inside you. Behind it, Free of Charge on giving and forgiving, and John Dear, Put Down Your Sword with its protest journals from India and Colombia.

For Matthew 16:21-28 — Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man is the best-documented thing in this whole search, and on the Markan parallel he is unanswerable: “The cross was neither a religious icon nor a metaphor for personal anguish or humility. It had only one meaning: that terrible form of execution reserved by Rome for dissenters.” Peter embodies messianic triumphalism — the orthodoxy that equates being on God’s side with the guarantee of success — and the “must” of the passion prediction is not predestination but “the conviction that the vocation of Messianic justice will inevitably clash with the Powers.” It is Mark rather than Matthew, but Matthew 16:21-23 is Mark 8:31-33 with edits, and no Matthew commentary on your shelf comes close. Hare’s Matthew (Interpretation) is the fresh preaching commentary, though I could only verify it at series level.

The queer and feminist shelf. Torah Queeries is organised parashah by parashah, so it necessarily contains an essay on Shemot — the bush, the call, the Name. I could not verify the essay’s title or author (two sources down, one returning 405); it is the highest-value unverified lead here and worth thirty seconds with the physical book. Austen Hartke’s Transforming works Moses renaming Hoshea as Joshua and argues “renaming is as old as language” — which puts a trans reading directly onto the Moses cycle. Shannon Kearns’ In the Margins has a Jacob-wrestling chapter: a night encounter that ends in a limp and a new name, structurally the same move. And Ruether’s Sexism and God Talk is the strongest feminist fit to this reading specifically, because it hits both halves at once — the “God/ess” notation is an argument about naming God, and she is explicit that Exodus is paradigmatic, God acting as liberator of social victims in a way that fundamentally challenges hierarchy. Grace Ji-Sun Kim’s When God Became White is the unexpectedly good partner: a book about who gets to picture God, next to a God who declines to be pictured.

The fiction pairing — Sue Monk Kidd, The Invention of Wings, and it is almost too neat. Sarah Grimké has a stammer that began the day she saw an enslaved woman whipped — and it disappears whenever she speaks her actual truth about abolition. Set that beside Exodus 4:10, three verses past our reading: “I am slow of speech and slow of tongue.” Same objection, same answer: sent anyway. On her eleventh birthday she is given a human being as a present, wrapped in a lavender ribbon; she stammers her refusal, then secretly writes Handful a certificate of freedom. She cuts a silver button from her dress as a token of her calling. Her father destroys the certificate, her mother tells her the ambition is foolish, and Sarah surrenders and drops the silver button into the fire — and Handful reaches into the fire and pulls it back out. A thing put into the fire, not consumed, returned to call her again. That is Exodus 3:2 in a Charleston parlour, plus the reluctant call, plus the family who talk you out of the hard right thing, which is Peter’s line in Matthew 16:22 spoken by a mother.

Two alternatives if that’s too tidy. Willy Vlautin’s Don’t Skip Out on Me — Horace Hopper, half-Paiute, renames himself Hector Hidalgo to become a boxer, and the novel’s verdict is that the reinvention does not save him: a self-issued name never holds. And David Diop’s At Night All Blood is Black, which is Romans 12:17-21 as a negative photograph — Alfa avenges his friend methodically and it eats him, until he loses even his own name. Brutal, and it makes Paul’s imperative sound like survival advice rather than piety.

Gaps worth knowing: there is no dedicated Exodus commentary on the shelf — no Childs, Fretheim or Propp, and the Wisdom Commentary series is well represented but has no Exodus, Matthew or Romans volume. Romans is the thinnest of the three readings: Achtemeier’s Romans is the only commentary and it went into last week’s post. So this week’s Romans material is ethics and theology rather than commentary, which is probably the better route anyway. Also: Olly Ponsonby, Fragments From Holy Ground has a title made for Exodus 3:5 but no subjects, Dewey or LCC in the catalogue — no idea what it is. Worth your own eyes.

6. From My Articles

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

For Romans 12:9-21, the nonviolence cluster is the strongest thing in the index. Start with Yoder, The Things That Are Caesar’s (Parts II and III) — different Yoder from last week. His signature argument is that Romans 12:14-21 and 13:1-7 are a single literary unit governed by “never avenge yourselves,” so the subjection of 13:1 is the political outworking of the non-retaliation of 12:19. Preaching 12:9-21 without 13:1-7 is exactly the split he attacks. Then King, Principles of Nonviolence; Myers, Was Jesus a Practitioner of Nonviolence?; Ellul, What I Believe; Weaver, The Gospel Confronts the Powers (the fresh Anabaptist replacement for last week’s Wink, and it carries nonviolent atonement straight into Matthew 16); and Chittister, Easter and Empire.

For Exodus 3, the best hit is Djiniyini Gondarra, “Let My People Go: Series of Reflections on Aboriginal Theology”, in From Dean/. The title is Exodus 5:1 — the sentence Moses is commissioned at the bush to go and say — and a Yolngu theologian taking that commission as his own is precisely the pairing. Different Gondarra text from last week. In the same folder: My Mother The Land and its foreword, for Exodus 3:5; and Fiona Magowan, “It is God who Speaks in the Thunder…”, on theophany and Yolngu ontologies of faith and fear — a genuinely unusual door into a burning bush. Then the liberation cluster: Cone (two pieces), Rosado, and the Covenanting Statement.

For Matthew 16:21-28: Pramuk, “Strange Fruit”: Black Suffering / White Revelation — lynching, Cone, theology of the cross. Plus Crowe, Nietzsche, the Cross, and the Nature of God and Ledgerwood, Subverting the System.

Two pastoral flags. Melanchthon et al., “Terror in the Bible: Rhetoric, Gender, and Violence” is in the index, keyworded to texts of terror and domestic violence, and it belongs beside Matthew 16:24 for the reasons in section 4. And When Women Speak: Domestic Violence in Australian Churches, flagged last week, applies again this week and more sharply.

Honest gap: not one article on Exodus, Moses or the Pentateuch anywhere in the 214 rows; none on Romans 12; none on Matthew 16. The Hebrew Bible articles cluster on Isaiah, Ruth and Genesis; the Matthew ones on chapters 13 and 23-25; the Romans ones are all chapter 13. Three readings, three genuine holes — which is a real finding about the collection rather than a failed search.

7. Liturgical Resources

Words for Worship has not one but three exact matches, and somebody has already found them — shortcuts to all three were dropped into the 30.08.26 folder today. Each run picks a different reading as its focus, so between them you have three complementary liturgies:

wfw-Year A - 2023 - Pentecost 14 - Exodus 3.1-15; Psalm 105.1-6, 23-26, 45b; Romans 12.9-21; Matthew 16.21-28.pdf — focused on Exodus 3, theme “taking our place in the adventure of faith… God meets us in the places of our fear, our doubt, and our lack of vision.” A .doc twin exists but isn’t shortcutted.
wfw-Year A - 2020 - Pentecost 13 - … (same readings).doc — focused on Matthew 16:21-28, “Taking up the cross.” Dated 30 August 2020, the identical calendar date. Its Prayer of Confession quotes Romans 12:9-21 almost in full as the congregational response and its intercession is a line-by-line paraphrase of the same passage — the most directly usable Romans 12 material in the whole collection.
wfw-Year A - 2017 - Pentecost 13 - … (same readings).doc — focused on Romans 12:9-21, “The way of Christ.”

Spill the Beans has nothing and L3 has nothing, both verified rather than assumed — neither collection holds any Year A RCL material at all. And the same problem as last week is sitting in the folder: the LINK – Spill the Beans – Women’s Lectionary – Living Together doc points at Exodus 4:18-26 and Ephesians 5:21-33, i.e. the track the congregation has just stepped off. It should be removed or marked superseded before someone opens it on Saturday night. (It also labels the Sunday “Pentecost 13,” which is wrong for 2026 — by strict counting from Pentecost Day on 24 May, this is Pentecost 14.)

What the service is already doing — and what it isn’t

The Liturgy - 30.08.26 doc was updated today: the reading is now the full RCL set, and Adrian is named as preacher. Greg is leading, Lachlan reading, with Leigh, Graham, Claire and Val on music.

Everything else is blank. All four song slots. The Call to Worship, Opening Prayer, Centring Meditation, Prayer of the Day, Prayers for Others, Offering and Benediction — headings only. This is the opposite of last week, where the liturgy was essentially finished by the Tuesday and was quietly doing the theology before the sermon arrived. If anything is going to be offered to Greg, this is the week and it is early enough to be useful.

Songs — nothing has ever been sung here for these readings, because no service in any log has used Exodus 3 or Matthew 16:21-28. Fresh ground. From what the congregation actually holds:

How Shall I Call You — ATN 43, Robin and Dorothy Mann. The closest thing in the entire collection to Exodus 3:13-15, and it is an Adelaide song. Listen.
Here I Am, Lord — ATE 296 / TiS 658. Call-and-response to a God who has seen and heard, which is the grammar of Exodus 3:7-10. On Words for Worship’s own list too. Hymnary.
Goodness Is Stronger Than Evil — ATW 463, Desmond Tutu and John Bell. This is Romans 12:21 set to music, almost verbatim, and short enough to use as a sung response through the prayers. Hymnary. Caveat: it’s in the Songs Log but not on the CotT Song List.
God Has Chosen Me — ATOK 402, Bernadette Farrell. The liberation half of the burning bush. Publisher.
Help Us Accept Each Other — TiS 648, on Words for Worship’s own Romans 12 list. Hymnary.
Freedom Is Coming — ATOK 355. Exodus as liberation, and it sings unaccompanied. Hymnary.

And one deliberate reprise worth considering: Leaning In: A Prayer of Intention (Christopher Grundy) had its first outing on 28 June — the Sunday Romans 12:9-21 was read. It may now be learned well enough to bring back on the Sunday the passage is actually preached. Words for Worship also lists Take, take off your shoes (TiS 651) and ‘Take up your cross’, the Saviour said (TiS 583), both ideal and neither of which the congregation appears to hold — sheet music would need sourcing.

Themes emerging. Three readings, and they converge on one uncomfortable question: what does it cost to be the person you’ve been called to be? Exodus gives the call and the objection. Romans gives the daily discipline — not heroics, but blessing people who don’t deserve it, over and over. Matthew gives the price. Your own archive has been circling this for years: the second call to discipleship, the Stuttgart Declaration, redemptive violence and its lie, forgiveness that can’t be commanded. The one thing to guard is the gap between cost freely chosen and suffering imposed by someone else — the whole womanist critique in section 4 lives in that gap, and so, quietly, do several people in the pews.

8. Coming Up: Other Commemorations

Nothing on the 30th itself, but the day after is unusually rich.

31 August — Liyapidiny Marika O.A.M., the first Yolngu woman ordained a Minister of the Word in the Uniting Church. Born 1945 at Yirrkala, a full-time Health Worker among her own people from 1970, awarded the O.A.M. in 1981 for that service — “daily involved in the physical, mental and spiritual suffering of her people.” She resigned in 1986 to train at Nungalinya and was ordained in September 1991. The calendar is blunt that “as the first ordained Aboriginal woman, her ministry was not always accepted,” and gives her own words: “God called me, even though I am a woman, to do His Ministry.” That is Exodus 3 in a single sentence — the call arriving despite every reason the called person could give for why not. In Malaysia in 1990 she “walked arm in arm with her Asian sisters teaching them her theme song ‘Bind us together, Lord’” — they knew no English and learned it anyway. Died 31 August 1998.
31 August — John Bunyan. After the Restoration closed non-conformist meeting houses by Act of Parliament, he went on preaching in the countryside anyway, was gaoled for twelve years, and wrote most of his books inside. Freed, gaoled again in 1675, and wrote The Pilgrim’s Progress during that stretch. The calendar’s own line: “The spirit of God was so strong in Bunyan that he could not stop sharing the gospel no matter what the consequences.” A man who kept going knowing exactly what it would cost — which is this week’s gospel without the theology.
1 September — George Brown and John Thomas. Thomas, a blacksmith’s son, wrote of “my own rough and knotty mind… what a raw, weak and uncultivated wretch was I when I left our England” — another reluctant, self-doubting call, if anyone wants a second one.
4 September — Albert Schweitzer, which is convenient, because he supplies section 11.
5 September — Robert Browne (imprisoned thirty-two times) and Mother Teresa.

9. A Piece of Music

Fleet Foxes — “Helplessness Blues”. This one goes with the lead angle. It’s a song by someone raised to believe he was singular, who now wants to be handed a task and a place instead — he’d rather be told what he is for than have to work it out. Which is Moses at the bush arguing in the opposite direction for exactly the same reason: the terror isn’t being unimportant, it’s being addressed by name and given something to do. The last third turns toward a smaller, harder, more ordinary calling, which is roughly where Exodus 3 leaves him. Close harmony, builds and then drops into something quieter. Lyrics checked: clean.

If you’d rather something aimed at Romans 12: The Brilliance — “Brother”, piano and strings, on what happens when you stop letting an opponent be a category and start letting them be a person — and it never pretends that’s easy or deserved. Also clean.

10. In the News

The story of the week, and it is almost too on the nose: David McBride was released on parole on 13 August after more than two years in Canberra’s Alexander Maconochie Centre — the former ADF legal officer convicted of taking classified defence material to journalists. He has also disclosed early-stage lung cancer. His lawyer said the case “matters deeply to the Australian public” and that his stand had “strengthened our democracy.” The complication is the honest part: McBride’s stated intent was to expose over-investigation of soldiers, and the reporting that followed instead surfaced allegations of unlawful killings. He said yes to something and it went somewhere he hadn’t chosen. That is a very Exodus 3 shape, and Bernard Collaery’s response — that McBride ended up in prison because he “couldn’t find the right route to raise his concerns” — is the second voice.

The necessary guardrail on Romans 12, from an Australian theologian the congregation may know: Robyn Whitaker of the University of Divinity, “Forgiveness is central to the Easter story, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be abused” — forgiveness detached from repentance, justice and accountability becomes cheap grace that harms survivors: “forgiveness meant forgetting; that forgiveness meant going back to the marriage; that forgiveness meant no accountability.” April rather than this week, but it is the piece. “Do not repay evil for evil” is not “pretend no evil occurred.”

Season of Creation starts on Tuesday — 1 September to 4 October, theme “Living Water” from Ezekiel 47, with the symbol “Immersion in Living Water.” Everything is free download, no registration, but the two editable DOCX files (the guide and the plain-text order of service) are the practical ones and should be pulled before Sunday if anyone wants the language in next week’s service. Pleasingly, the Murray is actually rising — flows up to about 22.5 GL a day, the highest since the 2022-23 floods, after 8 GL in 2025 and 4 GL in 2024. A river rising and everything living where it goes, in the same week the theme arrives.

Still on the radar: the revised Code of Ethics and Ministry Practice, effective 1 January 2027.

11. Just for You

“He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lake-side, He came to those men who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same word: ‘Follow thou me!’ and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfil for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is.”

Albert Schweitzer, the closing paragraph of The Quest of the Historical Jesus, trans. W. Montgomery (Adam and Charles Black, 1910). Verified against a page-marked transcription of chapter XX and against the Project Gutenberg edition’s title page — not a quote site.

He is commemorated on 4 September, four days after this Sunday, which was not planned. And the passage is about being called by a voice you don’t recognise and set to work you didn’t choose, which was not planned either. Enjoy the pew.