RSTelfer

Monday Prep — 22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, 6th September 2026

RST

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39–58 minutes

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How the Sermon Took Shape

Written Friday 4th September 2026, from the Friday prep conversation and the draft Richard finished that afternoon. A note on what he actually preached can follow on Sunday.

Richard arrived on Friday with a brief that looked like the prep’s lead angle: Genesis 2 as a launch pad for ecotheology, the land as alive, Wendell Berry (who died on Monday) for the quotes, and the tension between Living Water and killing water, with Nepal in the room. What he wrote by the end of the day was the prep’s other sermon — the one section 4 called the “live alternative” and filed second. The title is “Water is Life.” Its spine is a refrain, not an argument: Water is Life. Until it isn’t. Water is Life. Water is Death. Nothing is one thing.

The route runs through Burke and Wills, then the Langtang Lirung ice fall in some technical detail — 1,200 metres, 180 km/h, the debris slurry, and the new lake now pooled behind loose rubble above the same villages — then Ted Lasso, where Dani Rojas has to learn to hold “Football is Life” and “Football is Death” in the same body before he can kick again. From there it turns pastoral: three psalms of drowning (69, 42, 18) via a World Council of Churches piece by the Brazilian Lutheran Mauro Batista de Souza, and a plain list of the ways people in the room are already up to their noses — family separation on Father’s Day, money, transphobia and racism. “It is not our fault if a wave comes and we inhale water” is the sermon’s anti-blame move, done in one sentence. Then the Gospel: not Jesus walking on water but Jesus thirsty, asking a Samaritan woman for a drink, and living water as a spring that rises in people who hold each other up. Genesis gets one line — the stream rising from the earth before the human is formed — and the whole thing lands on the communion table.

It is a communion Sunday, so he had eight to ten minutes and one point, and he is not preaching again this month. That constraint did more to shape the sermon than any resource did.

How the prep held up, and what the Friday conversation got wrong:

  • The prep backed the wrong horse, and said so at the time. Section 4 offered “serve and preserve” as the lead and “still thirsty” as the alternative, but also wrote that the alternative was “the sermon that can hold Nepal and the spring together without choosing.” That was right. With a thousand dead in the news, the pastoral angle was always going to win, and future preps should weight the angles by what the room is carrying, not by how much scholarship sits behind them.
  • The Friday conversation kept trying to braid; Richard cut. When he said “there are two or three sermons in this,” the first instinct here was to find the hinge that joined them — soil as the mediator between living and killing water, Gundagai alongside Nepal, Job, the Berry Questionnaire. Clever, and wrong for eight minutes. He picked one and wrote a refrain. The learning: when Richard names the surplus, the job is to help him choose, not to make the surplus cohere.
  • Berry fell out entirely, after being pushed three times from this side. The verified soil quote from The Unsettling of America was good and is still good; it just wasn’t this sermon. Attachment to a source is not a reason to keep it, and Berry now has a blog post waiting instead.
  • Genesis 2 is still unpreached. The prep’s Hebrew — ha-adam out of ha-adamah, serve and preserve, the undifferentiated earth creature and the queer reading built on it — none of it made the manuscript. That is not a loss; it is a whole sermon banked for a Sunday without a flood in it. But it means the “first time” the prep flagged is still coming.
  • What the conversation actually contributed was smaller and more useful than the theology: verifying the glacier figures, finding and explaining the barrier lake for the survivors-aren’t-safe line, sourcing the WCC piece properly so Souza gets credited, catching that Isaiah 43, not the Gospels, carries the “through the waters” promise, and correcting its own Genesis line — the river of 2:10 comes after the human; it is the stream of 2:6 that comes first. Fact-checking and attribution earned their keep; the grand unifying structure did not.
  • Songs and music. No change — the four songs in section 7 stand as chosen, and the sermon quotes none of them. The one seam the prep found still holds, though: the Call to Worship, the seed litany and the “Spring — Communion” liturgy all land on spring, and the sermon now ends on the same word without having planned to. “Atlantic” (section 9) is closer to this sermon than to the one the prep expected — beauty and dread in the same glass — so the music pick survived the change of angle better than the commentary did.
  • Two things the prep didn’t know. It was built on the Wednesday and missed the Souza piece, published that day, which supplied the sermon’s scripture spine; and it never noted that the service was a communion Sunday with a short sermon slot. Sermon length and what surrounds it belong in section 1, every week.
  • Pop culture arrived from outside. Ted Lasso is the sermon’s best illustration and the prep has no slot for it — that’s the Sunday Toolkit’s section, not Monday Prep’s. Worth asking whether Monday Prep wants one line of “what Richard is watching” when the archive shows he reaches for it this often.

Rebuilt Wednesday 2nd September 2026. The liturgy for this Sunday is now up in the Current Worship Season folder, and the readings have changed. This is no longer Exodus 15 and Philippians 4 — the service is Genesis 2:4b-15 and John 4:7-15, and it is a Season of Creation service. Everything below has been rebuilt on the actual readings, songs and liturgy in that document.

1. Hello, Richard

Two things happened while you were putting this service together, and you should know about both, because they make you look considerably more organised than you probably felt.

First: you opened the service by flagging the Feast of Creation and pointing everyone at feastofcreation.com. The Consultation on Common Texts adopted “Creation in Christ” into the Revised Common Lectionary in April this year — the first new feast added since the RCL was released in 1983 — for a three-year trial running 2026 to 2028. Its date is the first Sunday of September. Its Year A first reading is Genesis 1:1–2:3 or Genesis 2:4-25. So the Sunday is the Feast’s very first Sunday in its very first year, and the passage you picked is its designated Year A option. The paperwork is sitting in your own Drive.

Second: the global Season of Creation theme for 2026 is “Living Water”, out of Ezekiel 47, with the symbol “Immersion in Living Water.” And you have paired the earth creature in the garden with the spring gushing up to eternal life. Habel’s original Forest Sunday pairs Genesis 2 with John 3, and the Feast pairs it with John 1 — your John 4 is your own addition, and it is more on-theme this year than either official option. Worth saying out loud from the front, because nobody in the room will know it and it’s a genuinely good bit of liturgical instinct.

This is also your first Sunday back in the pulpit since 16 August — two guest Sundays in a row, so the room has had a fortnight of other voices and will be pleased to have you back.

One thing to brace for: your opening prayer sits the beauty of creation directly next to the deaths in Nepal and Tibet, and then declines to resolve them. That refusal is, I think, the actual sermon. Section 4 has people who have thought hard about how to preach exactly that without tidying it away.

If you want an opening. The seed pots are already on the table at item 5, so use them. Start with the Hebrew: the text doesn’t say God made a man, it says God made an earthling out of earth — ha-adam out of ha-adamah — and the only way to get the pun into English is to say God made a human out of humus. Then pay it off at the end by going back to the pots: the seeds are being carried home and watered for a month, and that is the entire job description in verse 15 — not “have dominion,” but, in the Hebrew, serve and preserve. Every time someone waters one this month the sermon preaches itself again. It needs the pots visible, not a show of hands, so the Trinity seating won’t defeat it this time.

2. This Week’s Readings

Old Testament: Genesis 2:4b-15 — the second creation account: the human formed from the dust, the garden in Eden, the four rivers, and the charge to till it and keep it. Read on Bible Gateway (NRSVue) (Bible Gateway needs whole verses, so that link opens at 2:4.)

New Testament: John 4:7-15 — Jesus and the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well; the living water. Read on Bible Gateway (NRSVue)

(Excerpts, abridged — full text via the links above. Scripture quotations from the New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition. Copyright © 2021 National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America.)

“then the Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.” (Genesis 2:7)

“The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.” (Genesis 2:15)

“Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty… The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” (John 4:13-14, abridged)

Where this sits. Genesis 2:4b is the seam where the Bible starts over — the second creation account begins mid-sentence after the first one has finished, and it runs to 2:25 as a single unit. Your reading stops at verse 15, which means it stops before the naming of the animals, before the deep sleep, and before the rib. That matters more than it sounds: at verses 7 and 15 the human is still ha-adam, undifferentiated, not yet male, not yet anything except earth with breath in it. Sexual differentiation doesn’t happen until 2:21-23, outside your reading. If you want the larger unit, the Australian L3 resource sets Genesis 2:4b-22 for this Sunday and the Feast sets 2:4-25 — either takes you through to the differentiation, which is a different sermon.

John 4:7-15 is the opening third of the long Samaritan-woman narrative that runs 4:5-42. You stop before the five husbands, before the “worship in spirit and truth” exchange, and before she leaves her water jar and goes to fetch the town. Stopping at 15 means the sermon is about thirst and the spring rather than about her marital history — which, given how badly that history has been handled for two thousand years, may be a mercy. Section 4 has the scholarship if you want to go there anyway.

3. What Have I Done Before

Last time you preached (16 August, Genesis 39): you used Potiphar’s wife as a doorway rather than a room and ran the whole Joseph novella, leaving Mark 10 alone entirely. The spine was Joseph’s queerness, worked out of the Hebrew — the coat that otherwise only King David’s daughter Tamar wears, and “well-built and handsome” rendering a phrase used of exactly one other person in the canon, Rachel. It landed on the three weepings and the courage to be known, with compassion as the path to liberation — a thesis that came out of the centring music rather than the manuscript. Two guest Sundays have followed, so this is your first time back.

The thing you most need to know: you have had John 4:7-15 in the room already this year. On 8 March 2026, Lent 3, International Women’s Day, the set reading was this exact verse range. It was read twice — straight, then a dramatised retelling later in the service by the same reader, with a centring meditation in between. The room was set café-style, six to a table, blue cloths, a water vessel on each table, prayers of the people done in table groups. The log records the theme as “the unlikely conversation across religious, ethnic and gender lines that changes everything.” There is no manuscript, because you didn’t write one — the following week’s sermon refers back to “those questions I forced everyone to answer last week,” so it was an interactive session rather than a preached text. Songs that day included “Come to the Water” and Henry Lebedinsky’s “Plenty Good Room.”

So: the archive looks empty on John 4, but the room isn’t. Six months ago they sat with this passage around water jugs and answered questions about it themselves. Whatever you preach on Sunday is the second half of a conversation they’ve already started, and naming that from the front would be a gift — especially to whoever remembers what they said at their table.

Genesis 2, by contrast, is genuinely new. Across roughly 276 logged services in all six sermon logs, you have never preached it. What the logs do show:

  • Genesis 2:8-9 was read once, at an undated Harvest service at Palmerston (2018), with people bringing forward home-grown fruit and photos. No manuscript survives.
  • Genesis 1:1-2:4a was read once, Trinity Sunday, 7 June 2020 — a creation-and-communion service that ended in a church picnic, using Sacredise’s “Liturgy of Creation and Communion.” The sermon slot in the log is empty. Note the verse: it stops at 2:4a. Sunday starts at 2:4b. The two abut exactly and don’t overlap.
  • Genesis 2:15-17 with 3:1-7 was on the roster once — Lent 1, 26 February 2023 — and you swapped it out for Psalm 17 and Mark 12. The intercessions that morning nonetheless went hard on creation: humanity as “co-creators” who have “plundered” the earth, and “the earth cries out in pain.”

The usual caveat applies with more force than usual: the logs index by reference, so an occasion-based service — a Harvest, a commemoration, a Sustainable September week — can cover a text without being filed under it, and several 2023 and 2025 Season of Creation files never converted out of .pages and are unreadable. “Never preached Genesis 2” holds up well. “Never touched the second creation account” would be too strong.

The structural callback worth making: you have preached the well before. Twice, in fact — Genesis 24, on 9 July 2023 and again on 12 July 2026, seven weeks ago. From the 2026 manuscript: “In Ancient Near Eastern Literature, this is a classic meet-cute scene. These days it’d be a local inner-city bar, or a Whole Foods shopping aisle, in ANE lit it’s the well at twilight.” And you closed it: “And may we respond to requests for a sip of water with the generosity of Rebekah. May we be generous.”

That is the betrothal type-scene, and John 4 is built on it — man meets woman at a well, the pattern says a marriage follows, and John breaks the pattern on purpose. You laid the groundwork for this sermon in July without knowing it. The line about a sip of water is seven weeks old and the congregation may well remember it, which makes it a callback rather than a repeat. (One flag: you read heavily from Robert Alter that week, and the log had already marked him as “likely spent for a while.” Rotate him to a secondary mention here.)

Living water elsewhere. On 31 May 2026, Trinity Sunday, the reading was John 7:37-39 — the rivers of living water. Your own Prayer of the Day that morning named the Trinity as “Creator the light-bringer, Spirit hovering unafraid over chaos, and Word breathing life.” A guest preached; there’s no manuscript. TIS 188, this Sunday’s opening hymn, was sung that day too.

Season of Creation — you have a decade of this, and two pieces of it are directly useful:

  • 28 September 2025, closing the season on Luke 16. You built an original image that is almost purpose-made for John 4: “There is a wellspring of sacred water bubbling away here… We didn’t create it, but we are called to care for it. The water bubbles up from deep within creation… But this water flows out. Many churches have this sacred water bubbling away, but some try to dam it. Try to keep it for themselves.” You mapped the creek onto Trinity Sessions, the Op Shop, the Pub Lunch, and closed on caring for the water going out to Lazarus at the door. A spring that gushes up and flows out is precisely John 4:14. This is your own image, a year old, and it is waiting for you.
  • 29 September 2024, closing that season on Mark 9, is your most explicit creation theology and it bears straight on Genesis 2: “What does it mean if Humanity isn’t the primary expression of Love? Or even the centre or point of creation. It’s destabilising, but what new thoughts and experiences are opened up by it?” Genesis 2 answers that question — the human is made of the same ground as everything else and put there to serve it. You asked the question two years ago; the text hands you an answer.

Also in the file: 7 September 2025, Ocean Sunday — “I am thinking about how I receive from creation. I care for it, but I also receive care from it… We are part of creation.” That is Jesus asking a woman for a drink, in advance. 1 September 2024, the Greta sermon, opened that year’s season and sang TIS 181, which you’re singing again this week. 4 September 2022, Ocean Sunday, asked “what it would mean for Christians in the environmental justice movement to seek forgiveness from the natural world itself” — and had a ritual of tasting salt water. And 8 February 2026, Epiphany 5, prayed for “a holy rage, a righteous anger” against the systems wrecking the climate.

Voice Profile threads that genuinely apply: “who gets remembered vs. who is erased” fits the Samaritan woman exactly — she is the first evangelist in John’s Gospel and the tradition has spent two millennia discussing her sex life instead. And the outsider woman who argues with Jesus and wins is your 8 September 2024 Syrophoenician sermon — the closest sibling in the archive to this week’s encounter.

One gap worth knowing: nothing at all is logged for 23 or 30 August 2026 yet, and there’s no Season of Creation 2026 material in any log. Worth a catch-up when you have a spare half hour.

4. Commentary & Reflection Links

Genesis 2:4b-15

  • Working Preacher — “Forest Sunday: Preaching Season of Creation Week 1” (Patricia Tull). Written for exactly this Sunday in the Season of Creation cycle, on Genesis 2:4b-22. Humans are placed in Eden “to serve and preserve it”; dominion language is routinely exaggerated; and there’s a lovely turn on trees as themselves generative, sustaining all life by their own industry. Cites Habel’s The Season of Creation: A Preaching Commentary.
  • Working Preacher — Commentary on Genesis 2:4b-7, 15-17 (Jacqueline E. Lapsley). The sharpest thing anywhere on verse 15: translations obscure the text by rendering ‘abad as “till” or “work” when it plainly means to serve. The human is “groundkeeper or tenant farmer,” not ruler. Also stresses that humans and animals share nephesh hayah — “we all come from the same place” — and reads the verse-7 human as an undifferentiated earth creature with no gender specified.
  • Working Preacher — Commentary on Genesis 2:4b-25 (Safwat Marzouk). Best single overview. God as farmer; “earthling” and “groundling” endorsed as translations; work as original design rather than punishment; and no hierarchy established anywhere in the creation order.
  • Rex Hunt — Creation 1A / Forest Sunday. A direct hit, built on Genesis 2:4b-10, 15-22a, and written for the southern hemisphere spring, which almost nothing else is. Reframes the myth as truth-seeking rather than literal, and quotes Paul Collins’s God’s Earth — “we have only one world… and it is here and nowhere else that we will find God” — alongside Suzuki and McKibben. His matching liturgy page reproduces Habel’s own Prayer of Awareness and Opening Sentences, which name Australian flora and fauna.
  • One Man’s Web — “Grounded” (Genesis 2-3) (Andrew Prior, Adelaide, UCA). “The human being is adam; the earth is adamah” — we are earthlings, clay beings. The key sentence: “We are neither autonomous, nor above the creation, in this story.”
  • John Squires — “Original Sin? or Innate Goodness?”. Australian UCA. Adam as “the earth person,” Genesis 2-3 as aetiological myth, and a systematic dismantling of Augustinian original sin as a mistranslation of Romans 5:12. Useful if you want creation’s goodness without dragging the Fall in behind it.

John 4:7-15

  • Working Preacher — Commentary on John 4:5-42 (Jennifer Garcia Bashaw). The best all-rounder. States flatly that “neither Jesus nor the Gospel writer make a value statement about the five husbands,” names “serial divorcée or unfaithful tramp” as modern invention, and handles the betrothal type-scene with a twist — the reunion anticipated isn’t a wedding but the Samaritans and their God. Calls her the first and most effective evangelist in John.
  • Working Preacher — Commentary on John 4:5-42 (Meda Stamper). Best on the water itself, which is what your verse range actually is: the wordplay on living water as both flowing water and eternal life, tied forward to John 7:37-39. One blunt sentence worth borrowing: “there is no mention of sin or sinfulness in this text.”
  • Journey with Jesus — “Living Water” (Amy Frykholm). The one closest to your seam. Reframes marriage in that world as economic rather than sexual, then makes water political: “Who could drink from what well. Who had access to clean water and who did not.” Also gives the Eastern name for her — Photine, “the illuminated one.”
  • One Man’s Web — “Still Thirsty” (John 4:4-42) (Andrew Prior). Adelaide again, and unusually honest. Argues “never thirsting” is not magic resolution, because Jesus himself says “I am thirsty” from the cross: living water is ongoing conversion, not a solved problem. This is the John 4 page that already does what your opening prayer does — it refuses to tidy the ache away.
  • Marg Mowczko — “The Samaritan Woman of Sychar”. Five husbands as “a series of tragedies,” citing Lynn Cohick on early marriage, easy divorce and high male mortality, plus the 2 Kings 17 five-nations symbolism. Notes Origen and Chrysostom both called her a preacher, and that Orthodoxy names her equal to the apostles. Cites the Australian scholar Deborah Storie on wells as sites of unexpected encounter.
  • Jaime Clark-Soles — “The Nasty Woman Who Persisted”. The fiercest of them: “The Bible has plenty of words for whore and prostitute. She’s not one of them.”
  • Reta Halteman Finger — “Man Meets Woman at a Well”. The betrothal type-scene laid out properly against Rebekah, Rachel and Zipporah — and then the reversal: “he reversed gender roles and offered her a drink instead.” Pair this with your own Genesis 24 sermon from July.

Bill Loader has nothing substantial on either passage. Laughing Bird has paraphrases for Genesis 2:15-17 and 2:18-24 but nothing covering 2:4b-14. Textweek’s Genesis and John 4 index pages exist and are clearly on topic but blocked automated fetching — worth a manual look rather than a claim I read them.

Queer readings

Genesis 2 — this is one of the richest weeks you’ll get. The whole thing turns on ha-adam at verses 7 and 15 being an earth creature that is not yet male, and it is not a modern imposition: the rabbis got there first, by about seventeen centuries.

  • Keshet — “TransTexts: Queerly Created” (Rabbis Reuben Zellman and Elliot Kukla). The best single citable page. Lays out Genesis Rabbah 8:1‘s three readings side by side: R. Yirmiyah ben Elazar, that the first human was “created wholly female and wholly male at the same time,” an androgynos; R. Shmuel bar Nachman, that it was created double-faced and then split; and R. Tanchuma, that it was created as a golem — “a formless and infinite mass” with “neither a discernable sex, nor even a defined physical form.” Cross-refs Berakhot 61a and Eruvin 18a.
  • Julie Faith Parker — “In the Bible, gender is not binary” (Christian Century). The bridge from the rabbinic material into Christian preaching, and the best short statement of Phyllis Trible‘s argument: the original human is sexually undifferentiated, ha-adam carries no corporeal gender, and translators impose maleness by rendering it “the man,” “linguistically erasing nonbinary possibility.”
  • Austen Hartke — “Nonbinary gender and the diverse beauty of creation”. A free excerpt from Transforming, which is on your shelf. The famous move: separating day from night doesn’t abolish dawn and dusk, and separating land from sea doesn’t abolish marshes and estuaries — so “male and female” names the poles, not the whole set.
  • Life Is a Sacred Text — “We Have Always Been Here” (Rabbi Benjamin Luks-Morgan, guest post at Danya Ruttenberg’s site; free, not paywalled). The androgynos, the eight Talmudic gender categories, and Mishnah Bikkurim 4:1-5.
  • Rabbi David J. Meyer — “What the Torah Teaches Us About Gender Fluidity”. Accessible secondary discussion of Margaret Moers Wenig‘s merism argument — which is chapter 1 of Torah Queeries, sitting on your shelf (see section 5).

John 4 — genuinely thin, and I’d rather say so than stretch it. There is no established queer reading of the Samaritan woman comparable to the Genesis 2 material. What exists is analogical rather than textual.

  • New Ways Ministry — “From the Margins to Preachers” (Margie Winters, March 2026). The best of a small field, and recent. Winters was sacked from a Catholic school for marrying a woman, which gives it its authority. “Those of us on the margins know what it is to thirst.” Then the sharp move: women in Scripture are sexualised and marginalised by default interpretation, and “that same narrowing lens has been turned on the LGBTQ+ community.” That single sentence is the whole queer case for this passage.
  • Hanna-Maria Mehring — “The Samaritan Woman as a Quick-Witted Border Crosser in John 4” (Religions 15:8, 2024, open access). Intersectional rather than queer, but the liminality frame is what a queer reading would want anyway: she is “neither clearly Gentile nor Jewish,” a border-dweller under multiple discriminations. Mehring names the interpretive tradition as “slut shaming.”

Verdict: preach the queer reading through Genesis 2, where it is textual and ancient, and let Winters carry the margins-and-thirst weight in John 4 without forcing it.

Ecological scholarship — the verse-15 argument

  • Ched Myers — “To Serve and Preserve: Does the Bible Call Us to Dominion over Creation?” (Sojourners, March 2004; free full PDF, and the same paper is in your articles folder). The core: outside Eden ‘abad means servitude, not management, and shamar means “conservancy of life or observance of covenant.” So the job description in 2:15 is service and covenant-keeping. On Genesis 1:28 he argues dominion is derivative and dependent — creation held as a gift, and the gift “can be revoked.” He preserves the wordplay as human/humus.
  • Theodore Hiebert, The Yahwist’s Landscape — the scholarly source underneath Lapsley and Myers both: adamah is specifically cultivable soil, against the general erets, and the human is a farmer rather than a steward-ruler. A copy is on archive.org.
  • Mick Pope — “The Image of God and Our Vocation of the Soil”. Australian eco-theologian with a meteorology PhD: abad as working for the soil, serving its needs, and shamar as observing the soil’s limits.
  • Rev Dr Rod Benson — “Reading Scripture in a Climate Emergency, Part 3”. Published 31 August 2026, six days before you preach. Humans are “creatures before they are cultivators, rulers or stewards,” with a dedicated section arguing lament is the necessary pastoral response to ecological loss — and a pointed warning against extracting Indigenous ecological knowledge without Indigenous theological voices, which is worth reading before Sunday given the Acknowledgement is doing real work in this service.

Holding the beauty and the catastrophe together

Your opening prayer poses the problem and refuses the easy answer. These four people have thought about that specific move:

  • Andrew Prior — “The Good, the Bad, and the Hope: Forest Sunday”. Adelaide, on Genesis 2 and Psalm 139, structured exactly as good / bad / hope. His diagnosis is better than the statistics: the worst news is that “we fundamentally have no idea how to be human in a way that lives in and with a finite earth.” He suggests the day might honestly be called “Forests Funeral Sunday,” and his hope refuses technology entirely — conversion, plus small concrete acts.
  • Nancy Petty — “Reality, Grief, Hope”. Brueggemann’s three-move framework applied to ecological collapse, which is a ready-made sermon shape for a preacher who doesn’t want to resolve: name the reality, stay in the grief, and only then let hope be action rather than feeling. Quotes Augustine — “Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are Anger and Courage.”
  • “Eco-Grief and Acts of Beauty”, on Trebbe Johnson’s Radical Joy for Hard Times. The most beautiful thing in the whole search, and the most usable. The practice is going to a wounded place and making something beautiful there — not fixing it, not explaining it. Johnson’s question is almost your opening prayer verbatim: “How do we find and make beauty even when it seems on the surface that there’s nothing there?” Also introduces solastalgia.
  • John van de Laar — “Weeping with the Earth” (Sacredise; partly paywalled, free portion is enough). Lament as the most common psalm-type in scripture, and in Jeremiah “the land and the people were intertwined, and so, along with the people, the land experienced the devastation.” He is explicitly against faith communities that treat grief as a failure of faith.
  • For the disaster itself, the most preachable account is The Conversation, “When a mountain falls” — it names the mechanism rather than just the toll, which matters, because it means Nepal isn’t a separate concern sitting awkwardly next to Season of Creation. It is Season of Creation. Ice failing on a warming mountain.

Two ways in.

Lead angle — “serve and preserve.” The human has no name, no gender and no separateness; it is humus with borrowed breath in it. And the job it is given is not to till and keep but, in the Hebrew, to serve and preserve. That mistranslation is roughly the distance between a garden and a glacier. Nepal is what dominion looks like when the bill arrives; the earth creature that serves the ground is the alternative that was there in the second sentence of the story. And because ha-adam is undifferentiated at verses 7 and 15, the passage quietly refuses two orderings at once — humans over earth, and one gender over another. Same verse, same refusal. Supported by: Myers, Lapsley, Marzouk, Tull, Hiebert, Prior’s “Grounded,” Trible via Parker, Keshet, Hartke.

Live alternative — “still thirsty.” Jesus, who is elsewhere the source of living water, sits down at a well and asks a woman for a drink because he can’t reach it himself. She has the bucket. What he offers back isn’t a full cup, it’s a spring — not the end of thirst but a source that keeps giving, in a person who has been handed every reason to think she is the problem. Prior’s point that Jesus still says “I am thirsty” from the cross is the honest note here. This is the sermon that can hold Nepal and the spring together without choosing, because the woman at the well is the person who knows exactly what water costs. Supported by: Stamper, Bashaw, Frykholm, Prior’s “Still Thirsty,” Mowczko, Clark-Soles, Finger, Winters, Mehring, and the Season of Creation 2026 “Living Water” theme.

5. From My Library

Genesis 2 and creation

  • De-Colonising the Biblical Narrative, Volume 1: Genesis 1-11 — Norman Habel (2022). The single best fit on the whole shelf, and you own two copies. Habel is Adelaide, founder of the Earth Bible Project, and the effective author of the Season of Creation lectionary you’re inside this week — this is his First Nations and Earth decolonising read of exactly these chapters. His hermeneutic renders 2:15 as “serve and preserve,” which is the move the sermon wants. Go straight to the Genesis 2 section.
  • Reading Genesis — Marilynne Robinson (2024). If you want the beautiful version of the argument rather than the technical one.
  • God in Creation — Jürgen Moltmann (1985). The systematic backbone if you want one.
  • Through Ecological Eyes — Robert Barry Leal (2006). Australian ecotheology, which is rarer on the shelf than you’d think.
  • The Five Books of Moses — Robert Alter. On the shelf and obviously relevant for the Hebrew — but you leaned on him heavily seven weeks ago for Genesis 24, so keep him as a secondary check rather than the source you quote from the front.
  • Worth knowing: there is no Wisdom Commentary volume on Genesis in the collection. The series runs to 24 volumes on your shelf and Genesis isn’t one of them.

The queer reading, on your own shelf

John 4

  • John 1–10 (Wisdom Commentary vol. 44) — Mary L. Coloe PBVM (2021). The feminist commentary on this chapter. Coloe reads the whole gospel through Sophia / Wisdom, which means the living-water offer in 4:10-14 sits directly on Wisdom’s own invitation to drink (Sirach 24:21, Proverbs 9:5). That’s the argument to look for on the page.
  • What Jesus Learned from Women — James F. McGrath (2021). Structured as chapters on the individual women Jesus encountered, and it inverts the usual power dynamic — Jesus as learner. Given he opens this scene by asking her for something, that inversion is the text’s own move. (I didn’t verify a dedicated Samaritan-woman chapter — worth a look at the contents page.)

For the Acknowledgement and the Kaurna land

  • Anaditj — Aunty Rev Dr Denise Champion (2021). Adnyamathanha, Uniting Church, South Australian — and you own five copies, which suggests you give it away, which suggests you rate it. The closest thing on the shelf to a South Australian First Nations theology, and she also wrote the Adnyamathanha blessing in the Peace with Creation liturgy in your own Special Liturgy folder (section 7).
  • Following Jesus in Invaded Space: Doing Theology on Aboriginal Land — Chris Budden (2009). If the Acknowledgement is going to carry weight rather than sit at the top of the page, this is the argument for why.

For the seeds and the lament

Fiction pairing — and this week there’s a very good one.

  • Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray: River of Dreams — Anita Heiss (2022). Take this one. Set around the 1852 Gundagai flood on the Murrumbidgee. Wagadhaany is a young Wiradyuri woman, daughter of Yarri — one of the men who rowed a bark canoe through floodwater to save white settlers from a town they had been warned not to build on a floodplain. She survives, and is then kept as a servant by the family she helped save, and taken away from her river and her country. It puts a river, a flood disaster, a woman of the country meeting settlers who don’t know the land, and dispossession from country into one story. That is Genesis 2’s four rivers, John 4’s woman who knows the water source better than the stranger does, the Kaurna Acknowledgement and the Nepal prayers, all at once. Threaded with Wiradyuri language.
  • The Tree of Man — Patrick White. The oblique one. It opens with Stan Parker clearing bush to make a farm, and critics read Stan and Amy as Adam and Eve, with Stan trying to grasp existence by naming things — Adam’s job in the verses just past your reading. The ending is the theological punchline: Stan dies inside the garden rather than being expelled from it. A counter-reading of Genesis 2-3 with no fall in it, for a Sunday that stops before the fall.
  • The Year of the Farmer — Rosalie Ham. A drought-stricken river town at war over water allocation — the authority demanding efficiency upgrades a struggling farmer can’t afford, while a lakeside development wants the same water for an ornamental lake. Read against John 4, where the whole encounter turns on who may draw from whose well. A Murray-Darling sermon waiting to happen.
  • Return to Dust — Dani Powell. Three days on unsealed roads through Western Desert communities, grieving a brother, poetic and non-linear and explicitly about dust. Adam from adamah sits right under the title.

6. From My Articles

The direct hit, and it could not be more direct:

  • Ched Myers, “To Serve and Preserve: Does the Bible Call Us to Dominion over Creation?” — Claudes Sorted/Articles/Myers, Ched, To Serve and Preserve- Does the Bible Call Us to Dominion over Creation-.pdf. Topic keywords: Genesis 2, dominion, creation care, ecology, stewardship, environmental theology. The title is a translation of Genesis 2:15’s le’ovdah ul’shomrah. If you read one thing on paper this week, read this one. (The Sojourners version is also free online — link in section 4.)

The rest of the Myers cluster and neighbours:

  • Ched Myers, “The Cedar Has Fallen” — Articles/Myers, Ched, The Cedar Has Fallen.pdf. Deforestation, empire and the prophets. Forest Sunday in a sentence.
  • Ched Myers, “Anarcho-Primitivism and the Bible” — Articles/Myers, Ched, Anarcho-Primitivism and the Bible.pdf.
  • Alastair McIntosh, “The Fall” (excerpt including ‘The Rotting Tree Faerie’) — Articles/McIntosh, Alastair, The Fall (excerpt including 'The Rotting Tree Faerie').pdf. Genesis 3, ecology, land, Celtic spirituality.
  • George W. Fisher et al., “Science, Religious Naturalism, and Biblical Theology” — Articles/Fisher, George W. et al., Science, Religious Naturalism, and Biblical Theology- Ground for the Emergence of Sustainable Living.pdf.

For the Acknowledgement of Country — this is where the folder is genuinely strong:

  • Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr, “Dadirri — Inner Deep Listening and Quiet Still Awareness” — Articles/From Dean/Ungunmerr, Miriam-Rose, Dadirri - Inner Deep Listening and Quiet Still Awareness.docx. Deep listening to land and water. The obvious pairing with a garden and a well, and with a service that plants seeds and then sits.
  • “My Mother The Land” — Articles/From Dean/My Mother The Land.pdf. Aboriginal theology, land, country, creation.
  • Fiona Magowan, “Waves of Knowing: Polymorphism and Co-Substantive Essences in Yolngu Sea Cosmology” — Articles/From Dean/Magowan, Fiona, Waves of Knowing- ....pdf. Water as knowledge and relationship rather than resource.
  • Djiniyini Gondarra, “Let My People Go” — Articles/From Dean/Gondarra, Djiniyini, Let My People Go- Series of Reflections on Aboriginal Theology.pdf.

Also relevant: John Dominic Crossan, “The Seed Parables of Jesus” (Articles/Crossan, John Dominic, The Seed Parables of Jesus.pdf) for the seed ritual; and Ibrahim Abraham, “‘On the Doorstep of the Work’: Ricoeurian Hermeneutics, Queer Hermeneutics, and Scripture” if you want the method behind section 4’s queer reading rather than just the reading.

Honest gap: the 214-row index has nothing at all on John 4, the Samaritan woman, wells, springs or living water — not one row. Coloe’s commentary and McGrath’s book in section 5 are your only routes in on that side. And these are pointers to PDFs on your Mac, not summaries — I haven’t read any of them.

7. Liturgical Resources

The find of the week is already in your Drive, and there’s a catch.

L3-Year A - Creation 1 Forest Sunday to Creation 4 River Sunday - 2026 SoC online.pdf — published this year by Liturgy, Learning, and (Purposeful) Life (UCA Synod of SA, Mission Resourcing), explicitly licensed “for use by subscribing congregations during Season of Creation (6 September – 27 September 2026).” Season theme: “Wisdom in All Things.” Colour: aqua, “the colour of Earth when seen from space.” Its four Sundays are Forest, Land, Wilderness/Outback and River.

6 September is Creation 1, Forest Sunday, titled “Beneath the Canopy,” and its first reading is Genesis 2:4b-22 — which contains your reading entire, including the four rivers and “till it and keep it.”

The catch: the spoken Forest Sunday liturgy was already used last Sunday, 30 August, when Greg led. The Call to Worship, Opening Prayer, Prayer of Confession, Words of Grace, Offering paragraph and Blessing all came out of it more or less verbatim, credited at the foot of the order of service. So anyone reaching for L3’s spoken texts this week will be repeating last week.

What is still unused and available: the “Engaging the Word” exegetical note (worth reading — it argues the Hebrew verbs “carry the language of kinship and care rather than ownership and control,” which is exactly Myers and Lapsley in one sentence); the Word for the Day; the four Ideas for Reflection; the Prayers for Others; the Intergenerational Conversation, which uses two potted trees and a ball of wool to demonstrate mycelial networks between trees; and the three Embodied Practices — Listening to Soil (a bowl of soil, and the question “Dear soil, what is it like to be you?”), Mini Forest Bath, and Planting Hope.

Note that Planting Hope is essentially what you’re already doing at item 5 — seeds, small pots, soil, watering can, write your hope for creation on the pot, plant it, water it, hold it and speak the hope to God. If you want to deepen the ritual, or hand the “Maybe kids story” slot in the Short OoS to the mycelium-and-wool conversation, the instructions are sitting right there and the licence covers adaptation.

Spill the Beans — an exact verse match. spill-Women's Lectionary - Lent 3 - Judges 16.6-21; John 4.7-15.pdf (Lent 3, 12 March 2023). That is John 4:7-15 precisely, the same range you’re preaching — it is what was used on 8 March 2026. Caveat worth having: Gafney’s Women’s Lectionary pairs the Samaritan woman with Judges 16, Delilah, so the commentary reads her against a “dangerous foreign woman” text rather than a creation one. Useful, but expect it to pull a direction you’re not going.

Also close: spill-Women's Lectionary - Trinity Sunday - Genesis 1.1-2.4a; John 7.37-39.pdf. It ends at Genesis 2:4a where yours begins at 2:4b — they abut exactly without overlapping — and its gospel is the other Johannine living-water text. A genuinely useful companion.

Peace with Creation (2025), in your Special Liturgy folder: an outdoor Season of Creation liturgy introduced by Rev Charissa Suli, containing Aunty Rev Dr Denise Champion’s “Blessing for a sacred place” in Adnyamathanha, a water-based Prayer of Confession by Rev Alex Sangster with a Kyrie refrain and a physical water ritual, and Jessica Morthorpe’s “A blessing for the Season of Creation” (wattle, eucalypt and petrichor as incense; bees giving sermons). Sangster’s water confession is the piece most directly usable against John 4.

Words for Worship has nothing this week — no Season of Creation material at all, no 2026 material at all, and no scripture data in the index to search against. Saying so plainly rather than pointing you at date-matched Proper 18 files that are about Exodus 12 and Matthew 18.

The songs — all four are already chosen, and they’re good.

  • TIS 188, “Where wide sky rolls down” — text at hymnary.org. Elizabeth J. Smith, Australian Anglican priest, liturgist and — the description used of her is exact — “a feminist hymnologist who uses inclusive language and non-hierarchical images in her writing.” Tune HANOVER. It does for this country what Genesis 2 does for Eden: names a particular landscape as the place God shapes and inhabits. You last sang it on 31 May 2026, Trinity Sunday, on John 7’s rivers of living water — so it has already been paired with a living-water text once, and it was also the closing hymn for Big Sky Sunday in September 2024.
  • TIS 181, “Come, O God of all the earth” — hymnary. Marty Haugen, 1985, usually titled “Sing Out, Earth and Skies.” It summons earth and sky themselves to praise and then turns that praise toward justice — creation as participant rather than backdrop, which is the whole premise of the season. You opened the 2024 Season of Creation with this one, on the Sunday of the Greta sermon.
  • LFB 106-7, “These I lay down” — hymnary. John L. Bell (with Graham Maule credited in several hymnals), © 1989 The Iona Community. It’s a pre-communion confession in sung form: before receiving, you name and set down what you’re carrying. Sitting where it does — after the reflection, before Community Sharing and the table — it is doing exactly its intended work. One practical note: the sheet music in the 06.09.26 folder is the ATOK 397 edition, so the number on the screen should probably match the number on the music.
  • ATOK 408, “May the Lord bless you today” (also indexed as “The Blessing” in the Song List). The congregation holds the sheet music. I could not verify the author, composer or publisher anywhere — All Together OK isn’t indexed on hymnary and there are many unrelated songs with that first line. Flagging rather than guessing, and definitely not the Alison Campbell Rate “Blessing Song” from Walk As One, which is a different piece.

If you want one more: “Spirit of God in the clear running water” (ATA 105, keyword-tagged Pentecost / Spirit in the Songs Log) is the only song in the collection that sits on the John 4 living-water axis and the Genesis 2 rivers-out-of-Eden axis at the same time. Avoid “Touch the Earth Lightly” and “Search Me, O God” — both were sung last Sunday.

Where the music meets the reading. Three seams, and one of them is doing your work for you.

The communion liturgy already preaches John 4. The “Spring — Communion” doc linked at item 16 remembers Jesus in the Thanksgiving as the one “who sat by a well with a stranger / and spoke of water that becomes a spring within.” So the Samaritan woman lands twice in this service — once in the reflection, once at the table — and you can preach toward the table rather than away from it, knowing the text will meet them again in ten minutes.

The Call to Worship and the seed litany are already rhyming. The Anglican Church of Southern Africa text ends on the God “who turns deserts into springs, division into community, and fear into hope,” and then the seed planting reprises it word for word — “knowing that God turns deserts into springs… knowing that God turns divisions into community.” Val has effectively set up a refrain before you stand up. If the sermon lands on spring — the noun in John 4:14, and the season outside — that refrain has already been planted twice and it will pay off without you having to build it. (One note: I could not find the ACSA text published anywhere online, so credit it exactly as you have it and don’t add a link.)

David Coleman’s Prayer of the Day is more radical than it looks on the page. He is Eco-Congregation Scotland’s Environmental Chaplain, a URC minister and a member of the Iona Community, and the prayer asks God to teach us “to read the signs of sky and soil,” names fellow creatures as our teachers and as stakeholders in the Rainbow Covenant, argues that tyranny is itself a form of slavery, and confesses “our entitled preference for every arrogant transport.” Then it ends not on resignation but on Christ “who rose beyond ‘too late’” — which is a resurrection answer to climate despair, and the single best line in the service to preach off. I couldn’t find the text published online either, so describe it, credit it, don’t link it.

Themes emerging from the whole of this. The service is already doing one thing consistently, in four different voices: creation is kin, not property, and the people who know that best are the ones who have least. The Kaurna acknowledgement says the lands and waters carry sacred stories. Coleman says the creatures are our teachers. Genesis says the human is made of the same stuff as the ground and put there to serve it. John says the person with the bucket is the Samaritan woman. Set against that, Nepal isn’t an interruption to Season of Creation — it’s the cost of the other view. Your 2024 question, “what if humanity isn’t the centre or point of creation,” has a whole liturgy built around its answer this week, and you didn’t plan it that way.

8. Coming Up: Other Commemorations

Nothing falls between 6 and 12 September. The Calendar has a genuine twelve-day gap between 5 and 17 September, so this is an honest empty week rather than a search that came up short. The neighbours either side, in case one is worth reaching for:

  • 4 September — Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965), Christian pioneer. The natural reach-back for this Sunday. Bach scholar, organist and New Testament scholar who at thirty started medicine and left for Lambaréné, explicitly as penance for what Europeans had done to Africa. His ethic was “reverence for life,” extended deliberately to animals and plants: good is to maintain and further life, bad to damage and destroy it. The Calendar records his childhood night prayer — “O heavenly Father, protect and bless all things that have breath; guard them from all evil, and let them sleep in peace.” That sits directly alongside a God who breathes into dust.
  • 5 September — Robert Browne (c.1550-1633), reformer of the Church. The one with the denominational hook: he led the English Separatists, and he and his fellow pastors founded the Congregational Church on the voluntary principle — one of the three streams that became the UCA. The Calendar links him explicitly to Paragraph 10 of the Basis of Union. Imprisoned 32 times; two men were hanged at Bury St Edmunds in 1583 for circulating his books; he later returned to the Church of England and died in gaol after striking a constable. An honest entry. It also connects him to John Robinson, whose line “The Lord has yet more light and truth to break forth from his word” became TiS 453.
  • 5 September — Mother Teresa of Calcutta (1910-1997), faithful servant.
  • 17 September — Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), person of prayer. Over a week out, but flagging her now because viriditas — greenness — is made for this season, and she’d be worth doing properly with a named translation when her week comes.

9. A Piece of Music

“Atlantic” — The Weather Station (Tamara Lindeman), from Ignorance, 2021. Listen on Spotify. Indie/dream-pop with a jazz rhythm section, squarely in your lane.

The song is a person standing in a field with a glass of wine watching an extraordinary sunset over the water, and being completely unable to enjoy it, because they know what is happening to the planet the sunset is happening on. Lindeman has described writing it out of feeling “dread, even in beautiful moments.” It never resolves — it stays in the tension, and the closest it comes to an answer is asking whether it would be better to simply cover her eyes, which she can’t do either.

That is your opening prayer set to music: “we come holding these competing stories, unsure of what to do or where to turn.” This pick goes with the arc rather than either angle — beauty and catastrophe held in the same hand — so it survives whichever of the two ways in you take on the day. Lyrics verified clean, no profanity.

10. In the News

Nepal and Tibet. The ABC has stayed on this and the numbers have moved a long way since the first reports:

Closer to home, and on theme:

No fresh ABC story on First Nations connection to country surfaced in the late-August window — flagging that as a gap rather than padding it. The nearest is a month old: “High Court rules in favour of native title holders fighting Northern Territory water licence” (5 Aug), which is First Nations water rights decided at the highest court and would still preach.

From the wider church:

  • Season of Creation 2026 — “Living Water”. The national page, with the Ezekiel 47 theme, the “Immersion in Living Water” symbol, five downloadable resources (resource guide, PowerPoint template, season prayer, introduction and guide, order of service template), and confirmation that the Feast of Creation is “celebrated 1 or 6 September.”
  • The President’s Season of Creation message (1 Sept) — Rev Charissa Suli holding creation care and First Nations justice together, and calling the Church to “pray, learn, act, and advocate.”
  • The President’s Pastoral Prayer for Nepal (28 Aug) — the prayer you’re using at item 14, in its published form. It also appears on UnitingWorld’s Nepal Emergency Appeal page, which is the practical thing to give people alongside it: funds go through United Mission to Nepal in the Dhading and Nuwakot districts, immediate relief for about 1,000 families plus school reconstruction. Between the President’s video at item 13 and the prayer at item 14, the congregation will be primed to do something — worth having the appeal details ready.
  • From the SA Synod, the Reflection for the Week, 1 September by Cathie Lambert, works from Psalm 19 on a raindrop on a leaf and a feather on the wind: “our encounters with creation are also moments in the presence of God.” A local voice if you want one that isn’t national.

11. Just for You

“There lives the dearest freshness deep down things” — Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur,” line 10. Written 1877, first published in Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Robert Bridges, 1918.

It’s the turn of the sonnet: after eight lines of soil bleared, smeared and wearing man’s smudge, nature is never spent. Eight words about inexhaustible freshness underneath the damage, on a Sunday about a garden and a spring. Verified against the Project Gutenberg transcription of the Bridges first edition rather than a quote site — this one is unusually safe, since Hopkins published almost nothing in his lifetime and the poem has no pre-publication history in which a rival attribution could form. The common error with it isn’t misattribution but misquotation: people insert an “of” and write “deep down of things.” He didn’t.

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