RSTelfer

Monday Prep — 23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, 13th September 2026

RST

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12–18 minutes

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1. Hello, Richard

This week you get five sisters who walk into Moses’ tent as a united front and simply refuse to disappear from the record — followed, a few pages of the calendar later, by Paul signing off a letter with a list of names that reads almost exactly like the end of a group email, one of whom is a woman running a church out of her living room. It’s a good week for anyone who has ever had to say a thing twice, loudly, in front of the people who are meant to be in charge, before it actually got written down.

Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah and Tirzah don’t ask permission so much as present a case, and the text’s real punchline is that they win — Moses takes it to God, and the daughters’ argument becomes the law, on the spot, for everyone. If you’ve ever wanted a text that proves “well, actually, the rules should probably change” is a viable liturgical strategy, here it is.

If you want an opening: read the five names slowly, one at a time, like a roll call — Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, Tirzah — then ask the room how many of the five they’d already lost by the time you got to the fifth. Come back to the roll call at the very end, but add a sixth name to it: Nympha, who nearly didn’t make it back into your Bible at all (more on that in section 4). The pay-off is the same list, longer, read the same way, so the room hears itself catching up. Worth knowing before you build it around a show of hands, though — the seating at CotT has form for swallowing that kind of moment whole.

2. This Week’s Readings

Old Testament: Numbers 27:1-11 — Mahlah and her sisters Read on Bible Gateway (NRSVue)

New Testament: Colossians 4:2-15 — Nympha Read on Bible Gateway (NRSVue)

No notes attached to this week’s row in the lectionary spreadsheet, and the Preacher field is blank — standard for a week this far out, worth a check nearer the time.

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

“Then the daughters of Zelophehad came forward… ‘Why should the name of our father be taken away from his clan because he had no son? Give to us a possession among our father’s brothers.’ Moses brought their case before the Lord… ‘The daughters of Zelophehad are right in what they are saying; you shall indeed let them possess an inheritance.’” (Numbers 27:1, 3-4, 5, 7, abridged)

“Give my greetings to the brothers and sisters at Laodicea, and to Nympha and the church in her house.” (Colossians 4:15, abridged)

Where this sits: Numbers 27 falls right after the second wilderness census (chapter 26), at the exact planning moment when the land is being divided up among the tribes — the daughters’ petition isn’t a side story, it’s inserted into the middle of the land-allocation itself. It isn’t fully resolved here either: the men of their father’s tribe object in Numbers 36, worried the land will pass out of the tribe if the sisters marry outward, and the ruling gets a second, narrower pass right at the end of the book. If you want the whole arc rather than the pericope, it brackets almost everything from here to the close of Numbers. Colossians 4:2-15 is the letter’s closing movement — prayer instructions, then a run of about ten named greetings — sitting directly after the household code (3:18-4:1) Richard’s congregation will recognise from Ephesians 5 a fortnight before this Sunday. Nympha’s line (v.15) is the second-to-last name before the letter tells its readers to swap copies with the church at Laodicea.

3. What Have I Done Before

Last week (6 September, Genesis 2:4b-15 & John 4:7-15, “Water is Life”): this one was rebuilt on Wednesday 2 September onto the actual Season of Creation readings, so it never was Exodus 15/Philippians 4 by the time Sunday came. You went into the Friday prep session leaning toward the Genesis 2 “serve and preserve” angle — the earth creature, the queer reading, Ched Myers, Wendell Berry (who’d just died) — but what you actually wrote and preached was the other angle: “Water is Life. Until it isn’t. Water is Death. Nothing is one thing.” It ran from the Burke and Wills expedition through the Langtang Lirung glacier collapse in Nepal, into Ted Lasso’s “Football is Life / Football is Death,” through Psalms 69, 42 and 18 (via a WCC blog post on “Through the Waters”), out to people in the room who are “up to their noses” — Father’s Day, money, transphobia, racism — and landed on Jesus asking the Samaritan woman for a drink, living water as a spring in people who hold each other up, before closing at the communion table. Berry, the Hebrew wordplay, and the Heiss/Job material about the floods all dropped out entirely — not wasted, just banked for a Sunday without a flood already in the room. If it’s useful: the pastoral, in-the-room angle won out over the more scholarly one once the week’s actual grief (Nepal, the room) was sitting right there in the opening prayer before the prep had caught up to it.

Nothing in the sermon logs, the sermon PDFs, or the Sermon Reference Log for Numbers 27 or anywhere in Colossians — this really does look like first time on both texts, checked across all five sermon-log sheets, the full 120-plus PDF archive, and the reference log. The one near-hit (Christmas Day 2018, Colossians 3:12-17 listed among the documented readings) has no surviving manuscript for either service that day, so there’s nothing to draw on even there. As always: the logs index by passage, so an occasion-based service could in theory be missing from this list without being filed under “Numbers” or “Colossians” — but nothing turned up, and I’d rather say that plainly than assert a first with false confidence.

Worth naming before you commit to Nympha, though: you’ve now preached a close cousin of this exact beat — obscure New Testament woman, plausible house-church host or leader, reduced or erased by the text and its later readers — three times in just over a year: Rhoda at the gate (18.06.23), Lydia and the unnamed slave girl twice (16.07.23 and 28.06.26, the second only about seven weeks before this Sunday), and Chloe from 1 Corinthians (26.07.26). Nympha would be a fourth pass at very similar ground in fairly quick succession. That’s not a reason to avoid her — the “who gets remembered vs. who is erased” thread from your voice profile fits her precisely, and her case is genuinely different (she isn’t just under-narrated, her name was later grammatically regendered by copyists uncomfortable with a female house-church leader, which none of the other three quite have) — but it’s worth knowing you’d be returning to a well you’ve drawn from often lately.

Numbers 27 is unambiguously fresh ground — no prior sermon from the Book of Numbers at all in the tracked period. The nearest kin in your own preaching is the Ruth material (3.11.24 and 10.11.24, plus two Palmerston-era whole-book services) — widow’s inclusion and provision rather than a daughter’s direct legal petition, but the same instinct for “the text bends to include the person the system would otherwise leave with nothing.” Esther and Vashti sit in similar territory (a woman’s stand forces a permanent change in law) but your own reference log already flags Esther as recently spent across three sermons — better as a passing callback than a fresh well.

4. Commentary & Reflection Links

Both readings sit outside the standard RCL cycle for this date, so Working Preacher, Rex Hunt, Bill Loader, Journey with Jesus and Howard Wallace all came back empty on direct passage searches — the usual Women’s Lectionary/RCL mismatch rather than a dead end on those sites generally. Two solid general finds instead:

Queer readings

Numbers 27. Genuinely nothing found. Ruttenberg’s Life Is a Sacred Text archive, Laurel Dykstra, Q Christian Fellowship, Queer Theology and the Queer Bible Commentary were all checked directly and none has a piece on this passage that I could locate. The strongest available lens here is feminist and legal-justice, not queer — saying so plainly rather than stretching one out of a text that isn’t carrying it this week.

Colossians 4 / Nympha. No dedicated queer-lens piece either, but the Mowczko material above is worth reading right up against that gap: a woman’s gender, quite literally edited out of the manuscript tradition by scribes uncomfortable with what she was. That’s feminist textual criticism rather than a queer reading proper, but it’s the same underlying question — whose gender gets allowed to survive in the record, and who decides.

Two ways in. Lead angle — “Being counted”: Mahlah and her sisters refuse to let their father’s name, and their own future, disappear from the register, and the law itself moves to accommodate them — fresh ground for you, strongly sourced, and it doesn’t ask you to revisit recent territory. Live alternative — “The erased host”: Nympha’s one verse and the scribal campaign against her gender, read alongside the whole hidden network of women like her the closing greetings barely gesture at — a good sermon, but see section 3 first, since it’s your fourth trip to this particular shape of story since last winter.

5. From My Library

  • The Women’s Lectionary: Preaching the Women of the Bible Throughout the Year — Ashley M. Wilcox. Title, author and publisher (Westminster John Knox) all point to this being the actual source of the lectionary project you’re preaching from — very likely has entries on both Mahlah’s sisters and Nympha directly, though I couldn’t open the book itself to confirm chapter and verse.
  • Philippians, Colossians, Philemon (Wisdom Commentary, vol. 51) — Elsa Tamez, Cynthia Briggs Kittredge, Claire Miller Colombo & Alicia J. Batten. Feminist verse-by-verse commentary series you already own several volumes of; this one will engage 4:15 and Nympha directly.
  • A Room of One’s Own — Virginia Woolf. An oblique but genuinely strong pairing for Numbers 27: Woolf’s whole argument is that a woman needs money and property in her own name before she can have a voice at all — close to exactly what Mahlah is standing in Moses’ tent asking for.
  • Concilium 182: Women Invisible in Theology and Church — ed. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza. Title alone speaks to both figures — one erased by having no son to carry the name forward, one erased by a later scribe’s pen.
  • Torah Queeries: Weekly Commentaries on the Hebrew Bible — Gregg Drinkwater et al. Organised by weekly Torah portion; Numbers 27 falls in Parashat Pinchas, a portion with a real progressive-Jewish commentary tradition around the daughters. I couldn’t confirm the specific essay’s content, but the portion match is solid — a shelf job rather than a link, and worth a look given how directly your queer-reading search above came up empty.

Fiction pairing

  • Dirrayawadha — Anita Heiss (pairs with Numbers 27). Set during the 1820s Bathurst War on Wiradyuri Country, centred on Miinaa, sister of resistance leader Windradyne, navigating the renaming and seizure of her homeland by an outside legal-administrative system — land, displacement and a woman’s agency amid dispossession, sitting close to your established Day of Mourning and First Nations land-rights preaching.
  • The Vanishing Half — Brit Bennett (pairs with Colossians 4 / Nympha, as a secondary option). Twin sisters whose paths and identities diverge, one erased from her own family’s record by the choices later generations make about her — a looser fit than the Heiss pairing, but a strong echo of a woman written out of her own story.

6. From My Articles

Nothing in your articles catalogue speaks directly to Numbers 27, Zelophehad’s daughters, Colossians, or house churches — checked the full Topic Keywords column and came up empty on both. Closest available, all genuinely loose fits offered for completeness rather than as strong recommendations:

  • Roland Boer — “Women First? On the Legacy of ‘Primitive Communism’” (JSOT, 2005) — an economic/property lens, oblique but relevant to the daughters’ claim.
  • Robert Bos — “Jesus and the Dreaming,” Chapter 4: “Social Change in the Self-Determination Era.” Explicitly tagged with land rights — a possible decolonial cross-reference alongside the Heiss pairing above. Path: Claudes Sorted/Articles/From Dean/Robert Bos Jesus and the dreaming/Bos, Robert, Jesus and the Dreaming- Religion and Social Change in Arnhem Land (Chapter 4- Social Change in the Self-Determination Era).pdf
  • “Australian Church Acts on Aborigines” — tagged with land rights, general reference rather than a close textual match.

7. Liturgical Resources

Direct hit: Spill the Beans has a resource built for these exact two readings — file spill-Women's Lectionary - Pentecost 15 - Numbers 27.1-11; Colossians 4.2-15.pdf, titled “Courageous Daughters of Zelophehad” (originally from the 10 September 2023 issue). It’s worth pulling in full: it includes a five-voice “Re-Sisters” congregational retelling of Numbers 27 from the Good News translation, and — genuinely useful for section 4 above — it draws the exact Mahlah/Nympha erasure parallel itself, noting Nympha’s name and pronoun were altered by later scholars in the same way this story was quietly dropped from the standard lectionary. Words for Worship and L3 track RCL dates only and have nothing for this non-RCL pairing.

Song recommendation: There Is a Line of Women (Iona, One is the Body, no. 60) — a direct thematic fit for five named sisters standing in a line claiming what’s theirs, and the congregation already holds the sheet music (file IONA One is the Body 60 There is a Line of Women.pdf). No record of it being sung for this reading before — this would be a first pairing, worth logging once used. Secondary, weaker option for the Nympha/hospitality side if you’d rather lean that way: Fill My House (ATN 69) or Community (ATFG 561) — I couldn’t find a confident weblink for either, so flagging rather than guessing.

No entry in any of the five sermon logs’ “Songs Used” columns for either reading — no usage history to draw on, saying so plainly. The Current Worship Season folder has no 13.09.26 subfolder yet — update, 7 September: it does now, but it’s still a bare skeleton with the songs left blank. It does confirm you and Roger B are both preaching/sharing this Sunday, and Roger F is leading worship. By contrast, 23.08.26 and 30.08.26 already exist (see this week’s refreshed prep for what’s turned up there).

Themes emerging: both readings turn on who gets to be named, counted and kept in the record — one story where the record changes because five women insist on it, one where a woman’s name in the record was later changed against her. Read together they’re less “two options” than two halves of the same question, which might be worth saying explicitly whichever one you preach.

8. Coming Up: Other Commemorations

Two fall within the week of 13-19 September:

  • 17 September — Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), person of prayer. Benedictine abbess, composer, poet, theologian and visionary; wrote 77 songs and the earliest surviving liturgical morality play, founded convents at Rupertsberg and Eibingen. The source notes she’s “of contemporary interest with her appreciation of the feminine, her emphasis on the relationship between soul, mind and body” — a nice adjacent figure in a week already thinking about women’s authority being recognised (or not) by the institutions around them.
  • 18 September — Dag Hammarskjöld (1905-1961), faithful servant. UN Secretary-General 1953-61, killed in a plane crash during Congo ceasefire negotiations, posthumous Nobel Peace laureate. His private journal Markings, published after his death, revealed a deeply contemplative inner life alongside the diplomacy.

9. A Piece of Music

“Something to Love” — Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit (from The Nashville Sound, 2017). Written for Isbell’s own daughter, it’s a father hoping she finds something worth pouring herself into, drawing on his own family’s tradition of making music together on the porch — goes with the lead angle: a song about a parent wanting a daughter’s name and future to matter, sitting close to what Mahlah and her sisters are actually asking Moses for. Confirmed no profanity in the lyrics, and it’s squarely in your usual Americana/alt-country lane.

10. In the News

Checked abc.net.au for anything resonant with inheritance, women’s property rights, or the “erased from the record” theme this week and came up empty on anything current and clearly ABC-sourced — reporting that plainly rather than forcing a weak connection.

Checked uniting.church: nothing September-specific beyond the ongoing Season of Creation (1 September into October, still running through this Sunday). Also on the site: Intercultural Neighbouring Sunday 2026 and a recently announced change to the Code of Ethics for Uniting Church Ministers — both worth knowing about as general denominational news rather than sermon material.

11. Just for You

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.” — Zora Neale Hurston, the opening line of Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).

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