Monday Prep — 25th Sunday in Ordinary Time, 27th September 2026

Updated Monday 14 September 2026 on the refresh pass. Worth flagging near the top, not buried: the draft liturgy now sitting in Current Worship Season for this date names Anna as preacher (not you), with Rachel leading worship and Adrian reading. This matches the same pattern already flagged for 20 September, where Adrian is preaching — the lectionary spreadsheet’s blank Preacher field this far out doesn’t reliably mean “as usual.” Everything below still stands as good prep material regardless, and it’s worth keeping in case the roster changes again, but it’s worth knowing before you build anything around preaching it yourself.

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1. Hello, Richard

Last Sunday the lectionary gave you Deborah under her palm tree, and then it stopped — mid-sentence, really, seven verses in. This Sunday it hands you the rest of the chapter, and the rest of the chapter is a woman driving a tent peg through a sleeping general’s skull. Two Sundays, one chapter. It’s the closest thing to a serial the Women’s Lectionary has offered you all year, and it has saved the tent peg for the second episode like a showrunner who knows exactly what they’re doing.

And it isn’t only Judges that runs on. Last week’s epistle was 1 Timothy 2, women silent and saved through childbearing. This week it’s 1 Timothy 5, an actual administrative procedure for deciding which widows the church will feed. Both of your readings continue directly from last Sunday’s. If ever there was a week to say out loud from the front “this is part two,” this is it.

The thing worth noticing before anything else is where the reading stops. Judges 4:22 is not the end of the story. Chapter 5 is Deborah’s song — some of the oldest poetry in the Hebrew Bible, the version where Jael is called most blessed of women, and the version that ends with Sisera’s mother at a lattice window waiting for a son who is never coming home. The lectionary cuts all of it. Your voice profile flags “why does this reading start here and stop there?” as one of your recurring congregational exercises. This week the text has practically written the exercise for you.

A left-hand note, since the week supports it honestly rather than requiring it: this is a story about an occupied people, a general with nine hundred iron chariots, and a woman with no army at all who does the thing the man with the army wouldn’t. It is also, unavoidably, a story that celebrates a killing. You have never preached a text like that. There is no sermon anywhere in ten years of your logs that takes on divinely sanctioned violence directly. The closest you’ve come is Hosea 11 in February, where you were explicit that you’d historically written the text off “because of the marriage imagery” and set yourself the discipline of not shying away. That is the model available to you here.

No Preacher listed against this week in the lectionary spreadsheet, and no notes — normal enough at this distance, but worth a check nearer the time.

If you want an opening: don’t start with the tent peg — everyone starts with the tent peg. Start at the window. Sisera’s mother, in the part they will not hear read, peering through the lattice, asking why his chariot is so long in coming, while her ladies-in-waiting reassure her that the boys are simply busy dividing the spoils — a girl or two for every man, which the Hebrew puts far more brutally than most translations let on. Then go to the battle. Then Jael. Then come back to her at the end, still at the window, and land it there — something in the shape of: there are three women in this story. One of them sings it, one of them ends it, and the third one is still at that window. The lectionary drew the curtain on her; we don’t have to. Write the closing line down and put it where you’ll see it. On 16 August the Odyssey frame opened beautifully and the closing comparison vanished in delivery, so the frame never shut. This one needs no show of hands and no volunteers, which given the seating at Trinity is a feature, not an accident.

2. This Week’s Readings

Old Testament: Judges 4:12-22 — Jael Read on Bible Gateway (NRSVue)

New Testament: 1 Timothy 5:1-16 — Widows Read on Bible Gateway (NRSVue)

(Excerpts — 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.)

“Jael came out to meet Sisera and said to him, ‘Turn aside, my lord, turn aside to me; have no fear.’ So he turned aside to her into the tent, and she covered him with a rug… But Jael wife of Heber took a tent peg and took a hammer in her hand and went softly to him and drove the peg into his temple until it went down into the ground.” (Judges 4:18, 21, abridged)

“Honor widows who are really widows… Let a widow be put on the list if she is not less than sixty years old and has been married only once.” (1 Timothy 5:3, 9, abridged)

Where these sit. Judges 4 and Judges 5 are a doublet — the same event told twice, once in prose and once in verse, and they do not agree. In chapter 4 Sisera is asleep under a rug when the peg goes in: premeditated, quiet, domestic. In chapter 5 Jael strikes him while he is standing or crouching and he “sank, he fell, he lay still at her feet”: a warrior’s blow, hand to hand, in the open. You have the prose version. It is the more disturbing of the two, and the poem is the one that blesses her for it. Judges 5:24 calls her most blessed of women — the same construction Luke 1:42 later uses of Mary, which is a startling intertext if you want it.

Wider still: the whole Deborah–Barak–Jael sequence sits inside the Judges cycle pattern (the people do evil, are handed over, cry out, get a deliverer, and the land has rest), and this is the one cycle where the deliverer role is shared out among three people, two of them women and one of them not even an Israelite.

1 Timothy 5 sits inside the Pastorals’ long stretch of household management — chapter 2 legislates women, chapter 3 overseers and deacons, chapter 5 widows and elders, chapter 6 slaves. Reading 5:1-16 without that frame makes it look like pastoral care. Reading it inside the frame makes it look like an org chart.

3. What Have I Done Before

Last week (20 September, Judges 4:1-7 & 1 Timothy 2:1-15): Adrian preached, not you — the Current Worship Season liturgy confirmed him as preacher, with Rachel leading worship, exactly as this post already flagged above before the fact. No sermon manuscript or liturgy record has reached Drive yet for that Sunday, and no Liturgy post has gone up on rstelfer.com for it either, so there is nothing of your own to carry forward from the pulpit this time. Worth checking again on a future refresh in case a recording or liturgy write-up turns up later.

The honest headline: there is nothing on Judges anywhere in your sermon logs. Not chapter 4, not any chapter, not Gideon or Samson or Ehud or Jephthah, across Years A, B and C, from Palmerston 2016 through to 16 August this year. I searched every part of every log, including the split parts, precisely so this wouldn’t be another false “first time” — and it does look genuinely like open ground. But name the limit from the pulpit if you use it. The logs index by scripture reference, and a Pride service, a commemoration, a Day of Mourning or a topical Sunday can carry a text without ever generating a citation. That is exactly how Genesis 39 went missing in August. If Jael has come up in a prayer or a litany somewhere, the logs would not know.

The one hit, and it’s yours. On 26 November 2023, Reign of Christ, closing out that year’s Women’s Lectionary, you wrote a responsive piece called “Who Was She?” that identified three hidden women prophets by riddle — Miriam (“she played the tambourine… she was a prophet”), Deborah (“she sang a song with Barak”), and Huldah (“I’d never heard of her, had you?”), closing with “we celebrate the women whose lives have often been hidden. We look back with thanks and wonder.” It was a liturgy rather than a sermon, it was three years ago at a different congregation, and almost nobody at Trinity heard it. Which makes it perfect: your own line about Deborah singing a song with Barak, written before you’d ever preached her, waiting for the week the lectionary cuts the song.

Widows, on the other hand, you have form on.

• 16 October 2022 — the persistent widow (Luke 18:1-8). The strongest of them. You walked the congregation through your own research, cited Klyne Snodgrass on this being one of the hardest parables to read, and Amy-Jill Levine’s reminder that biblical widows — Naomi, Ruth, Abigail — are agents advocating for themselves rather than weak. Then you floated the reversal: what if God is the widow, nagging humanity into justice, and we are the unjust judge who has to be worn down. Directly reusable this week, because 1 Timothy 5 is a text about widows being administered rather than heard.
• 10 November 2024 — Ruth and the widow’s mite, read through the US election. Ruth as a migrant widow taken in by a community with gleaning provisions built into its law — “what happens when the system is working well” — set against Ched Myers on how the temple-land system meant to protect widows was turned into a means of devouring their houses. You closed telling people to watch out for religious leaders in long gowns who say long-winded prayers or sermons. That sermon is the closest thing in the corpus to a 1 Timothy 5 sermon, and it already contains the argument: a rule written to protect widows is exactly the kind of rule that gets turned against them.
• 22 February 2026, Lent 1 — the widow’s mite again, this time from a guest preacher, with you off the roster. Recent, and heard in this room. Worth knowing before you reach for Mark 12 as an illustration.
• 8 January 2023 — Anna (Luke 2:22-40). You unpacked the numerology of her age, seven years married and eighty-four widowed, and made the point that she preaches, evangelises and witnesses, though the text gives her not one word of direct speech. A widow whose ministry the text records and whose voice it does not. Set that beside 1 Timothy 5:13 calling widows gossips and busybodies and you have a sermon.

The Pastoral Epistles you have essentially never preached. One service, 22 October 2023, read 2 Timothy 1:3-7 in a service responding to the failed Voice referendum — and no sermon manuscript survives. 1 Timothy appears repeatedly in the unused RCL column across September and October 2022 and is explicitly noted as not having been used. So: 1 Timothy 5, never; 1 Timothy 2, never. Two weeks running, this lectionary is handing you a book you have never opened in the pulpit.

Structural and character echoes worth calling back by name:

• Rachel and the household gods (2 August 2026) — three sermons ago, and the single closest precedent for how you handle a woman who deceives and wins. You slowed at Rachel taking the god, refused to settle her motive, and said out loud that the story resists a moral: “she stole her family god, hid it, and lied about her cycle to keep it. Go and do likewise.” Jael needs exactly that refusal.
• Rahab (7 December 2025) — a woman who lies to the king’s soldiers and bargains for her family’s survival. And note what happened to the reading: it was abridged to Joshua 2:1-9, 12a, 14-16, cutting the spies’ oath and the crimson cord. Same editorial logic that cuts Judges 5. You could put the two abridgements side by side.
• Vashti (12 April 2026) — refusal, Thoreau, and the resurrection as God’s own defiant “no.” The landing was “Thoreau goes to jail. Vashti disappears. The power-mongers win. Chapter One.”
• Lydia and the unnamed enslaved girl (28 June 2026) — your cleanest statement of the who-gets-remembered thread, including the observation that the RCL stops the reading before the enslaved girl and the Women’s Lectionary carries on. Judges 4 is the same shape: Deborah is remembered as a judge, Jael as a curiosity, and Sisera’s mother not at all.
• The Nagib and Taraq parable (1 March 2026) — your own invention, about what gets carved in stone and what gets written in sand: be careful what you immortalise. That is a Judges 4–5 sermon in miniature and it is already in your voice.

Two cautions from your own notes. Esther is flagged in the reference log as “covered extensively across three separate sermons — avoid returning to it soon,” and Esther is precisely the escape hatch a Jael sermon reaches for. Don’t. And Robert Alter, Marcus Borg / John Dominic Crossan and Amy-Jill Levine are all flagged for rotation — Levine especially, since she is the obvious call for a widows text. Use her if she’s genuinely the best voice, but not at the top.

4. Commentary & Reflection Links

Two structural facts shaped this hunt, and they’re worth knowing. Judges 4 does appear in the RCL — but only verses 1-7, at Proper 28 in Year A, filed in November. Your reading, verses 12-22, is precisely the part the RCL cuts, so every commentary below stops just where your reading starts. And 1 Timothy 5 is not in the Revised Common Lectionary at all, at any point in the three-year cycle, which means the lectionary sites are structurally empty on it. That’s a fact about the text, not a failure of searching.

Judges 4 — from your own sites

• Working Preacher — Lisa Wolfe on Judges 4:1-7. The pick of the four. Wolfe protests the truncation herself and calls Jael a “woefully under-appreciated biblical character,” then lays out the live options for her motive without resolving them: self-protection from becoming spoil of war, political calculation about the winning side, or the femme fatale archetype readers impose. She also notes that neither Barak nor the narrator registers the slightest surprise that Deborah is a woman — the shock is entirely ours.
• Working Preacher — Dennis Olson. Frames the whole narrative as a withheld answer to “who is the real judge here?” — Deborah, Barak or Jael — with the text keeping the reader guessing until a non-Israelite woman married into a family with enemy connections lands the blow. That’s a sermon spine.
• Working Preacher — Sara Koenig. Good on Deborah’s triple office and on the ambiguity of eshet lappidoth: “wife of Lappidoth,” or “fiery woman,” since lappidoth means torch. James Limburg is the weakest of the four for your purposes — he notes Jael acted “under the subterfuge of typical mid-eastern hospitality” and then declines the ethical question entirely.
• Enter the Bible — Judges 4:1–5:31 (Working Preacher’s sister site). Covers the whole unit including chapter 5, and supplies the meteorological detail the poem adds: the Kishon in flood, miring nine hundred iron chariots.
• Howard Wallace — Judges 4:1-7 (UCA). Reads Barak’s demand for Deborah’s presence as wanting the visible sign of God’s presence, which is what costs him the glory. His distinctively Australian move is a direct warning against reading the conquest narratives literally in a settler-colonial context — he cautions against readings that would justify Indigenous dispossession. That is a live caution for an Adelaide pulpit and worth a sentence from the front.
• Journey With Jesus — Dan Clendenin, “She Crushed His Head”. Opens on Jael and the tent peg and uses her as the doorway into the whole problem of scriptural violence. He sets out ten strategies preachers actually use — canon within the canon, descriptive not prescriptive, cultural distance, allegory, late composition — and then honestly concedes that none of them quite works. If you want to preach the difficulty rather than dissolve it, this is the frame.
• Vanderbilt — Year A, Proper 28. Go for the art index rather than the commentary. The Jael-and-Sisera tradition in Western painting is extraordinary — Artemisia Gentileschi’s version among them — and a projected image would do more work here than another paragraph.
• Sacredise — Proper 28A: full worship package, but it mentions Deborah only in passing and does not mention Jael at all. Liturgy, not exegesis.
• Could not read, but confirmed to exist: Textweek’s Judges 4 index is robots-blocked to automated fetching but is normally the fastest route to aggregated art, film and commentary links — worth opening yourself. And Rex Hunt’s domain would not resolve at all this week; his Year A liturgy collection is the place to retry. That’s probably temporary rather than a dead site. Bill Loader, Laughing Bird, Montreal Cathedral, Pilgrim UCA, Progressive Christianity, With Love to the World, Dan Oudshoorn and One Man’s Web had nothing on-topic for either reading — said plainly rather than padded.

Judges 4 — beyond your list, and this is where it gets good

• Tikva Frymer-Kensky, “Yael” (Jewish Women’s Archive). The best short scholarly piece on the passage. She nails the chapter 4 / chapter 5 divergence and reads both versions as dramatic inversions of motherhood: the prose gives maternal nurture — blanket, milk, hushing — and then the blow; the poem gives “a grim parody of birth,” with the man falling between her feet. Her companion entry on Deborah is just as good on “mother in Israel” as an office of communal authority parallel to “father,” not a statement about her biology.
• Claude Mariottini — “Sisera’s Mother”. Argues the usual translation of Judges 5:30 sanitises the Hebrew, which is closer to “a womb or two for every man” — the women of the court consoling themselves with the arithmetic of other women’s rape. He also states the honour logic flatly: it was a disgrace for a warrior to be killed by a woman. This is the source behind the opening suggested in section 1.
• John Holbert — “Deborah and the God of Surprise”. “Like a thunderclap this simple tale of male heroism has been turned on its head.” Notices the visual rhyme between Deborah sitting under her palm and Sisera sitting in his chariot.
• Wilda Gafney — “H.A.M. Hard As a Mother (In Israel)” and “Deborah Speaks”. Deborah “governed the whole people and commanded the whole army in which she was the chief warrior as well” — written against the habit of confining women preachers to women’s messages. Gafney is quieter on Jael than on Deborah, but her Womanist Midrash, Volume 2 covers this material properly, and given you are running your own Women’s Lectionary, her Women’s Lectionary project is worth knowing exists.
• On the hero-or-murderer question: Mieke Bal, Death and Dissymmetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges (Chicago, 1988) argues the book has an ideological coherence in which the treatment of women is pivotal, and that “murder, in this text, relates to gender.” Her term is countercoherence — read Judges through domestic and sexual violence rather than through battles, and you get a different but equally coherent book. And Susan Niditch, “Eroticism and Death in the Tale of Jael” (in Alice Bach, ed., Women in the Hebrew Bible, pp. 305-315) is where the penetration imagery of the tent peg gets taken seriously rather than nervously — attraction and revulsion, longing and fear, the goddess who is both seductive and homicidal.
• One correction worth having before you stand up. Phyllis Trible’s Texts of Terror treats four women — Hagar, Tamar, the concubine of Judges 19, and Jephthah’s daughter. Jael is not one of them. Trible’s category is women who are victims of male violence, and Jael inverts it. If you reach for “texts of terror” on Sunday, reach for it knowingly: Jael is the text of terror turned around, which is a far more interesting sermon than a misattribution.

1 Timothy 5 — the debate is sharper than the Judges material, and it’s the reason this reading is live

The central question is whether this chapter is regulating an order of widows or dismantling one.

• Reta Halteman Finger — “1 Timothy 5:3-16: The Politics of Too Many Widows!” (Christian Feminism Today). The best single piece for the suppression reading, and the sharpest for preaching. Finger argues the chapter multiplies categories precisely in order to narrow eligibility: “few women will qualify to be called ‘real’ widows and to receive church support.” She reads the age-sixty rule as a device for pushing younger women back into marriage, and the “gossips and busybodies, gadding about from house to house” slur as the polemical price of a widows’ circle that had become an attractive option for unattached women. Her mechanism — the multiplication of categories as a means of exclusion — is the sermon, if you want it.
• Marg Mowczko — “The Ephesian Widows”, a five-part series, and she’s Australian, which makes her congenial for this congregation. Part 1 does the lexical work: chēra need not mean bereaved but can mean any woman independent of a father or husband; timaō (“honour,” v.3) means financial support, not deference; and the “really” of “really widows” is doing enormous work. Part 3 is the payoff and it’s well documented: Ignatius greets “the Virgins who are called Widows” at Smyrna; Tertullian complains that in one place a virgin under twenty has been placed in the order of widows; the Didascalia Apostolorum drops the enrolment age to fifty; the Testament of Our Lord lists teaching, prayer and assisting at women’s baptisms among the order’s functions; Hippolytus tries to shrink them back to prayer only. A church legislating repeatedly against an order’s expansion is a church with a popular order on its hands.
• Sandra Glahn — “Are the ‘Widows’ in 1 Timothy 5 Leaders, Needers, or Both?” A more conservative voice, useful precisely because even non-feminist scholarship concedes the order was an office rather than a welfare roll.
• Bill Sytsma on 1 Timothy 5 (Center for Excellence in Preaching). Not on your list, but CEP is the nearest thing to a Working Preacher for continuous readings and it covers both of this week’s texts — Kory Plockmeyer on Judges 4 as well. Sytsma reads the chapter pastorally and benignly: church as household, reciprocal obligation running both ways. He’s the foil if you want to argue against a benign reading, and his three-word summary of what generates church conflict in every century — sex, power and money — is a serviceable hook either way.
• Finger on authorship. Yes, it matters for preaching. She sets out the standard case for pseudonymity — 335 words unique to the Pastorals, faith recast as rational assent rather than relational trust, a diminished Spirit, opponents rebuked rather than reasoned with, a church anxious about respectability in Roman society — and, usefully, argues that pseudonymous composition was not forgery in Greco-Roman education but a customary act of honour. That gives you a way to say from the front that this is a later community negotiating with its culture rather than Paul’s own voice, without it landing as debunking. Her last point is the sharpest: the distinguishing feature of the Pastorals is the rejection of the gender and class equality the undisputed Paul holds. Galatians 3:28 against 1 Timothy 5 is probably the sermon.
• If you want one book behind it: Bonnie Bowman Thurston, The Widows: A Women’s Ministry in the Early Church (Fortress, 1989) is the standard monograph. Not on your shelf, and I could only confirm the bibliography rather than read it.

Queer readings

Judges 4 is the richest week for this we’ve had. This is not a stretch applied to the text; it is what the Hebrew is doing.

• Aysha W. Musa — “Jael Is Non-binary; Jael Is Not a Woman” (Journal for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies, 2022), from her Sheffield doctoral work. The most textually concrete of the lot, and every detail is preachable. Jael’s name is in the masculine form (ya‘el) when a feminine form was available. 4:17 introduces her with the feminine eshet while carrying that masculine name. And in 4:20 Sisera addresses her with a masculine imperative — commentators have routinely written this off as scribal error rather than evidence. Musa’s argument is that the nurture and the violence are not sequential but simultaneous: Jael performs masculinity and femininity at the same time. The Ancient Jew Review summary is a good short version, and the full thesis is open access.
• Deryn Guest — “From Gender Reversal to Genderfuck: Reading Jael through a Lesbian Lens,” in Bible Trouble: Queer Reading at the Boundaries of Biblical Scholarship (SBL, 2010), pp. 9-43 — readable at the Internet Archive. Guest’s argument is that the standard scholarly language of “gender reversal” is itself the problem, because it reinforces the two-sex binary and so concedes the very frame the story breaks. Not a woman doing a man’s job — something that undoes the normalcy of the sex/gender regime altogether. Guest also writes the Joshua and Judges chapter in The Queer Bible Commentary (2nd edition, SCM, 2022), which I couldn’t read; this essay is by the same author on the same passage and is free, so it’s the practical substitute. (Fair warning on the title if you’re quoting it aloud on a Sunday morning — it’s her word, and it’s the point, but it’s yours to decide.)
• Caryn Tamber-Rosenau — “How to Get a Head in Ancient Israel: Women-Turned-Warriors and Queer Theory”, summarising her book Women in Drag. Her thesis: Jael’s femininity is the weapon — motherliness and seductiveness deployed as battle tactics. The detail that carries it is that these women-warriors are consistently childless, so their ability to perform motherhood while remaining childfree exposes the role as construction rather than biology. Best line: “She cannot ‘mother’ Sisera to death and mother children at the same time.”
• Sarah Emanuel — “Letting Judges breathe: Queer survivance in the book of Judges” (JSOT 44/3, 2020). Reads Judges 3–4 against Gad Beck’s memoir An Underground Life: Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin, arguing both show marginalised people surviving through gender-bending performance and deliberate ambivalence. Her statistical aside is lovely: of the roughly 400 years Judges covers, only about 111 involve subjugation — three-quarters of the book is autonomy, and reading it as a decline narrative is a scholarly habit rather than a textual fact. Queer survivance is a genuinely fresh frame and it is the one I’d build a sermon on if you go this way.
• 1 Timothy 5: I could not find a queer reading of this passage worth linking, and I’d rather say that than stretch one. I searched Queer Theology, Q Christian Fellowship, the Institute for Welcoming Resources and the general literature specifically for it. What is available is adjacent and arguably better anyway: Mowczko and Finger between them describe a real institution of women living permanently outside marriage and the household, supported by the church and exercising ministry — and a canonical text working hard to shut it down with age limits, marital-history tests and character slurs. A congregation that has argued about who counts as a family will recognise the shape of that without the word being said.

Two ways in

Lead angle — where the reading starts and where it stops. Judges 4:12-22 begins mid-battle and ends the instant the peg goes in, and chapter 5 — the song, the blessing, Sisera’s mother — is cut entirely. Preach the cut. Three women: Deborah who sings it, Jael whose gender the Hebrew itself refuses to settle, and a mother at a window that nobody in the room will have heard about. Supported by Musa and Guest on Jael’s gender, Frymer-Kensky on the doublet, Mariottini on Sisera’s mother, Emanuel on survivance, and your own “Who Was She?” riddle from 2023.

Live alternative — the order of widows, and what a rule does. 1 Timothy 5 as a church multiplying categories until almost nobody qualifies, read against Galatians 3:28 and against your own 2024 Ruth sermon on rules written to protect widows being turned against them. Supported by Finger, Mowczko, Sytsma as the foil, Finger again on authorship — and, in section 10, an aged-care funding algorithm that decides who is a real case by rule rather than by knowing the person. 1 Timothy 5:9 is an algorithm.

5. From My Library

Judges — the direct hit, and it’s the only one

• Judges (Wisdom Commentary, vol. 7) — Mercedes L. García Bachmann (2018). The feminist Wisdom Commentary volume, and the only Judges-specific book anywhere across all six catalogue parts. Exactly the book for this week. Its companion volumes are on your shelf too and are relevant sideways: Alice Laffey’s Ruth (vol. 8, filed under the same “Judges and Ruth” heading) and Wilda Gafney’s Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah (vol. 38).

The world behind the story

• Peasants, Prophets, and Political Economy: The Hebrew Bible and Social Analysis — Marvin L. Chaney (2017). The socio-economic reading of premonarchic Israel, which is the world of a tribal confederacy with no king and nine hundred enemy chariots.
• A History of Israel — John Bright; A Social Reading of the Old Testament — Walter Brueggemann; Jameson and Jeroboam — Roland Boer (on the historical books).
• The Art of Biblical Narrative — Robert Alter, which is the obvious tool for the chapter 4 / chapter 5 doublet — but your own log flags Alter as spent for a while after Genesis 24, and you cut him in the room on 16 August. Keep him as a secondary mention rather than the spine.

Violence, which this text will force

• The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium — Walter Wink. The load-bearing one. Wink’s myth of redemptive violence is precisely what Judges 4–5 celebrates, and naming that from the front is the honest move.
• How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian: Is God Violent? — John Dominic Crossan (2016). Direct, accessible, and squarely on the problem. (Crossan is on the rotation-caution list, so use him or Wink, not both.)
• Fire by Night: Finding God in the Pages of the Old Testament — Melissa Florer-Bixler; The Kings and Their Gods: The Pathology of Power — Daniel Berrigan; Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence — Karen Armstrong; Violence: Six Sideways Reflections — Slavoj Žižek.
• See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Violence — Jess Hill (2019). Australian, and the bridge to section 10’s ABC piece if you take the reading into the present.
• Nonviolence, if you want the counterweight: Put Down Your Sword — John Dear; Should War Be Eliminated? — Stanley Hauerwas; Exclusion and Embrace — Miroslav Volf.

1 Timothy — also a direct hit

• 1–2 Timothy, Titus (Wisdom Commentary, vol. 53) — Annette Bourland Huizenga (2016). The only commentary on the Pastorals in the catalogue, and it’s the feminist one. It will deal directly with the order of widows and the younger-widows instruction.
• The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church’s Conservative Icon — Marcus Borg (2009), which is built precisely on the disputed/undisputed distinction you’d need for a Galatians-3-against-1-Timothy-5 sermon. Borg is on the rotation list; this is the week where he earns it.
• Making Sense of Sex: Attitudes towards Sexuality in Early Jewish and Christian Literature — William Loader (2013); Church — Hans Küng, on ecclesiology and order; The Church, Its Nature, Function and Ordering — Joint Commission on Church Union (Australia), 1984, which is a nice local-polity companion to a text about church order.
• On the economics of who gets carried: Quarterly Essay 57, Dear Life: On Caring for the Elderly — Karen Hitchcock, and Come of Age: The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble — Stephen Jenkinson. Both go directly to the age-sixty rule.
• Stated plainly: there is no book in the catalogue whose subject wording contains “widow.” Nothing on the order of widows as such. The nearest by subject are the Ruth volumes.

Gender and queer readings on the shelf — this is the strongest category in the whole library, and it isn’t reachable from a passage-name search, so worth listing:

• Jacob’s Wound: Homoerotic Narrative in the Literature of Ancient Israel — Theodore W. Jennings Jr.; Torah Queeries: Weekly Commentaries on the Hebrew Bible — Gregg Drinkwater (ed.), which covers the historical books.
• No One Taught Me How to Be a Man: What a Trans Man’s Experience Reveals about Masculinity — Shannon T. L. Kearns (2025). Directly on the Barak problem: the shame of being handed over into the hand of a woman is a story about what masculinity is supposed to be.
• Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny — Kate Manne; Women in the Hebrew Bible — Alice Bach (ed.), which is where the Niditch essay above lives; But She Said: Feminist Practices of Biblical Interpretation — Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza; A Women’s History of the Christian Church — Elizabeth Gillan Muir.
• And The Women’s Lectionary: Preaching the Women of the Bible Throughout the Year — Ashley M. Wilcox, which you own and which is doing the same job as the sheet you preach from.

Fiction pairings

• I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness — Irene Solà (2025). The pairing for Judges 4, and it’s uncanny. A Pyrenean farmhouse across four centuries of women — witches, killers, the drowned and the hanged — narrated by the dead who were written out of the official record. It is Jael’s tent from the inside: domestic space as the place where the violence actually happens, and women as the ones history declines to name properly. Judges 4 gives Jael no genealogy and no afterlife; this is two hundred pages of exactly that grievance.
• Damascus — Christos Tsiolkas (2019). The pairing for 1 Timothy 5. Paul and the first churches: the violence at the founding, the outcasts and dependents the movement gathered up, and the institutional hardening that follows. Read straight against a text busy sorting which widows are “really” widows and which are to be married off again.
• Also live, if either of those is wrong for the week: The Girl with No Hands (and Other Tales) — Angela Slatter, dark retold fairy tales of women taking revenge with household implements, which is the nearest thing on the shelf to a tent peg; Tess of the D’Urbervilles — Thomas Hardy, the powerless woman who kills her man in a lodging house, hospitality inverted; Convenience Store Woman — Sayaka Murata, the unmarried woman under constant pressure to marry, which is 1 Timothy 5:14 as a novel; and Beowulf in Seamus Heaney’s version, for the hall, the guest, the sleeping enemy and Grendel’s mother’s counter-raid — the same Iron Age moral grammar as Judges 4.

6. From My Articles

These are pointers, not summaries — the PDFs live on your Mac at Claudes Sorted/Articles/<Subfolder>/<Filename> and I can’t open them from here, so what follows is what the index says a piece is, not what I’ve read.

• “Terror in the Bible: Rhetoric, Gender, and Violence” — Monica Jyotsna Melanchthon et al. Keywords: texts of terror, gender violence, feminist hermeneutics, Bible and violence, domestic violence. The single best match in the whole index for this week, and the thing that supplies the interpretive frame the book collection lacks. Melanchthon, Monica Jyotsna et al., Terror in the Bible- Rhetoric, Gender, and Violence.pdf (index root).
• “When Women Speak: Domestic Violence in Australian Churches” — the contemporary companion. When Women Speak- Domestic Violence in Australian Churches.pdf (root).
• Norman K. Gottwald, “Response: Twenty-Five Years and Counting” — his own retrospective on The Tribes of Yahweh, which is to say on the tribal-confederacy Israel of Deborah and Barak. Closest the index gets to Judges 4. Gottwald, Norman K., Response- Twenty-Five Years and Counting.pdf (root). Alongside it: Roland Boer, “The Sacred Economy of Ancient Israel” and Gottwald’s “Social Class as an Analytic and Hermeneutical Category in Biblical Studies.”
• Roland Boer, “Women First: On the Legacy of ‘Primitive Communism’” — a feminist-Marxist angle on power and kinship that would sit oddly and usefully against a Kenite woman married into an alliance with the enemy. Boer, Roland, Women First- On the Legacy of 'Primitive Communism'.pdf (root).
• Ibrahim Abraham, “On the Doorstep of the Work”: Ricoeurian Hermeneutics, Queer Hermeneutics, and Scripture — the methodological piece if you want to say from the pulpit why a queer reading is a reading rather than an imposition. Abraham, Ibrahim, 'On the Doorstep of the Work'- Ricoeurian Hermeneutics, Queer Hermeneutics, and Scripture.pdf (root).
• If the sermon turns toward nonviolence rather than into the violence: Ched Myers, “Was Jesus a Practitioner of Nonviolence?”, Martin Luther King Jr., “Principles of Nonviolence”, and J. Denny Weaver, “The Gospel Confronts the Powers” — all in the index root. Myers is already in your bloodstream from the 2024 Ruth sermon.

Nothing at all on 1 Timothy, the Pastoral Epistles, widows, deacons, church order or almsgiving. I searched the Topic keywords column for every one of those and got zero. That reading is served entirely from the book catalogue this week, not from the articles.

One piece of housekeeping: the Articles and Other Interesting Resources folder on Drive — empty when this skill was set up — has started filling. It now holds the Bringing Them Home report, several Arnhem Land mission histories, an “Open and affirming” subfolder, and Ibrahim Abraham’s queer-Muslim material including a complete bibliography added on 27 August. Those ones I can read, unlike the Mac PDFs. Worth knowing the shape of it is changing.

7. Liturgical Resources

Direct hit. Spill the Beans has an issue built for these exact two readings: spill-Women's Lectionary - Pentecost 17 - Judges 4.12-22; 1 Timothy 5.1-16.pdf, in the Women’s Lectionary folder of the Worship Resources shared drive (originally the 24 September 2023 issue, Pentecost 17). Same pairing, same week of the year — it should transfer almost untouched.

Two neighbours worth pulling at the same time, given the serial:

• spill-Women's Lectionary - Pentecost 16 - Judges 4.1-7; 1 Timothy 2.1-15.pdf — last Sunday’s issue, i.e. part one of both readings.
• Judges 11-29-40 & 2 Timothy 1-3-7.pdf (Pentecost 18) — next Sunday, 4 October: Jephthah’s daughter. Judges gives you a woman who kills and then, seven days later, a woman who is killed. If you want the comparison, you have it built in.

Words for Worship. Nothing on 1 Timothy 5 anywhere — it isn’t in the RCL, so structurally there can’t be. But Judges 4:1-7 is, at Proper 28 Year A, filed in November: FW231119.doc / .pdf (19 November 2023, Pentecost 25) and Nov15_20.doc (15 November 2020) both carry genuinely reading-matched Deborah material. Week-matched only, for shape and prayers rather than content: FW231001.docx (Proper 21 Year A) and September-27-2020-uqg8yl.doc, which is literally 27 September. Year C Proper 20 and 21 sets carry 1 Timothy 2:1-7 and 6:6-19 — adjacent Pastoral Epistle material in the same voice: FW220918.doc and FW220925.doc.

L3 has nothing for either reading and no Year A material at all, so it doesn’t even match 2026’s cycle. Week-matched only: 04.28 September 2025.docx. Its Season of Creation collection L3_2026_SoC_-_online.pdf is more useful this week — see section 10, since 27 September falls inside the season.

Songs. First, honestly: the Songs Used column across all the sermon logs has no record of anything sung for either of these readings, because neither has been preached. So there’s no usage history to lead with. And the Songs Log’s Theme and Keyword columns carry no tags at all for widows, ageing, hospitality or victory-songs — the last few picks below rest on knowing the texts rather than on the index.

• There is a Line of Women — Iona, One is the Body 60. First choice by a distance: it names Deborah in a line of scriptural women, and it was written for very nearly this Sunday. hymnary.org
• Inspired by Love and Anger — Iona, Heaven Shall Not Wait 122. Holds the anger of the text without blessing the violence; the “how long?” refrain lets a hard passage stay hard. hymnary.org
• God of Freedom, God of Justice — TiS 657. Explicitly about torture and the cost of violent power. The right lament to set beside a tent peg if you want the congregation to feel the weight rather than cheer. hymnary.org
• Tell Out My Soul — TiS 161. The Magnificat: the mighty cast down, the lowly lifted. Rhymes with a victory song the lectionary cut. hymnary.org
• Beauty for Brokenness (“God of the poor”) — TiS 690. For the 1 Timothy angle: the widow, the poor, the ones a community must not let fall off the list. hymnary.org
• Brother, Sister, Let Me Serve You (The Servant Song) — TiS 650 / ATA 191. The mutual care 1 Timothy 5 is trying to legislate into existence. hymnary.org
• When Evenings Shorten — HIOS 147, Shirley Murray on ageing and later life. Almost nothing else in the collection touches the elderly-and-remembered strand of the epistle. No confident weblink found for this specific text — flagging rather than guessing.

Reserves: Not the Powerful, Not the Privileged (TiS 288), Goodness is Stronger than Evil (ATW 463), Freedom is Coming (ATOK 355). And on the CotT song list but with no matching sheet music on file, so it would need sourcing: If the war goes on (John Bell) — the strongest lament-over-violence text on either list, and if you can find the music it may be the single best fit for this week.

Recently used, so probably avoid: WaO 6, WaO 66, WaO 96, WaO 104, ATW 459, ATW 433, ATOK 394, TiS 668, ATE 301, A Place at the Table, Ground and Source, I Come to You.

Where the music meets the reading. Not known yet, and worth saying so plainly: there is no 27.09.26 folder in Current Worship Season at all, and the 06.09.26 folder exists but is empty. The prepared buffer currently runs out after 30 August. So this is a standing prompt rather than an observation: when the order of service for 27 September does appear, look at the centring music before you finish the sermon. On 16 August the entire thesis — compassion as the path to liberation — came out of the centring piece and your own opening prayer, and this prep never saw either, because it was only looking at the lectionary. The seam between the music and the text is where that sermon actually started.

Update, 14 September 2026: the 27.09.26 folder now exists in Current Worship Season, but it’s still a bare skeleton — songs, reading and reflection are all left blank. It does confirm Anna as preacher, Rachel leading worship, Adrian as Bible reader, and Sue & Noel, Graham, Lynne and Lachie as musicians (a note flags Sue may be unwell and asks for this to be confirmed). Nothing yet on what the music will actually be — worth another look nearer the date.

The themes emerging from all of this, taken together. Everything here converges on a single question, and it is one you have been circling for two years: who gets written down, and who decides? Judges hands the victory to a woman and then lets the lectionary cut the song where she’s blessed for it. 1 Timothy takes a real order of women with a real ministry and hands us a list of qualifications instead. Your Lydia sermon, your “Who Was She?” riddle, the Nagib and Taraq parable about what gets carved and what gets written in sand — they are all the same sermon at different addresses. The new thing this week adds is that the record is not merely incomplete; it is edited, and both readings show you the hand doing the editing.

8. Coming Up: Other Commemorations

Exactly one entry falls in the seven days from Sunday: nothing on 28, 29 or 30 September, or 1, 2 or 3 October.

• 27 September — James Watson, Christian pioneer. Methodist missionary who began on Dobu in Papua in 1891, nearly died of repeated malaria and came home after two years; then circuits at Narrabri, Inverell, Broken Hill, Wallaroo and Kempsey. Foreign Missionary Secretary from 1914, and in 1916 chosen to establish the Methodist mission on South Goulburn Island in Western Arnhem Land. At a time when Aboriginal people were widely written off as a dying race, he called them “a remarkable people,” argued that missionaries should not try to radically change how Aboriginal people lived but should stand with them and between them and the injustices of white society, and during the First World War publicly compared their treatment to “the atrocities of the Huns.” His obituary noted he was no great lover of books but had a gift for getting alongside people.

Two just outside the window that make one story rather than two. 22 September — Lazarus Lamilami (1906–77), Maung man of West Arnhem Land, sailor, carpenter, pastor, translator, speaker of five Aboriginal languages, and the first ordained Aboriginal Methodist minister in Australia — who as a boy of about eight attended the Goulburn Island school Watson founded. And 23 September — Henri Nouwen. Just past the window, 4 October — Clare and Francis of Assisi, and Seluvaia Ma’u, Tongan missionary sent with her husband to Papua in 1891 — the same year and the same field as Watson.

If you use the Watson and Lamilami pairing, the denominational dimension is worth checking against the UCA core documents on Drive — the Revised Preamble and the Covenanting Statement both speak directly to what the church did and did not do on those missions, and Watson’s “stand between them and the injustices of white society” is a line the Preamble has since had to complicate.

9. A Piece of Music

“And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda” — Eric Bogle (1971). Listen on Spotify.

This one is for the lead angle — the victory song, and who is left out of it. Bogle wrote it in Canberra a couple of years after emigrating, and he has lived in South Australia for most of the time since, which makes it about as local as a song gets without being a hymn. It follows a young man from a life he liked, through Gallipoli, to coming home without his legs and finding that the band still plays and the crowds still cheer and nobody looks at the stretchers. It ends decades later with the old men marching and the young people watching and asking what they are marching for. No profanity anywhere in it.

The reason it survives a change of mind is that it is pitched at the whole arc rather than one scene: a war, a song written to celebrate it, and the people the song does not mention. That is Judges 4 and 5 in six and a half minutes. It works whether your sermon lands on Jael, on Sisera’s mother, or on the question of what a victory song is for. Play it, or read the last verse, or just take the shape of it. (A caution worth naming: it will read as an ANZAC song to this congregation, and September is not April. That may be exactly the productive dissonance you want — or it may be a fight you don’t need. Your call.)

If the sermon goes to the live alternative instead, the pick is “Why We Build the Wall” — Anaïs Mitchell (from Hadestown). A call-and-response work song in which a community catechises itself about who is inside and who is out, and every answer turns out to be circular. It is 1 Timothy 5’s list of qualifications set to music. Also clean.

10. In the News

Three solid ABC pieces this time, all from the last month, and all of them uncomfortably well matched.

• “New threats testing Australia’s plan to end violence against women” (29–30 August). Australia is at the halfway mark of the ten-year National Plan, and a dozen crossbench MPs argue governments can’t show the spending is reducing harm. Chanel Contos on algorithmic radicalisation of young men; the Social Services Minister on an “explosion of sexual violence” with both perpetrators and victims under eighteen; states given two years to align risk-assessment frameworks, which critics call far too slow. Handle deliberately if you use it. A text about a woman who kills a man, read in a week when the national conversation is about men who kill women, is not a straightforward pairing — but pretending the resonance isn’t there is worse.
• “Support service helping older women navigate the ups and downs of housing insecurity” (5 August). In 2024–25, 31,700 Australians over 55 received homelessness assistance — 54 per cent of them women, around 17,000. One advocate: “We’re just another group in the housing crisis pool that’s trying to swim, and we’re drowning sadly.” This is the 1 Timothy 5 pairing: older women with no household to fall back on, and whether the community carries them.
• “Labor resists widespread calls to ditch ‘cruel’ aged care funding algorithm” (19 August), and the companion piece inside the algorithm itself (17 August). An assessment tool sorts older Australians into funding categories and cannot be overridden by a human assessor, even in extenuating circumstances: over a thousand review requests in five months, 207 successful. The sharpest resonance of the three. “Let a widow be put on the list if she is not less than sixty years old” is an algorithm — a rule that decides who is a real case without ever meeting the person.

From uniting.church: Season of Creation 2026 runs 1 September to 4 October, so 27 September sits inside it — theme “Living Water,” from Ezekiel 47, with a downloadable resource guide, service slides, prayers and an order-of-service template. Worth at least a passing acknowledgement in a week the set readings point elsewhere, and it pairs oddly well with a story whose turning point is the Kishon in flood. Also on the national feed: a change to the Code of Ethics for Uniting Church ministers (11 August), the President’s pastoral prayer for Nepal (28 August), and a cost-of-living piece asking who picks up the pieces when fuel prices rise.

11. Just for You

“I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.”

— Oliver Cromwell, in a letter to the General Assembly of the Kirk of Scotland, written from Musselburgh on 3 August 1650, three weeks before Dunbar. He was writing to Scottish Presbyterians who were quite certain God was on their side.

(Checked against the letter itself, as printed in Carlyle’s edition — and note that almost every version online inserts a “that”: “think it possible that you may be mistaken.” The letter has no “that.” If you put it on a slide, this is the accurate form.)

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