Sunday Toolkit — 25th Sunday in Ordinary Time, 27th September 2026

1. Encouragement

Some Sundays hand the worship leader a gentle text and an easy job. This isn’t quite one of those weeks — Jael’s story is sharp, and 1 Timothy’s instructions about widows are blunt in ways that need a steady hand. If that’s landed on your plate, here’s the truth: you don’t have to resolve the hard bits in order to lead well. You just have to hold the space honestly, and trust the people in front of you to sit with a difficult story alongside you.

That’s most of what leading worship actually is — not having every answer ready, but being willing to stand up the front and stay present anyway. However Sunday goes, that willingness is already worth something.

2. This Week’s Reading

Old Testament: Judges 4:12-22 — Jael. This picks up straight after last week’s reading. Sisera, the enemy commander, flees the battlefield on foot and takes shelter in the tent of Jael, a Kenite woman whose people are at peace with his side. She welcomes him in, covers him, gives him milk when he asks for water — and once he’s asleep, kills him. The narrator doesn’t flinch from any of it, and neither should we; it’s a genuinely confronting story about a woman acting decisively, on her own terms, inside her own domain, in a war she didn’t start.

New Testament: 1 Timothy 5:1-16 — Widows. A much quieter text, but not a comfortable one either. The letter sets out how the early church should treat older women, and widows in particular — who counts as “really” a widow, who the community should support financially, what’s expected of families. It’s a passage that shows a young church working out its obligations to its most vulnerable members in real time, with all the mess that involves.

3. What Richard’s Explored Before

Jael herself is new territory — nothing in Richard’s sermon logs or reference files touches Judges 4:12-22 directly, so there’s no past sermon to point you to here. But it’s not unfamiliar ground. Richard closed the 2023 Women’s Lectionary year with a Reign of Christ liturgy honouring three “hidden women prophets” — Miriam, Deborah and Huldah — built around an original responsive piece called “Who Was She?” that named each of them by riddle before revealing who they were. Deborah, who leads straight into this week’s Jael, was very much part of that picture.

On the widows theme, there’s more to draw on. In October 2022 Richard preached on the parable of the persistent widow (Luke 18:1-8) — a different text, but the same underlying question of who gets cast as powerless. He leaned on Amy-Jill Levine’s point that biblical widows like Naomi, Ruth and Abigail “are not weak but agents advocating for themselves,” and floated the idea of God as the widow, wearing down an unjust world into caring for the vulnerable. Worth a look if you want a way into 1 Timothy 5 that doesn’t flatten these women into a category needing charity. There’s also an earlier sermon touching on the widow’s mite (Mark 12:41-44), read as “the widow who gives everything from her poverty” — a useful contrast to 1 Timothy 5’s more institutional, means-tested approach to who gets support.

As for the fortnight just gone: last week’s toolkit covered Deborah leading Israel’s army (Judges 4:1-7) alongside 1 Timothy 2’s uncomfortable instructions about women’s silence — Richard’s Monday Prep called it “a genuinely funny piece of scheduling,” Deborah commanding armies in one reading and women told to keep quiet in the other. The week before that was Numbers 27 (Mahlah and her sisters) and Colossians 4 (Nympha). So the last few weeks have all circled the same question in different keys: what does it look like when women act, lead, or simply survive in texts that weren’t necessarily written with them centred?

Words for Worship has a service filed against the “Pentecost 17” slot in its Year A cycle (24 September 2023) — but that sheet doesn’t index by scripture reference, so this is a week-label match only, not a confirmed match to this specific reading. Worth a look, but don’t assume it lines up. The L3 sheet couldn’t be checked properly for this week — the portion available to this run didn’t reach far enough into September to say either way, so it’s honestly unclear rather than “nothing there.”

4. Resources

Spill the Beans has a file built specifically for these two readings — search the shared folder for the Judges 4:12-22 / 1 Timothy 5:1-16 resource (it’s filed under the Women’s Lectionary section, originally used 24 September 2023). Worth checking first; it’s a direct match rather than a guess.

Beyond that, this is a good week to lean on the Old Testament Lectionary and Working Preacher sites (linked below) for extra grounding on Judges — it’s a book that doesn’t come round often, so fresh commentary is more useful than usual.

5. Songs

Nothing traceable ties a specific song to this exact reading — the Song List itself is inventory only, and neither the Sermon Reference Log nor past Monday Preps show a confirmed pairing. So take the suggestions below as fresh options, not “what’s always sung here.”

There is a Line of Women — an Iona/Wild Goose song that names women through scripture and history by name. About as direct a fit for Jael as you’ll find; worth checking whether the congregation has sung it before, since it’s not in the recent service records this run could see.
Freedom is Coming (HIOS 13) — a South African freedom song. Jael’s story sits inside Israel’s fight against an oppressive military commander; this carries that note of liberation without needing to spell out the violence.
God of Freedom, God of Justice (TiS 657) — pairs the OT and NT readings neatly: justice for the oppressed, and justice — properly worked out — for the community’s most vulnerable, which is exactly what 1 Timothy 5 is wrestling with.
Draw the Circle Wide — an inclusion song that leans more toward the widows reading: who gets counted in, who the community makes room for.

For the Centring Meditation slot, this might be a week to go instrumental or reflective rather than narrative — the Judges story is a lot to sit with twice in one service. A quiet piano piece, or a poem about hospitality and its risks, would give the room a breath before the Reflection.

6. Weblinks

Old Testament Lectionary — Howard Wallace’s site, and one of the few places with dedicated commentary on Hebrew Bible texts that don’t come up in the standard lectionary often, like Judges.
Howard Wallace — his own site, similarly strong on the Old Testament end of things.
Bill Loader — reliably good on both testaments, including the household-and-community ethics that 1 Timothy 5 is doing.
Working Preacher — broad, dependable commentary; worth checking for both readings this week.
Journey With Jesus — good for a more reflective, essay-style take if the straight commentary sites feel too dry.
Sacredise — liturgy-focused resources that might help with framing the harder parts of Jael’s story for worship.

7. Pop Culture

Songs to listen to in the lead-up:

Song for Zula — Phosphorescent. A song about refusing to be made into “some broken thing” by what’s been done to you. There’s something of that defiance in Jael, acting entirely on her own terms inside her own tent.
If We Were Vampires — Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit. A quiet, devastating song about loving someone knowing one of you will grieve the other one day. About as gentle an entry point into the reality behind 1 Timothy 5’s widows as a song could offer.
A Groundedness — Nat Bartsch. Solo piano, unhurried. Good for sitting with a hard week’s readings rather than rushing past them.
Broadview — Slow Pulp. A steadier, more settled kind of song — useful as a change of pace after the heavier picks above.
The Mary Ellen Carter — Stan Rogers. A change of genre, but a genuine fit: a folk anthem about refusing to give up on something everyone else has written off. Worth it for the closing lines alone.

From the library: Judges (Wisdom Commentary Series) by Mercedes L. García Bachmann. A feminist commentary on the whole book of Judges, so it covers Jael directly rather than needing a stretch. It’s a scholarly volume rather than a light read, but if you want to understand what’s actually going on in this story — and why it’s in the Bible at all — this is the real thing rather than a guess.

Film: Nomadland (2020, dir. Chloé Zhao, starring Frances McDormand). Fern, a woman in her sixties, loses her husband and her town’s only industry in the same year, and takes to the road living out of a van alongside a real community of modern-day nomads. It’s a gentle, unhurried film about what it means to keep going and build a chosen community after loss — a strong companion piece to 1 Timothy 5’s concern for widows, though it asks harder, more contemporary questions about who actually looks after people the system has let go of. Content note: there’s one brief, non-sexual nude scene (a hot-springs sequence) — worth knowing about rather than being surprised by, though nothing else in the film needs a warning.

8. Notable Dates

A handful of things worth knowing about in the ten days or so around this Sunday:

22 September — Lazarus Lamilami. The Uniting Church’s calendar remembers Lazarus Lamilami (1906–1977), the first ordained Aboriginal Methodist minister in Australia — a sailor, carpenter, translator and pastor who moved fluently between Maung and European worlds and helped begin an Aboriginal literary tradition. A genuinely significant figure to name in the notices or a prayer, especially given this week’s story is also about a woman navigating between two peoples.
23 September — Henri Nouwen. The anniversary of Henri Nouwen’s death (1932–1996) — the Catholic priest and writer whose whole teaching gift was hospitality: making space for others without trying to fix or change them. Worth a mention given Jael’s story turns hospitality inside out; Nouwen’s gentler vision is a good counterweight.
1 October — International Day of Older Persons. A UN observance that sits naturally alongside 1 Timothy 5’s concern for the community’s older members. Could be as simple as a line in the notices honouring the older people in the congregation, or a prompt in the Prayers for Others and Ourselves.
2 October — International Day of Non-Violence. Marked on Gandhi’s birthday. Given how unflinching this week’s Old Testament reading is about violence, this is a natural, honest pairing — not to resolve the tension in Jael’s story, but to sit with it openly.

9. Final Word

With a text like Jael’s, it can be tempting to soften it on the way to the pulpit — to summarise rather than sit with it. Try resisting that instinct this week. A lay-led room can absorb an honest “I don’t have a neat answer for this one” far better than most leaders expect, and it usually lands as more trustworthy than a tidy resolution would.

Whoever ends up leading this Sunday — thank you, and go gently with yourself as well as the text. May you have exactly the steadiness this week’s readings ask for, and people around you who meet you halfway.