1. Hello, Richard
This week the lectionary hands you a woman who makes one of the most quoted vows of loyalty in the whole Bible, and then, two verses over the page, a letter warning Timothy about “silly women” who get led astray by anyone with a smooth line. It’s a genuinely funny piece of scheduling: Ruth’s “where you go, I will go” would make a lovely reading at a wedding, and 2 Timothy 3 reads like the in-laws who didn’t approve.
Ruth also opens with a line worth sitting on: “in the days when the judges ruled.” That’s not throat-clearing — it’s the book of Ruth placing itself deliberately at the end of the very era you’ve just spent three Sundays inside, with Deborah, Jael and Jephthah’s daughter. Whoever arranged this course knew what they were doing: after three weeks of women doing extraordinary and often violent things inside a broken political system, the lectionary closes the run with two ordinary women simply staying loyal to each other through a famine, a migration and a bereavement, and lets that quiet loyalty turn out to matter more than any battle.
No Preacher or Notes are listed against 11 October in the lectionary spreadsheet — normal for a week this far out, worth a check nearer the time.
If you want an opening: read Ruth’s vow slowly and let it land as the wedding reading everyone half-remembers — “where you go, I will go” — then ask, without a show of hands, who in the room has said something like that to someone who wasn’t a spouse: a friend, a sibling, a parent they moved cities to be near. Hold that. Then read 2 Timothy 3’s line about “silly women” who get taken in, and let the room feel the whiplash: two texts about women, four pages apart, and the second one doesn’t believe the first one could be right about anything. Land it there — you don’t need to resolve it, the tension is the sermon’s engine either way.
2. This Week’s Readings
Old Testament — Ruth 1:1-22 — Ruth and Naomi. Read on Bible Gateway (NRSVue).
“But Ruth said, ‘Do not press me to leave you or to turn back from following you! Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God.’” (Ruth 1:16, abridged)
New Testament — 2 Timothy 3:1-7 — “Silly Women” (the lectionary’s own title for it). Read on Bible Gateway (NRSVue).
“For among them are those who make their way into households and captivate silly women, overwhelmed by their sins and swayed by all kinds of desires.” (2 Timothy 3:6, abridged)
(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.)
Where these sit. Ruth 1:1-22 is only the first act of a four-chapter novella — the whole book is the natural larger unit, and it’s short enough to read in one sitting if you wanted to build a service around it the way Palmerston once did. As noted above, its opening line (“in the days when the judges ruled”) sets it explicitly at the close of the Judges period — this is the lectionary’s own way of finishing the arc Deborah, Jael and Jephthah’s daughter opened. On the New Testament side, 2 Timothy 3:1-7 sits between last week’s reading (1:3-7, Lois and Eunice) and chapter 4’s closing charge (“I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race”). It’s the letter’s warning about “the last days,” listing the vices of “lovers of self” before turning to the specific claim that some of these people prey on “silly women” — and it’s worth knowing before you preach it that this is precisely the section the standard Revised Common Lectionary skips: the RCL’s own reading from this chapter is 3:14–4:5, starting six verses after the ones the Women’s Lectionary hands you.
3. What Have I Done Before
Ruth is not fresh ground — say this plainly rather than let it surprise you from the pulpit. You’ve preached it three times in the tracked period alone: 11 December 2022 (Ruth 3-4 and Luke 1, “Jesus’ family tree and who gets claimed,” built around your own family’s editorial choices about which ancestors get talked about); 3 November 2024 (Ruth 1:1-18 and Mark 12:28-34, “Christianity is a verb”) — and this is the one to look at closely, because the reading is nearly identical to this week’s (1:1-18 then, 1:1-22 now); and 10 November 2024 (Ruth 3-4 and Mark 12:38-44, “the widow’s offering and people doing it tough,” read through the days after the US election). Further back, two whole-book Palmerston services exist: a Mother’s Day reading of all four chapters straight through (13 May 2018) and a stations-style all-age service the following fortnight (27 May 2018) with pizza dough standing in for gleaned grain.
The 3 November 2024 sermon is the one worth having open on your desk. In it you argued “Christianity is a verb… a doing,” read Ruth, Orpah and Naomi’s love as demonstrated through sacrifice rather than sentiment, and landed on your own colleague’s accident and the congregation’s presence at Adelaide Pride the day before (“we celebrated God’s Children… our church was out there loving”). If you preach Ruth again this week, that sermon is either a well to draw from directly or a reason to find a different angle entirely — worth deciding on purpose rather than drifting into a repeat.
2 Timothy 3, by contrast, is genuinely fresh. The only Timothy material you’ve preached is 2 Timothy 1:3-7 (22 October 2023, “hope-filled hugs,” referenced again just last week for 4 October). Nothing on 1:1–2:26 or on chapter 3 at any point. The Sermon Reference Log (which only runs from January 2025) has no Ruth or Timothy entries either, consistent with everything above rather than contradicting it.
Worth naming out loud if you want the four-week arc as a whole: Deborah commissioned, Jael’s tent peg, Jephthah’s daughter’s grief, and now Ruth’s loyalty outlasting all three — four very different ways a woman’s action or endurance turns out to matter more than the men around her expected. You have, without quite planning it, just run a month on it.
4. Commentary & Reflection Links
Ruth 1. Working Preacher carries entries on this text (it’s a genuine RCL reading, Year B Proper 26, usually falling in early November) built around several consistent points worth knowing: Ruth is “one of the few places in the male-dominated world of Scripture where women play the major roles”; Naomi’s suffering is framed by the narrative — and by Naomi herself — as direct divine action (“the hand of the Lord has turned against me”); the family’s move to Moab because of famine deliberately echoes Abraham’s and Jacob’s earlier migrations to escape famine (Genesis 12, 42); and Ruth’s vow in verses 16-17 functions as what one commentator calls a “speech-act” — she doesn’t promise to be loyal, she performs loyalty in the act of saying it, using language of “clinging” that denotes profound, near-unshakeable attachment. Working Preacher on Ruth 1:1-18. Rex Hunt, Bill Loader and Journey with Jesus were all checked directly for this exact passage and none turned up a dedicated piece — worth flagging as a genuine gap on their part rather than assuming they’ve been searched thoroughly enough; it’s possible something exists filed under the November RCL date that a fresh search closer to that time would catch.
2 Timothy 3. The single best find this week: Marg Mowczko, “The ‘Little Women’ in 2 Timothy 3:6-7”. She makes the case that “silly women” is a poor translation of the Greek gynaikaria (literally “little women,” a diminutive), and that the older English rendering has done real damage by making it sound like Paul is disparaging women as a category. Her actual argument: Paul’s target is the false teachers — men — deliberately infiltrating households to exploit a specific group of vulnerable, under-educated women; the diminutive conveys pity or exasperated concern rather than contempt, and elsewhere Paul is on record naming capable women as coworkers, deacons and apostles (Phoebe, Priscilla, Junia). If you preach this text, this is the corrective the label itself needs before you even get to the content.
A queer reading — checked separately, as always
Ruth 1:16-17 has a genuine, if contested, queer reading tradition, and it’s worth knowing both the case and the pushback. The argument, made in places like Kittredge Cherry’s Q Spirit, rests on the Hebrew verb dabaq (“cling”) in Ruth’s vow — the same verb Genesis 2:24 uses for how a man “clings” to his wife — plus the fact that Ruth’s words are now widely used in wedding ceremonies of all kinds, including same-sex ones. It’s not a fringe reading: it has a real interpretive history, including at least one 1937 novel in which lesbian characters recite the vow to each other. The honest counter-case is just as real, though: Ruth goes on to marry Boaz, dabaq is used elsewhere in scripture without any romantic charge at all, and deep familial loyalty between two grieving women doesn’t need to be read as erotic to be moving. Present it, if you use it, as a live debate rather than a settled discovery either way.
2 Timothy 3:1-7: nothing found, and worth saying so rather than reaching. Ruttenberg’s archive, Q Christian Fellowship, Queer Theology and the general literature were all checked and none has a dedicated piece on this passage. The “silly women” material doesn’t obviously carry a queer reading the way this week’s Old Testament text does — better to leave that gap open than manufacture one.
Two ways in
Lead angle — “the vow, again.” Ruth’s loyalty to Naomi, read through the Genesis 2 language of clinging and the queer-reading tradition around it. Well-sourced and genuinely moving, but see section 3 first: this is your third pass at Ruth in four years and the closest reading yet to a sermon you preached less than two years ago. Worth doing deliberately, not by accident.
Live alternative — “who gets called silly.” 2 Timothy 3’s slur, corrected by Mowczko, read against the structural pattern this whole month has surfaced — the Women’s Lectionary keeps handing you the exact half-chapter of the Pastoral Epistles the official RCL quietly steps around. Genuinely fresh ground, and it lets you close out four weeks of “what does the record leave out” with the sharpest example yet: a phrase the tradition itself mistranslated to disparage the very people the text was trying to protect.
5. From My Library
All six catalogue parts searched.
Ruth, directly. The Book of Ruth / Megillas Ruth (The Artscroll Tanach Series) — Meir Zlotowitz. A traditional rabbinic commentary and translation, and a natural companion to the article in section 6 below, which draws on exactly this tradition of Midrashic reading. Alongside it on the shelf, already flagged in recent weeks as the companion volume to the Judges commentary you’ve now used three Sundays running: Alice Laffey’s Ruth (Wisdom Commentary, vol. 8) — filed under the same “Judges and Ruth” heading as Mercedes García Bachmann’s Judges. And, as ever, The Women’s Lectionary: Preaching the Women of the Bible Throughout the Year — Ashley M. Wilcox, almost certainly with her own entry on Ruth.
Watch for over-use. A Room of One’s Own (Woolf) and Kristin Hannah’s The Women have both already been used as pairings for the Judges run this month — flagged here rather than reached for again.
Gender and queer readings, honestly. The shelf’s strongest queer resource for the Hebrew Bible, Torah Queeries, is organised around the weekly Torah portion — and Ruth sits in the Writings (Ketuvim), outside the Torah’s scope, so for the first time this run that particular shelf strength genuinely doesn’t apply. Worth naming rather than reaching past it.
Fiction pairing — Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens, Shankari Chandran (Miles Franklin winner, 2023). Maya and Zakhir, a Sri Lankan couple who fled civil war and built a nursing home in Sydney, navigating what displacement does to identity and belonging decades on, as an old accusation forces the whole community to reckon with race, trauma and what “home” means in multicultural Australia. It’s Ruth and Naomi’s migration read forward a few thousand years: a foreign woman’s loyalty and labour eventually becoming the thing that holds a community together, and the community’s own reckoning with how it treats the people who arrived from elsewhere.
6. From My Articles
A genuine direct hit: Jonathan Magonet, “Rabbinic Readings of Ruth” (European Judaism, vol. 40 no. 2, Autumn 2007) — read via Drive. I opened and read this one in full, so this is what it actually argues, not just a title. Magonet traces how the early rabbis, needing to work out how outsiders could join a scattered, land-less Jewish community after Rome destroyed Jerusalem, mined Ruth’s story — despite one rabbi’s own admission that the book “contains nothing about uncleanness or cleanness, about what is prohibited or permitted” — for a working theology and even legal procedure of conversion. The most usable material for Sunday: the Midrash reads Naomi’s three-times repetition of “turn back” (1:8-13) as the origin of a tradition that a would-be convert should be gently discouraged three times before being accepted if they persist, and it treats Ruth’s vow itself as one half of a catechism — inventing, verse by verse, the instructions Naomi must have given her about Sabbath law, mezuzahs, the 613 commandments and the prohibition on idolatry, each one keyed to a line of Ruth’s reply. The recurring word behind all of it is chesed — loyalty, loving-kindness — which the rabbis single out as the entire point of a book with no laws in it. (The Midrash also engages frankly with the story’s sexual undertones, particularly around the threshing-floor scene — worth knowing it’s there if you go looking yourself, though it’s not the material a Sunday sermon needs.)
Nothing on 2 Timothy, the Pastoral Epistles, or “silly women” turned up anywhere in the Topic Keywords column — checked directly and came up empty, which is a genuine gap in the collection rather than a failed search.
7. Liturgical Resources
Spill the Beans has nothing for this exact pairing. The nearest thing in the whole sheet is a resource for Ruth 3:1-18; 4:13-17 with Luke 1:46-55 (Advent 3, 11 December 2022) — a different reading entirely, and not close enough to count as a match; worth naming rather than stretching it into one.
Words for Worship has a genuine reading-matched hit, filed exactly where the pattern this month would predict. Because Ruth 1:1-18 really is an RCL text (Year B, Proper 26, usually early November), FW181104.doc (4 November 2018, Pentecost 24, Year B) sits on precisely this reading. Worth pulling for this Sunday even though it’s eight years old. L3’s holdings don’t reach back that far, so nothing there.
Songs. A direct thematic hit from the Songs Log: Where You Tread (ATW 507), whose first line is literally “Where you tread, I will tread” — as close to a direct setting of Ruth’s vow as the congregation holds sheet music for. No confident external weblink found for this specific text, so flagging rather than guessing at one — but the file is in the Songs folder and worth opening directly. Checked both 2024 Ruth sermons’ Songs Used columns and neither used it, so this would be a first pairing.
The Current Worship Season folder has no 11.10.26 subfolder yet — expected, four weeks out, nothing to report on the actual liturgy or music until the refresh pass gets closer to the date.
Themes emerging. Both readings are ultimately about who gets to be trusted and who gets to belong: Ruth, a Moabite outsider, becomes — by the book’s own logic — the great-grandmother of King David; the women of 2 Timothy 3 get written off as gullible by a text that (per Mowczko) was actually trying to protect them from the people exploiting that reputation. Read together, they’re less “two options” than the same question asked from opposite ends: whose loyalty and whose testimony does a community choose to believe?
8. Coming Up: Other Commemorations
A genuinely full week, running from the Sunday itself through the following week.
- 11 October — Ulrich Zwingli (1484-1531), reformer of the Church. Falls on the Sunday itself. Zurich’s Reformed pastor, who began preaching straight through whole biblical books rather than the set lectionary readings of his day (itself a nice small irony for a week you’re following a lectionary), survived the plague in 1519, and pushed reform of fasting, images and church-state relations before dying in battle defending it in 1531.
- 12 October — Elizabeth Fry (1780-1845), renewer of society. A Quaker who, after finding a dead child’s body in Newgate Prison’s women’s cell in 1813, spent the rest of her life on prison reform — founding the Association for the Improvement of Female Prisons in 1817, campaigning against solitary confinement (“too cruel even for the greatest crimes”), and pressing for humane treatment of convicts transported to New South Wales. A strong pairing, if you want it, with a week already asking whose treatment a community is responsible for.
- 15 October — Teresa of Avila & John of the Cross, people of prayer. Co-founders of the reformed “Discalced” Carmelites; Teresa for her writing on interior prayer (The Interior Castle) and her famously blunt exchanges with God after a cart accident tipped her into the mud (“Then it is no wonder you have so few [friends]”); John for The Dark Night of the Soul, written during nine months’ imprisonment by opponents of the reform he and Teresa were pursuing.
- 18 October — Luke, witness to Jesus. Gospel-writer and (per tradition) physician and companion of Paul; the Gospel most attentive to women’s voices in the nativity and resurrection narratives, which makes an odd, quiet bookend to a week already full of women’s testimony being weighed and sometimes dismissed.
No obvious denominational or UCA-specific dimension to any of these this week — none required checking against the Core Documents folder.
9. A Piece of Music
Iron & Wine — “Naked As We Came” (from Our Endless Numbered Days, 2004). This one goes with the lead angle. It’s a quiet, devastating song about a couple facing the fact that one of them will die before the other — its central image is of two people’s paths finally diverging while the love between them holds. It isn’t a literal retelling of anything in Ruth, but it’s the shape underneath the whole first chapter: two women bound together by loss, one path splitting off (Orpah, back to Moab) while the other stays bound to it (Ruth, to Naomi) — and the bond outlasting the parting either way. Confirmed clean, no profanity, and it survives whichever angle the sermon actually lands on because it’s pitched at the endurance of the bond rather than any single scene.
10. In the News
The strongest and most directly resonant story this week is not really framed as a “Ruth” story but reads as one anyway: “Reports employers are increasingly using ABNs to misclassify and underpay migrant workers” (ABC, 7 September). Employers are increasingly requiring temporary visa holders to obtain an ABN and work as sham “contractors,” stripping them of minimum-wage protections; international students alone are short-changed an estimated $3.18 billion a year, and two-thirds of migrant workers are paid less than the Fair Work Act requires. One student is quoted simply saying “we just want to have the income, so we accept the situation.” Ruth arrives in Bethlehem with nothing and survives because the law required landowners to leave gleanings for exactly people like her — a real, enforceable protection for an economic migrant with no standing of her own. This week’s news is the modern version of a system quietly removing that protection instead of extending it.
From uniting.church: the most recent items are all from the first half of September — the President, Rev Charissa Suli, joined Pacific women leaders in Tuvalu (8 September) for a regional gathering explicitly exploring “faith, gender and climate justice”; Frontier Services attended the National Bush Summit; and Uniting Church and Papua New Guinea church leaders met on climate change. Nothing directly on this week’s texts, but worth knowing as general denominational news.
11. Just for You
“Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
— Emma Lazarus, from “The New Colossus” (1883), the sonnet later engraved on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty (1903). Verified against the text as printed by the Poetry Foundation. It wasn’t chosen to force a connection to this week’s migrant-widow story — it’s simply this week’s small gift — but it rather lands one anyway.
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