Monday Prep — 31st Sunday in Ordinary Time, 8th November 2026

Built four Sundays ahead, as usual. Content note: the Old Testament reading is the rape of Tamar, so this prep names sexual violence plainly. No Preacher is listed against this week in the lectionary spreadsheet, which is normal this far out. The thing most worth your attention near the top: both readings sit outside the Revised Common Lectionary’s usual Sunday cycle, so there is no lectionary-site commentary to lean on, and section 4 says what I could and could not find instead.

1. Hello, Richard

Last week the Hebrew narrator reached for a word to describe a husband: nabal, a fool. This week the same root turns up in a woman’s mouth, and the thing it describes is no longer a husband’s churlishness but a rape. Tamar begs Amnon not to do this nebalah, this outrage, and warns him he will become “one of the fools in Israel”. If that is as I remember the Hebrew (worth checking against Alter on your shelf before you lean on it), the lectionary has quietly set Nabal and Amnon side by side: one man whose foolishness a woman manages with a donkey train, and one whose foolishness no woman can manage at all.

It is a heavy week, and I would rather say so plainly than dress it up. The second reading does not rescue the first. Revelation 12 gives a woman wings, a wilderness prepared for her, and an earth that opens its mouth to swallow the dragon’s flood. Tamar gets a torn robe, ashes, a brother who tells her to keep quiet, and a father who is furious and does nothing. The honest sermon may be the one that lets those two readings sit in the same room without letting the second one paper over the first.

There is also a good deal of you already in this week. You preached Jephthah’s daughter on 4 October, Dinah’s rape in August 2023 (with a guest), and Joseph’s garment in August this year. Tamar’s robe belongs to that family. You are not starting cold.

If you want an opening: begin with the content note, spoken slowly, before anything else, and say that the passage is rarely read in church. Then tell the small domestic detail first: Tamar is sent to cook for her sick brother, and she does it carefully, in his sight, with her own hands. The cruelty of the story begins with her competence and kindness. You will want to close the frame rather than leave it hanging, because recent openers have come unstuck there. Finish by coming back to the robe (the garment the text says daughters of the king wore) and ask what the church does with a woman who tears it. This opener needs no show of hands and no audience answer.

2. This Week’s Readings

Old Testament — 2 Samuel 13:1-21 — Tamar and Amnon. Read on Bible Gateway (NRSVue).

New Testament — Revelation 12:1-6, 13-17 — the woman and the earth. Read on Bible Gateway (NRSVue).

(I have deliberately not reproduced verses here, because I could not check the NRSVue wording line by line during this run; please take the text from the links above. Scripture quotations from the New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition. Copyright © 2021 National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America.)

Where these sit. 2 Samuel 13 is the hinge of the Court History: it follows David’s rape of Bathsheba and murder of Uriah and Nathan’s judgement that violence will not leave his house (chs 11-12), and it sets up Absalom’s murder of Amnon two years later and his eventual revolt. The set reading runs from the set-up (Amnon’s “love”, Jonadab’s advice) through the rape, Amnon’s loathing, Tamar’s lament, Absalom’s instruction to be silent, and David’s anger in verse 21. It stops before the part that explains why this is political (verse 22 onward, Absalom’s hatred and the sheep-shearing murder). If you preach it, you have to decide whether the sermon is about Tamar, about the men around her, or about the household as a system. As far as I know, 2 Samuel 13 appears nowhere in the Revised Common Lectionary’s Sunday readings, which matters in itself: Gerald West makes the exclusion of Tamar from lectionaries and liturgies one of his central charges against the church (see section 4).

Revelation 12 is the vision of the woman clothed with the sun, the dragon who wants her child, and the flight to the wilderness. The set reading omits verses 7-12 (war in heaven, Michael, the accuser thrown down, “the blood of the Lamb”), which is the part that most readings dwell on and the part the RCL does keep when it reads this chapter on 15 August. What survives is the pursuit and the surprising verse 16: the earth comes to the woman’s help. That is a deliberate shape. The Women’s Lectionary sheet labels the pairing “Women and Earth”, and the selection strips out the heavenly battle so that the weight falls on the woman, the dragon’s rage and the earth.

A caution on Revelation 12. The woman has been read as Mary, as Israel, as the church, as Eve, and as a constellation. Reading her as “the church” and Israel as superseded has an ugly history. Two things follow: it is worth saying which reading you are using, and it is worth knowing that the Jewish background of the imagery (Genesis 3, Exodus, Isaiah 66) is part of what the text is doing.

3. What Have I Done Before

No sermon on either passage turns up in the sources I can reach, and here is what those sources are. I searched all six Sermon Log sheets and the Sermon Reference Log for 2 Samuel 13, Tamar, Amnon, Revelation 12, the woman clothed with the sun and the dragon, and found nothing under any of them. The limits are the usual ones: the logs index by reference, many weeks have only a liturgy and no manuscript, and a topical service may have touched the story without being filed under it. Neither of this week’s readings is a first for you in the sense of a whole subject, though, because the close echoes are strong:

• Dinah, 6 August 2023 (Genesis 34 with 1 Corinthians 14): a guest, Robyn, preached on the “graphic and brutal” rape of Dinah. It is the nearest thing in the logs to a sermon on sexual violence in Scripture, and it was not yours. What the congregation heard then is worth knowing before you decide how to open.
• Jephthah’s daughter, 4 October 2026 (Judges 11:29-40). Another daughter whose father’s decisions cost her everything, and a Women’s Lectionary week you have just been through. The congregation is already thinking about daughters in texts of terror.
• Joseph and the garment, 16 August 2026 (Genesis 39:1-20): your queer reading of Joseph, and the argument that his compassion breaks a cycle of harm. The robe in 2 Samuel 13:18 is the same rare garment as the coat Joseph wears (the Hebrew phrase is the same, ketonet passim), which gives you a link to your own August sermon. That echo is mine and worth checking against your manuscript.
• Revelation, in passing. 8 May 2022 (Revelation 5:11-14, no sermon summary in the log), 2 March 2022 (Ash Wednesday, a lament for refugees, with Revelation 21:1, 3-5) and 13 November 2022 (Isaiah 65:17-25 with Luke 21:5-19, “hope in Isaiah’s new creation amid apocalyptic warnings”). You have used Revelation as a hope text, never as a dragon text.
• Power that protects itself. 2 Samuel 11-12 (David and Nathan) has not been a sermon of yours that the logs show; 2 Samuel 7 was in the Advent 4 service on 24 December 2023, and 1 Samuel 3 and 8 are in the logs. Nothing on David’s household and its violence.
• Your own writing. Your article “Solidarity and Resistance in New Creation Communities” is in the Articles folder and is the natural place to look for how you have already put Revelation’s visions to work. I haven’t opened it this run.

Voice Profile threads that apply: the Women’s Lectionary itself interrogated (“why does it start and stop here?”, and this week the cuts are the whole story); “who gets remembered vs. who is erased” (Tamar’s name is remembered, and Absalom later gives it to his daughter); and women who act where men have failed, which Tamar does by refusing silence and the dragon’s woman does by flight.

Last time Revelation 12 was in front of you: not in the logs.

4. Commentary & Reflection Links

Honest headline: neither passage is in the lectionary cycles that Working Preacher, Bill Loader and John Squires cover as Sunday readings, so none of them has a page for these verses. I checked Loader’s Year C index, Working Preacher’s Revelation series and Squires’s Revelation introduction and found nothing for Revelation 12 or 2 Samuel 13. Textweek’s Revelation page refused my request (its robots file disallows automated fetching), so I did not open it and have not worked around that; it is worth opening from its own index. What follows is therefore built from scholarly and church-resource pieces, and I say for each whether I opened it.

2 Samuel 13 — Tamar.

• Gerald West, “Tamar Summons the Church to Account: Resisting Patriarchal (and Ecclesial) Impunity in 2 Samuel 13:21”, Journal of Anglican Studies 22.2 (2024). The strongest find. I read the abstract only (the full article is behind a paywall). West draws on over 35 years of gender-based Contextual Bible Study on the passage and argues that the church silences, abuses, excludes and abandons Tamar, with the last two failures including her absence from lectionaries and liturgies. It closes with a Contextual Bible Study on verse 21, which is the verse about David’s anger without action. Directly relevant to the church-impunity thread, and to the Australian church’s own history.
• Liddy Barlow, “Listening to Tamar” (sermon, 2012). I read a summary of the page. A sermon preached in a United Church of Christ congregation in Pennsylvania, selected for Sojourners’ “100 Sermons Against Domestic and Sexual Violence”. It draws on Phyllis Trible’s Texts of Terror, opens with a content warning, pairs the passage with Ephesians 5 and Matthew 11, and closes by lighting candles to remember local victims by name. A useful model for the form of the service, not just the argument.
• Charlene van der Walt, “Hearing Tamar’s voice: how the margin hears differently”, lectio (2011). Abstract only. A qualitative study using an intercultural Bible reading method grounded in feminist and African hermeneutics; it finds the method cannot escape power dynamics but still makes space for dignity and change.
• Pointers only, which I saw in search results and did not open: D. M. Ackermann’s article on Tamar in NGTT (PDF); “Sermon Starter and Response: Holding Tamar’s Story” (2013); “In Search of Tamar: An Investigation of Feminist Interpretations of 2 Samuel 13” (an undergraduate comprehensive exercise at Carleton, so a map of the feminist literature rather than a source in itself).
• Phyllis Trible’s Texts of Terror is the classic, and I’d expect you to want it. It did not turn up in your catalogue, so you may need to borrow it.

Revelation 12 — the woman and the earth.

• “The earth opened its mouth”, a Substack reflection (I have not tried to name the author; the page I read did not make that clear). I read a summary. It takes verse 16 as showing the earth as a protective, living presence in solidarity with the victims, drawing on Catherine Keller, on the line from Hosea that “the land mourns”, and on Indigenous understandings. It is a reflection rather than scholarship, and I haven’t opened Keller herself, but it is the closest thing I found to a sermon-ready ecological reading of the verse your reading is built around.
• Boyd Luter and Sarah Sanders, “The Woman, Her Male Child, the Dragon, and the Rest of Her Offspring: A Non-Supersessionist Reading of Revelation 12”, Kesher (2022). I read a summary. It argues the woman is Jewish (Mary, then corporate Israel) and warns against readings that replace Israel with the church. It comes from an evangelical, Messianic-leaning journal, so I would use it for its caution about supersessionism, not as a progressive source.

Queer readings — checked separately, as always

I found no dedicated queer reading of either passage, and I’d rather say so than stretch one. A search for queer readings of Tamar and of Revelation 12 returned only feminist and contextual material (West, van der Walt, the Carleton piece). The nearest relevant ground is the one you have already walked: the shared garment with Joseph, and the fact that the story’s whole machinery depends on rigid gender roles (the king’s daughter in her special robe, the brother who “loves” her, the cousin who knows how to arrange it, the brother who says keep quiet). “Such a thing is not done in Israel” is also an honest description of how purity talk is used to protect abusers and silence people, which is where queer people’s experience of church and Tamar’s meet. That connection is mine, not a sourced one. On your shelf, Jennings’s Jacob’s Wound and Drinkwater’s Torah Queeries are the queer-reading books, though neither is on Samuel or Revelation as far as I know.

Two ways in

Lead angle — “be quiet, he is your brother.” Follow the silences: Jonadab’s quiet planning, Amnon’s door barred behind her, Absalom’s instruction to say nothing, David’s anger that does nothing, and a lectionary that never reads her. Against that, Tamar tears the robe and cries aloud. Revelation 12 then becomes the vision where silence is finally broken by the world itself: the woman is not blamed, not told to be quiet, and the earth takes her side. Honest limit: Tamar does not get that. She stays “desolate” in her brother’s house, and you will want to let that stand. Sources: West, Barlow, van der Walt for Tamar; the Substack for verse 16.

Live alternative — “the dragon and the household.” Treat both readings as portraits of power that expects to get away with it: Amnon, shielded by Jonadab, Absalom and David; the dragon who stands before the woman waiting to devour. The Spill the Beans team make this move (see section 7). It lets you speak about systems rather than only one household, and brings in the church’s own failures. Caution: the dragon-as-rape-metaphor can slide into treating Tamar as a symbol, so keep returning to her by name.

5. From My Library

All six catalogue parts searched. I am listing what your catalogue records; I have not been able to check what each book says about these passages, and I say so where it matters.

On the passages.

• Robert Alter, The David Story: A Translation with Commentary of 1 and 2 Samuel (2000). The obvious shelf book for the Hebrew of chapter 13, including that nebalah question in section 1. Your own log has flagged him as heavily used lately, so treat him as a lookup, not a lead.
• Walter Brueggemann, First and Second Samuel (Interpretation, 1990). Held, unchecked for this chapter.
• Baruch Halpern, David’s Secret Demons (2001). A historical reading of David’s court; I have not checked what it says about Tamar.
• Bruce Malina, On the Genre and Message of Revelation: Star Visions and Sky Journeys (1995). As far as I know, Malina reads Revelation as astral prophecy, including the woman as a figure in the sky, which is a very different angle from the political one. Held, unchecked.
• Norman Habel, Why on Earth Do You Still Read the Bible? (2016), and Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation (1985). The ecological companions to verse 16. I haven’t checked either against Revelation 12.

On sexual violence and the church.

• Tim Hein, Understanding Sexual Abuse: A Guide for Ministry Leaders and Survivors (2018).
• Lucia Osbourne-Crowley, My Body Keeps Your Secrets and I Choose Elena; Amy Remeikis, On Reckoning (2022); Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score; The Reckoning: How #MeToo is changing Australia (Quarterly Essay 84). Australian and clinical voices for a congregation that needs words for what the text describes.
• Melissa Davey, The Case of George Pell: Reckoning with Child Sexual Abuse by Clergy (2021). Not a commentary, but it is the Australian church’s own account of the “ecclesial impunity” West names, and a hard one to preach beside this text. Use with care.
• Mercedes García Bachmann, Judges (Wisdom Commentary, vol. 7): the other book of texts of terror, for the family resemblance to Jephthah and Dinah.

Fiction pairings. I could not confirm a good fiction pairing for either reading, and I would rather say so than invent one. Candidates on your shelf that I have not checked against the themes: Ellena Savage’s essays Blueberries (Fiction/Lit in your catalogue), and Alice Pung’s novel One Hundred Days. Treat both as guesses.

Watch for over-use. Jess Hill’s See What You Made Me Do was the 1 November suggestion, so I have left it out of the lead position here even though it fits.

6. From My Articles

I did not open any article this run; the lists below are from the two indices (the Drive articles index and the Mac-only index) and are pointers only, from titles and keywords.

• Terror in the Bible: Rhetoric, Gender, and Violence, Melanchthon and Whitaker (SBL, 2021). The 1 November prep read its contents and foreword and noted a chapter by Gilmour on Tamar in 2 Samuel 13; I’d start there.
• Christopher Pramuk, “Strange Fruit: Black Suffering/White Revelation”: about apocalyptic and unrecorded suffering; a possible companion for Revelation.
• “Trauma & survival 2” and Jenny Swanburry, “The Desert Shall Bloom: A Dialogue Between Experiences of Supporting Trauma Survivors and Moltmann & Soelle’s Theologies of Suffering and Hope”: both indexed under trauma.
• Your own “Solidarity and Resistance in New Creation Communities” (on Drive).
• Uniting Church: the Assembly’s resource on preventing harm from sexual orientation and gender identity change efforts (SOGICE) and Warren Talbot’s “LGBTIQA+ Communities and the Uniting Church’s Prophetic Voice” are both in the Mac-only index under “Unread (Study Leave)”, so I can’t link them from here. The Assembly Standing Committee’s Issues, Challenges and Opportunities (noted last week) commits the church to “an end to gender based violence”.

Nothing in either index is tagged to Tamar, 2 Samuel or Revelation 12 specifically. That is a genuine gap in the collection, not a failed search.

7. Liturgical Resources

The best find of the week is a full resource on exactly these two readings. Spill the Beans, file spill-Women's Lectionary - Pentecost 14 to Reign of Christ - Issue 48 HQ.pdf (Worship Resources shared drive, Spill the Beans → Women’s Lectionary), the section headed “Tamar’s horrific experience” for Pentecost 23 (5 November 2023), pairing 2 Samuel 13:1-21 with Revelation 12:1-6, 13-17: the same pairing as this Sunday. I read that section of the PDF. It is unusually frank. The team say they debated at length whether to focus a service on the story, advise telling people about it ahead of time to reduce triggering, and point to All Saints readings (Proverbs 31 and James 2) as an alternative if the congregation can’t take it. It has a retelling in Tamar’s voice (“Tamar’s Side”), discussion starters on myths about sexual violence and on patriarchy, and a link between the dragon of Revelation 12 and abuse of power in general. Practical ideas include leaving a pillar candle unlit in silence while people read the story and then write a single word on it, and tying scraps of wool together as a silent prayer. Its other activities (a maze, a beanbag game) are pitched at children and would be wrong in this setting, so take the candle and the wool and leave the rest. It also points to Church of Scotland violence-against-women resources, which are UK-based.

Pastoral note. The Spill the Beans team put a lot of weight on pastoral follow-up. In Australia, 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732) is the national sexual assault, domestic and family violence line; it’s worth having on the order of service or the screen (please check the number is current before printing).

Not reading-specific, and labelled as such: your Words for Worship and Liturgy folders; I did not find a Words for Worship entry for 2 Samuel 13 or Revelation 12. There is no Bibliography - DD.MM.YY document for 8 November yet, and the Current Worship Season folder has no 08.11.26 folder yet, so I can’t tell you what the service will sing.

Songs. The Songs Log and Song List show these in the congregation’s books; I haven’t checked their usage history for these texts.

• Lament: How Long (ATFG 563); Sorrowing Song (ATE 286, “Lord, hear my praying”).
• The earth and the woman: Touch the Earth Lightly (TiS 668); All Things New (ATFG 512); Praise with Joy the World’s Creator (TiS 179).
• Women and standing together: There is a Line of Women (Iona); She Sits Like a Bird (TiS 418); Goodness is Stronger than Evil (ATW 463; sung 2 November 2025, so use it sparingly).

No confident external weblinks found for any of these, and I would rather say so than guess; Hymnary.org is the first place to check.

Themes emerging. The material keeps saying the same thing from two sides: the powerful expect not to be held to account, and the text and the church have both helped by looking away. The Spill the Beans team put the dragon and the household in one frame, West puts the church in the dock, and the Women’s Lectionary’s own cuts tell the same story. What you have done before pulls the same way (Jephthah’s daughter, Dinah, the Joseph garment), so this week sits inside a thread you have been following all year.

8. Coming Up: Other Commemorations

A fuller week than some: the Calendar’s index has three entries between Sunday 8 and Saturday 14 November.

• 9 November — Karl Barth, Christian thinker. Swiss Reformed pastor and theologian (1886 onward), whose Romans commentary and Church Dogmatics shaped twentieth-century theology and who helped draft the Barmen Declaration against the “German Christian” church. The Calendar notes that the Barmen Declaration was cited in an early Joint Commission on Church Union document and that his way of describing discipleship undergirds the Uniting Church’s foundations. The entry quotes a prayer he used to open and close sermons; see section 11. A sturdy fit if you want a resistance-to-empire note beside Revelation.
• 10 November — Thomas Merton, person of prayer. Trappist monk and writer (1915-1968) who held prayer and the political, economic, social and environmental issues of his day together. Less direct, but the entry’s “open to experience and not afraid of it” is a quiet companion to a week about not looking away.
• 14 November — John Geddie & John Paton, Christian pioneers. Presbyterian missionaries in the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu). I’d handle with care and with the Pacific in mind: the entry is a mission-history account, and the Uniting Church’s current statements on the Pacific (section 10) are the better frame.

Just outside the window: Remembrance Day falls on Wednesday 11 November (it is not in the Calendar’s index, which I am noting from general knowledge), and 16 and 17 November (Margaret of Scotland; Hilda of Whitby).

9. A Piece of Music

Tracy Chapman, “Behind the Wall” (from her debut album, 1988; on Spotify, about 1 minute 50). As far as I know it is sung unaccompanied, and its subject is a woman hearing violence through the wall of the next flat and the neighbours and police who do not come. It goes with the lead angle: the whole piece is about people who hear it and stay quiet, which is the Jonadab, Absalom and David pattern in another century. It is short enough to sit in the centring slot without taking over. It is new as a pick for these notes.

Two honest flags. I have not read the lyrics line by line during this run, so please glance at them before using it from the front; and it is about domestic violence, so it should come after the content note, not as a surprise.

10. In the News

“Uniting Church urges Australia to stand with Pacific on fossil fuels” (uniting.church, 6 October). I read a summary. The Uniting Church’s President, Rev Charissa Suli, is one of 80 senior faith leaders who signed an open letter asking the Prime Minister to back a global Fossil Fuel Treaty and a fair, planned transition from coal, oil and gas, launched with faith-community actions in seven cities. Australia holds the role of President of Negotiations for COP31, to be hosted in Antalya, Türkiye, with a Pacific Pre-COP in Fiji and a Leaders’ event in Tuvalu. The conference dates (9–20 November 2026) come from my own earlier prep notes for 18 October rather than from the page I opened, so check them before quoting. The earth that “came to the help of the woman” in Revelation 12 has an obvious partner here, and so does Suli’s line that “love is expressed through action and accountability”.

Also on uniting.church: “Three years on: A message and prayer for peace” (7 October) and the President’s statement on immigration, “A confident nation does not fear diversity” (7 October), which I saw in the news listing but did not open. I did not find a reliable current news item on sexual violence in Australia this run (my search returned older and secondary pieces), so I haven’t forced one.

11. Just for You

“May your light enlighten us, your peace be upon us.”

— Karl Barth, from the prayer he used to open and close his sermons, as quoted in the Calendar of Other Commemorations (the entry for 9 November). I have the wording from that document, not from a printed edition of Barth. It is chosen as a small, plain prayer to carry into a heavy week.