Monday Prep — 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, 15th November 2026

Built four Sundays ahead, as usual. No Preacher is listed against this week in the lectionary spreadsheet, which is normal this far out. Three things to know before you read on. First, a content note: Revelation 17 is the passage that calls a woman Babylon and “mother of whores”, and the verse just after your set reading (17:16) has her stripped, eaten and burned. This prep names that plainly, and so do some of the sources below. If you want a support line in the notices, 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732) is the national service; check the number on their website before printing it. Second, the spreadsheet labels this the 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, and I have kept that label in the title; by the standard lectionary count it is Proper 28, the 33rd. Third, it is the second last Sunday of the church year (Reign of Christ is 22 November), and the COP31 climate talks open in Antalya on 9 November, so they will be under way on the day.

1. Hello, Richard

A queen sets out with a camel train of spices, gold and jewels to put some questions to a king, and the writer tells us the questions were hard and then declines to record a single one. The Queen of Sheba has the best entrance music in the Western canon and not one line of the interview. Beside her the lectionary sets a woman on a scarlet beast, holding a gold cup, with a name written on her forehead and a reputation that has done real damage to real women for a very long time. It is an awkward double act for the second last Sunday of the year, and I mean that as a compliment. About all the two women have in common on the surface is a great deal of luxury cargo, and whether the text wants you to hear them in conversation is a question the week hands you without an answer.

It is also a week with two quite different kinds of difficulty. Sheba is a gift for a congregation that loves a woman with power who is not punished for it. Babylon is a text that has been used against women, sex workers and queer people, and that you will want to approach with your eyes open. You have preached neither before, so far as the logs show (section 3 says what that does and does not mean).

If you want an opening: Handel’s “Arrival of the Queen of Sheba”. Most of the room will know it from weddings and from the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics, and some will remember that the congregation processed to it on 12 November 2023. According to Wikipedia, the piece is the opening of Act Three of Handel’s oratorio Solomon (1749) and depicts the bustle of preparations for her arrival rather than the queen herself, which makes it a fitting soundtrack for a text where everyone talks about her and almost no one hears from her. Play the first minute, say that much, and begin. To close the frame without tying it up, come back to the music at the end and leave the unrecorded questions as questions. This opener needs no show of hands and no answer from the room, so it should survive the seating.

2. This Week’s Readings

Old Testament: 1 Kings 10:1-13, the Queen of Sheba. Read on Bible Gateway (NRSVue). A queen hears reports of Solomon, travels to Jerusalem with spices, a very large quantity of gold and precious stones, and puts her questions to him. She sees his court, his table, his officials and his offerings, and is left breathless. She tells him the reports were true and that the half had not been told her, blesses the Lord his God, and gives him her gifts. Solomon gives her everything she asks for, besides what he gives from his own bounty, and she returns to her own land. Verses 11 and 12, about Hiram’s ships bringing almug wood and jewels, sit in the middle of the visit like an interruption.

New Testament: Revelation 17:1-6, the woman on the beast (the Women’s Lectionary calls her “The Great Whore”). Read on Bible Gateway (NRSVue). One of the angels with the bowls takes John into a wilderness, where he sees a woman sitting on a scarlet beast covered in blasphemous names. She is dressed in purple and scarlet, glittering with gold, jewels and pearls, and holding a golden cup full of abominations. Her forehead carries a name, a mystery: Babylon the great, mother of whores and of the earth’s abominations. She is drunk on the blood of the saints and the witnesses to Jesus, and John, seeing her, is greatly amazed.

A note on method: I could not open the NRSVue text during this run, so I have summarised both readings rather than quoting them. Please check two small wordings when you read the text on Tuesday: the footnote at 1 Kings 10:8 (the Hebrew has “your men” where the Greek versions have “your wives”, if I have the textual note right, and it is a curious place for a variant when the subject is who is blessed by being near Solomon), and how the NRSVue renders the English word at Revelation 17:5.

Words worth knowing, in plain English.

“Hard questions” (1 Kings 10:1). The Hebrew word is chidot, usually translated riddles. It is the same word used for Samson’s riddle at his wedding feast (Judges 14), so the writer may be inviting you to hear a contest of wits, with stakes, rather than polite conversation. The text gives you no riddle and no answer, only the result: “nothing hidden from the king”.
“No more spirit in her” (10:5). The Hebrew ruach means breath or spirit, so the plain meaning is that she was breathless, overwhelmed.
“Whore” (Revelation 17:1, 5). The Greek is pornē, the ordinary word for a woman who sells sex (it is where English gets “pornography”). In verse 5 Babylon is the mother of the pornai, the plural. In the Greek Old Testament the same word family is how prophets describe a city or nation that has given its loyalty to the wrong power (Nahum 3:4 does it to Nineveh, and Ezekiel 16 and 23 do it to Jerusalem). Whether John means this mostly as a charge about political and economic allegiance, or mostly about a woman’s body, is the thing the commentary below argues about.
“Mystery” (17:5). The Greek mystērion in the New Testament often means a secret now being disclosed. It is an odd word to find written on a forehead like a label.
“Greatly amazed” (17:6). The Greek repeats itself: John wonders at her with a great wonder. The angel’s first reply (verse 7, just outside the reading) is “Why do you wonder?”

Oddities and echoes, left as I found them.

Both visitors are overwhelmed by what they see. Sheba has “no more spirit in her” at Solomon’s court; John is “greatly amazed” at the woman. One of them praises the Lord, and the other is asked what she is amazed about.
Sheba arrives with spices, gold and jewels. The cargo list of Babylon in Revelation 18:11-13 (just past your reading) includes gold, jewels, pearls, spices, incense and frankincense, and ends with horses and chariots and then bodies and human lives. The luxury goods overlap, and so does the road they travel on.
The set reading ends at verse 13, before 10:14-29, which lists Solomon’s annual gold, his shields, his ivory throne and his imported horses and chariots, and well before chapter 11, where his many foreign wives turn his heart. Deuteronomy 17:16-17 warns a king against multiplying horses, wives and silver and gold. The reading takes you to the doorway of that list and stops.
In the New Testament Jesus names her “the queen of the South” (Matthew 12:42; Luke 11:31) and says she will rise at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, because she came from the ends of the earth to hear Solomon’s wisdom. Revelation 17:9, three verses past your reading, says “this calls for a mind that has wisdom”, in the same breath as the beast’s seven heads. Wisdom is where both readings go next.
She blesses the God of Israel and goes home. The text does not say she converts, joins anything, or stays, and later tradition fills the silence with a child (Jewish and Ethiopian traditions name him differently).

Where each sits. 1 Kings 10 is the high point of the Solomon narrative (1 Kings 1-11), the chapter where the wise and wealthy king is at his most impressive before chapter 11 starts to take it apart. The Queen of Sheba story also appears in 2 Chronicles 9:1-12, with small differences. Revelation 17 begins a two-chapter vision (17-18) of the fall of Babylon, which most scholars read as Rome, and it leads into the heavenly celebration in chapter 19. This week’s Revelation 17 follows the woman clothed with the sun of Revelation 12 (your 8 November reading) and precedes the Bride of Revelation 19 and 22 (the 22 November reading), so the Women’s Lectionary is giving you three women of Revelation in three weeks, and this is the middle one.

3. What Have I Done Before

You have a direct precedent for the first reading, and no sermon text survives from it. On 12 November 2023 (logged as Pentecost 27) the service used 1 Kings 10:1-13 together with Proverbs 3:1-18 instead of the standard readings for that Sunday. It was a farewell service in which Tony, a retiring minister, laid down his stole, with communion co-led by you and Tony. Jenny led worship and Wendy played. The congregation processed in to Handel’s “Arrival of the Queen of Sheba”, Kahlil Gibran’s poem “Fear” was read as “Wisdom from Another Culture”, and the intercessions named Israel and Gaza. The sermon line in the order of service was blank and the log says no manuscript survives. The log lists a file called nov 12 sermon.pdf among its sources, but it is not in the Sermons folder on Drive, so it may still be on your Mac. Worth a look if you want to know what you said about her then.

Songs that day, from the log: Sing of the Lord’s Goodness (TiS 183 / ATFG 524), For Everyone Born, a Place at the Table, The Summons (ATOK 413), Cry Out for Love (ATW 477), and May Our Homes Be Filled with Dancing.

Nothing on Revelation 17, on Babylon, or on the woman on the beast in any of the six Searchable Sermon Logs, the Sermon Reference Log, or the Sermons folder (searched by title for Revelation, Babylon, Kings, Sheba and Solomon). As always, the logs index by reference, and they stop at August 2026, so a topical or occasional service may have touched either text without being filed here, and the sermons since August are not in them at all.

Echoes in earlier sermons, by name:

Women who refuse or are written out: Vashti (12 April 2026, Esther 1); the unnamed enslaved girl and Lydia (28 June 2026, Acts 16), a sermon on who gets remembered and who is erased, which is the question Revelation 17 raises about a woman who is only ever a symbol; and the Reign of Christ 2023 litany of Miriam, Deborah and Huldah (26 November 2023, “Who Was She?”).
Empire and wealth: 15 February 2026 (Hosea 11, idolatry as trusting empire and wealth, with a feminist reading of Gomer); 24 November 2024 (“Christ, not Caesar”); 3 March 2024 (the Temple economy); 10 November 2024 (widows and the powerful).
Apocalyptic: 13 November 2022, the logs describe a sermon on prophetic versus apocalyptic writing and the fall of the Temple in 70 CE. That is the nearest thing to Revelation in the record and is worth a look before Sunday; I could not find a PDF for it.
Wisdom as a woman: Proverbs 1:20-33 (12 September 2021, a liturgy only), and Proverbs 3 sat beside Sheba in 2023.

Voice Profile threads that apply: feminist criticism that centres women the text sidelines; the anti-empire political reading; the “why does the lectionary start and stop here?” question, which is a gift this week (the reading stops before Solomon’s gold and horses, and before chapter 18); and the habit of ending on an “I wonder”. Esther and Genesis 24 are the examples the logs flag as well used, so lean on them lightly.

4. Commentary & Reflection Links

Honest headline: neither passage is in the Revised Common Lectionary, so the usual lectionary sites (Working Preacher, Textweek, Vanderbilt, Journey with Jesus, Rex Hunt, Sacredise) have no page keyed to this pairing. I searched for each by passage reference and found nothing from Working Preacher, By The Well, Rex Hunt or Journey with Jesus on either text; I did not manage to open Textweek (it blocks automated access). What I did find is below. I opened the items marked as read; where my information comes from a summary rather than the full text, I say so.

1 Kings 10, the Queen of Sheba.

Enter the Bible (Luther Seminary), “1 Kings 10:1-13: The Queen of Sheba”. Read through a summary tool, so treat my description as a summary. It makes Sheba a trading power (the Sabaean kingdom, in present-day Yemen, controlled much of the spice trade) and suggests she may have been as concerned about the threat Solomon posed to her trade as she was curious about his wisdom. It calls her one of the few women in the Hebrew Bible with power and agency in her own right, whom Solomon treats as an equal.
Paula L. McGee, “Divine Divas”, Journal of the ITC, a womanist sermon first published in The African American Pulpit (Summer 2003). McGee preaches 1 Kings 10:1-9, 13 against the grain of a text meant to show off Solomon and holds up the queen as someone who asks hard questions, sees for herself, and asks for what she needs. Useful as a model of preaching her as a person rather than as Solomon’s audience.
Dorcas C. Juma, “The Queen of Sheba and daughters of Africa: Reimagining redemptive matriarchy in 2 Chronicles”, HTS Teologiese Studies 81(1), 2025. An Afro-feminist reading of the Chronicles parallel (2 Chronicles 9) that treats 1 Kings 10 as a cross-reference. Juma presents her as a model of African women’s agency and wealth, argues against attempts to “de-Africanise” her, and also asks hard questions about women who uphold oppression of other women. The article does not discuss Revelation 17.
Printed study notes on 1 Kings 10 from Community on Columbia (author not named, so treat as a handout rather than scholarship). It gathers the later traditions in one place: the riddle contests in the Targum, the legends of a child, and a darker rabbinic strand that doubts her sincerity. It also notes how much of the midrash about her fixates on her body, including a famous story about her legs. That fixation is worth noticing against Revelation 17.
A pointer only, not opened: Jacob Lassner, Demonizing the Queen of Sheba: Boundaries of Gender and Culture in Postbiblical Judaism and Medieval Islam (University of Chicago Press, 1993), which I saw listed in search results.

Revelation 17, the woman on the beast.

Mark Longhurst, “Back to Babylon”, the holy ordinary (Substack, 15 February 2026). Read through a summary tool. Longhurst reads Babylon as a code name for Rome, notes that “whoring” in the Hebrew Bible usually describes a community’s political and economic allegiances, and then does something I would flag for you: he draws on Avaren Ipsen’s work with sex workers, who largely heard this image as a “kill the whore” message, and says the imagery is morally indefensible and scapegoats women and sex workers, while still defending the critique of empire. It is the nearest thing I found to your usual stance of keeping the political edge and refusing the misogyny.
Judith König, “The ‘Great Whore’ of Babylon (Rev 17) as a Non-Survivor of Sexual Abuse”, Religions 13 (2022), article 267. Read through a summary tool. König reads Revelation 17:16 as the violent sexual punishment of a female character, notes that the text calls Babylon a woman several times before verse 18 says she is a city, and argues that interpreters cannot be neutral about a text that depicts sexual violence and presents it as God’s work. She engages feminist and postcolonial readings and does not address queer ones.
Jonathan Robinson’s review of Avaren Ipsen, Sex Working and the Bible (Equinox, 2005), Pacific Journal of Theological Research. Read. Ipsen’s book reads texts with a group of ten North American sex workers who are also political activists, and has a chapter on the whore of Babylon (Rev 17:1-19:10). The review does not describe what that group made of the chapter, so it is a pointer to the book rather than to the reading, and the reviewer finds many of the interpretations unconvincing on historical-critical grounds while valuing the book for showing how differently texts land.

Queer readings, searched separately

I found no queer reading of either passage. The searches (Danya Ruttenberg’s Life Is a Sacred Text, Queer Theology, Q Christian Fellowship, and general searches on queer and gender readings of Sheba and of Revelation 17) came back empty for 1 Kings 10, and König says plainly that she does not address queer readings. Three adjacent things are worth knowing about without being passed off as the real thing. The midrashic obsession with the queen’s legs and body (above, and in Lassner’s title) is a story about policing how a powerful woman’s body should look, which is gender-boundary material even if it is not a queer reading. Revelation 17 stages a woman’s presentation (purple, scarlet, gold, a name on the forehead) as the very mark of her corruption, a point that Sontag’s essay on camp, which is on your shelf, makes interesting in a way that is my observation and not a sourced reading. And the Terror in the Bible volume on your Drive (section 6) has a queer Australian chapter on the “foreign woman” trope in Numbers 25 that cites Solomon’s foreign wives in 1 Kings 11, which is the other side of the Sheba story.

Two ways in

Lead angle: the visiting queen. Sheba as a woman of wealth and power who goes, looks for herself, asks hard questions, praises, and goes home, and what the text does and does not record. Supported by Enter the Bible, McGee and Juma, with Revelation 18’s cargo list as the place where the same luxury goods end up. The Queen of the South in Matthew and Luke gives you the New Testament echo.

Live alternative: the woman as symbol. What it means that Revelation uses a woman’s body to stand for an empire, and who has paid for that image. Supported by König, Longhurst and Ipsen, and by the ABC item in section 10. If Sheba is the woman the text lets speak and Babylon is the woman it will not let speak, the two readings together give you a sermon about what women are asked to carry as symbols, but that pairing is mine and not a sourced one, and per your notes I have left it open.

5. From My Library

All six Library Catalogue parts were read in full (1,129 rows; none looked truncated). On the shelf for the passages:

Daniel Berrigan, The Kings and Their Gods: The Pathology of Power (the catalogue spells the author “Berrogan”), LibraryThing. The best fit on the shelf for 1 Kings, though it was the From the Shelf pick on 7 September.
Wilda Gafney, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah (Wisdom Commentary), LibraryThing. Nahum 3 uses the prostitute image for imperial Nineveh, which is the Hebrew Bible precedent Revelation 17 is drawing on, so this is the best shelf book for the second reading.
Song-Mi Suzie Park, 2 Kings (Wisdom Commentary vol. 12), LibraryThing. The nearest Wisdom volume, but it covers 2 Kings only; there is no Wisdom volume for 1 Kings or Revelation on the shelf.
The ten-volume New Interpreter’s Bible Commentary set (LibraryThing, catalogued under the name Joseph Blenkinsopp). It should cover both 1 Kings and Revelation, but I cannot tell from the catalogue who wrote those sections and I have not opened the set.
Marvin L. Chaney, Peasants, Prophets, and Political Economy (LibraryThing), for the tribute-and-wealth lens on Solomon’s court; Alice Ogden Bellis, Proverbs (Wisdom Commentary, LibraryThing) on Woman Wisdom and the Other Woman; and Bruce J. Malina, On the Genre and Message of Revelation (LibraryThing), the only Revelation-specific title in the catalogue.
Wider: Walter Wink, The Powers That Be (LibraryThing); John Dominic Crossan, How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian (LibraryThing), which runs through to Revelation; Kate Manne, Down Girl (LibraryThing), on how misogyny works, for the Revelation 17 side; and Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads (LibraryThing), for the long-distance trade Sheba’s caravans belong to.

Queer and gender-studies titles, searched separately. None is about these passages, but they are the shelf’s nearest help: Joy Ladin, The Soul of the Stranger (LibraryThing), on the stranger in the Torah, which suits a foreign queen at a king’s court; Torah Queeries (LibraryThing); Austen Hartke, Transforming (LibraryThing); and Craig Williams, Roman Homosexuality (LibraryThing), useful for the Rome that Revelation is writing against. The catalogue has nothing on sex-work theology and nothing on Sheba or Ethiopia.

Fiction pairings. Three, with my confidence stated.

John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (the modern-day version on the shelf, LibraryThing). Vanity Fair is a town built on selling luxuries to travellers, and the pilgrims are punished for refusing to buy. As I remember it, Bunyan’s list of the fair’s wares runs from houses and honours to lives, bodies and souls, which looks like a deliberate echo of the Revelation 18 cargo list, but check the passage before you rely on that. It sits best with the live alternative.
Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone (LibraryThing). Set largely in Addis Ababa, so it brings in the Ethiopian Sheba tradition only obliquely; I am confident of the setting and not of anything finer. A pairing for the lead angle if you want to follow the queen home.
Seamus Heaney, Beowulf (LibraryThing). From memory, Queen Wealhtheow carries the cup through the hall as hostess and gift-giver. Set against Babylon’s gold cup that gives you two women with cups, one of hospitality and one of abomination. I am fairly but not fully sure of the scene, so check it.

Sue Monk Kidd’s The Invention of Wings and Christos Tsiolkas’s Damascus were both used in the 1 November prep, so I have left them out. Robert Alter, Annette Bourland Huizenga’s Wisdom Commentary on 1-2 Timothy and Titus, and Walter Brueggemann on Samuel have all been leaned on in recent weeks, so none leads here.

6. From My Articles

I opened the following, so I can tell you what they are, with the limit stated for each. The Drive text of long PDFs gets cut off partway through, so “read” below means the part that came back.

Lakey, review of Boer and Økland (eds), Marxist Feminist Criticism of the Bible (Sheffield Phoenix, 2008), Review of Biblical Literature, 2010. Read on Drive (whole review). It summarises ten essays, and several touch your readings. Avaren Ipsen’s “Solomon and the Two Prostitutes” is a reading of 1 Kings 3:16-28 by a community of sex workers, who see Solomon’s test as threatening violence against the mother. Jobling reads the sage-king as a figure who is “tacitly ambiguous”, and Gale Yee sets Woman Wisdom against the Other Woman in the setting of imperial and ethnic politics. It is the only place in your collection where I found sex workers’ readings of Solomon’s court, and a useful bridge to the Revelation 17 conversation.
Melanchthon and Whitaker (eds), Terror in the Bible: Rhetoric, Gender, and Violence (SBL Press, 2021). On Drive. I received the foreword, the editors’ introduction, chapters 1 to 3 and part of chapter 4. The Revelation chapter (Whitaker, on “Jezebel” in Revelation 2:20-23) was not in the text that came back, so I know it only from the editors’ summary, which says John’s “Jezebel” language threatens sexual violence and has been used to silence women. Eller’s chapter on Numbers 25 is a queer Australian reading and says the “foreign woman” trope is “prevalent throughout the Hebrew canon”, with Solomon’s wives as an example.
Roland Boer, The Sacred Economy of Ancient Israel (Westminster John Knox, 2015). On Drive. Only the introduction and first chapter came back. From the contents list, chapter 5 has sections called “Ivory, Apes, and Peacocks” and “The Curse of Tyre”, which look like 1 Kings 10:22 and the trade world around it, but I did not read that chapter.

Pointers only (not opened): Ched Myers, “The Cedar Has Fallen” (empire and ecology, and Lebanon cedar as Solomon’s temple timber); Norman Gottwald, “Social Class as an Analytic and Hermeneutical Category in Biblical Studies”; Marvin Chaney, “Whose Sour Grapes: Isaiah 5:1-7 in Light of Political Economy”; J. Denny Weaver, “The Gospel Confronts the Powers”; Seforosa Carroll, “Homemaking” (hosting the stranger); Ibrahim Abraham, “On the Doorstep of the Work” (queer hermeneutics). There is nothing in the Articles Index tagged to Revelation, apocalyptic, Sheba, Ethiopia, Yemen or sex work, which is a gap in the collection and not a failed search.

UCA documents. The UCA Core Documents folder now holds 30 files and the index lists 27. The three not yet indexed are the Assembly Standing Committee paper Issues, Challenges and Opportunities, Can the Church Listen (a 2000 article on gay and lesbian people, from NSR&J), and a new file added on 17 October, 2010-10-09 EMW Address Decolonising Mission; I have not opened that last one, but a decolonising reading of mission and wealth might sit well beside Sheba’s trade. The UCA’s Watch Your Language (revised 2022) is the document to hold for gender-inclusive handling of “mother of whores” in the pulpit.

7. Liturgical Resources

Spill the Beans has a full resource on the Sheba reading. The file is spill-Women’s Lectionary - Pentecost 24 - 1 Kings 10.1-13; Revelation 17.1-6.pdf (Worship Resources shared drive, Spill the Beans, Women’s Lectionary folder; issue 48, pages 80 to 86, written for 12 November 2023). I opened it. It retells the visit as a state occasion, raises where Sheba was (Yemen or Ethiopia) and the unrecorded questions, and treats her as Solomon’s equal. It also brings in Jesus naming her Queen of the South, a first-person “Solomon’s Response” monologue, discussion starters, and the idea of writing questions to the powerful. There is a call to worship (play Handel), prayers of dedication, adoration and confession, a sending, and children’s activities (a spice picture, a journey game, matching pairs). It also has a link to Remembrance Sunday, which is UK-specific and falls on 8 November this year (the Sunday nearest 11 November). It contains nothing on Revelation 17, and neither do the other resources I checked, so the second reading has no ready liturgical help.

Not reading-specific, and labelled as such: Words for Worship FW231112.doc (12 November 2023, the Sheba week), Nov15_20.doc (15 November 2020, Pentecost 24, Year A, the exact Proper 28 match), and FW231119.doc; the lead-ins to Reign of Christ are Nov22_20.doc and FW231126.doc. For L3, 11.16 November 2025.docx is the nearest. I saw these as listings only and did not open them.

Songs. There is no song titled “Babylon” in the Songs Log or Song List.

“Not the Powerful, Not the Privileged” (John Bell), Together in Song 288. In the Song Lists and in Songs Log 2. The log shows it sung on 13 February 2022 and 16 February 2025, both on Luke 6 readings about woes to the rich. It suits a reading about wealth and power reversed. I could not confirm a weblink, so none is given.
“For Everyone Born, a Place at the Table” (Shirley Erena Murray), Church Hymnary 4 no. 685. Hymnary.org entry (author confirmed there). It is in the Songs Log as “A Place At The Table – Rewrite” with no collection number, and the sermon logs show it sung on this very reading on 12 November 2023 and on three later occasions. It fits hospitality for the foreign visitor, though you may not want to repeat it.
Also in the books: “Woman in the Night” (TiS 661), “There Is a Line of Women” (Iona, One Is the Body 60), “God of Freedom, God of Justice” (TiS 657), and “O Day of God, Draw Near” (TiS 616).

Where the music meets the reading. There is no 15.11.26 folder in Current Worship Season yet (the folders there stop at 25.10.26, and that one is empty), so I cannot tell you what the service will sing. What I can say is that the 2023 Sheba service was built around the Handel processional, and the Spill the Beans notes suggest the same. The standing prompt: the music is a sermon input, not decoration, so if you settle on an angle early, say so in time for the centring music to carry it.

Themes emerging. Women with power and what the texts do with them: one is allowed to speak, test and leave, the other is only ever an image. Luxury and who pays for it, with the Revelation 18 cargo list as the place where Sheba’s kind of goods end up. And the oddness of the lectionary choosing a stop at verse 13 and verse 6. What you have done before pulls in the same direction (Vashti, the girl in Acts 16, Hosea’s idolatry as trusting empire), but you have not been in Revelation at all, so this is new ground.

8. Coming Up: Other Commemorations

Four entries fall between Sunday 15 and Saturday 21 November, and the first three are well matched to a Sunday about women and power.

16 November: Margaret of Scotland (faithful servant). An English princess in exile who married Malcolm III, read the Bible to him, funded a monastery and pilgrim ferries, and washed the feet of the poor. The Calendar holds her up as an example of the just ruler. Her husband and son were killed in 1093 and she died days later.
17 November: Hilda of Whitby (faithful servant). Abbess of a double monastery for men and women, she named Caedmon a poet, hosted the Synod of Whitby, advised kings and bishops, and opposed church leaders when she disagreed.
19 November: Mechtild of Magdeburg (person of prayer). A thirteenth-century Beguine and mystic who criticised church dignitaries, some of whom called for her writings to be burned, and wrote The Flowing Light.
20 November: John Williams and Thomas Baker (Christian pioneers). Williams was a missionary killed on Erromango in 1839, who also spoke to the House of Commons for Aboriginal people and helped form the Aborigines Protection Society. The text I read had only the Williams biography and nothing on Baker. This one needs a critical, anti-colonial reading, and the unindexed Decolonising Mission address in the UCA Core Documents (section 6) may be the place to start.

Just outside the window: 22 November is Reign of Christ Sunday (and C. S. Lewis in the Calendar). The UCA Core Documents Index does not link to the commemorations.

9. A Piece of Music

Nat Bartsch, “Searching For The Map” (from the album Hope; on Spotify). It is an instrumental piano piece of about two and a half minutes, so there are no lyrics to check for swearing. I have not been able to listen to it from here, so the fit is by title and by the general character of her work: it goes with the lead angle (the visiting queen) and is pitched at the whole journey of setting out, looking, and returning, not at a single scene. She is in your Spotify taste (ambient piano) and this is a different record from the one you already have saved. The more obvious choice is Handel’s sinfonia from Solomon, but it is the one you used in 2023 and is the opener suggested in section 1, so I have kept it there.

10. In the News

“Inquiry into violence against sex workers to examine stubborn stigma and legal solutions” (ABC News, 21 July 2026). It reports on an inquiry organised by Debolina Dutta at the Centre of Excellence for the Elimination of Violence Against Women at Melbourne Law School, with a panel including Marcia Neave and Fiona Patten, examining violence against sex workers in Australia and Thailand. Stigma is named as a major driver of violence, and Scarlet Alliance describes Border Force raids on migrant sex workers’ workplaces as “extremely aggressive and intimidatory”. It is the contemporary Australian conversation behind the Revelation 17 question about what happens to real women when a text makes a woman the symbol of everything wrong. Not a church story, and I would not force it into a sermon. One flag: the article says the findings will inform reform in “South Australia and Thailand”, but elsewhere only mentions Victoria’s law, so that line looks like a slip.

COP31. The talks are in Antalya, Türkiye, from 9 to 20 November 2026, with Australia’s Chris Bowen as president of negotiations. The Babylon cargo list and the question of who pays for luxury and extraction sit comfortably beside that, though the connection is yours to make.

From uniting.church: President Charissa Suli and 80 faith leaders urged the Prime Minister to back a global fossil fuel treaty ahead of COP31 (6 October); the Northern Synod met in Darwin under the theme “Kulini… Are you listening?” (6 October); and the inaugural Michelle Cook Lecture argued that Covenant with First Peoples should reshape the church (13 October).

11. Just for You

“There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle, because we do not lead single-issue lives.”

Audre Lorde, from her speech “Learning from the 60s”, given at the Malcolm X weekend at Harvard in February 1982 and reprinted in Sister Outsider (1984). The wording and source match the one page I could open that gives a citation; I could not open the printed text, so treat it as well attested rather than checked against a page.