RSTelfer

Monday Prep — Reign of Christ, 22nd November 2026

RST

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28–43 minutes

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Built four Sundays ahead, as usual. No Preacher is listed against this week in the lectionary spreadsheet, which is normal this far out. Four things to know before you read on. First, this is the last row of the Women’s Lectionary sheet. The congregation returns to the standard Revised Common Lectionary from Advent 1 on 29 November, and I have no source yet for 29 November or 6 December, so the next runs will need you to say where those readings should come from (I will not guess them). Second, the Spill the Beans pages for this Sunday (Issue 48, pages 95 to 102, on Huldah) have not come through from the PDF, the same snag the 22.11.26 liturgy document notes, so nothing from Spill appears below. Third, I could not open the NRSVue text during this run, so both readings are summarised rather than quoted, and section 2 lists the few wordings worth checking against the page. Fourth, this is also a week of verses I have not been able to hear you on: nothing in the logs shows a sermon on either text, and the one earlier mention of Huldah is a litany, not a sermon (section 3).

1. Hello, Richard

The Women’s Lectionary finishes its year with a woman who has no sermon in your logs and, as far as I can find, no Sunday of her own in any lectionary you or I could name. A scroll turns up in the temple during a repair job, the king tears his clothes, and five senior men, including the high priest, walk across Jerusalem to a prophet whose husband looks after the wardrobe. The text does not say why they chose her. It also does not say they were surprised to find her, and one scholar I read this week argues that nobody in the ancient world would have been. I think that is a lovely way to end a year of women the church forgot: the people who run the temple cannot read their own find without her.

Beside her the lectionary puts the Bride of Revelation, who in your reading is spoken about at length and says exactly one word, in the very last chapter of the Bible. If you have been keeping count, that is three women of Revelation in three weeks (the woman clothed with the sun on 8 November, Babylon on 15 November, and now the Bride), and the dress code runs through all three. I did not plan the clothing thread and cannot tell you the lectionary did either, but Huldah’s husband keeps the wardrobe, the Bride is given fine linen to wear, and fine linen turns up on Babylon’s cargo list. It is on Reign of Christ Sunday, which makes it a day when the congregation will hear the word “reigns” shouted in Greek by a heavenly crowd and then be asked what, after twelve months of the Women’s Lectionary, that word could mean.

A week of real difficulty sits underneath this one too. Huldah’s oracle is a word of coming disaster for Judah, with a private mercy for the king, and the Bride is an image that has done complicated work for women and for men alike. Both are easier to handle with a congregation that has had a year of practice reading against the grain, and yours has.

If you want an opening: your own litany from 26 November 2023, “Who Was She?”, which names Miriam, Deborah and Huldah (the log has the Huldah line as “I’d never heard of her, had you?”). It closed the Women’s Lectionary year then as well, so repeating it would make a small tradition rather than a rerun, and it needs no new material. If you would rather start somewhere else, the clothing thread works as a spoken opener: ask the room to listen for who is wearing what in the readings, and let them find the wardrobe keeper, the torn robe, and the fine linen without being told. Neither opener asks the room for an answer or a show of hands.

2. This Week’s Readings

Old Testament: 2 Kings 22:3-20, Huldah. Read on Bible Gateway (NRSVue). In the eighteenth year of his reign King Josiah sends Shaphan the secretary to the temple to have Hilkiah the high priest count the money collected for repairs and hand it to the workers. Hilkiah says he has found the book of the law in the house of the Lord. Shaphan reads it, takes it to the king and reads it aloud, and Josiah tears his clothes. He sends Hilkiah, Ahikam, Achbor, Shaphan and Asaiah to “inquire of the Lord” for him, for the people and for all Judah, because the wrath stored up against them is great. They go to Huldah the prophet, wife of Shallum, keeper of the wardrobe, who lives in Jerusalem in the Second Quarter. She tells them to say to “the man who sent you” that disaster is coming on the place and its people, in line with every word of the book, because they have abandoned the Lord and made offerings to other gods. Then she has a second message for the king of Judah: because his heart was tender, he humbled himself and wept, and tore his clothes, he will be gathered to his ancestors and buried in peace, and his eyes will not see the disaster. The delegation takes the answer back.

New Testament: Revelation 19:4-9 and 22:17, the Bride. Read on Bible Gateway (NRSVue). The twenty-four elders and the four living creatures fall down before God on the throne and say “Amen. Hallelujah!” A voice from the throne calls on all God’s servants, small and great, to praise. John then hears what sounds like a huge crowd and rushing water and thunder, shouting hallelujah because the Lord God the Almighty reigns, and calling on everyone to rejoice because the marriage of the Lamb has come and the Bride has made herself ready. She has been given bright, pure fine linen to wear, and the text says the linen is the righteous deeds of the saints. The angel tells John to write that those invited to the Lamb’s wedding supper are blessed, and that these are true words of God. The second reading then jumps to the end of the book: the Spirit and the Bride say “Come”, let everyone who hears say “Come”, and let anyone who is thirsty come and take the water of life as a gift.

A note on method: I could not open the NRSVue during this run, so these are summaries from my own reading of the text, not quotations. Please check against the page: how it renders “Second Quarter” at 2 Kings 22:14 (some translations say “New Quarter”, “Second District” or leave the Hebrew word mishneh); whether the NRSVue says the Lord “reigns” or “has begun to reign” at Revelation 19:6; and how it words the “righteous deeds” of 19:8.

Words worth knowing, in plain English.

  • “Prophet” (2 Kings 22:14). The Hebrew is nevi’ah, the ordinary feminine form of the word for prophet. It is the same word used of Miriam (Exodus 15:20), Deborah (Judges 4:4), the wife of Isaiah (Isaiah 8:3) and Noadiah (Nehemiah 6:14). Nothing in the Hebrew marks Huldah as a lesser kind of prophet, whatever the English “prophetess” sometimes sounds like.
  • “Inquire of the Lord” (22:13, 18). The Hebrew is darash, which means to seek out or consult, and is the usual word for going to a prophet or oracle to ask what God says. The king sends five men to do it, and the question they are sent to ask is about a book.
  • “Second Quarter” (22:14). As I understand it, the Hebrew mishneh means something like “second” or “repeat”, and is used for a district of Jerusalem. As I remember it, the prophet Zephaniah, who was active in Josiah’s reign, uses the same word for a district in 1:10 (“a wail from the Second Quarter”), but check that verse before you say so.
  • “Book of the law” (22:8, 11). Most scholars treat this as some form of Deuteronomy. The text itself only calls it a book, and does not say who wrote it or how long it had been lost.
  • “Hallelujah” (Revelation 19:4). This is the Hebrew hallelu-yah, “praise Yah”, written out in Greek letters. As far as I know it appears in the New Testament only in Revelation 19, in verses 1, 3, 4 and 6, so the whole New Testament’s hallelujahs are gathered into this one stretch.
  • “Reigns” (19:6). The Greek ebasileusen belongs to the same word family as king and kingdom. The tense lets translators choose between “reigns” and “has begun to reign” or “has taken power”. I have not checked which way the NRSVue goes, and it is worth a minute on Reign of Christ Sunday, because the translation decides whether the crowd is announcing a long-standing fact or a new one.
  • “Wife” and “Bride” (19:7, 22:17). At 19:7 the Greek is gyne, the ordinary word for woman or wife. The Greek for bride, nymphe, appears at 22:17 (and at 21:2 and 21:9, outside your reading, where she is both “the bride” and “the wife of the Lamb”). So the lectionary’s label “the Bride” is a title the book itself takes a few chapters to arrive at.
  • “Made herself ready” and “it was granted her” (19:7-8). The first phrase is active, and the second uses a Greek passive, edothe, “was given”. In the space of one sentence the Bride gets herself ready and receives her clothes as a gift, and the text does not sort out which of those carries the weight.
  • “Righteous deeds” (19:8). The Greek dikaiomata is plural, so it points to acts rather than to a standing. Lexicons also allow “just decisions” as a meaning. I have not read far enough to tell you whether commentators think these are the saints’ own acts or God’s verdicts in their favour, and the question is open enough to be worth leaving open.

Oddities and echoes, left as I found them.

  • Five men go to Huldah, and the text gives no reason for choosing her. Her contemporaries Jeremiah (Jeremiah 1:2) and Zephaniah (Zephaniah 1:1) were both active in Josiah’s reign, according to the opening verses of their books. The Talmud (Megillah 14b, as summarised on the Substack I read) offers explanations, including that women are gentler and, in a less kind reading, that her reply to the royal envoys shows haughtiness. A scholar I read this week, Jonathan Stökl, rejects the “women are gentler” reading and argues that an ancient reader would have found her role normal (section 4). Neither answer is in the text.
  • She tells the delegation to say to “the man who sent you”, in verse 15, and only in verse 18 does she say “the king of Judah”. It is a small change, and I am not sure it means anything.
  • The oracle has two halves that point in opposite directions: ruin for the place and peace for the king. The king is then killed in battle at Megiddo, which 2 Kings 23:29 records just after the great reforms. “Buried in peace” and a death in battle sit awkwardly together, and the commentary I read treats the oddity as evidence about when the oracle was written. Your reading stops at 22:20, so the question never arrives on Sunday unless you bring it.
  • Clothing runs through both readings. Josiah tears his robes (22:11, 19), Huldah’s husband keeps the wardrobe (22:14, and the text does not say whose wardrobe, and I did not check whether commentators agree), and the Bride receives fine linen (Revelation 19:8). Babylon, whom you met last week, is dressed in purple and scarlet (17:4), and the cargo list in 18:12 names fine linen among her goods, in the same Greek word family as the Bride’s. The Bride’s fabric is, on that page, also a commodity.
  • The Bride is talked about at length in 19:7-9 and does not speak. In 22:17 she speaks, and says one word. Huldah, by contrast, speaks at the greatest length of anyone in her reading, and is addressed by five men who do not speak again.
  • Handel, whose “Arrival of the Queen of Sheba” was the suggested opener on 15 November, wrote the Hallelujah chorus in Messiah, whose words come in part from Revelation 19:6, as I recall it (“the Lord God omnipotent reigneth” in the older translation), and the Calendar commemorates him on 25 November (section 8). Check the chorus text before you say so from the pulpit.
  • Your reading ends at 22:17, which is four verses before the end of the Bible. The last thing in the book after the invitation is a warning about adding to it and a closing “Come, Lord Jesus”, which the lectionary leaves out.

Where each sits. 2 Kings 22 and 23 are the story of Josiah’s reform, the high point of the long account of the kings of Judah, and Huldah’s scene appears again in 2 Chronicles 34:22-28 with some differences. The reading stops before 23:1-3, where Josiah reads the book to the whole people and renews the covenant, and before the Passover of 23:21-23, so the reading ends with Huldah and does not include what her word set off. Revelation 19:4-9 comes directly after the fall of Babylon (chapters 17 and 18) and the hallelujahs of 19:1-3, and before the rider on the white horse in 19:11-16. In 19:10, one verse past your reading, John falls at the angel’s feet to worship and is told to worship God. Revelation 22:17 is in the epilogue, after the vision of the new Jerusalem (21:1 to 22:5), where the city is also imaged as a bride, so that Revelation gives you two cities as women, Babylon and the new Jerusalem, and Huldah lived in a quarter of Jerusalem.

3. What Have I Done Before

There is one earlier Huldah, and it was a litany. On 26 November 2023 (Reign of Christ, and the end of the Women’s Lectionary year that time too) your liturgy included an original responsive piece, “Who Was She?”, that named Miriam, Deborah and Huldah (the log gives the Huldah line as “I’d never heard of her, had you?”), and which the log says closed the Women’s Lectionary year. The readings logged for that day were the standard Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24 and Matthew 25:31-46, so Huldah was brought in by the liturgy and not by the readings. The sermon text for that day is not preserved: the log lists 26.11.23 sermon.pages among its sources, and my title searches on Drive for Huldah and for 2 Kings 22 turned up no sermon, so it may be only on your Mac. Songs that day, from the log: All Creatures of Our God and King, Rejoice, the Lord Is King, Woman in the Night, When I Needed a Neighbour, and May the Grace of Christ Our Saviour.

Nothing else on either reading in the six Searchable Sermon Log parts I could read or in the Sermon Reference Log, apart from two near misses. Revelation 22 appears only in the RCL column of the logs, for 29 May 2022 and 1 June 2025 (both the Seventh Sunday of Easter, the same RCL reading), and in both cases the sermon was on Acts 16, so Revelation 22:17 was in the lectionary and not in the pulpit. As always, the logs index by reference and stop in August 2026, so an occasional service may have touched either text without being filed under it.

Earlier Reign of Christ Sundays, by name:

  • 20 November 2022 (Luke 23:33-43): the log describes a sermon tracing the feast to Pope Pius XI in 1925 amid rising nationalism, acknowledging the Uniting Church’s discomfort with hierarchical “king” language, and holding onto the day as a reminder of an allegiance that is different from any political party. That is the nearest thing in the record to a position on “reigns” before Sunday.
  • 21 November 2021 (John 18:33-37): no summary survives, only the songs: Praise My Soul the King of Heaven, Gifts of Grace, Limit Not the Truth of God, and My Lord, What Love Is This.
  • 24 November 2024 (“Christ, not Caesar”): the logs describe the empire reading, which the 15 November prep also noted.

Voice Profile threads that apply: “who gets remembered and who is erased” is almost a description of Huldah, and the 2023 litany shows you already know it. The anti-empire political reading is available for both readings (a king who learns his law from a woman, and a crowd that says the Lord reigns where Caesar claimed to). The feminist habit of asking what the text does with its women has two different answers this week: one woman is consulted and believed, the other is spoken about and given a single word. The habit of ending on an “I wonder” has an obvious place here, since the text leaves out why they chose her.

4. Commentary & Reflection Links

Honest headline: neither passage is in the Revised Common Lectionary on a Sunday, so the usual lectionary sites have no page keyed to this pairing. A Working Preacher commentary does exist for Josiah’s reform in the Narrative Lectionary, and I opened it, but it spends almost nothing on Huldah (below). I found nothing from By The Well, Rex Hunt or Journey with Jesus for either text, and I could not open Textweek (it blocks automated access). I found no scholarly commentary keyed to Revelation 19:4-9 together with 22:17, only study-Bible and devotional sites that came up in searches, and I have not listed those. Where my information comes from a summary tool rather than the full page, I say so.

2 Kings 22, Huldah.

  • Jonathan Stökl, “Deborah, Huldah, and Innibana: Constructions of Female Prophecy in the Ancient Near East and the Hebrew Bible”, Journal of Ancient Judaism 6(3). Read through a summary tool. Stökl rejects the idea that the delegation went to Huldah because a woman would be easier to persuade, argues that an ancient reader would have found her role normal and that her gender stands out mainly to modern readers because female prophets are rare in the Hebrew Bible, and compares her to a Mesopotamian technical diviner in a royal household more than to Miriam or Deborah. On his reading she controls her access to God and serves the king without leading him. He also argues that the oracle’s promise of a peaceful death suggests the core narrative was written before Josiah died. This is the nearest thing I found to a scholarly answer to “why her?”.
  • Melany Marildia Adonis, “The theological significance of the prophet Huldah’s prophecy: a feminist perspective on 2 Kings 22:14-20”, MTh thesis, Stellenbosch University, 2002. Read through a summary tool (abstract only). It argues that existing explanations for her presence are unconvincing, reads 2 Kings 22:1-20 closely in its Deuteronomistic setting with attention to the Hebrew, and concludes that her inclusion shows God calls women and men, and holds her up as a model for women. It notes that she was a married woman and a respected prophet in a patriarchal society.
  • Vanessa Lovelace, commentary on 2 Kings 22:1-10, [14-20]; 23:1-3, Working Preacher (Narrative Lectionary, 2015). Read through a summary tool. It reads Josiah as a model of piety and the story as a warning about straying too long from God’s commands, and mentions Huldah only briefly, as the one who confirms the judgment. It does not discuss her gender or her authority, which is itself worth knowing: a mainstream preaching commentary on this passage has almost nothing to say about the woman at the centre of it.
  • Meg Adler, “Huldah, the In-Between”, Turn It, Turn It (Substack, 12 July 2022). Read through a summary tool. It draws on the Talmud (Megillah 14b) and a rabbi’s remarks about Huldah as a Torah teacher in Jerusalem, mentions the Huldah Gates on the Temple Mount, and then offers an original midrash, a first-person imagined life of Huldah from childhood. It has a clear feminist angle. The introduction mentions reclaiming queer voices, but the Huldah text itself does not develop a queer reading.
  • University of Iowa Bible and Archaeology page on Huldah (22 April 2022; no author named). Read through a summary tool. A short note on the name, which may come from a Hebrew word for a small burrowing animal such as a weasel or mole, and on the walled-up Huldah Gates in the southern wall of the Temple Mount.
  • A pointer only, not opened beyond its catalogue page: Graham Harvey, “Huldah’s Scroll: a pagan reading” (pp. 85-100 of Lisa Isherwood, ed., Patriarchs, Prophets and Other Villains: Gender, Theology and Spirituality, Equinox, 2007). The page describes the volume as a whole, which it says draws on the hermeneutics of suspicion and on queer theory, and I cannot tell you what Harvey’s chapter itself argues.

Revelation 19 and 22, the Bride.

Queer readings, searched separately

I found no queer reading of 2 Kings 22 or of Revelation 19 and 22. I searched for queer, gender and non-binary readings of Huldah, for queer readings of the Bride of Christ and the wedding of the Lamb, and for queer theology treatments of Revelation, and found no source that takes either text on directly. Several adjacent things are worth knowing without being passed off as the real thing. In a footnote, Stökl acknowledges the scholarly debate over whether the assinnu, a masculine-only title in Mesopotamian prophetic texts that is linked to cross-dressing in ritual texts, represents a third gender. He cites several scholars on both sides and does not settle it, so it is a pointer about the ancient world around Huldah and says nothing about Huldah herself. The Harvey chapter sits in a volume that advertises queer theory (above), which makes it worth opening, though I cannot tell you whether it uses it. For the Bride, the Wikipedia article on the Bride of Christ has no queer or feminist critique, and it does note that the image has long been applied to the church as a whole and, in the mystics, to the soul: Bernard of Clairvaux, as I understand it, reads the bride as the soul joined to Christ, and the thirteenth-century Brautmystik movement is linked to Beatrice of Nazareth and Hadewijch. If the church is the Bride, then every man in the congregation is being addressed as a bride, which is my observation and not a sourced reading, and it may be an interesting thing to say aloud in a room that has thought about gender. One book turned up in search results that I have not opened and cannot describe, Reading the Bible through Queer Eyes: Good News for LGBTQ People from Genesis to Revelation, so it is a pointer only.

Two ways in

Lead angle: the woman nobody had heard of. Huldah as the person the temple authorities cannot do without, who is consulted by five men at once and speaks at length, and what it means for a congregation that has spent a year with the Women’s Lectionary to end the year on a woman whose name most people in the room will not know. It is supported by Stökl (her authority, and the question of why her), Adonis, the 2023 litany you wrote, and the Lovelace gap (a mainstream commentary that passes her by). The Bride gives a second voice to the same morning: she is the community, she is dressed by gift, and she says one word.

Live alternative: what “reign” could mean. Reign of Christ Sunday on the other side of a year of readings in which women were used, silenced, consulted and ignored, with Revelation 19:6 shouted in the middle of it. Sally Douglas’s chapter in section 6 offers a vocabulary for this (divine power as “unpower”, a power used for others and not over them), and your own 2022 sermon already took the congregation’s discomfort with king language seriously. Whether Huldah’s oracle, with its judgment and its private mercy, sits easily inside that, I have left open. The pairing of the two readings 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. The set I could recover and de-duplicate came to 1,086 distinct rows (the catalogue says 1,127, and I put the difference down to duplicate editions and to rows that my reads did not return, so treat “nothing on the shelf” as probable and not certain). On the shelf for the passages:

  • Song-Mi Suzie Park, 2 Kings (Wisdom Commentary, vol. 12), LibraryThing. This is the best fit on the shelf, since it covers 2 Kings and so should deal with Huldah directly. I have not opened it, so I cannot tell you what it says about her.
  • Ashley M. Wilcox, The Women’s Lectionary: Preaching the Women of the Bible Throughout the Year, LibraryThing. The source of the lectionary you have just spent a year in, so it will have Wilcox’s own notes on both readings for this Sunday. I have not opened it.
  • Alice Bach, Women in the Hebrew Bible (LibraryThing), the widest feminist survey on the shelf for the Old Testament side.
  • Jeffries M. Hamilton, Social Justice and Deuteronomy: The Case of Deuteronomy 15 (LibraryThing), for the book that is generally taken to be what was found in the temple, though this is a dissertation on one chapter and not on Josiah.
  • Walter Brueggemann, Texts That Linger, Words That Explode: Listening to Prophetic Voices (LibraryThing), and D. Premnath, Eighth Century Prophets: A Social Analysis (LibraryThing), for prophecy in general; the second is for the century before Josiah, so it is the wrong century, though it is the nearest social analysis of prophets on the shelf.
  • Bruce J. Malina, On the Genre and Message of Revelation (LibraryThing), still the only Revelation-specific title in the catalogue, and the ten-volume New Interpreter’s Bible Commentary set (LibraryThing, catalogued under Joseph Blenkinsopp), which should cover both books but whose authors for these sections I cannot tell from the catalogue.

Queer and gender-studies titles, searched separately. None is about these passages. The nearest are Steff Fenton, Gender Expansive Faith: How Trans Lives Are Illuminating the Divine (2025, LibraryThing), which is new on the shelf and may help with the language of God for Reign of Christ Sunday; Mx Chris Paige, OtherWise Christian: A Guidebook for Transgender Liberation (LibraryThing); and Ruth Hunt (ed.), The Book of Queer Prophets: 24 Writers on Sexuality and Religion (LibraryThing), whose title borrows “prophets” and which I would not expect to touch Huldah, though I cannot tell from the catalogue. The catalogue has nothing on Huldah or Josiah by name and nothing on the Bride beyond Malina.

Fiction and devotional pairings. Three, with my confidence stated.

  • Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose (LibraryThing). From my memory of the book, a lost and then rediscovered text in a monastery library, and the men in charge of the library who fear what the text will do. It pairs with the found scroll and with a community that has to be told by someone else what it holds. I am confident of the setting and the plot outline and not of finer detail.
  • Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (LibraryThing), where, as I remember it, she imagines a sister for Shakespeare whose gifts go unrecorded. It is a pairing for the lead angle, on who is remembered and who is not. Check it against the book.
  • Julian of Norwich, Writings of Julian of Norwich (Upper Room Spiritual Classics, LibraryThing; the catalogue marks it “Fiction/Lit”, but it is devotional writing). A woman sought out for her spiritual word by people with more official standing than she had. As I remember it, Margery Kempe travelled to consult her in Norwich, but I have not checked the date or the account.

I have left out Sue Monk Kidd and Christos Tsiolkas (1 November), Bunyan, Verghese and Heaney (15 November), and the titles used in the 8 November prep. Robert Alter and Walter Brueggemann have been leaned on a good deal recently, so neither leads here.

6. From My Articles

I opened the three below and can say what they are. Each came back whole, except where I say otherwise.

  • Sally Douglas, “Praying for Others?”, chapter 8 of Rewilding Prayer: God Beyond Gender, Faith Beyond Formulas (Cascade Books, 2025). Read on Drive (whole chapter, a University of Divinity course extract). Its argument bears on Reign of Christ Sunday more than on either reading. Douglas says divine power, as Jesus embodies it, is power used for others and not over others, and she coins “unpower” for it. She reads the mustard seed, the seed growing unseen and the woman searching for the lost coin as pictures of how the reign of God works. She notes that Jesus imagines himself as a mother hen gathering Jerusalem (Matthew 23:37), and that people in the Gospels have the power to refuse. The chapter ends with sample intercessions, including one based on Mary’s song, which could be borrowed with credit.
  • Ched Myers, “Easter Faith and Empire: Recovering the Prophetic Tradition on the Emmaus Road”. Read on Drive (whole essay). The index files this under Joan Chittister’s name, but the file opens with the last page of a different piece by Chittister and the essay itself is by Myers, so the index entry may need a correction. Myers treats the prophets as the key to reading scripture, and reads Luke 24 as a story of disciples under empire who have to be taught to reread everything through them. He notes that the women’s report of the empty tomb is dismissed as women’s rumours, and I read an echo there with Huldah: the word of women is set aside in one story and sought out in the other. That echo is mine, not Myers’s.
  • Strandjord, lectionary commentary on Matthew 25:1-13 (Ten Bridesmaids), The Clergy Journal, 2008. Read on Drive (whole piece). It reads the wedding banquet as the kingdom of heaven and the bridegroom as the coming Lord, and the church as the waiting bridesmaids, which is a different casting from Revelation’s, where the church is the Bride. It carries a call to worship, a confession and a children’s time; I have not weighed whether any of it suits a Reign of Christ service.

Pointers only (not opened): Edith Ashley, “Women in Luke’s Gospel”; Roland Boer, “Women First: On the Legacy of ‘Primitive Communism’”; “When Women Speak: Domestic Violence in Australian Churches” (about women’s voices in church, not about Huldah, and one for a content note if you use it); and Ibrahim Abraham, “On the Doorstep of the Work” on queer hermeneutics, which is the closest thing in the collection to a method for the queer-reading gap above. Nothing in the Articles Index is tagged to Huldah, Josiah, Deuteronomy, Revelation or the Bride, which is a gap in the collection and not a failed search. The Mac-only list (58 rows) is mostly Yolngu, Arnhem Land and Uniting Church history material, and nothing in it touches these readings.

UCA documents. The UCA Core Documents folder has nothing newer than the one I noted on 17 October, 2010-10-09 EMW Address Decolonising Mission, which I have still not opened. The one to hold for this Sunday is Watch Your Language (revised 2022), for the language of “king”, “reign” and “Bride” for God and the church.

7. Liturgical Resources

The 22.11.26 liturgy in Current Worship Season is a skeleton. It names Sue as worship leader and you as preacher, with the Bible reader and musicians still to be confirmed. The candle words are in, and so is a blessing before the readings, credited to Gretta Vosper. The call to worship, the Acknowledgement of Country, the opening prayer, the prayer of the day, the centring meditation, the prayers and the commissioning all say “to come”, and no songs are chosen. There is no Bibliography document for 22.11.26 yet.

Spill the Beans. Issue 48, pages 95 to 102, is the Huldah resource, and your note in the liturgy says those pages did not come through. I opened the combined Issue 48 file (Pentecost 14 to Reign of Christ, Issue 48 HQ) and searched its text for Huldah, Josiah, 2 Kings 22 and Revelation 19: nothing, so the pages are probably images with no text layer. There is no per-reading Spill file for this Sunday, and the Spill the Beans listing has no row for 2 Kings 22 or Revelation 19, so the only copy is those pages in the combined PDF, to be read by eye. For Revelation 19:4-9 and 22:17 I found no ready liturgical help.

Not reading-specific, and labelled as such: Words for Worship has Reign of Christ files for several years. Nov22_20.doc is 22 November 2020, the same Sunday on the calendar and the same RCL year as this one, so it is the closest match. The others are FW231126.doc (26 November 2023), FW221120.doc, FW191124.doc and 2021 11 21.doc. I saw these as listings only and did not open them, and none is a Huldah resource. The L3 listing stops at 16 November 2025, so there is no L3 file for a Reign of Christ Sunday.

Songs. I picked these from the titles and first lines in the Song List and Songs Log, and I have not read the words or pulled the sung dates, so check each before using it.

  • “Spirit, Lead Us” (first line “Fire of prophet”), ATAR 643 and Walk as One 42. The first line is the reason I flagged it, since this is a week for prophets, and I cannot tell you more than that.
  • “There Is a Line of Women” (Iona, One Is the Body 60), a natural fit for the year’s end. It was also suggested on 15 November, so you may want only one of the two weeks.
  • “Woman in the Night” (TiS 661), which was sung on this same Sunday in 2023.
  • “Women Waiting” (Song List only, no hymnal reference given) and “Dreams and Visions” (ATE 249), both on the lists and worth a look for the prophet side.
  • “Halle Halle Halle” (ATOK 319), for the hallelujahs of Revelation 19, and “Tell Out My Soul” (TiS 161), a setting of Mary’s song, which is the other text in the Women’s Lectionary year that talks about thrones.
  • Handel’s “Hallelujah” chorus from Messiah as a recording or a sung item for Revelation 19:6, with the check on the text noted in section 2.

Where the music meets the reading. There are no songs in the 22.11.26 liturgy yet, so I cannot say how the service will sing. The standing prompt: the music is a sermon input and not decoration, so if you settle on an angle early, say so in time for the centring music and the closing hymn to carry it.

Themes emerging. A woman the temple cannot do without, and a text that does not explain why. Judgment and mercy in a single oracle, with a promised peace that the next chapter does not keep. A Bride who is spoken about and then says one word, and what “reign” could mean after a year of women who were used, silenced or sought out. The end of the Women’s Lectionary year and the question of what comes next. What you have done before pulls in the same direction (Vashti, the girl in Acts 16, Hosea’s idolatry as trusting empire, the 2023 litany), though you have not preached either text, so far as the logs show.

8. Coming Up: Other Commemorations

Four entries fall between Sunday 22 and Saturday 28 November.

  • 22 November: C. S. Lewis (Christian thinker and apologist). Born in Belfast in 1898, he left the faith as a young man and returned to it in 1931 after a long conversation with Tolkien and Hugo Dyson, and he wrote of it in Surprised by Joy. He wrote Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters and the Narnia books, and A Grief Observed after the death of his wife, Joy Davidman Gresham. It falls on Reign of Christ Sunday itself.
  • 24 November: John Knox (reformer of the Church). The Calendar entry notes that his first sermon at St Andrews in 1547 called the Church of Rome “the whore of Babylon”, an echo of last week’s Revelation 17 that this week needs to have an answer for. It also records his preaching on Haggai before the Reformation Parliament of 1560. Not in the Calendar entry I read, and from my own knowledge: Knox also wrote The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558), against rule by women, which belongs beside any week on Huldah and the Bride. Check the date and title before you use it.
  • 25 November: Isaac Watts, G. F. Handel and J. S. Bach (faithful servants). I read the Calendar text for Watts and Bach but have not pulled specific figures from it here. Handel is the composer of the Hallelujah chorus (section 2), and was also the opener for the Sheba prep, which gives the same composer in consecutive weeks.
  • 26 November: Sojourner Truth (renewer of society). The Calendar text I read gives her heading and no biography, because the extract goes straight on to 29 November, so I have nothing from the Calendar to report. From my own knowledge, she was an abolitionist and a speaker for women’s rights who preached, and who was born Isabella and took the name Sojourner Truth in 1843. Check that before you use it.

Just outside the window: 29 November is Advent 1 (and Dorothy Day in the Calendar), and the first Sunday of the standard lectionary again.

9. A Piece of Music

Hildegard of Bingen, “O viridissima virga” (Sequentia, with Barbara Thornton, from the album Hildegard von Bingen: Canticles of Ecstasy; on Spotify). It is a medieval chant of about four minutes sung in Latin, so there are no English lyrics to check, and I have not been able to listen to it from here. I chose it for the lead angle: Hildegard was a woman consulted for her prophetic word by men with institutional power, and I understand the Church approved her visions at a synod in the late 1140s, though I have not checked the details. Spotify lists several other recordings of the same chant, and the Sequentia one is a choice by length and by women’s voices and not by any judgment of the recording. I would not play it over the reading itself, only before or after, and the Latin text is worth checking in translation before you introduce it.

10. In the News

I could not find an ABC News item to link this week. The ABC page I tried needed a permission this unattended run could not get, and a general search returned nothing suitable about women’s religious authority or the church. I would rather leave that slot empty than fill it with something I have not read.

From uniting.church (I opened each of these): President Charissa Suli’s pastoral message following the attack on Dr Helen Haines MP (23 October), which includes a prayer for Dr Haines and will sit alongside the prayer in your 25 October liturgy; “From where will liturgical renewal come?” (23 October), Matthew Julius, the Liturgical Renewal Project Lead, after presenting at the Australian Academy of Liturgy conference, arguing that renewal should draw on ecumenism, the shared pattern of Christian life and catholicity, and that it depends on the Spirit and on listening to First Peoples and welcoming marginalised groups, which is useful reading for a service that ends one lectionary and begins another; and “Eight Years On: Marking the National Apology” (16 October, updated 20 October), with a statement from the President and a downloadable 2026 Liturgy of Redress; it concerns child sexual abuse, so treat it as a content note, and the page lists no phone numbers and links instead to Seeking Redress, the National Safe Church Unit and the National Redress Scheme (which it says closes on 30 June 2027).

COP31. The talks in Antalya were scheduled for 9 to 20 November, so by the 22nd they should have concluded. I have not checked the outcome, which belongs in the 22 November refresh once there is something to read.

11. Just for You

“Well-behaved women seldom make history; against Antinomians and witches, these pious matrons have had little chance at all.”

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “Vertuous Women Found: New England Ministerial Literature, 1668-1735”, American Quarterly 28(1), Spring 1976, p. 20. The wording and citation come from a quotation-history page (Quote Investigator) that gives the sentence as above and reports Ulrich saying in 2007 that the first half spread onto T-shirts and mugs, often without attribution and sometimes credited to others. The original sentence is about pious women left out of the historical record. I have not seen the printed article, so treat it as well attested and not checked against a page.

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