"There Was a Girl..." (August 2, 2026 Sermon)
/There Was a Girl
2 Kings 5:1-4, 9-14
Naaman, commander of the army of the king of Aram, was a great man and in high favor with his master because by him the Lord had given victory to Aram. The man, though a mighty warrior, suffered from a skin disease. Now the Arameans on one of their raids had taken a young girl captive from the land of Israel, and she served Naaman’s wife. She said to her mistress, “If only my lord were with the prophet who is in Samaria! He would cure him of his skin disease.” So Naaman went in and told his lord just what the girl from the land of Israel had said.
So Naaman came with his horses and chariots and halted at the entrance of Elisha’s house. Elisha sent a messenger to him, saying, “Go, wash in the Jordan seven times, and your flesh shall be restored, and you shall be clean.” But Naaman became angry and went away, saying, “I thought that for me he would surely come out and stand and call on the name of the Lord his God and would wave his hand over the spot and cure the skin disease! Are not Abana and Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel? Could I not wash in them and be clean?” He turned and went away in a rage. But his servants approached and said to him, “Father, if the prophet had commanded you to do something difficult, would you not have done it? How much more, when all he said to you was, ‘Wash, and be clean’?” So he went down and immersed himself seven times in the Jordan, according to the word of the man of God; his flesh was restored like the flesh of a young boy, and he was clean.
Our passage today begins with a name; a name of a man who was healed of his leprosy by dipping himself in the Jordan seven times. His name, in Hebrew, meant “pleasant,” “delightful,” or “gracious.” Those monikers stand in stark contrast to the brutality with which he and his band of raiders pillaged and plundered the countryside and those who inhabited the lands of Israel, the northern kingdom that had split off from the southern kingdom of Judah. He was a commander in the army of the Arameans, a Semitic people whose nation bordered Israel to the east and the north. The text tells us that he was a “mighty warrior,” a “great man,” who was held in “high favor.” He had the credentials. He had the glory. He had the victories.
An Unnamed Girl
But womanist scholar Dr. Wilda Gafney, in a sermon I watched last week, challenges the use of the term “victory.” Because “victory” is the language of the conquerer, and never the conquered. What the conquerer calls “victory,” she preaches, the conquered call “slaughter.” And if we peel back the layers of this text that would have us give our undivided attention to him, we might adjust our gaze upon an unnamed character who was the collateral damage of his conquests. You and I aren’t privy to her name, as the text doesn’t deem her significant enough to be given such dignity. She was a slave-girl who had been abducted from her home in Israel, taken from her family, and forced to a life of servitude to the wife of the man with the “pleasant” and “gracious” name that begins this story.
I wonder if you and I could use our sanctified imagination to step into her shoes for a moment. Because there have been plenty of sermons that focus on the man she was forced to call “Master.” There are plenty of sermons, such as the one I gave last week, that focus on Elisha, whose healing authority the man sought to rid him of his disease. But there are precious few sermons by comparison that focus on the girl whose suggestion of Elisha’s prophetic power led the man to seek his counsel in the first place.
Rev. Dr. Jaqui Lewis once said, “There is always a girl.” Dr. Gafney says the following: “And while the scriptures speak most often to men, in the voices of men, there are still all of these girls. All of these girls who will not go away. They may be edited out of lectionary readings, cut out of the genealogies of the children to whom they give birth, erased from the stories that take place in their own homes, deprived of the dignity of names, silenced while text after text legislates their body and who has access to it…On the page, between the lines, behind the story; there is always a girl.”
The Girl Speaks
And in today’s story, there is a girl, a caged bird who sings of a God whose power is channeled through a prophet named Elisha. The girl wisely placed herself within earshot of her master’s complaining. A subtle but subversive observation in this text is that this man, lauded as a fierce and powerful soldier, a warrior of great strength and cunning, is helpless to help himself! Instead, he is so desperate to rid himself of this scandalous condition that he is forced to rely on the wisdom of the very girl he has claimed as property for his wife’s every need.
And this girl is given one line and one line only in this story: “If only my lord were with the prophet who is in Samaria! He would cure him of his skin disease.” It’s almost casual in tone: “if only my lord were with the prophet…”. It’s the kind of line you feed to someone who you know will want to know more once you tease them with hope. She has something, a knowledge, a trust in the God whose power the prophet proclaims, that she knows is something that her master can’t win in battle or negotiate in the king’s court. She knows of where he can find relief, and she makes herself useful.
And making oneself useful is not simply something to be commended in this text; it is instead something that needs to be named as a survival tactic by a little girl whose body didn’t belong to herself. Making oneself useful is a technique of subversive power wielded by the oppressed to reclaim agency in an agency-denying power dynamic. It was the same tactic employed by Esther, as she used her status in the king’s court to manipulate her husband, Ahasuerus, and his Gestapo advisor, Mordecai. It’s the same playbook as Rahab, the woman in Jericho who cleverly used her position to negotiate safety for her household before the city’s collapse. It’s the same game plan as Shiprah and Puah, the Hebrew midwives in the Book of Exodus who deny Pharaoh his murderous campaign to make Egypt great again by slaughtering all those Hebrew boys.
And so, we may not know the name of the little girl in today’s passage, but she’s in good company! Esther, Rahab, Shiprah, and Puah all knew the complexities of being a woman in a man’s world, and they knew a thing or two about how to exploit the powers of patriarchy to provide safety and security for the vulnerable around them. And their “good trouble” lives on in this unnamed girl who navigates her enslavement to express trust in the power of her God over and above the power of her enslavers.
As the father of two young girls, I want to lift up these stories so that they, and other girls like them, may come to know that their stories matter. That their agency matters. That their bodies matter. That their safety matters. That their dignity matters. The name of the girl in this story may be lost to history, but it is not lost to the God whose authority parted the very river whose waters cleansed the man of his leprosy. And lest we think that focusing on such marginalized characters in the Biblical narrative is a waste of time, consider this: the girls among us are listening. There are girls in our churches who are listening to how the men around them speak of them. There are girls in our world who wonder if their worth is nothing more than whatever makes the men around them happy or satiated or comfortable. There are girls in our homes, in our schools, in our workplaces, who are listening to how their fathers speak of them, how their pastors speak of them, how their President speaks of them, who deserve to know that they are more than simply a plot device meant to steer our attention to the men who get the privilege of being the center of attention.
What the Margins Reveal
Because if we do that work of lifting back the layers of the text to see where God is working in the margins, other revelations are sure to follow. For example, the girl who told her enslaver where to find help is not alone in this text — just verses later, it's his own servants (who may very well have been girls or women themselves) doing the same thing, in the same posture, and getting the same result: he listens to someone he outranks, and it saves him.
He arrives at Elisha’s house; he is offended that the prophet doesn’t even meet him, but instead sends a message that he is to dip himself seven times in the waters of the Jordan. His ego is bruised. He wanted the fanfare, the pomp and circumstance befitting a man of his stature, but instead he gets a sticky note with instructions to jump into muddy water. Yet it is his servants who compel him to set aside his ego and do what the prophet said. Once again, the man who is ostensibly all-powerful is dependent on the wisdom of those around him whom he is subjugating.
So he goes down to a muddy, unremarkable river he'd already insulted as inferior to the waters back home. Six times, nothing happens. By the seventh dip, soaked and humiliated in front of the very servants who talked him into this, I imagine something in him has already given way — because this healing was never going to happen to him from a distance. It only happens because a commander, a “great” man, a man in high favor, is willing to keep lowering himself into the water on the word of people he outranks. And perhaps that’s the true miracle of the story. Not the cleansing itself, but what it cost him to get there: he had to let a slave girl and his own servants be right and him be wrong, in front of everyone.
And so, let us give thanks for the unnamed women and girls in today’s text. Let us give thanks to the God whose authority and power were channeled not through a mighty warrior like the man whose name opens today’s text, but through those whose value he recognized only insofar as they served him. And let us give thanks to Jesus Christ, whose Spirit draws our attention to the margins of scripture, where we are far more likely to find God than in the centers of power we erect for ourselves.
In the name of God the Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer, may all of us, God’s children, say: Amen.