"There Was a Girl..." (August 2, 2026 Sermon)

There Was a Girl

Rev. Dr. Stephen M. Fearing·August 2, 2026·Guilford Park Presbyterian Church

10th Sunday after Pentecost (Year A)

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.

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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.

"The Medium of Endor" (August 3, 2025 Sermon)

Text: 1 Samuel 28:3-25

Have you ever experienced a time in your life when you felt like nothing you do is right? You put in effort. You try to make wise decisions. You do your best to do the right thing, but with no success. No matter how hard you try, everything seems to go wrong. You feel helpless. You feel despondent. You feel despair. You might even feel that God has forsaken you and that the whole world has turned against you. Mister Rogers expressed this feeling in his famous song “What do you do with the mad that you feel?”

What do you do with the mad that you feel?
When you feel so mad you could bite?
When the whole wide world seems oh, so wrong..
and nothing you do seems very right?

King Saul finds himself at his lowest point. Everything he attempts fails, while everyone praises David for his victory over Goliath. As David’s star is rising, Saul’s is falling. As Saul slips further into madness and paranoia, he loses confidence as he prepares for an upcoming battle with the Philistines. He anxiously seeks wisdom to break his losing streak. Saul is struggling with a familiar feeling to many of us: missing someone who once offered valuable advice. That person was Samuel. Although their relationship was imperfect, Saul views Samuel as a divine messenger—a source of guidance for his reign and for the Israelites he led. Now that Samuel has died, Saul needs his counsel more than ever.

And so, Saul decides to seek the advice of a woman known for her ability to lift the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead. Some people would call these women witches—a term used throughout history to unfairly marginalize women we do not understand or choose not to understand. For many of us, Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible was required reading in high school literature classes. It serves as a reminder of the damage caused when communities fall into mass hysteria, paranoia, and the abuse of power, irrationally targeting scapegoats. King Saul, however, chooses to seek out this woman, this ghost-master, as the Hebrew text literally reads, in order to summon Samuel from the grave to ask for his advice for the upcoming battle.

There was only one problem: King Saul had banned necromancy from the land because he feared such power would lead the Israelites to idolatry. But Saul doesn’t care. He knows he’s a hypocrite because he wears a disguise to hide his identity. He reaches out for the wisdom and power of a woman whose kind he has forbidden. For Saul is willing to break the very law he himself enacted if it gives him a solution to his political problems.

And so, he finds the woman, whose name is omitted in the text. To be clear, women like her were not possessed by ghosts; rather, they had dominion over them. No mention of demons or Satan appears anywhere in the text. There is nothing, at least on the surface, that is “evil” or “demonic” about her work. The text simply states that she had the ability to lift the veil between the realm of the living and the dead.

The woman is rightly suspicious when this hooded stranger enters her home and asks for her services; she knows they’ve been outlawed, and this could very well be a trap. But Saul, still hidden by his disguise, convinces her to proceed anyway, and she raises Samuel from his heavenly slumber. Samuel is grumpy (you’d be too if you were suddenly snatched from whatever bliss you were enjoying in the afterlife!). Samuel doesn’t rebuke the woman; instead, he rebukes Saul and chastises him for setting up this whole affair.  He does, however, share with Saul God’s verdict, and it isn’t good.  Saul and his sons will die in battle the very next day.  God has turned God’s face from Saul and his house, and there’s no going back.  It’s time for David to ascend to the throne, and Saul isn't going to be given the benefit of a restful retirement.

At this point in the story, two things happen simultaneously. First, the woman clearly realizes that she has been deceived; the very politician who banned her means of earning a living is now in her house, and she has done something that could easily get her stoned in the streets. Second, at that moment, Saul collapses on the floor in despair, just as any of us would likely do if we learned that God had forsaken us and that the next day’s sunrise would be our last.

I’m compelled by what the woman didn’t do in this moment.  She doesn’t express anger or fear, both of which would be understandable in her situation.  Anger that she had been tricked into doing something that was verboten and fear that that deception might cost her her life.  She also doesn’t decide to take advantage of Saul in his moment of vulnerability.  She could have run off to the tabloids and sold the story for a handsome sum of money.  She could have otherwise tried to manipulate the situation to her advantage with the knowledge that Saul was a condemned man who wouldn’t be a threat to her in a short 24 hours.

But she does none of this. Instead, the text makes it clear: she shows Saul hospitality. Before her was a grieving man, coming to terms with the fact that he and his sons would die the next day. She took pity on him and prepared his last supper. She offered her bed for him to rest. She killed the fatted calf. She baked bread for him. And she provided this gracious meal to Saul and his men on what would be their last day in the land of the living. The next day, Samuel’s prophecy comes true. Saul’s sons die in the battle against the Philistines, and he himself is wounded and chooses to die by his own sword rather than be taken captive. As for the woman who gave him his last meal, we never hear from her again.

I wonder if we might look at this woman as someone more than “just a witch” (as she has long been portrayed in most Biblical commentaries.  Just as my sermon on Rahab a few weeks ago wasn’t an endorsement of prostitution, neither is this sermon an endorsement of necromancy, witchcraft, or wizardry.  But I wonder what we might learn from this woman who showed hospitality to the very person who outlawed her very existence.

I had a Zoom meeting a few days ago with a colleague who is a Disciples of Christ minister in a Los Angeles suburb. Her name is Pastor Tanya Lopez, and about half of her congregation are immigrants. About a month and a half ago, she was working in her church office when her husband, who also works at the church, alerted her that a man was being taken into custody in their church parking lot. She rushed outside the building to find a group of unmarked vehicles and unidentified men in street clothes with generic vests that said “police.” Later that day, she called the LAPD, and they confirmed that the men were not Los Angeles police officers. They had no badge numbers and refused to identify themselves or their agency. Each was masked, so she couldn’t see their faces. They didn’t show a warrant or respect that this was private church property, such as the very property you and I occupy right now.

The man who was being abducted looked visibly upset, and she said to him in Spanish, “What is your name? Tell me your date of birth. Who can I call? Who do you need me to call?” One of the masked men pointed his weapon at Pastor Lopez, and she simply said, “I have the right to be here. I do not have to listen to you. This is the property of the church - Downey Memorial Christian Church - and we are not okay with you being on our property.” One of the men just looked at her and cavalierly said, “The whole country is our property.” Pastor Lopez then said to the man she assumed was an immigrant, as the masked men put him in a vehicle, “Don’t sign anything. Don’t tell them anything. Don’t sign anything.” And then they disappeared with the terrified man.

After Pastor Lopez recalled her harrowing experience with me, I thanked her for advocating for this man. She and I will never know the fate of the man who was disappeared that day. But I do know this: when this man was in such a vulnerable position with no one else around to advocate for him and his rights, the church showed up. For Jesus says, as we have done to the least of these, so too have we done unto him. Pastor Lopez advocated for this man who, like many others, has been treated so cruelly and callously because they are immigrants.

I couldn’t get this story out of my head as I wrote the words of this sermon. Because in the unnamed woman in today’s scripture who, though criminalized and considered persona non grata, showed kindness to the very man who marginalized her, I see the man whose name we’ll never know who was abducted at a place that’s supposed to be a sanctuary for everyone. You see, the Medium at Endor, by showing hospitality to King Saul, joins a long list of people in the Bible who exemplify God’s grace from the margins. The Good Samaritan, who showed mercy unlike the priest and the Levite. The Woman at the Well in John’s Gospel, who was the first person Jesus chose to reveal himself to, and who went and told all she knew of his wonders. Rahab, the woman who gave refuge to the Israelite spies in the city of Jericho and saved her family. Zacchaeus, the despised tax collector who repented of his extortion practices and gave back the money he took multiple times over.

You see, when we marginalize another human being—whether that person is a “witch,” a tax collector, a woman at a well, a prostitute, a Samaritan, or an immigrant—we diminish the image of God. And that’s not the work we’re called to do! You and I are stewards of the image of God in our neighbor. You and I are midwives of the image of God in our neighbor. We must honor and protect the image of God in everyone we meet, regardless of their cultural status or stigma. In today’s story, the woman honored the image of God in her enemy, and that makes her a heroine in my eyes. So may we, like her, honor the image of God in all who cross our path.

In the name of God the Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer, may all of us, made in God’s image, say: Amen.