"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.