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

Preaching: Rev. Dr. Stephen M. Fearing

Text: 2 Kings 5:1-4, 9-14

A powerful commander shows up in the Bible with everything that signals success: reputation, victories, and royal favor. Then the story quietly reveals his real dependence, not on status or strength, but on the wisdom of someone the text will not even dignify with a name. We take on 2 Kings 5 and practice a different way of reading Scripture, one that shifts the spotlight from Naaman and Elisha to the unnamed enslaved girl taken from Israel and forced into service in Naaman’s household.

We lean on womanist theology to question the story’s moral framing, especially the word “victory.” If “victory” is what the conqueror celebrates, what does the conquered call it when their homes are raided and their children are taken? From there, we explore the girl’s single line of dialogue as far more than a plot device. We name “making yourself useful” as a survival tactic inside an agency denying system, and we connect her to other women in the Bible who navigate patriarchy with holy cunning and courage, from Esther to Rahab to the midwives Shiprah and Puah.

Then we circle back to Naaman’s bruised ego at Elisha’s door. No fanfare, no performance, just a message to wash in the Jordan seven times. The turning point comes when servants he outranks persuade him to listen, lower himself, and keep going. The cleansing matters, but we also ask what it costs the powerful to be wrong in public, and what it might heal in us when we finally learn to listen to voices we have been trained to ignore. If this reframing helps you see Scripture, power, and dignity in a new way, subscribe, share with a friend, and leave a review so more listeners can find the show.

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Transcript

Scripture Reading On Naaman’s Healing

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Our lesson today comes from the second book of Kings, chapter five, verses one through four and nine through fourteen, as shown in your bulletin. 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 great victory to Aram. The man, though a mighty warrior, suffered from a skin disease. Now the Aramaeans, 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 the 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 Elijah'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 Abanah and Farperh the rivers of Damascus better than 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 has 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. Holy wisdom, holy word. Thanks be to God.

Prayer And A Different Sermon Lens

SPEAKER_01 2:46

Alright, folks, let us pray. The Lord, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable and pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen. Alright,

Shifting Focus To The Unnamed Girl

SPEAKER_01 3:05

folks, it's gonna be a little bit of a different sermon today. I'm gonna invite us all to a spiritual practice of attuning our attention to a character in this text that if you don't pay too close attention, which I know I've been guilty of time to time, of completely ignoring. So I'm hoping today that we might direct our attention to a place that may not feel intuitive to us. This passage today that Tara read begins with a name. It's a name of a man who, as you heard in the story, was healed of his leprosy by dipping himself in the Jordan River seven times, the same place we were last week when Elisha departed the waters. Now, this man's name in Hebrew meant pleasant or delightful or gracious. Now those monikers, I think, 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, which was the northern kingdom that it split off from the southern kingdom of Judah. This man was a commander in the army of the Arameans, which they were a Semitic people different from the Israelites, whose nation bordered Israel to the east and to the north. Now, today's text introduces him by calling him a mighty warrior, a great man who is held in high favor. According to the text, he had the credentials, he had the glory, and he had the victories. But womanist scholar Dr. Wilda Gaffney, in a sermon I stumbled upon last week, challenges the use of the term victory. Because she says that victory is the language of the conqueror and never the conquered. She says that what the conqueror often calls victory, she preaches the conquerors, the conquered call slaughter.

When “Victory” Hides Human Cost

SPEAKER_01 5:15

And if we peel back the layers of this text that would have us give our undivided attention to this man, we might adjust our gaze on an unnamed character who was the collateral damage of his victories. 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 today's story. And so I wonder if you and I, for a moment, could use our sanctified imagination to step into her shoes just for a moment. Because there have been plenty of sermons that focus on the man that she was forced to call master. There are plenty of sermons on the other major character in this story, Elisha. We spent an entire sermon with him last week. 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. Reverend Dr. Jackie Lewis once said of texts like these, there is always a girl. Dr. Gaffney said the following in the sermon that I mentioned. She said, 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. And in today's story, there is a girl, a caged bird, who sings of a god whose power is channeled through a prophet we met last week called Elisha. Now 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 as any of us would be to rid himself of this scandalous condition that he is forced to rely upon 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 Elisha, who is in Samaria, he would cure him of his skin disease. That's the only line that she says. It's almost casual in tone. If only my Lord were with the prophet, it's the kind of line that I think you would feed to someone who you know will want to know more once you tease them with hope. She has something that he needs. She has a knowledge. She has a trust in the God whose power the prophet proclaims that she knows, ironically, is something that her master can't win in battle or negotiate using his privilege on the king's court. She knows where he can find relief, and she decides to make herself useful.

Usefulness As A Survival Strategy

SPEAKER_01 9:24

And making oneself useful is not simply something to be commended in this text. I think that it is instead something that needs to be named as a survival tactic by a little girl whose body did not belong to herself. You see, making oneself useful is a technique of subversive power that is wielded by the oppressed to reclaim agency in an agency-denying power dynamic. It was the same tactic employed by Queen Esther as she used her status in the king's court to manipulate her husband Ahasuaris and his Gestapo advisor Mordecai. It's the same playbook back in the book of Joshua as Rahab, the woman in Jericho, who cleverly used her position to negotiate safety for her household before the city's collapse. And it's the same energy that Shiprah and Pua gave off, those Hebrew midwives in the book of Exodus who denied Pharaoh his murderous campaign to make Egypt great again by slaughtering all of those boys and turning the Hebrews into a scapegoat. And so while we may not know the name of this little girl in today's passage, she's in good company. Esther and Rahab and Shiprah and Pua, they 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 among 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. Now

The Girls Among Us Are Listening

SPEAKER_01 11:20

you all know that I am the father of two girls. So I want to lift up these stories so that they and other girls like them may come to know that their stories matter, even and especially in stories like today where they may only get one fleeting part. I want them to know that their agency matters, that their bodies matter, that their safety and that their dignity matters. The girl in this story, well, her name may be lost to history, but it's not lost to the God whose authority parted the very river whose waters cleansed this man of his leprosy. Unless we think that focusing on such marginalized characters in the biblical narrative is a waste of time, I invite all of us, this reminder, and it's a reminder that I give to myself, that the girls among us are listening. The girls in our churches 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. Because I think that if we do that work, 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.

Bruised Ego And Muddy Obedience

SPEAKER_01 13:10

For example, the girl who told her in slavery where to find help is not alone in this text. If we read carefully just a few 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, is forced to listen, I should say, to people he outranks, and they save him. He arrives at Elisha's house. He's offended that the prophet doesn't even come out to meet him, but instead sends a message that he is to dip himself seven times in the muddy waters of the Jordan River. You can hear it in the text. His ego is bruised. He wants that fanfare, he wants the pop and circumstance, he wants the healing preacher to take off his jacket and do that whole thing. But he doesn't get it. Instead, he gets a sticky note with instructions to jump into some muddy water. Yet he doesn't want to do it, but it's his servants, again, likely girls themselves, who compel him to set aside his ego for just a moment and to do what the prophets said. Once again, this man who is ostensibly all-powerful is dependent on the wisdom of those around him who he himself is subjugating. So he goes down to a muddy, unremarkable river he'd already insulted as inferior to the waters where he came from back in Aram. Six times he dips himself, nothing happens, but by the seventh dip, soaked and humiliated in front of the very servants who talked him into this, I imagine something in him has maybe already given way. Because I think this healing was never meant to happen to him from a distance. It only happens because a commander, this great man, a man in high favor, is willing to keep lowering himself into the water on the word of the people he outranks. And I thought that maybe that's the true miracle of the story. Not the cleansing itself, but what it cost him to get there. That he had to let a slave girl and his own servants be right and for him to be wrong in front of everyone else.

The True Miracle And Final Thanks

SPEAKER_01 15:27

And so I invite us all to 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 in this story 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, who will meet us at the table today, 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 that we erect for ourselves. In the name of God, the Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer, may all of us God's beloved children say. Amen.