There Was A Girl: 2 Kings 5:1–4, 9–14; Psalm 30; Acts 16:16–24; Matthew 9:18–26

A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church, Epiphany V, Year A

Matthew 9:18 While Jesus was speaking, suddenly a leader [of the synagogue] came in and prostrated himself, saying, “My daughter has just died; but come and lay your hand on her, and she will live.” 19 And Jesus got up and followed him, along with his disciples. 20 Then suddenly a woman who had been hemorrhaging for twelve years came up behind him and touched the fringe on his clothing, 21 for she said to herself, “If I could only touch his clothing, I will be healed.” 22 Jesus turned, and seeing her he said, “Take courage, daughter, your faith has healed you.” And the woman was healed from that hour. 23 Then Jesus came to the leader’s house and saw the flute players and the crowd making a disturbance. 24 He said, “Leave, for the precious girl is not dead but sleeping.” And they laughed at him. 25 But when the crowd had been put out, he went in and took her by the hand, and the precious girl arose. 26 And the news of this spread throughout that district.

There was a girl.

Let us pray:

My prayer is Mother Mary’s prayer,
 Let it be.
Let it be with your woman-servant
according to your word.
On this day, as on that day,
let the daughter of God
bring forth the word of God again. Amen.

There was a girl. In the annals of ancient Israel, in the archives of the reigns of the monarchs of Israel and Judah, just after the transition from the stories about the prophet Elijah, kingmaker and chariot rider, to the stories of Elisha the prophet and miracle worker, who provided debt relief for the widow and her children, multiplied food for the hungry, prayed up a pregnancy (for a woman who never asked for it), raised that child to life when death had gone too far and, transubstantiated the poison in the pot of mushroom soup into food fit for the children of God, there was a girl.

In the movie, Black Widow, the villain and notorious human trafficker infamously says, “The only natural resource the world has too much of: girls.” For him, girls were either compliant currency or, dead and discarded; broken dolls for which he and his customers had no use. But there was always a replacement to be had because, there is always a girl.

 In the first lesson which begins with the name of a man we are expected to place in the center of our storytelling, there is a girl. There is a woman-child on the verge of womanhood: young enough to be compliant or trainable, fertile and virginal, who is stolen from her people by a roving band of soldiers – on one of their raids. There is never really only a girl. Not only has her world been turned upside down, but the world of the story is upside down. Because the man who shall remain as nameless as the girls pushed to the margins of scripture, the military commander who God is blessing with violent victories, is a foreigner to the people of Israel whom he is savaging on the field of battle. The storyteller only takes notice of the life of this woman-child being turned upside down because it is ancillary to the story of their ancestral world being turned upside down. She is not a person; she is a prop.

As a visiting womanist scholar of Hebrew biblical translation and interpretation in your midst this weekend, I invited you into the sacred discipline of close reading, of not letting any detail escape your notice. Thus it is that when the word “victory” appears, it is important to me as a womanist scholar and preacher whose reading, translation and interpretive ethics bring everyone pushed out to the edges and onto the ledges in to the circle of community to pause at the word “victory” and remind myself and those of you on this journey with me, that victory is not the celebration but the slaughter.

Victory is the death of some mothers’ sons sliced through with swords and hacked at with hatchets, leaving life and limb on the battlefield. And the one who has the victory, the one who has spilt more blood or perhaps the right blood, that one is the victor. But the Church has white-washed the screaming bloody red language of conflict and conquest that the second testament writers used to describe the birth of the Church to peoples who were subject to the bludgeoning boot of empire to toy swords in Christmas and Easter pageants. Should we replace the swords and shields of scripture with the Glock nines and riot shields of ICE? Then, perhaps we might be able to hear what the Spirit has been saying to the Church. But that is another sermon.

And while those who survived and those who sympathize can well be imagined to be asking themselves and each other: What has happened to our world that God has turned the world upside down against us and is favoring our enemy over us? How is it that we are in a place where kindergartners and two-year-olds and nursing babies are dangled before their mothers as bait by modern day slave catchers? How is it that we have gotten to this place?

We are nation of invaders, genocidaires, enslavers and white supremacist land thieves who justify their savagery with Iron Age theology, led by a mendacious, rapacious, racist misogynist. The world created by this nation has never been right side up. And as long as there was money to be made, power to be wielded and girls to snatch and sell, nobody bothers about missing indigenous, black, Latina and trans girls. But to the girls stolen by flesh peddlers and given as a gifts by billionaires, princelings and warlords, perhaps the world was already and always upside down.

In that upside down world, there was an enslaved girl who had learned to serve her slave-mistress and anticipate her needs and those of the man she calls “her master” and “her lord.” The same title she would have been taught to use to pray to and sing praises to the God of her ancestors whose Name was so holy, it could not be spoken by anyone except the high priest and then, once on the Day of Atonement and once again when passed from one high priest to the next. That girl-child wasn’t indifferent to her enslavement. She was trying to survive the best way she knew how, by making herself so useful to her enslaver that she wouldn’t be sold again.

There was a girl who the brutality of kidnapping, trafficking and enslaving could not shake loose from her knowledge that there was a God in Israel who had power and a prophet and heard prayer.

She was taken captive but she knew there was a God.
She was held in bondage but she knew there was a God.
She was separated from her people but she knew there was a God.
She may have been torn screaming from her mother’s arms but she knew there was a God.
She may have seen her entire family slaughtered around her, but she knew there was a God.
She was living in the midst of those killers and slavers, but she knew there was a God.
She was living in the heart of the empire that disposed of young girls like her as trinkets when not using them to breed more labor for the empire but, she knew there was a God.
There was a girl who knew there was a God even when that God did not come to her rescue, save her or set her free.

Here in this Black History Month, Black folk are often at pains to remind everyone else that our ancestors always knew there was a God. A God who heard their prayers for freedom. A God who heard their children’s prayers for freedom. A God who would hear their children’s children’s prayers for freedom. And among those children and children’s children and children’s children’s children there would always be girls, sassy and grown, God talking and back talking girls. They would become the mothers, mother’s mothers and mother’s mother’s mothers and aunties of womanish girls and girls who became womanist women. There was a girl whose end we cannot know but we can and do know there would always be another girl.

In the Gospel attributed to Matthew, while Jesus is explaining to his disciples why they do not have the same ritual practices at the same frequency as the Pharisees – of whom Jesus was most likely one for, it is in Matthew that Jesus says: The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat; therefore, do whatever they teach you and follow it – there, there was a girl. A girl passing from life to death while, a woman who had, perhaps, bled her entire life from when she was a girl with her first menses, who all but crawled to Jesus to touch the fringe signifying the covenant which God swore to their mama’s ancestors, by which God above and God in flesh still abided. There was a girl.

There was a girl who grew up bleeding. A girl who smelled. A girl who could never get clean. An ostracized girl, a lonely girl. A girl who was unlikely would ever marry or give birth or – if she bled after her first child and then for twelve years, a girl grown woman who would’ve also been abandoned, ostracized and lonely, sharing the lineage of those who crossed the street when they saw her coming, held their noses and, ducked their heads as they passed her by.

A girl for whom the horror of her girlhood is compressed and fast forwarded into womanhood in a narrative that can’t seem to sit with her in her diseased state like those men who sat with Job in his. A day, a night and another day and another night and another and another and another and another and another.

And there, this woman also knew that there was a healer in Israel so full of the healing, saving power of God that it just leaked out of him, running down his clothes like oil on the beard of Aaron. She knew that all she had to do was just touch the fringe on his garment. She didn’t plan to speak to him and didn’t expect him to speak to her. And just as she prepared to reach out and take her healing into her own hands – maybe even before her fingers brushed the holy fringe, she heard herself pronounced whole, well, saved. Named as Abraham’s daughter; she was restored to a daughterhood that evoked a girlhood with an entirely different ending.

And there in the midst of her story, there was a girl. There was a girl whose father pressed his way to Jesus. There was a girl, whom the whole of the world as she knew it had given up on her and given her up for dead. Everyone except her daddy. There was a girl who would’ve been abandoned to a death that was not her due were it not for her father pressing his way to Jesus alongside the bleeding woman he would’ve never allowed himself to have gotten that close to if it wasn’t for the fact that there was a girl and she was his girl.

Because he was a girl dad. He loved his girl and he was willing to do everything he could to wrestle her soul back from Shadow-Valley Death. He turned to Jesus whose miracles surpassed anything that his forerunner, John, could do; just as the miracles of Elisha surpassed anything that Elijah could do. And even though the Judaism of Jesus didn’t sound like the Judaism he grew up with, he didn’t let doctrinal debates or theological trutherism keep him from going out into the street to put his body on the line for one child. And for those who do not yet understand, each child snatched, stolen and sold is our child. That is why there, there was a girl who survived. There was a girl who survived because she had one person who believed, who believed for her. Just one person.

In the accounting of the Acts of the Apostles, as Paul passes from shore to ship and from ship to shore, there was a girl.

There was a girl that Paul passed by on his way to prayer. There was a girl for whom Paul did not pray though he saw her as spiritually damaged and, being exploited by men who sold her vulnerability, her brokenness, to other men for profit. He didn’t want to hear what she had to say. She was in his way. He was going to pray. There was a girl trapped in the bondage of enslavement like so many girls before her and so many after her. But she wasn’t his problem. He didn’t want to hear her story. She was too loud. He didn’t want to hear her voice. The man of God was going to pray and he didn’t have time for somebody else’s trafficked and exploited daughter along the way. There was a girl into whose life Paul spoke no word of salvation.

There was a girl who Paul and his biographer deemed possessed. Because there was a girl who prophesied in a different manner than Paul. There was a girl who prophesied through what I would like to suggest, in my sanctified imagination, are women’s ways, the ways of the Sibylline Oracle – sharing the same Greek word. Perhaps, she and they were not in fact possessed by a python spirit. Perhaps her truth-telling ways were so alien to him and the men who preserved, edited and narrated scripture that they could not accept them and their wisdom ways and demonized them. Like the Earth based birth knowledge and life saving ways of so many women burned as witches. Ways that like the hoodoo, conjuring and root working ways of Black women were deemed incompatible with the white man’s religion, all while Christianity swallowed up and stood itself upon the pagan traditions of European nations.

There was a girl whose prophetic voice Paul silenced because it wasn’t the same timber and resonance as his own. There was a girl who Paul deemed, in his own theology, in need of the expulsion ritual he understood to be to her health and benefit yet, to whom he only offered what he considered transformation and liberation when he got tired of the sound of her voice proclaiming his truth. There was a girl to whom Paul’s only word was, in my sanctified imagination, “Shut up!” as he left her with the men who were exploiting her. Men who had become angry because they couldn’t use her for what they used to use her. Paul gave no thought to what they would do with and to that girl who was now worthless to them. And he went to pray. There was a girl that the self-proclaimed apostle to the Gentiles would have passed by and left in what Paul believed was a disordered and demon possessed state except he was tired of the sound of her voice.

As I heard Rev. Dr. Jaqui Thompson say, “There is always a girl.” And while the scriptures speak most often to men, in the voices of men, yet 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 legislate their body and who has access to it and if and, when they are acceptable to participate in the common life, in the sacred life, to live or die, be free or sold. On the page, between the lines, behind the story; there is always a girl.

There is always a girl. There’s always a girl we have been conditioned to ignore. A girl who we’ve been told to set aside. A girl whose story has never been preached in our hearing. A girl who only shows up for half a verse. A girl whose life and loss is just considered the cost of doing business, the way it used to be and what everyone else was doing too. A girl whose sorrow and horror is a prop to our self-aggrandizing storytelling. A girl whose loss will go unmourned and unlamented. A girl whose story we were told we never needed to know to know Jesus. A girl in whom we cannot see the image of God or we would never treat her like she’s not a child of God. And, there is a girl in your family and in your church watching and listening to how you talk about girls and women, how you treat girls and women and, how you preach about girls and women. There is a girl learning whether or not she has value in this world or in the eyes of God because of what the Church has to say to her and about her. How much it is obsessed with her blossoming body and the need to control it. And sometimes her abusers come from within her own community.

We find ourselves at a crossroads where some have just now figured out the girls like them and their daughters will be snatched through car windows, beaten and even murdered in the streets on live TV. While others of us stare at them in black woman, black mama and murdered black baby girl.

We got here by creating a society in which girls were devalued and commodified; one in which we have stood by as girls were trafficked. Where we stood by as the daughters of other mothers were enslaved. Where girls have been blamed for their own violation. Where so many girls have lost their girlhood because we created a world in which they could never be skinny enough, pretty enough or popular enough.

We are also at this particular crossroads because we have stood by as girls and their gifts were dismissed by the leaders of the Church; as daughters who prophesy proclaimed the Word of our God but were told they were out of their minds, possessed or not fit for the pulpit. There is always another girl. And there will always be girls whose names we never know, I like all the girls in these readings today, whose fate we never learned.

But this one thing I do know. There was this one other girl. A girl who interrogated an angel when he came to her telling her what was going to happen to her body. A girl who decided to offer up her girlhood-on-the-threshold-of-womanhood body to the God of all the enslaved Israelite girls in her lineage.

A girl into whose untested womb Hagar’s spring of salvation, Miriam’s way through the waters, Rahab’s rescuer, Deborah’s battleaxe, sword and shield, Hannah’s hymn, Bathsheba’s vindication and Tamar’s revenge and, a Love that transcends death was poured.

It was through a girl that a Son, who was not ashamed of the company of women, was born.
It was through a girl that a Son came to tear tyrants from their thrones.
It was through a girl that heaven and earth collided and every grave stone hung just a little bit loose.
It was through a girl, that redemption came to the wretched and to the ratchet.
It was through a girl.

A girl whose genealogy was largely given to a man who wasn’t even the biological father of her child. A girl who raised a son who took a woman whom other folk called crazy and made her the Apostle to the Apostles. A girl was God’s partner in salvation and we could save this whole world if we listen to, love, nourish and protect all our girls and stop pushing them to the margins, the margins of scripture and the margins of this world.

In the name of the One who waded in the waters of Miryam’s womb, walked the way of suffering as one of the woman-born, and woke from the grasp of death in the deep darkness of the morning. Amen.

May the God of all Life, all Love and all Liberation lead you to the places where the gifts you already have meet the needs of the world. Amen.

Plymouth Congregational Church, Wichita Kansas