Sista Save Yourself: 2 Kings 5:1–4, 9–14; Acts 16:16–24

Sisters are doing it for themselves
Standing on their own two feet
And ringing on their own bells
Sisters are doing it for themselves.

Now this is a song to celebrate
The conscious liberation of the female state
Mothers, daughters and their daughters too, yeah
Woman to woman
We’re singing with you
The “inferior sex” got a new exterior (yeah)
We got doctors, lawyers, politicians too – au
Everybody, take a look around
Can you see? Can you see? Can you see?
There’s a woman right next to you.
Aretha Franklin and Annie Lennox

Sometimes a sista has to save herself.

Let us pray:

Let it be with your woman-servant
according to your word.
With these words
the word of God was formed in the woman of God.
On this day, as on that day,
let your word come forth 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, there was a girl.

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, 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 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.

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 ,who is then trafficked to a no name woman with the privilege of hierarchy – as in higher than you but still subject to patriarchy. A woman who only had what she had because of her man. A man who only had what he had because of Israel’s God. A God who weaponized him to punish the people of that God.

That military commander was highly esteemed, because through him the Holy One had given victory to Aram. What is victory to some is slaughter to others. The Church loves it some victory. As a womanist preacher and biblical scholar attending to those pushed out to the edges and onto the ledges of the text in the world and the world in the text, I couldn’t let the word “victory” pass unregarded given how much the Church talks and sings about victory.

Victory is not the celebration but the slaughter. The celebration comes later. And the truth of the slaughter is often the first casualty of war, with it reimagining of history and the articulation of self-centered legend under divine Providence. Victory is the death of some mothers’ sons sliced through with swords and hacked at with hatchets, losing life and limb with bodies, brain, bones and blood 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.

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 praying for and praising vicious violent victories in the name of Aryan Jesus.

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 always upside down.

Aramean troops went out and took captive from the land of Israel a little girl, and she was placed before Naaman’s woman. There is a mighty loud silence between “took captive” and, “was placed.” The silences of scripture are screaming if you know how to listen. And we can help you with that here. With my sanctified imagination: These battle hardened roughnecks had already won the victory, believing it was through the strength of their arms and not caring to know better. They had already raped and pillaged and slaughtered and stolen. But it was not enough. They wanted tender flesh to use, to sell, to gift in hopes of recognition or promotion or favor down the line.

And there was a girl. She wasn’t a prisoner of war or enemy combatant; she was nowhere near the battlefield. She and the girls with her were just a little extra compensation. I say “girls,” because there never is only one girl.

A “raid” is a bunch of armed folk, usually men, with superiority in numbers or weapons or vehicles – horses, chariots, motorcycles or pick-up trucks. They do what they want: set crosses on fire, lynch, drag folk behind trucks with chains, destroy the prosperity of the people they despise.

They take what they want: lives, trophies, women and girls to use and destroy or to barter and bargain. A raid violates the safety and security of home. Home itself is destroyed as raiders, in this case soldiers, ride in and make every space unsafe. They tear families apart. Killing some and stealing others. Can’t you see it – girls being torn from the arms of their mothers and fathers, watching their fathers and sometimes their mothers slaughtered for trying to hold on to their precious child. That child bloody, with her dress torn, thrown over the knees of a soldier or in a wagon with other girls from her home, some perhaps soiling themselves. She, and likely others – they would need enough to make the raid worth their time – examined and sorted like cattle. The hands of people she doesn’t know checking the inside of her body for her treasure.

The text tells us nothing about this because it is not interested in the trauma of girls unless it is useful to add flavor to a story – a story about a man. Someone, perhaps the man who stole her, shattering her world, gave her or sold her to the wife of the commander. But first, they would have to break her. Force her to accept the yoke of slavery as identity and destiny so it would be safe to let her serve her enslavers. In the upside down world of the text, there was an enslaved girl who had been taken on a raid.

There was a girl who had been through more than we can imagine by the time she shows up on the sacred scrolls looking unbothered by her enslaved estate. No matter how good she seemed to have it working for Miss Ann on the inside, she would never forget what these people were capable of, what they did to her, her family and her community. There was a girl who learned the hard way that no one was coming to save her and, if she was going to survive, she was going to have to seek her own salvation. Sometimes a sista has to save herself.

So she learned to serve her slave-mistress and anticipate her needs and those of the man she calls “her master” and “her lord.” That girl-child survived the best way she knew how, by making herself so useful that perhaps she wouldn’t be sold again.

here 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 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.

Salvation without liberation is survival and sometimes salvation is survival. It would have been for:

Dr. Cerina Fairfax,
Pastor Tammy McCollum,
Vice Mayor Nancy Metayer Brown,
Qualisha “Sadiddy” Barnes,
Devonta Curtis and,
Barbara Deer.

There was a girl who learned the hard way that prophets, pastors and apostles busy proclaiming the word of God are readily accepting of a world in which women and girls are stolen, trafficked and enslaved.

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. There was a girl trapped in the bondage of enslavement like so many girls before her and so many after her. He didn’t want to hear what she had to say. She was in his way. He was going to pray. She wasn’t his problem. He didn’t want to hear her story. 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.

Sistas, sometimes you got to save yourself. These prophets, preachers and apostles comfortable with or complicit in your captivity and ain’t studying ‘bout what salvation means to and for you.

There was a girl who Paul and his biographer deemed possessed. Because there was a girl who preached 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 lifesaving 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 thought was too loud. 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 for. Paul gave no thought to what they would do with and to that girl who was now worthless to them as 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.

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. There is a girl who is not safe in her church. There is a girl who is not safe in her home. Women would rather be alone with a bear in the woods because a girl child ain’t safe in a house of men.

We find ourselves at a point 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, 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 whose genealogy was largely given to a man who wasn’t even the biological father of her child.

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 boy-child 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 that a holy child came to:

bring good news to oppressed girls,
to bind up brokenhearted girls,
to proclaim liberty to captive girls,
and release to incarcerated girls.

And yes, to boys and men and non-binary children and adults and trans folk of all ages.

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. But until then, some of us will have to save ourselves by any means necessary. Sistas, sometimes you got to save yourself.

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.

A revision of https://www.wilgafney.com/2026/02/08/there-was-a-girl/.