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January 8, 2012
NOTE: This sermon is adapted from “Like a Child,” in Building a House for All God’s Children: Diversity Leadership in the Church (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2008), pp. 76-84.
“What are little girls made of? Sugar and spice and everything nice. That’s what little girls are made of.” These days, we know better than to put much stock in such old-fashioned, gender-biased adages, if for no other reason than the fact that our experience has introduced us to at least some girls and women who are obviously composed of anything but “sugar and spice and everything nice”—all present company excluded, of course.
Even so, we might be surprised to see in this morning’s Old Testament lesson a girl of an entirely different mettle than in the nursery rhyme. We never learn her name or anything more about her than what we read in 2 Kings 5:2-4. But from what we do learn about her in these three verses, I want to suggest an alternative adage to characterize this na‘ărâ qĕtannâ, this “little girl” from the land of Israel: Nails and gold and everything bold. That’s what this girl is made of.
There is a cast of powerful people in the fifth chapter of 2 Kings. There is Naaman, the Syrian general. There is the king of Syria and the king of Israel. And there is the prophet Elisha who lives in Samaria, the capital of Israel. It would be all too easy for us to assume that we can learn the most from the most powerful people in the story. But it turns out that it’s the “little girl” from whom we can learn the most. Recognizing that the most important person in the story is the one who appears to be the least powerful person in it is a striking reminder that our assumptions and our expectations and our conventional interpretations frequently limit what we can learn from reading the Bible.
Perhaps you have read 1 Peter 3:7, which speaks of women as “the weaker sex.” Those three words in 1 Peter 3:7 have created centuries of assumptions and expectations and conventional interpretations in the church and in our culture. But 1 Peter ignores the biblical woman named Deborah who was a judge and a prophet over Israel without whom Barak, the commander of the Israelite army, refused to go to war unless she went with him (Judges 4:4,8). It ignores the biblical woman named Athaliah who was queen over Judah for six years when there was no king in the land (2 Kings 11:3). It ignores the biblical woman named Esther whose cunning and courage saved her people from a massacre (Esther). It ignores the biblical woman named Phoebe whom the apostle Paul refers to as “a deacon of the church” in Romans 16:1. And it ignores the biblical woman named Eve in Genesis 2.
Genesis 2:7 reads, “God formed a man from the dust of the ground.” The Hebrew verb in that verse is yatzar, “to mold” or “shape” or “form.” It’s what a potter does to make a clay vessel. Contrast that with verse 22, the creation of Eve: “the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man [God] made into a woman.” So the man is made of dust, and the woman is made of bone. Which one might be stronger? Dust or bone? The Bible says men are made of dust and women are made of bone. Who looks like “the weaker sex” now?
In fact, Bible translators don’t play fair with you or with Eve either one when they use the generic English word “made” to describe the creation of Eve. The Hebrew verb in that verse is banah, and it means “to build” or “to construct.” Eve was not just “made.” Eve was built. Elsewhere in the Bible, houses are built, city walls are built, towers are built, fortresses are built. There is nothing weak about this woman created in Genesis 2.
So when I say that the little girl in 2 Kings 5 is made of nails and gold and everything bold, you shouldn’t be surprised. Because 1 Peter 3:7 may call women “the weaker sex,” but the rest of the Bible pictures women very differently than 1 Peter does. Nails and gold and everything bold.
I say, “nails,” because she was “tough as.” Consider what we know about this girl’s situation. She was an Israelite captive who had been carried away from her village by Syrian raiders. Naaman the general must have selected her as part of the spoils of war to give to his wife as a household slave. So when this girl suggests in verse 3 that Naaman could be cured of his disease if he would pay a visit to “the prophet who lives in Samaria,” she reveals an amazing spiritual toughness. In spite of the terror, misfortune and dislocation she has experienced, she has not abandoned her confidence in her God and in the religious institutions of her upbringing. How could her faith be so tenacious as to survive and even thrive as a captive slave in a foreign land instead of a child at home? Tough as nails.
This “little girl from the land of Israel” models for us the toughness and the tenacity of faith that is required for citizenship in the kingdom of God. The author of the book of Revelation understood what it takes when he wrote, “as a follower of Jesus I am your partner in patiently enduring the suffering that comes to those who belong to his Kingdom” (Revelation 1:9). That’s not the kind of talk we like to hear about citizenship in the kingdom of God. When’s the last time you saw a sign outside a church that read, “Come suffer patiently with us”?
That’s not a gospel you and I want to hear or to preach, much less to live. We buy the conquering savior who vanquished sin and death and evil, and we sell the suffering servant because we want no part of servanthood or suffering either one. We preach a Christ who conquers, overcomes, protects and defends us against all comers, a national championship Jesus. And then we find ourselves and our theology utterly unprepared for the adversity that eventually comes our way in life when there is no triumph, only travail, when the losses in our lives pile up and the wins are few and far between at best or evidently all in the past. In adversity, our faith slips away like sand through our fingers, and we fall into despair or cynicism, unlike the girl from the land of Israel, who had not sold her soul to a theology of victory and success. Nails, I say, because she was tough as. Nails and gold.
I say “gold” because she had “a heart of.” Why it ever occurred to this child to be so astonishingly compassionate as to wish that her captor could be cured of his disease we will never know. Perhaps she is an ancient example of what is called the “Stockholm Syndrome” or “capture-bonding,” in which persons who are held hostage, such as prisoners of war, kidnap victims, battered wives and abused children, become emotionally attached and intensely loyal to their captors. Or maybe her circumstances as a household slave in the home of a wealthy and pampered Syrian woman was actually an easier and happier condition than she had known in the home of her rude, impoverished Israelite father who had no good use for a daughter who was no help to him in the fields. Or maybe it was her character. Maybe she was one of those unusually empathetic children you come across from time to time, that child with a sensitivity to others that takes everyone by surprise.
We can’t get behind the text in front of us to reconstruct her feelings, but what we can see in the text is an astonishing compassion that looks right past differences in nationality and religion and disparities in power and wealth to see the commonality of human suffering and need. And so she said, “I wish that my master could go to the prophet who lives in Samaria! He would cure him of his disease.” That is astonishing compassion on the part of a victim of conquest and coercion. And it is precisely the compassion that is required for citizenship in the Kingdom of God, as Jesus puts it in the sermon on the mount: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:43-44). That’s another piece of the gospel for which it is hard to find a practitioner in these days of religious, political, and national partisanship, polemics and polarization. But we’ve found one in 2 Kings 5. This little girl from the land of Israel exhibits Kingdom-of-God compassion for her enemy and her oppressor. Nails and gold, I say, because she had a heart of.
Nails and gold and everything bold. I say, “everything bold,” because this girl makes an outrageously bold claim on the grace and mercy of God. We have no idea how she knew that the prophet Elisha and the God of Israel would cure the Syrian general of this disease. Perhaps she had suffered from it herself, or perhaps someone in her family had, or perhaps the reputation of this prophet was so widespread that she needed no personal experience with his gift of healing. However she knew it—or perhaps only believed it or hoped it or prayed it, she was outrageously bold in her offer to Naaman. She invited this foreigner to avail himself of the health and wellbeing that was available in her own community of faith. She invited the wolf into the sheepfold, for heaven’s sake. And when she did, she made an outrageous claim on the grace and mercy of God by suggesting that God would act to heal an enemy of God’s people, that God whom she worshiped was every bit as interested in and concerned for Naaman’s health and wellbeing as for her own.
Syrians were historic enemies of Israelites, so much so that more than 800 years later the good people of Nazareth in Luke’s gospel became so incensed at Jesus that they wanted to kill him when he reminded them of this passage that contradicted their assumptions and their expectations and their conventional interpretations. A leprous Syrian warrior is healed while Israelite men, women and children are not? They became furious with Jesus when he proclaimed as “the truth” (v 25) an understanding of God that insists that God does not discriminate against people we despise or detest.
In Luke 6, Jesus says, “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful” (Luke 6:32-36).
In the end, it’s not the sociological imperative—“love your enemies”—that infuriates Jesus’ audience then and now. It’s the theological declarative that angers us most: God is “kind to the ungrateful and the wicked,” Jesus says, and God is merciful to our enemies. As Jesus preaches and teaches it, citizenship in the Kingdom of God requires worshiping and serving a God who loves even people who do not love God, a God who is good even to people who are not. That’s what this “little girl from the land of Israel” understood about God that many of us have not yet been willing to understand or to accept or to live by. Nails and gold and everything bold. That’s what it takes to be a follower of Jesus and to belong to Jesus’ kingdom.
And as for “the weaker sex”? Only in 1 Peter 3:7. The visionary words of the apostle Paul characterize Jesus’ kingdom this way: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”
May we never fail to live into and live up to Paul’s vision of Jesus’ kingdom. It’s nails and gold and everything bold.
Copyrighted © 2012 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeffrogers110@bellsouth.net.
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