Rev. Jared Buss
Pittsburgh New Church; April 19, 2026
Readings: 2 Kings 4:8-17 (children’s talk); 2 Kings 4:18-37; True Christian Religion §331.4; Secrets of Heaven §8159.5
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The story of Elisha and the Shunammite woman isn’t over, and we’re going to hear the second half of it now: the reading you’ll hear in a moment picks up right where the earlier reading ended. That earlier reading was a pleasant story about a woman who builds a room for a prophet, and is rewarded. She’s given a child, which is clearly what she wanted most of all. But this next reading is different. This part of the story is about what it looks like to go all the way to the Lord, because we need help and we know it, and because the things that we stand to lose are too important for half-measures. We read: [2 Kings 4:18-37].
This whole episode is a testament to the power of minimalist storytelling. For example, when the sick child is taken to his mother, the story says, “he sat on her knees till noon, and then died” (v. 20). That’s just ten words, and none of those words describe emotions. But what a painful picture those ten words paint. The mother then leaves her son on the bed in the room that she and her husband built for Elisha, and shuts the door (v. 21). Her silent self-control tells us exactly how she feels: she is not ready to accept what’s just happened, and she will not accept it until she’s done everything she can to reverse it. She calls for a servant and a donkey, because she’s going to find the man of God (v. 22).
And as she journeys to Elisha she demonstrates single-minded determination. She doesn’t want to talk to her husband. Clearly he has no idea what’s going on: he asks her why she wants to see the man of God, since it’s not a holiday. She puts him off, saying, “It’s well.” It’s fine (v. 23). Obviously this story isn’t here to say that married partners shouldn’t talk openly and honestly about their problems. The story doesn’t set this woman up as a saint, it just shows us what she did. She didn’t want to talk to her husband because her husband couldn’t fix the problem. She was going to Elisha. She was going to the Lord.
When Elisha’s servant Gehazi comes to meet her, she puts him off the same way. Gehazi even asks, “Is it well with the child?” and she just says, “It is well” (v. 26). She doesn’t want to talk to Gehazi: she wants to talk to Elisha. Only when she gets to Elisha does her bitter self-control begin to crack: the story says that she catches him by the feet (v. 27). In other words, she throws herself to the ground in front of Elisha. Gehazi comes to push her away, because she’s invading the personal space of an important person, but Elisha stops him: he perceives the woman’s grief. And when the woman finally says what she’s come all that way to say, her words are angry: “Did I ask a son of my lord? Did I not say, ‘Do not deceive me?’” (v. 28). In other words, “You were the one who gave me this gift: why did you give it to me and then take it away? I told you not to give me false hope—not to tell me that I could have this thing that I want so much, and then take it away.”
Elisha immediately goes to this woman’s son. He sends Gehazi on ahead, presumably because Gehazi is a young man and can travel faster; and note how he instructs Gehazi to travel with the same unwavering resolution that characterized the mother’s outbound journey. He says, “If you meet anyone, do not greet him; and if anyone greets you, do not answer him; but lay my staff on the face of the child” (v. 29). Gehazi is unable to wake the child (v. 31), but when Elisha gets there he prays to the Lord, and twice he stretches himself over the child’s body; and then the child opens his eyes (vv. 33-35).
So the story has a happy ending—which is a mercy. It would be a hard story to hear if it didn’t end with a miracle. Like many stories in the Word, it shows us that the Lord has the power to do things that seem impossible. Elisha was able to raise the dead child because he was a prophet and the Lord was with him. And in the internal sense of the Word, Elisha represents the Lord Himself, specifically “the Lord as to the Word” (SH §§2762.2, 5247.6, 5321.5 et al.). But today’s sermon isn’t about what Elisha did; we aren’t going to focus on the happy ending, or the details of how the child was healed. We’re going to focus on the child’s mother, and that journey that she made. She shows us what it looks like to confirm that something we say we love actually is that important to us; and what it looks like to show the Lord that we actually want His help. There are two aspects of her journey that we’re going to pay special attention to. The first is her mute, unwavering determination. There were no half-measures in her response to her child’s death: she was all in. The second thing we’ll pay special attention to is that her journey was a journey to Elisha—a journey to the Lord.
There are a lot of things that we know we’re supposed to be better at. We should all exercise more, eat less junk, get more sleep, spend less time on screens, regularly read the Word, pray more habitually, express less road rage, be more patient, volunteer more, spend more quality time with the people we love, and be more productive at work. When all of the “shoulds” are lined up like that, it becomes pretty obvious that we have to pick our battles. We can’t be good at everything—and thankfully that’s not what the Lord requires. But the fact we can’t do it all doesn’t mean that none of it matters. What it means is that we need to pick the things that are most important to us, the things that are too important not to do, and make sure that we at least do those things.
How many things that we say are important to us are things that we say we’ll “get around to someday,” when yet, “someday” keeps never coming? And maybe a more useful question is, how often do we allocate the best of our time and energy to less important things, or unimportant things, and save only the scraps for the things that we say are most important? The classic example of this is a parent who prioritizes success at work, and says that he loves his kids, but is forever giving his kids his second-best self. It is not uncommon for people to say that things are important to them, yet fail to act like those things are important. But of course, there can only be a small number of things that are “most important” to us. In practice, those are the things that we do not do second, the things that we do not do halfway.
The mother in today’s story shows us what it looks like to say—or to testify—“this is what’s important to me.” It looked like she was going to lose her son, and she would not accept that, at least not until she’d done everything in her power to find healing for him. She didn’t sit around wringing her hands: she got to work. Because that’s what we do when something is actually that important to us. What are the things in your life that you would pause everything else for—the things for which you say, “I will do what it takes”? Our children are an easy example: children make it easy to see what it means to love something that much. What about the spiritual things that we know are supposed to be important? What about honesty; what about forgiveness; what about the Lord Himself? Would we say “I will do what it takes” for those things?
The second thing that’s notable about the behavior of the mother in today’s story is that she doesn’t waste time trying to fix her problem on her own. She doesn’t set out on a journey to find a doctor or a mystical fountain of health. She goes to Elisha. She goes to the Lord. What she’s lost is too important to her for half-measures or pride or pretending. She goes to Elisha, even though she’s angry with Elisha, because she knows that the Lord is the only one with the power to heal her son. And she goes all the way to Elisha: she seeks him out with single-minded determination. And once she’s found him she says, “As the Lord lives, and as your soul lives, I will not leave you” (2 Kings 4:30).
Sometimes when we seek the Lord, we actually go only halfway to Him. We recognize that we need some Divine help, so we say a prayer, or the beginning of a prayer; and then we recede into our familiar thoughts. We go back to trying to figure it out without the Lord. But many—if not all— of the things that we want most are things that, in truth, only He can give us. Healing and peace are His to give. If something is important to us, and if God has all power in heaven and on earth to give it to us (Matt. 28:18), then why wouldn’t we keep searching for Him until we’ve found Him? Why wouldn’t we figure out how to let Him in? What does it look like to go all the way to the Lord, to figure out how to bring your life into the presence of His power so that He can change what needs to be changed?
There are two simple spiritual principles in the background of today’s story, and the mother in this story shows us how they go together. The first principle is that if something is important to us, we have to do something about it; it’s not enough to sit around lamenting, or to sit around waiting for an opportunity that might never materialize. And the second principle—which might seem like a contradiction of the first—is that all power is from the Lord and the Lord alone. At least when it comes to spiritual battles, we will never be victorious unless the Lord fights for us. Listen to these two passages from the Heavenly Doctrine of the New Church, and note how they seem to be in tension with one another [read TCR §331.4 & SH §8159.5)
So if we want to be washed clean, we need to get up and wash ourselves—we can’t sit around waiting for the Lord to do it for us. And yet, the Lord is the one who fights the evil within us, and we can’t win that fight on our own. If both of those ideas are true, then what are we supposed we do? One answer is that we’re to do what the mother in today’s story does. And here’s what that looks like: we get to work bringing the Lord into our lives. We take responsibility, we go on a journey—but the journey is a journey to the Lord. We show Him what we care about, and show Him that He is actually invited to come into our lives with healing power.
Of course we don’t always get exactly what we want. The mother in this story gets the miracle that she goes looking for, but we won’t always be able to say the same. Really this is a subject for its own sermon, but it’s important to at least mention that the Lord’s priorities have to do with eternal things—especially our eternal salvation—and He won’t give us the natural things we ask for if, for any reason, those natural things would get in the way of eternal things. We’re allowed to tell the Lord what’s important to us, but we also need to let Him tell us what’s important to Him. What we can know for sure is that if we bring a good love to the Lord and we tell Him, “this matters to me,” He will honor what we’ve brought to Him. He will answer us, like Elisha answered the Shunammite woman. He will go to that upper room in our minds and heal what can be healed.
We’ll close this sermon with one last reflection on the masterful, minimalist style of this story. The story never explains what the mother is feeling; when her son is awakened, it says nothing about joy or wonder or relief. But consider these words, the last words of the story:
… he said, “Pick up your son.” So she went in, fell at his feet, and bowed to the ground; then she picked up her son and went out. (2 Kings 4:36, 37)
Amen.