Sermon Tone Analysis

Date: 2022-04-03

Audience: Seattle White Center

Title: The Seed in this Pomegranate

Text: 2 Kings 5

Proposition: Maybe God isn’t as worried about some things as we are

Purpose: Worship God wherever you are

Grace and peace to you!

I am Captain Roger, which I know sounds a lot like a pirate name, but I am actually just the officer of the Grass Valley Corps in Northern California.

I’m sorry – I know that makes me immediately less interesting.

That’s okay, though, because I’m not here to tell you about me.

Instead, I want to talk about my favorite book, or at least a piece of it.

Would anyone care to guess what my favorite book is? Yeah, it’s the Bible.

If you’re surprised by that, today is probably your first day in church.

If that’s you, please make sure to speak to Captains Hector or Yasmin after the service.

They’d like to meet you and reassure you that I’m not usually the guy here so you’ll know it’s safe to come back next week.

I love the Bible because it is a book filled with just about everything you could care to read about.

Fencing.

Fighting.

Torture.

Revenge.

Giants.

Monsters.

Chases.

Escapes.

True love.

Miracles.

There are stories, and history, and poems, and advice, and romance, and instructions, and car chases, and explosions.

There’s even a helpful passage which explains that if two men get in a fight and the wife of one tries to rescue her husband by grabbing the other man by his… let's call it his oompa-loompas, her hand needs to be cut off immediately and without mercy (Deut 25:11-12).

Really.

This book has EVERYTHING!

Today I’m going to run you through a story from the Hebrew Bible – we Christians tend to call it the Old Testament.

It’s a pretty common story.

If you grew up in the church you probably heard it about once every two years in Sunday school as a kid or about once every three in the adult service.

It’s a good story and absolutely no one dies in it, which is different from a lot of OT stories.

I’m going to tell you the whole story and point out a couple of things about it on the way through, but what interests me most is a little part towards the end which tends to get missed, ignored, or just plain left out by most teachers and preachers.

What is that?

We’ll get there!

Relax already!

Grab your Bible and open it up to 2 Kings.

For those of you who aren’t clicking through an app to get there, let me remind you that there is a special, God-ordained page at the beginning of the Bible called the Table of Contents.

You can use it to find those books in the Bible you don’t know where they are, which, lets face it, is probably most of them.

I’m a professional Christian who spends several hours a day studying the Bible and I probably couldn’t put my finger on 2 Kings on the first try.

It’s right after 1 Kings, if that helps… If you’re in Genesis, you need to go farther in.

If you’re in Revelation, you’ve gone just a bit too far to the back.

The story we’re looking for in 2 Kings is in chapter 5.

While you’re finding it, how many of you ever eat pomegranates?

I don’t but let me tell you why.

It’s because I don’t understand them.

What’s with the seeds?

Are you supposed to eat them or spit them out?

[get answers]

Spitting them out seems like a lot of work, no matter how sweet the fruit around them is.

But crunching them up to eat them is a lot of work too, and I don’t remember them tasting very good.

But research has shown that we should be chomping them down instead of rejecting them because the seeds of a pomegranate are chock full of vitamin C and potassium and fiber and antioxidants, and eating them is actually good for us.

So in the center of this sweetness, there is a hard, bitter lump which we need to chew on to get down, but which is actually the best part of the fruit.

This story in 2 Kings 5 is the same way.

Today, we’re going to try to eat a seed from our scripture.

I’m using the New International Version Bible, so if you’re reading from a different version the words may be different, but the meaning behind them should be the same.

Now Naaman (naw-mon)was commander of the army of the king of Aram.

He was a great man in the sight of his master and highly regarded, because through him the Lord had given victory to Aram.

He was a valiant soldier, but he had leprosy.

f [1]

Let me stop for a second and make sure we are all hearing the same things in this passage.

First, Naaman.

He’s the top general over all the military forces in Syria.

Aram is a name they were called for a time, but we’re talking about Syria.

Syria’s military in those days tended to make their living by raiding their weaker neighbors.

Like Israel.

And they won.

Why?

Well, ancient story-tellers weren’t usually believers in free-will like we modern-day Salvationists are.

Their explanation for why Syria would win and Israel would lose is because God ordained it to be that way.

It’s kind of their way of saying, “We could have won, if we’d wanted to, but God told us not to.”

Mmm hmm.

They do acknowledge that maybe this Naaman guy was good at his job with this bit about him being a valiant warrior.

Then they tell us he’s got leprosy.

That word, leprosy, used to mean something more than it does now.

Now we think of leprosy being this thing called Hansen’s Disease, which is a kind of bacterial infection that kills your nerves and leave you open to injuring yourself without realizing it.

It also makes you particularly susceptible to other kinds of infection, like gangrene, so we think of lepers as people who develop sores and their bodies rot away.

Hansen's was a thing back then too, but when we read about leprosy in the Bible it actually meant any kind of infectious or unknown skin disorder.

It didn’t have to be human skin either.

There’s a section in Leviticus about dealing with leprosy infecting your house so you'll know when you need to burn it down.

People weren’t burned down, but they were quarantined.

And sent to live away from healthy people.

It was hard to lead an army from quarantine.

Naaman wanted to get well.

2 Now bands of raiders from Aram had gone out and had taken captive a young girl from Israel, and she served Naaman’s wife. 3 She said to her mistress, “If only my master would see the prophet who is in Samaria!

He would cure him of his leprosy.”

[2]

Naaman was apparently loved by his people, since even this slave in his household wanted to see him get well.

Or maybe she just didn’t want to live in a house with someone who was sick.

Samaria was the name of a province inside of Israel and the prophet the girl was referring to was this guy named Elisha (ellie-shah) who was from there.

Elisha was Elijah’s successor and is the prophet with the most miracles attested to him outside of Moses.

The man did some crazy cool things with the power God gave him.

He’s the guy who, when a street gang started making fun of his bald head, cursed them and sent two angry bears to shred 42 members of their club.

Another time there was a kid who had a brain aneurism and died but Elisha prayed and gave him Divine CPR and he was restored to life.

Pretty awesome stuff.

To make an already long story just marginally shorter, the girl told Naaman’s wife about Elisha, she told Naaman, he told the king of Syria, and the king of Syria sent a note to the kind of Israel that said, “Hey, one of my guys is coming to Israel to be cured of leprosy.

Make it happen.”

Then Naaman and a small army came rolling into town, bringing with them 750 pounds of silver, 150 pounds of gold, and ten really nice sets of clothes, including some new Levis and a really sweet pair of Jordans.

I’m guessing a bit on that last thing.