Sermon Tone Analysis

Intro - You can imagine the scene around the staff table - in mid-December - the Pastoral team trying to figure out the preaching schedule for the 2012 - that resulted in the youth pastor receiving the cue from the bullpen to preach this morning.

I’ll leave it for you to decide whether or not we were up in the inning or behind.

I fought my intuitive tendencies to break all of you up into gender exclusive clusters of four and place questions on the screen for you to answer.

Although, part of me still thinks it could have been a fun idea.

I must confess, however, how privileged I feel sharing with you this morning.

It is my first time teaching many of you, and I consider it an honor to share message that God has laid upon my heart some time ago.

I also consider this a privilege because I see many new faces that I otherwise might not see.

Some of you may be new to me because I am still relatively new on the Pastoral team myself and spend much of my time with the middle school through college-aged students.

Some of our paths do not cross often, so I consider this time a wonderful one that gives us an opportunity to meet and know one another.

Also, your face may be new to me because you, too, are new at Hillside, and we are all meeting each other for the first time.

Perhaps you came this morning because you desire to begin the new year on a fresh note.

If so, then let me be one of hopefully many who says to you, “Welcome.”

We are really glad to see you, and we hope you come to know this community as one of hope and authenticity and ordinary people from all slices of life, each attempting to live out the very topic of our discussion this morning: the Good News... the Good News of Jesus Christ...

On Christmas Eve, many of you heard me read the Christmas Story.

In that story, an angel appears to the shepherds and exclaims that he has Good News to share!

Moreover, the writers of the New Testament refer to the message that Jesus shared as Good News.

So, what did Jesus say that led others to call it Good News?

Where do we see stories and glimpses of it in Scripture and taking place throughout our world today?

And what does it look like for us - Hillside Church - a community of broken people, myself included - the pastoral team and staff included - you included, all of us in various stages of faith and understanding - to embody and share this very idea of Good News for others and our community?

Transition 1 - This morning, we will begin in Luke chapter 4 The first time Jesus stood up to teach in public, his inauguration address of sorts, he talked about ‘Good News.’

Move 1 - This teaching follows after he completed 40 days in the wilderness and endured temptation of all kinds.

Listen carefully to what Luke records:

“Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news about him spread through the whole countryside.

He was teaching in their synagogues, and everyone praised him.

He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom.

He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him.

Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:

18 “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down.

The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him.

21 Jesus then said to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

On that day, Jesus spoke the very words from the Prophet, Isaiah, who describes in his book the core identity markers of the Messiah.

Since the time of Isaiah - hundreds of years had passed - and the entire Jewish community awaited the season when the Messiah would rise up and restore Israel, also known as the people of God, from bondage and occupation and into the great nation that God had promised them long ago with Abraham.

So, you can imagine the emotions and the astonished responses of everyone listening at the synagogue when Jesus quoted this passage and boldly made the claim in verse twenty one that the words he had quoted from Isaiah are being fulfilled in their hearing.

Luke recalls that every eye was fixed upon Jesus, and the hearts of the leaders resonated deeply with the significance of what Jesus had just spoken.

Essentially, in Jesus’ inauguration address, he identified himself as that long-awaited and anticipated Messiah, the fulfillment and the embodiment of what Isaiah calls ‘Good News,’ which is the message of freedom, of rescue, of favor, and of the hope that one day our broken world and all within it would be set back to right.

Transition 2 - Now, this morning, in order to fully attempt to understand this message of Good News and what Jesus came to fulfill, we need to turn a few hundred pages to the left to the Old Testament.

I want to explore an event that took place about 2800 years ago and illustrates well this notion of Good News.

It is a story that will help us grasp a clear, defined picture of Jesus’ words in Luke, along with what it means to be a Hillside Church - a Christian community - who sees as one of its core identity markers the importance of sharing the message of Good News with others.

The story is found in the Book of 2 Kings chapter 6.

I want to read this story to you in its entirety, but along the way, we’ll stop at certain points to work through it bit by bit together.

Some of it might appear difficult, but we’ll work through it together, so just stick with me.

Move 2 - Let’s begin with 2 Kings chapter 6, beginning in verse 24:

“Some time later, Ben-Hadad king of Aram, mobilized his entire army and marched up and laid siege to Samaria.

There was a great famine in the city; the siege lasted so long that a donkey’s head sold for eighty shekels of silver, and a quarter of a cab of seed pods for five shekels.”

Let’s pause right here.

At this time, the Israelites, God’s people, lived in a land called Israel that had been divided into two kingdoms, the Southern and the Northern.

The setting of this story takes place in the Northern kingdom at a city called Samaria, the capitol city, purchased by a man named King Omri for about 20 shekels of silver.

By accounts of ancient historians, Samaria was a beautiful city, rivaling its neighbor, Jerusalem, the capitol of the Southern kingdom, for most beautiful.

Omri purchased the city because of its location near a lush valley for farming and resources, but set on a mountain top where it could provide safety for itself from invaders and enemies.

Several kings ruled over God’s people at Samaria for many years, until King Ben-Hadad of Aram, a neighboring nation to the north laid siege to it, which means that they attacked the city and then surrounded it with troops in such a way that that no one or nothing - people or resources - could go in or out of the city...

In fact, our story reads that the conditions in Samaria became so grave and severe that a donkey’s head sold for 8 shekels of silver - nearly half of what Omri paid for the entire city of Samaria!

This would amount to the equivalent of thousands of dollars.

Now, I am reading your minds and I know many of you must be thinking, “Hmmm, donkey’s head... sounds like ancient delicacy!”

In fact eating a donkeys head is like eating a Jack in the Box cheeseburger.

It would be something that you ate followed by hours of unpleasant stomach torture and bathroom visits - of which you paid thousands of dollars to get - you get the picture.

I know some of you who would pay thousands of dollars not to eat at Jack in the Box.

Yet, on the Samarian black market, donkeys heads sold for half the cost of the city of itself.

And what about a quarter of a cab of seed pods?

For those of you reading other translations, you might read: dove’s dung, or what my students sitting in the back would call, bird poo.

It was used for fuel to make fires, and sold for 5 shekels of silver or something around a thousand dollars.

Conditions got so bad over the course of the siege that people would sacrifice huge sums of money for basic, staple items, even items that would otherwise be tossed out or disregarded.

Conditions were desperate.

Now, let’s continue to the next passage in 2 Kings, and I must warn you that conditions worsen in Samaria, and the next story is both disturbing and atrocious:

“As the king of Israel was passing by on the wall, a woman cried to him, “Help me, my lord the king!”

The king replied, “If the LORD does not help you, where can I get help for you?

From the threshing floor?

From the winepress?”

Then he asked her, “What’s the matter?”

She answered, “This woman said to me, ‘Give up your son so we may eat him today, and tomorrow we’ll eat my son.’

So we cooked my son and ate him.

The next day I said to her, ‘Give up your son so we may eat him,’ but she had hidden him.”

When the king heard the woman’s words, he tore his robes.

As he went along the wall, the people looked, and they saw that, under his robes, he had sackcloth on his body.”

Now, let’s stop there.

Things became so bad in Samaria that for sheer survival, mothers were forced to eat their own children........ (pause)........ Let that sink in for a moment.

Transition 2 - When I fist heard this story some years ago, I sat in my seat aghast, stunned that such a story could exist in history, let alone in Scripture.

I thought to myself, “Well, I am sure glad that we live in a different world with 2800 years of human advancement.”

But then I turned on NPR in my car and thought, “Really?” Has our world really changed in the last three millennia?

Move 3 - I listened to an NPR article that listed 2011 as a year of upheaval, natural disasters, and conflict.

Yet, at the end of every year, journalists, commentators, and writers observe the same thing and list that year as the worst of the decade or the year of greatest conflict and so forth.

And while that kind of sensation certainly sells newspapers or appeals to our interest to watch a show, the reality still exists that conflict, upheaval, bloodshed, and the like - similar to what took place in Samaria 2800 years ago - still ravage our globe.

When you get home, I want you to try an experiment.

Open up the family atlas or turn the globe to the continent of Africa - put your finger anywhere on that beautiful continent, and in the one inch diameter around your finger, in that ring, take notice of the thousands of people suffering and dying from AIDS on a weekly basis.

At this moment right now at the Horn of Africa - Ethiopia, Somalia, and Kenya - as I speak to you over the duration of my message, thousands of people - namely children - will have died due to starvation and malnutrition, easily preventable deaths, caused by famine but fueled by dictatorial regimes who have withheld food and other food producing resources from starving families.

A few days ago, the Sudanese military confirmed the death of a man named, Khalil Ibrahim, the leader of the Darfur rebel group - you may know have heard of this man from organizations like Invisible Children, who brought awareness to his heinous actions.

Do you know what he did?

He and his gang snatched young boys from their families, gave them large doses of drugs accompanied with very little food and water, put machine guns in their hands, and sent them into neighboring villages to kill anyone not part of their rebel group.

Since Christmas, senseless killing continued in Syria with suicide bombers detonating themselves in public squares and killing dozens of innocent people.

All of this has happened as I sat and prepared the sermon in which I am sharing with you right now.

I can go on and on, as we all can.

And we all know of junk here at home in Marin and around the Bay.

All of this leaves with me a deep sense that the world is not as it should be.

Samaria, the city we just discussed, was not as it was supposed to be.

The enemy camped around the city gates created an environment so heinous that it ceased to reflect God and function as it was intended to live.

And I would say that this is also true of our world right now.

We can often feel like the enemy is encamped around our world preventing us from living in the way we should.

Think with me for a moment and use your imagination.

Go into your bedroom, close the door, look in the mirror, and look into the eyes of that person.