As I prepare to deliver a sermon on 2 Kings 5 (Healing of Naaman, the leper) for this Sunday at Travis Oaks, I have read
portions of Kaiser’s Preaching and Teaching from the Old Testament. The section on preaching from OT narrative is particularly helpful. Kaiser traces the importance of understanding the role of various elements in a narrative (setting, plot, characterization, point-of-view, structure, dialog, key-words, etc.).
When preaching a narrative, it is easy to get lost in the characters and plot, losing the overall God-centered perspective. Elisha or David can easily become our focus, our moral examples, without any sense of God being the central character and Christ being a part of the larger story. Kaiser notes:
The central character of the Bible is God…all efforts to concentrate on the human character in a story while failing to locate God’s actions in the narrative are wrong. It leads to divorcing the character from God’s larger redemptive plan, bypassing the point that the author was making. Accordingly, one of our key questions in determining the characterization of a narrative is: What is God doing in this scene?