Sermon Tone Analysis
Overall tone of the sermon
This automated analysis scores the text on the likely presence of emotional, language, and social tones. There are no right or wrong scores; this is just an indication of tones readers or listeners may pick up from the text.
A score of 0.5 or higher indicates the tone is likely present.
Emotion Tone
Anger
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Disgust
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Fear
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Joy
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Sadness
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Language Tone
Analytical
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Confident
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Tentative
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Social Tone
Openness
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Conscientiousness
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Extraversion
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Agreeableness
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Emotional Range
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Tone of specific sentences
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Anger
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Oof!
Come in from a long day at work?
What’s your reward?
More work at home!
Mowed the lawns?
Great!
Now you can get started on that fence.
Done the dishes?
Great!
Now get started on the laundry pile!
Finished your assignment?
Great!
Now you can study for exams!
Got through a pandemic?
Great!
Now you can start building up the lost momentum!
Crisis graph
At the beginning, this crisis pulled us together.
Remeber when we were at the top of that hill?
The streets were quiet, people were talking to their neighbours, the birds were singing and everyone was talking about the “new normal”.
Now, we see the long road ahead, we see how we have been worn down by two years of struggle, and that long road ahead just seems far too difficult.
It’s a bitter pill to swallow
Disciples have been listening to Jesus’ teaching:
“The Master commended the dishonest manager”
“You are the ones who justify yourselves in the eyes of others, but God knows your hearts.”
‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’
“It would be better for them to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around their neck than to cause one of these little ones to stumble. 3 So watch yourselves.”
“Even if they sin against you seven times in a day and seven times come back to you saying ‘I repent,’ you must forgive them.”
These are hard sayings.
They are bitter pills to swallow, and the disciples are struggling.
Disciples are beginning to realise that this is all too big for them to handle and they beg Jesus for more faith – enough faith to manage on their own.
“Increase our faith.”
“Help us through this hard time”
“This is too much for us!”
“it’s just not fair!”
How does Jesus respond?
Does he praise them?
Give them hope and encouragement?
No.
“Do you want a pat on the back?
A reward for your hard work?
You’ve only bneen doing what’s expected of you, so get on with it!”
It’s so discouraging!
I think Teacher of Ecclesiastes said it best:
“So I hated life, because the work that is done under the sun was grievous to me.
All of it is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.
What on earth is going on here?
Hard sayings of Jesus
o Luke 9 – Jesus predicts death, turns towards Jerusalem
o Day b day, chapter by chapter, we see the burden of Jerusalem – Jerusalem and the temple – Jerusalem and the cross – we see the burden of Jerusalem growing on Jesus.
o This is Jesus under a huge amount of stress, and he doesn’t float though it like a disembodied butterfly.
Nd while he never fails to heal and teach and drag people kicking and screaming into the kingdom of God, He does gets ragged around the edges
o Gets more and more urgent, more and more difficult until finally, at the beginning of Luke 22, Judas agrees to betray Jesus
o Title of this chapter in the NIV “Sin, faith, duty”
We tend to skip through most of this
o Not the Jesus that we know well.
o Tend to edit these bits out.
o They’re uncomfortable, difficult, jarring.
· Always difficult.
Tendency to harmonise it, or ignore it.
Make it rhyme where it jars.
Make it smooth where it is rough.
Make it OK where it’s not.
o Either that, or we just ignore it.
Preach from Timothy instead.
That stuff is easier.
Bitter pills & Mustard Seeds
· The faith of a mustard seed.
· In other words, if you had the whole kingdom of heaven in your hands, then you might be able to sort this out.
· So far so good.
· Then we get to the difficult part.
What does this teach us about the kingdom of God? How does this help us to understand the faith of a mustard seed?
Well, I don’t know that there is and easy answer to this part.
· This is difficult.
It always has been difficult.
But if we only ever lean in to the things that are easy.
If we only ever concentrate on the things that we understand or agree with, then where do we get to when life itself is difficult?
· Because there are times, aren’t there, when we feel like that servant who has been toiling in the fields all day, under the hot sun, or in the cold and the rain, and we just want shelter and sustenance and rest.
· But we don’t always get it.
· In those moments, Jesus is saying to us, I can’t promise you rest, but remember that you are not carrying the entire kingdom of heaven on your shoulders.
It might feel like your faith, your resilience, your hope is even smaller than a mustard seed.
But here the thing: even in that tiniest speck of hope, in the tiniest ray of light is the hope of the fullness of the kingdom of heaven.
Every week we light the Christ candle.
It seems like such a small, ineffectual light.
But the promise we hold to is this - that light, as small as it may seem in the dark valley, will grow and grow and grow until it fills the whole of creation with light and life.
The burdens of this world can seem overwhelming, too heavy to bear.
Meaningless and a chasing after the wind.
But they’re temporary, finite, transitory.
Faith in Jesus, however, is a seed of the infinite.
It’s transformative, and never-ending, and enlivening.
Faith however small, can blossom into something truly beautiful, and tranform even the heaviest of burdens into blessings that we never could have imagine.
“It’s not great faith you need, it’s faith in a great God.” - N. T. Wright
· It’s not all up to us, and it’s not all down to us.
The disciples, in their desparation, plead for more faith.
In the same way, we might plead with God to help us get through this difficult time.
Jesus’ reply - “You already have within you the seeds of faith, the seeds of hope, the seeds of love that I am using to transform your lives, and transform all of the into the beautiful creation it was always meant to be.”
There are bitter pills, but there are also mustard seeds.
Which will we cling to?
· I know that these words don’t really resolve the words of Jesus in this passage.
I don’t know that words can.
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