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
Tones
Emotion
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Social Tendencies
Anger
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I don’t get mad.
I get _______.
What goes in that line?
You ever feel like that?
Some people spend hours or days or weeks plotting how they will get even.
A study done last year on revenge found that the sweetness of revenge is typically fleeting.
People involved in the study found a lot of satisfaction in getting revenge on someone who had done something wrong.
But then the more they thought about it, the more they were still bothered by the original offense that triggered their revenge.
Revenge is sweet.
But only for a time.
It’s easy to want revenge.
We want life to be fair.
We want people to be punished for behaving badly, especially against us.
We all have a sense of justice, although that sense can be badly misinformed.
Our movies and fiction stories often have elements of revenge, and the revenge brings a sense of closure and justice.
but in real life, it almost never works that way.
Closure is fleeting.
Our story today has revenge written all over it.
But the ending to the story is quite surprising.
Hollywood likes this story.
There have been numerous versions of this story over the years.
Joseph: King of Dreams was DreamWorks attempt at telling the story.
It’s a rags to riches tale full of danger and success that everybody loves.
The story we have in our Bibles certainly lends itself to this idea of moving from being a shepherd to being a king… and it’s not the only story we have like this in our Bibles.
David was another underdog… and shepherd who ended up as king.
But just like the other stories we've looked at, Joseph is the hero of the story.
The moral of the story is if we simply hang on and we do what is right, things will turn out all right.
And in Joseph’s instance, because he was willing to make the best of bad situations, he ends up as a king.
And in some ways that it is presented, because Joseph always does what it right, he gets the last laugh on his brothers.
Way to go Joseph!
But that’s not how the Bible presents the Joseph story.
We’ve read this morning the opening chapters of Joseph’s story.
One thing we can say right away:
This is not a revenge story.
And Joseph is not the hero.
But this is a story of redemption.
And along the way, we learn a little bit about our own salvation.
Joseph’s vocation
The first thing we notice in the story is Joseph’s vocation.
Genesis 37:2 “At seventeen years of age, Joseph tended sheep with his brothers.”
Joseph is a shepherd.
Shepherds in that culture were at the bottom of the economic ladder.
There was nothing romantic about being a shepherd.
In fact, years later when Joseph’s family shows up in Egypt, the Egyptians can’t get over the fact that they are shepherds.
Shepherds are dirty and smelly.
They were not part of the in crowd.
You didn’t want to be associated with shepherds.
But when our story starts, Joseph is tending sheep.
Joseph’s status
The next thing we notice in Joseph’s story is that he has a status the rest of his shepherd brothers don’t.
Our story says Joseph gave his father a bad report about the brothers.
Joseph is making his way into upper management at 17.
And then there’s this:
Genesis 37:3 “Now Israel loved Joseph more than his other sons because Joseph was a son born to him in his old age.”
Uh-oh.
Israel or Jacob, the father, loved Joseph more.
This is where Joseph’s story tends to go off the rails and it never recovers.
We’re not being given a lesson on what not to do in a family.
By the time we get to this point in the book of Genesis, we already have a very good picture of Joseph’s dysfunctional family.
The brothers are notorious.
They are not nice guys, for the most part.
We’re not told what the bad report was.
But we do know that Joseph enjoys a place in the father’s heart that the other sons do not have.
Joseph is the chosen one.
Joseph is the favored one.
Jacob himself is a chosen one.. the one through whom the blessing of God’s covenant will flow.
And as the story of Joseph begins, his father Jacob is setting Joseph up as if he will be the Blessed One through whom the messiah will come.
Joseph’s robe
Jacob then gives Joseph a token of his favored status.
Jacob isn’t simply loving Joseph as a chosen one, he wants Joseph to be seen as a chosen one.
Genesis 37:3 “Jacob made a long-sleeved (or multi-colored) robe for Joseph.”
This robe is the stuff of kings.
Of royalty.
Of destiny.
More importantly, this robe is the robe of Promise.
The multiple colors we’ve seen before… the Promise given to Noah after the flood, the Promise that the Offspring of Eve would flow through Noah is in a rainbow.
And here again, we have colors of Promise in the form of a royal robe.
This goes beyond simply being the primary caretaker in the family sheep business.
Joseph’s robe speaks to the anticipation of Promise and Blessing that had been promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
God had told Abraham that kings would come through his offspring and here Jacob is thinking… maybe Joseph is the One.
He dresses him in clothing that speaks to being a king and a promise.
Joseph’s dreams
But that hope of Jacob is embraced by Joseph himself.
Joseph isn’t simply wearing the robe of kings and promise, he’s is dreaming of kings and promise.
Genesis 37:5 “Then Joseph had a dream… there we were binding sheaves of grain in the field.
Suddenly my sheaf stood up, and our sheaves gathered around it and bowed down to my sheaf.”
First, that’s absolutely bizarre.
When was the last time you dreamed of sheaves of grain?
The subject matter is an immediate tip-off something is different here.
Joseph is dreaming about grain.
And the end result is that his brothers acknowledge his status as the king, as the Promised One.
I can think of all sorts of ways to convey that same sentiment, but grain would not be it.
But that’s not the end of it… again… another dream:
Genesis 37:9 “I had another dream, and this time the sun, moon, and eleven stars were bowing down to me.”
The grain is gone.
It’s now the planets and stars.. it is an image from beyond earth.
But the point is the same.
Joseph is being given dreams of destiny. of Promise.
That coat he had been given is now being given interpretation and narrative.
The coat and the dreams speak to the emergence of a Promised One, a King, that is bigger and more majestic than any king known on earth.
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