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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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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I’ve been here with you at Fellowship for almost four months now.
It has been long enough that I’ve got a sense now of all the thing that need to be done around here.
There is so much to do.
And I mean that in the best possible way—there is so much potential and so much opportunity ready to burst open here.
And the problem is, when we look at all this work and opportunity, it can quickly feel overwhelming.
I mean, where do we even start?
How do we prioritize?
How do we funnel all this potential into a vision that helps us know what steps should be taken, and in what order?
Those questions are tied pretty closely with our own faith and walk of discipleship.
Sometimes it feels like following God and living out the path of discipleship to follow Jesus can be a bit overwhelming as well.
Maybe it seems like there are so many vast components to being a Christian that maybe sometimes it seems like we lose track of where we are going and don’t know how to get there.
I want to be a part of the church and I want to be a Christian, but sometimes all this Christian life and all this church stuff feels just a little bit overwhelming.
I ask myself, what am I even doing to grow in the mission that God has given for his people?
How do I even begin?
Where do I start?
What do I have to do?
What must I do?
I don’t think we’re the first ones to ask that question.
In fact, somebody asked a very similar question to Jesus once, and it’s in the Bible.
People who lived in Israel back in the day of Jesus had so many laws and rules and codes to keep, I’m sure for many of them it felt a bit overwhelming at times to keep up with it all.
So, on one occasion Jesus is asked about it.
It’s sort of one of those “where do I start?” kind of questions.
Jesus responds to the question by telling the parable of the good Samaritan.
But I want to stop right here and just consider the question this morning.
What must I do?
There are so many laws, so many rules, so many codes and guidelines.
What must I do?
Here in this church there are Sunday School classes, Bible study groups, small groups, youth group, volunteer to be a teacher, volunteer to be a greeter, volunteer to serve on council, volunteer to help with Love Inc.
I show up for church, I read my Bible, I show up for prayer group.
There is so much.
What must I do?
Where do I even start?
The answer to that begins in this conversation of Luke 10.
Love God and love others.
Love God above all, and love your neighbor as yourself.
Maybe that still doesn’t give us a starting point.
So, the conversation continues to the next question.
And who is my Neighbor?
Actually, the question is much deeper than that.
Luke shares a very important piece of background information about this expert in the law with whom Jesus is talking.
Look at verse 29.
Luke 10:29 NIV
But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
He wanted to justify himself.
He wanted to justify himself.
He wanted a loophole.
He wanted a way to still come out on top.
And he asks, how shall we define who my neighbor is? Can I define my neighbors in such a way that this command to love my neighbor is easily checked off my list?
That this expert in the law even feels the need to justify himself tells us something.
It tells us that he lives in a world in which there are walls of division.
There are some people he associates with and will quickly acknowledge as his neighbors.
And there are other people whom he will never call his neighbors.
Back when I lived in Kalamazoo I owned a house on a street with several neighbors.
Looking back on it now, there were a few neighbors I got to know pretty well.
They had kids who went to the same school as my kids.
I knew where they went to church, so I knew they were Christians.
They were good neighbors.
No, they were great neighbors.
I had another neighbor who was an elderly widower.
When he passed away, his grown son moved in to the house along with his family.
They weren’t mean or anything.
But they were different.
He didn’t mow the lawn very much.
Which I guess didn’t matter because he didn’t water the lawn at all—so eventually it stopped growing.
Which I guess didn’t matter because the entire front yard eventually became a parking lot of cars—half of which didn’t run and were only there for spare parts.
He was my neighbor.
But I admit, I didn’t see him the same as the others.
And I didn’t treat him the same as the others.
Then there were two other houses across the street.
Both of these houses were rental properties.
Both of these houses needed serious painting and repair.
Which I guess didn’t matter because they had shrubs so overgrown that the bushes pretty much swallowed up the houses anyway.
These were the houses where the police would show up in the middle of the night because of domestic violence.
I have to admit.
I never knew the people who lived in those houses.
I never even knew their names.
I admit, I didn’t even care.
Then in 2010 I moved out to Denver.
I moved during the time when the housing bubble collapsed.
And my house I owned in Kalamazoo dropped so much of its value that I lost all my equity and then some.
So, when I moved to Denver, my family had to find a house to rent—we weren’t able to buy.
Now I had become the renter.
Now I was the guy on the block that I never wanted on the block.
That was an eye-opening experience for me.
I suppose there were neighbors in Denver who looked at me the same way I looked at the renters down the street when I lived in Kalamazoo.
Now I was the trash on the block that nobody wanted.
For those who believe in karma, I suppose maybe I had that coming.
For those who believe in grace, I was confronted with a moment of confession and an opportunity for redemption.
He wanted to justify himself.
We all look for ways to justify the divisions that we build up between us and other certain sorts of people.
Maybe you’ve got a neighbor like that on your street—someone whom you would rather never associate; I want nothing to do with them.
Maybe it’s another student at school.
Maybe it’s a coworker.
Maybe there’s someone who isn’t going to know that God loves them until they realize there is a neighbor who loves them too.
It was a few weeks ago that our seasoned saints group did that exercise where we all had to fill out a little slip of paper using a few words or phrases that we think describes this church.
Not surprisingly, there were several people describe this church as friendly and welcoming.
I was also intrigued by the occasional comment that pointed out: “Not as welcoming and friendly as they think they are.”
That’s insightful.
That’s someone who notices that we all have this human tendency to gravitate towards that same people—people who are familiar, people like us.
I stand in the same circle with the same others in the same spot in the lobby and talk about the same things.
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