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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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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The depths
Where does prayer begin?
For this
psalmist, prayer—like all genuine
theology—begins in pain.
Prayer is
not reciting a formula learned by rote
and repeated at a prescribed moment:
“Now I lay me down to sleep; I pray
the Lord my soul to keep” or even,
“Our Father, who art in heaven,
hallowed be Thy name.”
Nor is it the
cozy communion of a self-satisfied
soul contemplating the comforts of a
well-ordered world where no one’s
stomach is growling, no one’s heart is
broken—a kind of syrupy sentimentalism
or a God’s-in-his-heaven-andall-
is-right-with-the-world mentality.
Whatever else you might think about
that kind of prayer, it’s a million miles
away from where the psalmist lives.
Look at his verbs: I cried out.
I
sought and stretched out.
I groaned
and was troubled.
I mused and
pondered.
I was dazed and could not
speak.
All night long I was in deep
distress.
For this supplicant, prayer
truly begins in pain.
What caused his pain?
We don’t
know.
Perhaps it was some national
crisis or catastrophe that had befallen
the children of Israel, as when the
Babylonian army marched into
Jerusalem and destroyed the temple
and carried away thousands of Jews
into captivity, leaving the nation
devastated.
Perhaps this psalm
reflects the experience of the Exile,
the cajoling sneer and contempt of
the captors’ taunts: “Where now is
your God?
Is he blind that he cannot
see?
Is he deaf that he will not hear?
Is he paralyzed that he is not able to
move?” Or maybe it was a little more
personal than that: “Out of the
depths have I cried unto you,” says
the psalmist.
“O Lord, hear my cry.”
Depths?
What are the depths?
The
depths are those times when a
mother or father hold an all-night
vigil between the day their child was
well and the day he will be well
again.
The depths are when the
doctor comes in the room, takes your
hand, and says, “I’m sorry; there’s
nothing else we can do;” when the
roses have faded, the candlelight
flickers dimly in your marriage, and
she looks at you over a plate of leftover
Tuna Helper and says, “I don’t
love you anymore.
I found somebody
else.
I won’t be here tomorrow when
you get home;” when that unofficial
committee wants to meet with you
after a Sunday evening service to say:
“Oh nothing personal, pastor.
We
love you; we just feel your ministry’s
no longer effective in this church.”
Those are the depths.
Sooner or
later, all of us know these depths.
Prayer is born in these depths.
Track 22
There are four movements or
stanzas in this psalm.
We’ve been
dealing with the first one—six verses
that we might call the troubles or the
depths.
There are two images for the
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