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.
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Anger
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Conscientiousness
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Emotional Range
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Welcome
Announcements, Joys, & Concerns
Gathering Song #701
Lord, prepare me to be a sanctuary, pure and holy, tried and true.
With thanksgiving, I'll be a living sanctuary for you.
Call to Worship
Leader: We will give thanks to you, O LORD, with our whole heart; we will tell of all your wonderful deeds.
All: We will be glad and exult in you;
we will sing praise to your name, O Most High.
—from , NRSV
Leader: O magnify the LORD with me.
All: Let us exalt God’s name together!
—from , NRSV
Opening Prayer
Hymn #175: Seek Ye First
Seek ye first the kingdom of God
with all your heart.
Love the Lord your God
with all your soul.
Love the Lord your God
with all your mind.
Love the Lord your God
with all that you are.
and its righteousness,
And all these things shall be added unto you.
Allelu, alleluia!
Ask, and it shall be given unto you;
seek, and you shall find.
Knock, and the door shall be opened unto you.
Allelu, alleluia!
You shall not live by bread alone,
but by every word.
That proceeds from the mouth of God.
Allelu, alleluia!
Confession
Merciful God,
you pardon all who truly repent and turn to you.
We humbly confess our sins and ask your mercy.
We have not loved you with a pure heart, nor have we loved our neighbor as ourselves.
We have not done justice, loved kindness, or walked humbly with you, our God.
90
Have mercy on us, O God, in your loving-kindness.
In your great compassion, cleanse us from our sin.
Create in us a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within us.
Do not cast us from your presence, or take your Holy Spirit from us.
Restore to us the joy of your salvation and sustain us with your bountiful Spirit through Jesus Christ, our Lord.
Amen.
Have mercy on us, O God, in your loving-kindness.
In your great compassion, cleanse us from our sin.
Create in us a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within us.
Do not cast us from your presence,
or take your Holy Spirit from us.
Restore to us the joy of your salvation and sustain us with your bountiful Spirit through Jesus Christ, our Lord.
Amen.
and renew a right spirit within us.
Do not cast us from your presence,
or take your Holy Spirit from us.
Restore to us the joy of your salvation and sustain us with your bountiful Spirit through Jesus Christ, our Lord.
Amen.
—based on
Declaration of Forgiveness
Gloria Patri (Glory to God)
Glory be to the Fatherand to the Son and to the Holy Ghost.As it was in the beginning,it is now and ever shall be,world without end.Amen, amen.
Musical Meditation: Tom Smart
Witnessing God’s Work: Welcome Pastor Hosea Nelson Kyasooka
Prayer for Illumination (understanding)
Mark
Message: The Greatest Commandment
Next week, we’ll begin working our way through the ten commandments.
Surprise - it will only be a 6 week series.
Instead of breaking it up into one week per commandment, we’ll be breaking it into two three week sections.
Three weeks on loving God and three weeks on loving neighbor.
This is a natural break in the flow of the commandments.
The first four are on how we nurture our relationship with God and the last six are about living out our relationship with God in the context of human relationships.
When it comes down to it, the decalogue - fancy word for the ten commandments - is all about relationship.
Trouble in the text
The commandments are often misused or are cherry picked out of context.
They aren’t about a list of rules that should or shouldn’t be left in front of a courthouse.
They aren’t some magic guide to the perfect life.
They aren’t a plan to earn your way into heaven.
Trouble in the world
Frankly, I don’t care if they are carved on a big stone in front of any building.
For many, if not most, people, they have come to be little more than a symbol of the “us vs them” culture wars.
They are right up there with plain red starbucks cups and “happy holidays”.
In our passage from Mark, Jesus is being texted by some tricky folks who have been trying to use the law of the Hebrew Bible to earn their salvation.
So they ask Jesus, out of all these, which is the most important.
And Jesus points them back to the foundation of all the commandments - something called the Shema.
The Shema is referred to in the preamble to the commandments.
“I am the Lord your God.” God is saying, “remember this covenant we made in which everything that matters is our relationship - my love for you and your love for me.
Here’s some framework for what that looks like.”
The commandments aren’t the magic bullet for a peaceful society.
They are a description of what living into the covenant looks like.
Grace in the text
They aren’t about guilt or pride - they are about covenant.
Loving God is hard enough.
Loving neighbor is even harder.
But that’s what this all boils down to.
Hebrew - the language in which the commandments were written, as well as the scripture Jesus is quoting in our passage from Mark, is a language of verbs, not nouns.
Many of the nouns in Hebrew are derived from verbs.
A change to a verb in a sentence changes the entire meaning significantly.
There are entire verb tenses used to change the intensity of the verb’s meaning.
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