Sermon Tone Analysis
Overall tone of the sermon
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Who Do You Talk Like – A Sailor or a Saint?
Ephesians 4:25-5:2
Speech – our talk – it gives us away.
We express our views and opinions, on a myriad of issues from
politics to religion to everyday common-sense matters.
We express our attitudes, our train of thought, our
emotions, even though we may not have verbalized or expressed them yet.
We are an open book that people
read all the time, and what we say and do or don’t say or don’t do defines us.
So who do you talk like – a sailor
or a saint?
I hasten to offer my apologies to all sailors who have gotten the reputation for being foul-mouthed.
That character probably has a history back to pirate days.
I just needed a catchy title…
Back to speech and talk which may give us away as a foolish person or a wise sage.
My brother Les in
his younger day preached a little around the Hornbrook charge.
He was pretty good.
One thing he picked up
along the way that he shared with me was, “The more you think you know, the more you know how much you
don’t know.”
Now, how many times did I refer to knowing or not knowing something?
…Three “knows” and
one “think,” yet that was a “wise” statement and a humble one too.
Today we are going to talk about talk and what Paul has to say with what comes out of our mouth or,
more expressly, our heart.
It is said that talk is cheap.
But the kind of talk Christ calls us to utter ― kind,
compassionate, caring discourse ― may be the rarest of commodities and yet, the building block of true
Christian conversation.
It’s a simple but reliable principle of human life: how people talk reveals a lot about who they are.
Imagine a person comes up to you and says this: (in an English accent) “I was out driving the other day when I
had a punctured tyre (tiare).
I pulled off to the verge and opened the boot.
There was no spare.
So, I opened
the bonnet.
Fortunately, a lorry (lori) driver saw the raised bonnet and stopped to help me out.”
Anyone who follows that has likely spent some time in the British Isles.
Winston Churchill once said
the English and Americans are “two great peoples divided by a common language,” and this is a case in point.
Want an American translation?
“I was out driving the other day when I had a flat tire.
I pulled off to the
shoulder and opened the trunk.
There was no spare.
So I opened the hood.
Fortunately, a truck driver saw the
raised hood and stopped to help me out.”
2
The way we talk can also reveal something about how committed we are to being Christian.
It has
nothing to do with accent, or vocabulary, or grammar.
It has everything to do with how we use this God-given
gift of speech.
Do our words hurt, or do they heal?
Are they blathering, or are they wise?
Do they work in
service to truth or falsehood?
Do our words build up, or do they tear down?
I’ve got a couple good stories
about miscommunication and misinterpretation, with consequences.
A long-time Presbyterian mission worker,
Lois Kroehler, who spent most of her life aiding the Cuban church, once told of a visit she and American civilrights activist Jesse Jackson paid to Cuban President Fidel Castro.
Through a government translator, Jackson
prayed that the “Balm of Gilead” might be provided for Cuba.
The translator thought he’d heard that God
might deliver a bomb to the island nation.
Castro, Kroehler reported, nearly swallowed his cigar.
Even more seriously and consequentially was an episode near the end of WWII.
One wrongly translated
word contributed to the atomic conclusion of World War II.
In July 1945, many influential Japanese, including
the emperor, were prepared to consider the terms of the Potsdam ultimatum to surrender or face utter
annihilation.
Before responding, the Japanese cabinet felt that they needed more time, so they announced that
their policy was mo-ku-sat’-su, meaning (1) to refrain from comment, or (2) to ignore.
Unfortunately, the
foreign press translated the policy as “ignore” rather than “refrain” as intended.
It was impossible for the
Japanese to correct the wrong interpretation.
Hostilities intensified.
The hope for settlement was lost.
Within
weeks, the world saw the flames of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Russian invasion of Manchuria, and the
division of Korea into north and south – all because one word was misrepresented by the press.
“Put away falsehood; let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another.”
That one sounds like a no-brainer.
Christians are supposed to speak the truth.
Everybody knows that!
We like
to imagine ourselves as fundamentally trustworthy people.
But not so fast.
Sometimes we’re led to ask the
question Pontius Pilate famously asked, “What is truth?”
What about all the “little white lies” we tell, intended
to not hurt another person’s feelings?
What about when the dental hygienist asks whether we really do floss
twice a day?
What about the expenses we deduct on our tax returns?
Telling the truth isn’t always so
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