Sermon Tone Analysis

Ever been in a high stakes, high emotion conversation with a friend, a colleague, or a neighbor?

Of course!

One such conversation for me happened on a snowy morning in New Jersey a few months into my first church placement out of seminary.

A blizzard had come through that previous night and dumped several inches of snow on the ground, which meant before I could leave for the office, I needed to do the painstaking task of burying out my car from underneath the snow.

After several shovel piles, I noticed that my neighbor was peering through his window at me.

I knew my neighbor only as an acquaintance, but he and I got along well, so I smiled and waved.

Unbeknownst to me, however, as I dug out my car, I was heaping the snow higher on his car next to mine.

After a few more of my shovel tosses, he flung open his door and yelled out, “Hey Idiot, stop digging out the snow!”

I looked at him totally bewildered.

I remember shrugging my shoulders and wondering why he would make such a cruel comment.

Before I could even respond, he ran outside with his snow shovel and began to shovel the snow from on top of his car onto mine.

Still not realizing what started this whole confrontation, I asked him to please stop piling my car with snow and undoing the work I had just done.

But rather than explaining himself or helping me understand what I was doing wrong, he said something that stayed with me to this very day.

He said, “And you call yourself a Pastor."

All of a sudden, I found myself in a high-stakes, high-emotion conversation at 7 o'clock in the morning over shoveling snow.

My neighbor saw my behavior as something intentional and destructive, associated it with my faith and vocation, and then made a conclusion about me without ever engaging me in a single word of dialogue other than to call me an idiot.

He made a brash judgment.

And quite honestly, so did I.

Even though I held my tongue in the moment, I thought about him in all kinds of negative ways throughout the rest of the day.

Now, this situation did come to a good ending when later that night, I knocked on his door and entered into a difficult, but intentional, conversation toward understanding and forgiveness for both of us.

I learned that his mother had just passed away, and he was working through his grieving process, which had inadvertently crashed into me.

In talking through the issues, we prayed together and remained good neighbors until the day I moved.

Some of my hardest moments have involved conversations with misunderstandings, confusion, and prejudgments about people or circumstances.

These kinds of moments crash into our lives on a regular basis.

Probably on the daily for most of us, and they include every arena of life - at work, with our families, in our relationships, in politics.

And they also crash into our faith.

In his book Crucial Conversations, [[show pic]] Joseph Grenny offers tools to engage these dialogues with health and effectiveness.

I highly commend this book to you.

It’s written from a business perspective, but it can help you engage crucial conversations in every part of your life.

His premise states that for the conversations that matter most, we typically do our worst.

He wrote, “We’re designed wrong.

When conversations turn from routine to crucial, we’re often in trouble.

That’s because emotions don’t exactly prepare us to converse effectively.

Countless generations of genetic shaping have driven human beings to handle crucial conversations with flying fists and fleet feet, not intelligent persuasion and gentle attentiveness.”

(Grenny, page 5)

The long term affect of flying fists and fleet feet can be devastating and far-reaching on families, relationships, vocations, politics, and certainly matters of faith.

Enagang crucial conversations matter.

* How many families could still be together?

* How many communities could still be thriving?

* How many more people could know the saving grace of Jesus had it been for the courage of others to enter into life’s tough conversations?

Yes, it’s hard, but our fearful neglect of doing hard things shouldn’t be the reason why our lives, our relationships, families, communities, and faith break under the weight of tension.

Throughout his ministry, Jesus engaged the hard conversations, even the awkward and the tense!

He encountered all kinds of controversies, which threatened his ministry at best, but at worst, posed violence against his life.

Interestingly, though, Jesus never shy’ed away from these tough moments.

But rather, he diffused them and leveraged these moments as opportunities for life-giving, grace altering truth-telling.

And the question I want to help you answer today is, “How?”

How did Jesus do this?

Today marks the beginning of a new series called "The Jesus Conversations.”

Jesus modeled a different way of engagement to bring about restoration in the world, not division.

He engaged the most difficult issues of our human condition, including prejudice, sexual trauma, affluence, and power so that we may experience healing restoration here and now through God’s salvation.

Jesus’ crucial conversations offer all of us a way to invest our time into the difficult tensions of our life for the opportunity to invite those on the other side of the conversation into the community of faith where they may discover God’s grace and forgiveness.

We call this invest and invite, and it’s our strategic approach to help our family, friends, and colleagues find and follow Jesus.

As we prepare for Easter over the next few weeks, which is the most open opportunity for inviting others into church, may we learn together from Jesus how to get onto the restoration side of life’s prejudices so that we might see God’s Kingdom come in Miami as it is in heaven… together, as healed and restored men and women.

The Gospel-writer, Luke, recorded this conversation between Jesus and a lawyer, beginning in chapter 10, verses 25-37.

Let me share the conversation with you.

An expert in religious law confronted Jesus with with a test question, asking: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”

As the conversation unfolded between them, it becomes clear that the lawyer is really asking something different.

Has that ever happened to you?

In my experience, most crucial conversations begin exactly like this one.

The lawyer asked a question about one thing, but he really wanted to address something altogether different and trap Jesus in a semantic argument about the law.

Classic passive aggression.

If Jesus had taken the bait and answered the question at face value, then his answer certainly would have incited conflict and played into the lawyer’s intention to trap Jesus.

But that’s not what happened.

Rather, Jesus showed his own emotional intelligence by asking a clarifying and redirecting question in response.

Jesus asked, 26 “What is written in the Law?” he replied.

“How do you read it?”

27 [The lawyer] answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”

Jesus asked a question and gave the lawyer an opportunity to demonstrate his own understanding of the law, even acknowledging the lawyer, saying:

28 “You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied.

“Do this and you will live.”

I think for many of us when facing a crucial conversation - myself included - we speak, and then wait our turn to speak again, and then start shouting to make our point.

But Jesus went an entirely different direction.

Instead of shouting, Jesus dignified the lawyer, even though the lawyer set out to test Jesus.

That’s the kind of radical grace with which Jesus led his life first of all, and then entered into crucial conversations.

He always gave dignity to the person on the other side him, regardless of their motives.

And in doing so, Jesus dispelled the lawyer’s poor intention before it ever got a chance to escalate into conflict.

Think about the last crucial conversation you had… what if you had extended dignity to that person first before that conversation ever started?

Would the outcome have been different?

If we follow this way… if we listened first, and listen well, and then ask great questions, then undoubtedly, nearly all of our crucial conversations would resolve before they ever disintegrated into something that we would later regret.

As you encounter life’s tensions, Do something crucial: engage the conversation.

Listen first, then ask great questions.

But this particular conversation didn’t end there.

Luke recorded, But [the lawyer] wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?”

Well, obviously, the lawyer knew the law.

He knew what to do.

He knew what God expected of him: to love God and love his neighbor as himself, but here it becomes clear that the lawyer couldn't reconcile these commands with his own judgmental behavior, so he asked Jesus another trick question: Who is my neighbor?

Once again, Jesus used his emotional intelligence to perceive a deeper underlying question from the lawyer.

Jesus listened and listened well, and the true question Jesus perceived from the lawyer was: “Do I really need to love all of my neighbors?”

And let’s be honest, was ask the same question, too.

This question makes sense.

And here the conversation turned from the theological to the Uber practical.

There are people in our lives who are really hard to love.

Everybody's got that crazy bald neighbor who piles up snow on the car.

We’ve all got those crazy family members and those annoying colleagues, but we also have something much deeper happening in our hearts… in the shadow places of which we rarely speak, but lay dormant until a confrontation raises them these thoughts to the surface of our mind:

I know God commands us to love God and love our neighbors as ourselves, but

* I can’t imagine showing love to those people.

* I don’t know how I could ever love people who live there.

* I’m not sure that I can love people who believe that.

* It’s not possible to love people who look like that.

* I can’t love someone who would say that… or do that… or think that…