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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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
Tones
Emotion
Language
Social Tendencies
Anger
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The day kind of has that formless and void feeling.
Our Jesus still sleeps in death.
Keep the doors locked for fear of the Jews.
Normally it’s get back to work day.
Yesterday, the Sabbath, we rested.
Today, we get back onto the horse.
But why? Jesus is dead.
Everything feels formless and void.
It’s as if God went back to the beginning, back to the drawing board.
There’s nothing.
We need some of that marvelous creating work again.
Going back to the beginning would be great.
When there was only God and everything was good.
God spoke and it was.
And it was good.
Not just good, but very good.
The best.
Even when it was formless and void, a place without order, still, it was good, because there was God, and no sin.
No death.
Unlike today.
Today feels formless and void, empty, a wasteland.
And it’s not very good.
It’s bad.
Very bad.
Oh sorrow dread, Christ is dead.
Sure, there was darkness in the beginning too, but the Spirit hovered over the waters.
The darkness now seems so Spirit-less.
The darkness of the cross.
The darkness of the worst Sabbath day ever.
A darkness in our hearts.
A darkness that won’t ever lift.
Thomas won’t even stay with the rest of us; he’s so fed up about everything.
We need that Spirit hovering over us.
We need that Word of God bringing light, bringing “very good.”
But God is gone.
It’s only darkness now; and death.
His death; soon ours.
Oh sorrow dread, God is dead.
What a thought.
God gone.
All around: darkness.
Formless.
Void.
A waste.
No God.
No Spirit.
Nothing hovering.
Nothing working.
Why’d I waste my time?
What did I believe in?
He’s just another in a long line of them.
Teachers.
Mystics.
Rabbis.
Martyrs.
A futile gesture on his part; futile faith on ours.
Nothing’s different.
Nothing’s better.
Sin reigns.
Death comes.
He’s dead.
Except our women say he’s not.
But they’re crazy.
Except Peter and John say he’s not.
They say the tomb is empty.
Except Mary says he’s not.
Mary comes bursting in, not that Mary, the other one, the Magdalene, and she speaks impossibilities: “I saw him!” “I touched him!” “He called me by name.”
Is something bubbling and gurgling in that formlessness and void?
It took the LORD God six days to make all that something out of nothing.
Light.
Day and night.
The dry land.
The seas.
The skies.
The planets.
The animals.
Man.
It hasn’t been six days, only three, but Mary says God’s been busy, creating, recreating, calling things that are not as though they are.
Mary says that the Spirit has resumed his hovering.
All those evenings and mornings God spoke and it was: light, heat, water, life!
Could it be that God has finished his work?
At the end of the six days he rested from his labors.
He saw that all was very good, exactly as it was to be, and he rested.
He made the seventh day holy, set apart.
Rest.
Could that be all that Jesus was doing?
Resting.
Sabbathing.
In the tomb.
On the cross, he did talk about being in paradise and how “it is finished.”
God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.
All of it.
Every bit of it.
Nothing not good.
The Spirit hovered.
That divine “us” created everything and man last, in God’s image, in God’s likeness.
And it wasn’t sort of good or mostly good.
It was very good.
So good, that God could rest.
Could it be the same now?
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