This Sunday was our Rally Day, the start of sunday school. We have a small sunday school that is just getting restarted. Some would probably say it isn’t worthwhile, but in general I think based partly on Matt 18 and a lot on other places, that is not an option of a church. The congregation that refuses to instruct its kids is building up some serious debts I’d rather not consider.
In any case, since the order of service was full, this sermon is a good page shorter than normal. The Word Cloud is interesting in that there are a whole bunch of words that end up roughly the same size. It was also interesting to me that Jesus was still on of the largest. While writing and delivering, I felt this sermon was a large amount of law and little gospel. I was concerned about that. If my training had been Reformed instead of Lutheran it would not have been as big a problem. The text for the day provided the outline. Big chunks of it were law (i.e. do this, don’t do that) from Jesus. It is very textual, but almost becuase of that I felt skewed to the law. The word cloud makes me feel better. As long as Jesus is big in the cloud, the gospel should come through louder.
Overall I got the impression that there are some real strong moments, if you tracked with the sermon, but if you didn’t it was probably rather dry. If you didn’t get the law proclamation and feel convicted, then the gospel and how we live together probably didn’t make much sense. I saw some faces that were clearly with me, and some very bored.