‘Western’ Sermon

One of the assignments of my homiletics students is (will be) to grade a sermon they hear. I therefore applied the assignment to a sermon I heard in Church today. This seemed an unusual mix of great positives and great negatives. The preacher was experienced. The sermon was both topical and exegetical. He knew how to make his point -- although he did so loosely. The main failing, in my view, was that it was a typically Western sermon. God's power in particular was largely implied -- rather than being brought into focus. OBSERVATION: And this tended to make the sermon more abstract than concrete. With divided feelings over its great strengths and great weaknesses, I graded the sermon 50%. Perhaps, if I thought more like a Westerner, 75%.