Thoughts, lectures, sermons, and course downloads for my students.
Posted on Tuesday, July 15th, 2008 at 7:30 pm
For sermons on Matthew before chapter 14 look for the other pages of Matthew Sermons.
The Preacher Who Lost His Head 02 Matt 14-1-13 John the Baptist.mp3
When God Shows Up for Lunch Matthew 14-13.mp3
When You Get That Sinking Feeling Matt 14-22-33.mp3
How is Your Heart? Matthew 15:1-2002 Matthew 15-1.mp3
Posted on Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 at 4:39 pm
Yesterday Dr. Elmer Towns stopped by and sat in my office. It was an honor that I am not worthy of. Mr. Sunday School sitting in my office. It caused me to take a trip back to the times when I had used his material in trying my hardest to get my church and Sunday School to grow. I was never very good at that even when I used Dr. Town’s great materials.
I first started pastoring a church by helping my father when I would come home from college for the summer. As some of you might remember my father was older (50) when I was born so by the time I graduated from college he was 71 and I was drafted to do much of the work at the church. Only a few years later he had a stroke and passed away, about six months after my mom had died and I was left, at about 24 or so with a church and no real idea of what I was doing.
The building that we were in had been built by the church back when it was young and vibrant; growing and strong. At that time the neighborhood had been middle class and the church had been 350-400 strong. The decline in the church and the neighborhood started long before I was working there, but I became a convenient scapegoat. Since the building still had a sizeable mortgage it was difficult to keep everything paid with the shrinking congregation.
As time went on more and more of the older people began to say that I was “not like my dad” and leave the church. Meanwhile my efforts to recruit from the neighborhood were next to impossible because it had become much different in both race and economic status. I remember many, many mornings cleaning crack pipes off of the front of the church before going inside and answering the door several times during the day to those who needed “gas money,” “money for a fan belt” or any other scheme they could think of to buy another crack rock. The church was getting broken into pretty regularly. Once the communion set was even stolen.
While our crowds were shrinking, a Haitian church down the street was bursting at the seams. I thought, why not sell the church building to the Haitians, who could use it more than we could, and take the money and move out west into an area where more of our members actually lived. When I brought the idea up some of the members acted as if I had wanted us to apply for a liquor license (which is worse than almost anything in the Baptist church, first comes liquor, then that leads to dancing).
After some pretty ugly business meetings and some people showing up to vote whom I hadn’t seen in thirty years, we finally voted to sell the building. What really bothered me was the number of people who kept coming up to me saying “its really sad that you’ve got to sell the church.” WE ARE NOT SELLING THE CHURCH! I would tell them, we are moving. They just could not wrap their heads around the difference between the building and the church.
We did move, I worked hard to try to get things going but they never really took off. I later came to realize that once a church starts into serious decline like it had long before I had started there, it is almost impossible to turn it around. I gave it my best shot and still feel a lot of guilt about not making it work. I still think sometimes that if I had worked a little harder, or tried some other program, or done more EE, or something else that maybe the church would have grown. I am Calvinistic enough to know better, but our guilt doesn’t always allow us to be rational.
One of the most important things that I learned in that experience is not to follow a great and well loved pastor, even if he is your father. You cannot win. If you change things you have no respect. If you leave things the same, it is your fault that the place is going downhill. I learned that lesson well and will never make that mistake again, I can assure you.
Every May, the first Sunday, the church had what was called “Home Coming Day” in which old members would come back, there would be dinner on the grounds, etc. It had been in times past, an incredible day when people would come from out of town and old friends would gather. It became less and less of that as the friends got older and older. In 1995 it was the 50th anniversary of the church. Also in 1995 I had told the church that I was going to be leaving the pastorate to work on my Ph.D. I was to be moving to Chicago in a few weeks and so that homecoming day was the last one for me, and it would be the first time that the church would be without a pastor named Lamerson. I remember it well and I had written a poem for the occasion.
Now let me tell you that I am not a poet. I don’t know about meter, feet, iambic pentameter or any of those things but writing the poem was sort of therapeutic for me. With that backstory, I am putting my work on the board and asking you not to laugh at it. It is not good, not even mediocre, in fact it is pretty embarrassing, but it reminds me of the story that used to be mine.
It’s hard to believe that it’s been fifty years
Since the church started, amidst laughter and tears
There were those who said that it never would last
This work of the Lord that is now standing fast
It began as a dream and an answer to prayer
For the founder and others who met with him there
They said God had called him to start a new labor
Ignore Him they couldn’t for He had brought favor
On this small band of people now meeting with purpose
As they prayed and they worked, God blessed this service
They called a young man to lead them that day
And no one could know what results that would pay
As he preached and he called on those he did know
And slowly but surely the group was to grow
They grew even more as word got around
Word of a new church on the west side of town
Many were touched by the words of the pastor
And when they touched others, it grew even faster
Til finally one day he met with the board,
“We’ll build a new building, we’ll just trust the Lord”
And build it they did, with a great deal of speed
“We will look to the Lord to supply what we need”
The building was built and the people all came
To see this big structure and worship His name
As the pastor grew older, the people grew sad
A new young man came, “He’s not like his dad”
“He’s new and he’s different” the people would say
“We’ve done this for years, but never that way”
And slowly they left with a word here and there
“His father was better, he just doesn’t care”
The young man was trying to do what he could
He preached them the Scriptures as he knew that he should
But ever so slowly the truth was made clear
If change did not happen, then death was soon near
Some said they should move and the young man agreed
“This building’s too big, it’s more space than we need”
But others were mad and some misunderstood
In spite of it all he did what he could
But many were angry, and some caused great strife
In this move to the west, the church fought for her life
Now some things are different, things are not the same
Some long for the old days when things had not changed
Others stand far off and cackle with glee
“The church will now die, should’ve listened to me”
God’s church marches on in spite of it all
The Kingdom goes forth Summer, Winter, and Fall
It cannot be stopped by the work of mere mortals
The work is of God looking down from the portals
Of heaven is He and those others who call
That this is Christ’s church, no matter how small
It’s hard to believe that it’s been fifty years
So much has been great, yet so many tears
The young man is leaving in this fiftieth year
But God isn’t going, He will always be here
Onward . . . .
Luzene and Ruth Lamerson’s youngest boy
Posted on Tuesday, July 15th, 2008 at 6:29 pm
As a follow up to the last blog about the sentimental value of old buildings I remembered my favorite episode of the TV series NIGHT GALLERY. This was my favorite show when I was in the sixth and seventh grade. It was hosted by Rod Serling and had stories very similar to those you might have seen on The Twilight Zone (another favorite of mine, but only in reruns since I was too young to watch them in first run). In fact I believe that Serling was a genius, particularly at combining the bizarre with the melancholy.
The episode of Tim Riley’s bar is one in which a middle age man begins to face his mortality as a result of the tearing down of a local neighborhood bar in which many of his greatest memories have taken place; his first date, his welcome home after the war, and his meetings with his father. At the point of the story he finds himself alone and the tearing down of the bar seems to be the tearing down of a part of his past that can never be recaptured. You can watch the episode in one of two ways: One you can purchase the series, and there are some great stories here, from Amazon by clicking this link. The other way is to watch it on you tube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuWX4ZZv2YQ&feature=related) which cuts you out of a lot of the background that the DVD collection provides.
I of course recommend getting the entire season. There are some real gems if you like fantasy and soft sci-fi.
As to the story at hand, the hero sees his favorite watering hole being torn down and realizes that he must say goodbye to many things that he has loved. Here is my updated version: Goodbye Andy Griffith and Opie, and Barny nipping it in the bud; Goodbye picking up hitchhiker because the person probably just needed a ride; Goodbye trusting a man just because he was a minister; So long to your favorite athlete who stayed with his team because he loved it, not because of money; Goodbye to the time when America was looked upon as a nation that would always be the land that did the right and moral thing with prisoners of war; and more and more, goodbye to the church where, like at Cheers, everybody knows your name. We have torn down a lot of buildings over the years but the questions is, are we really any better off?
We can microwave our dinners, set our coffee pots to percolate before we get up, and even have books read to us while we do other things. We have more time saving devices than any culture in the history of civilization, but what do we do with that time?
This afternoon I was able to see some of the fruit of my time. Two of my former students Eric and Tommy passed their ordination exams at presbytery. For those of you not familiar with our system of government, this is a big deal. I didn’t have much to do with either of these two men passing their exam. I taught them a few things, but these are men whose gifts are great and far outshine the small things that I helped them with. As I saw them pass the exam, I was proud. I felt like I was perhaps a small brick, or better a little piece of morter in the building of their lives. I was so proud of them. If all that I do in my life is influence students like Tommy and Erick (and believe me there are many professors who likely had much more influence than I) it will be a building project that I am proud of. No matter when my building comes down.
A building showing its age,
DrSamLam
Posted on Tuesday, July 15th, 2008 at 11:47 am
As I sit in my office today I can see a gas station being torn down right outside my window. In between lightning, rain, and other such normal Florida summer sights, I see a large machine simply tearing down the building that has been standing since I was a student here (1990). There is something about buildings being torn down that makes me melancholy, especially in the rain. It seems like buildings ought to last at least as long as people.
I have this theory that the tearing down of buildings disturb us because it reminds us that our building will be torn down. We can make all the repairs that we like, but it won’t last. We fix the upper stories with eye glasses and hair pieces; the lower stories with knee braces and special shoes, but the problems with the construction continue to plague us as our building gets older and older. We see buildings that look as though they should last forever being torn down and at some level we think, “That is happening to me.” Time is our bulldozer and it continues along no matter what we put in its way. We can lie about our age, but the building is coming down at some point, no matter what we say.
Years ago there was at my father’s church a building that we called, appropriately enough, “the old building.” It had been the place where the first church had started and over the years had become more and more of a problem. The roof leaked, the water pooled in the floor when there was a bad rain, there was no way to properly lock the place up, it was time for it to go. I remember when it finally came time to tear that old building down what an emotional experience it was for me. The day before the demolition company came I walked through the twenty or so rooms looking around and was flooded with memories of what had happened in those rooms. I had been in sixth grade Sunday School and won a fishing trip for memorizing the books of the Bible; I had sat in the big room watching movies (or films as we were required to call them) like “Thief in the Night” and “If the footman Tire You (a film so violent that it would receive at least a pg13 today); I had come to know much about the Lord’s grace and love in those rooms many times through the words of my Dad or Mom. In another day the rooms would be gone, the building would cease to exist. In another fifteen or twenty years very few people would even remember that building.
I realized then that I needed to live my life so that when the building is gone I will have left something behind. Maybe just a small footprint of a few blogs on a website, maybe a couple of sermons that someone found helpful, or maybe just a life that was honorable to our Lord, but something. If you happen to drive by a building that is being torn down, think about what that building accomplished in its day. What did it mean to those who used it? Will the memory last? Then think of your own activities, the building that you are housed in is someday going to come down. Will anyone remember having visited it? I’m trying, despite my building being a little broken down. And You?
Onward . . .
DrSamLam
Posted on Sunday, July 13th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
These are the Logos lectures from the summer class (so far) If you are not a student in the class these will not make much sense to you so I wouldn’t bother downloading them.
Posted on Monday, July 7th, 2008 at 9:53 am
As my Greek students know, I have spent a good bit of time studying how the memory works and how to better remember things like vocabulary for Greek, Hebrew, German, French, and a few other languages I have studied. One of the great things about NT Greek is that we have a closed corpus. That is, we know exactly what books the student will be reading in Greek and can focus on the vocabulary for those books alone. When a student is learning classical Greek, for example, one cannot do this because the list of books to be read is very large.
With the NT we know that there are around 5,430 different words in the NT (give or take a few) and that these words occur a total of around 138,000 times. We also know that of those 5,400 words there are only about 315 that occur more than 50 times. So a student can learn all the words that occur more than fifty times in the NT and manage to read the NT with a lexicon. I teach my students that it is almost counterproductive to learn words that occur less than about 25 times.
For a list of these words and a wonderful online tool for learning them check out http://wermuthsgreekbook.wordpress.com/2008/03/06/58/ This is a web page by a friend of mine named Robert Wermuth. He blogs about ancient Greek, a very exciting subject I can assure you, and has written a fine book on learning the paradigms for first year students.
Check out his page, his PDF of all the words that occur more than ten times, and his program for testing yourself with these words. If you are a Greek student you will be glad that you did.
Onward to greater exegesis . . .
DrSamLam
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