Do you know Sumner Redstone? His autobiography is called “A Passion to Win.”

In the days when he was chairman of Viacom, Redstone ruled over an empire which included CBS, Paramount, Blockbuster, Simon and Schuster, and about half the channels on your cable system. As a young man, he graduated first in his class at Boston Latin, sailed through Harvard in three years, learned Japanese and decoded messages for the O.S.S. (forerunner of the CIA) during World War II, and argued cases before the Supreme Court—all before beginning his business career.

Not your average joe.

In 1979, Sumner Redstone checked into Boston’s Copley Plaza Hotel. Sometime after midnight he smelled smoke and made the mistake of opening the door. Immediately he was engulfed in flames. Just down the hall, his co-worker opened his door and stepped into the corridor — and was burned to death.

Redstone staggered across his room and managed to open a window. He was able to climb onto a ledge just outside his third-floor window and kneel there, his right hand clinging to the windowsill. Flames shot out the window, roasting his arm and hand. His legs had been burned to the arteries and now his arm was charring. He thought if he could just hold on a little longer, surely help was on the way.

What he did not know was that Copley had not wanted anyone to know they had a problem and had not called the fire department.

For what seemed an eternity, Redstone held on to the ledge. “The pain was excruciating,” he writes, “but I refused to let go. That way was death.”

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It was near midnight when the phone rang and Pastor Jim Cymbala answered. A pastor in South Dakota was on the phone. He wanted the Brooklyn pastor to know God had laid the inner city on his heart and seemed to be directing him to bring his family to New York. Pastor Jim listened politely, then told him how things were there.

Jim and Carol Cymbala were just beginning the work which would become the great Brooklyn Tabernacle. In those days, only a few people were meeting, the finances were small, and both the pastor and his wife were holding down two jobs to make ends meet. That night, he promised the South Dakota pastor he would ask the Lord to direct their steps.

One week later almost to the minute, the phone rang again. “We’re coming!” the South Dakota pastor said. “My wife, two kids, and I are packing up and leaving for New York tomorrow!” The Lord had spoken so clearly to them, he said, they had no doubt this was what they were to do.

This surprising turn of events unnerved Pastor Cymbala. What are these folks expecting from him? He had no work for them and no place for them to stay. He had not invited them to come to New York and yet they were on their way.

He asked the preacher to call him when they got to New Jersey.

Four days later, the phone call came. They were almost to New York. Jim ran to the store and bought the cheapest steaks he could find. Relating this story in “The Church God Blesses” (Zondervan, 2002), Pastor Cymbala says, “We didn’t have much money, but we wanted to be as hospitable and gracious as possible.”

That evening the Cymbalas received the young husband and wife and two beautiful children into their home. Over supper, they listened to their plans to make their lives count for God in New York City. Jim writes, “I was too shy and inexperienced to ask about their former pastorate or how they were able to leave South Dakota on such short notice.”

Soon the question arose as to where they could stay. Eventually, Jim and Carol decided they could make them a bedroom on the second floor of the church. “It wasn’t much but an elderly lady lived up there in a tiny apartment and another church member lived on the premises with her daughter.”

During the Friday night activities at the church, the visitors met some members of the congregation. On Sunday, Pastor Cymbala introduced them to the church. “I noticed he had gotten friendly with some of the members very quickly.”

Everything was going fine. Or so it seemed.

Then everything began to unravel.

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G. Avery Lee died on December 23 in Lake Charles. Readers with New Orleans backgrounds will remember this one-of-a-kind pastor who served St. Charles Avenue Baptist Church from 1961 to 1980. He was 92. A memorial service will be held at St. Charles Avenue Baptist Church (7100 St. Charles Ave) on January 30 at 2 pm.

The lengthy obituary in the Times-Picayune fills some of the gaps of my own knowledge of Dr. Lee. Prior to coming to New Orleans he served the FBC of Ruston from 1948 to 1961, and before that directed Baptist student work at LSU while serving as associate pastor of the FBC in Baton Rouge.

I was a student at our New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary in the mid-60s, so had occasion to learn of Dr. Lee first-hand. After I became director of missions for BAGNO in 2004, he and I swapped a few notes and kept promising to get together. I regret that we didn’t.

Would it be too harsh to say that Dr. Lee took a special pleasure in being a burr-under-the-saddle to defenders of the status quo in our denomination? (The newspaper’s headline calls him a “pioneering pastor.” That’s one way of putting it, I suppose.)

Some quotes….

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There’s a line where the Apostle Paul says in the last days men will be “ever learning and never coming to the knowledge of the truth” (II Timothy 3:7).

I don’t want to be too hard on such folks, because that describes me in more than one area. Last evening, for instance….

On the way home from the office, I ran by the neighborhood grocery store. I approach that parking lot with fear and trepidation because it has to be the most dangerous spot in town. Cars enter from all directions, people are walking everywhere, baskets stand where shoppers abandoned them, kids speed through on bikes as though they were in their backyards, and foolish drivers impatient to get home rush down the lanes as though they were on the highway.

One would think I would enter that parking lot on full alert and watching for trouble. Instead, after a long day filled with multiple meetings and conferences, my brain was operating on three cells and my eyelids were having trouble staying open. I spotted a parking space close to the front and veered in that direction. As I begin turning into the space, a panel truck roars into the lane. I’m already turning, but throw on my brakes and come to a halt just as he would have crashed into me. I turned the wheel to the right, giving up on that parking space, and as I drove past him, did something I would never do when my mind was working.

I rolled down my window and spoke to him.

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Not long after Pearl Harbor, the actor Jimmy Stewart joined the Army and became a pilot. Through two long years of training, he suffered stateside, wanting to join the action but being used, overused, and abused, he felt, by his military superiors who wanted him as a spokesman for the war effort and bond drives and who thought him too valuable a resource to send into harm’s way. Stewart chafed and complained and pulled every string he could, and finally arrived in England, ready to pilot the Liberator bombers in their runs over Germany.

He got what he had been hoping for. And for the first time in his life, he found himself dealing with fear on a massive scale. He was fine flying his plane into battle. What unnerved him was watching friends get shot down and thoughts of what could happen to him.

In “Jimmy Stewart: a Biography,” Marc Eliot tells of the young pilot developing a “fear he could not easily shake.” During the night before an especially risky assignment, “he lapsed into a fit of panic. Unable to sleep, he broke out in cold sweats, believing he would not survive that attack.”

Later, as he reflected on the fear gripping him at that time, he said, “I was really afraid… our group had suffered several casualties even before I knew I was going to have to lead the squadron deep into Germany… I feared the worst. Fear is an insidious and deadly thing. It can warp judgment, freeze reflexes, breed mistakes. And worse, it’s contagious. I felt my own fear and knew that if it wasn’t checked, it could infect my crew members.”

In subsequent flights, Stewart felt increasingly that he was not going to survive the war, that his plane would be shot down and he would be killed. Yet he knew that many a person with such fear does indeed survive and outlive the threat, and that his fear was both normal and deadly unless it was dealt with.

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The e-mail Saturday said the young adult son of some longtime friends had been in a serious automobile accident and was in intensive care. The Sunday night phone call and the Monday morning e-mail said he had died. We are devastated for these precious friends.

No one who has ever raised a family thinks the time may come when they hold a funeral for their child. It’s unnatural, it’s not in the correct order of things.

The 1996 Christianity Today Book of the Year was “Not the Way It’s Supposed to be: A Breviary of Sin” by Professor Cornelius Plantinga, Jr. The title alone was worth the price of the book. It gives me a certain amount of comfort when looking at the world around us with its strife between nations, war between religions, and ugliness between families and friends to be reminded that this is not the order of things as the Creator set them up.

Plantinga says sin distorts our character, perverts human excellences, and both causes and results from misery. Sin produces death, and by that we mean both kinds: spiritual and physical.

The front page of the Times-Picayune in my city this morning tells of a fellow who murdered his 72-year-old mother over the weekend. Neighbors told the story of this hard-working, devoted mother who knocked herself out raising two boys by herself. She kept the cleanest house and neatest yard in the Carrollton section of New Orleans and, they say, she doted on her sons. She sang in the choir of her Missionary Baptist Church and was the centerpiece of her community. And now one of her sons has killed her. Police say he stabbed her and choked her. He admits it, saying he did it for drug money.

There’s something bad wrong with this world when this sort of thing happens.

In 1993, Woody Allen was asked to explain his incestuous affair (and later marriage!) with the Asian daughter he and Mia Farrow had adopted. “The heart wants what it wants.”

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This cries to be made into a cartoon….

Grandpa was visiting his daughter’s family. After lunch, he told the family he’d be back in 15 minutes, that he was going to take a walk around the block. Two hours later, he returned. “Sorry I’m late,” he said, “but I ran into an old friend and he just wouldn’t quit listening.”

The other day, reading a biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt, I ran across a new term. The writer spoke of FDR’s accommodating himself to the polio that hit him as a young adult. When people would come to visit him or to assist him, he would talk them to death. The writer said, “Polio victims call this ‘walking on their tongues.'” The idea is that they feel guilty when people come to assist them and so feel they must try to amuse them by a constant stream of chatter.

I’ve not had polio, but I think I’ve found the phrase that describes my condition!

Some things that just do not make sense….

Why does Hamas feel it can use the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip anyway it pleases — even as shields and suicide bombers — to provoke Israel into retaliating, then when they do retaliate, accuse the Jews of cruelty and barbarity? At a pro-Israel rally I attended Thursday night with one of our pastors who had been asked to speak, another speaker quoted former leader Golda Meir with the best bit of wisdom I’ve heard in years on that situation: “There will not be peace in the Middle East until the Palestinian political leaders decide they love their children more than they hate the Jews.”

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You’ve seen Jonathan Alter on television news talk shows. He is a senior editor at Newsweek, a contributing correspondent (whatever that means) for NBC, and knows everyone on the political scene. His most recent book is “The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope.”

In this book Alter covers the beginnings of Roosevelt’s first term in the White House in 1933. Those “one hundred days” have long been chronicled and analyzed as a turn-around for our nation stuck in the depths of the Great Depression.

The reason I call attention to the book here — other than the fact that as a history student I find it fascinating reading and as an American citizen, I’m aware of the parallels between FDR’s situation and Barack Obama’s as he takes the leadership next week — is that Alter is a great story-teller and loves those little tidbits from history which make great reading and terrific gossip. They also work well in lessons you teach and sermons you preach when you’re searching for a fresh illustration.

Here are a few stories and quotes and insights from Alter’s book. (Incidentally, run down to Border’s or Barnes & Noble and you can buy it on the “bargain table” for 5 bucks instead of the $16 printed on the cover.)

–You know how during the Iraqi War people in this country hollered to high heaven about the Patriot Act which gave the government extraordinary powers to pursue terrorists. Well, here’s what Alfred E. Smith, the Democrats’ candidate for president in 1928, said about this same issue when this country was fighting Germany in the First World War: “During the World War we wrapped the Constitution in a piece of paper, put it on the shelf and left it there until the war was over.” (p.5) Lincoln did much the same thing during the Civil War and FDR ditto in the 1940s.

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I was driving down York Road in Charlotte, North Carolina, one day and was stopped in my tracks by a little sign in front of a small church: “For Sale. By Owner.”

Who owns the church, I wondered then, and I wonder now.

In national news, a court in California has determined that the national office of the Episcopal denomination owns the church buildings and grounds of several congregations which are pulling out in order to protest the gay agenda of national religious leaders. No matter that the members of those congregations are the ones whose offerings paid for the buildings; what counts is that each congregation had covenanted with all the others of their denomination that the national office would hold the title to every church. The idea was — and is — to keep renegade pastors from stealing entire congregations.

In our own city, after the Catholic diocese of New Orleans made the tough decision to shutter some of its church buildings following the devastation of Katrina, a lot of long-time parishioners have been unhappy. Two churches in particular have received the brunt of their frustrations.

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