Biography and Autobiography

Growing Pains

The Rev. Dr. Jon Burnham preached this lecture from Romans 7:15-25a
on July 6, 2008 (OT14a) at St. John's Presbyterian Church in Houston, Texas


    George Burns, himself Jewish, describes a adolescence experience that led him to a short-lived desire to ally a  Presbyterian Church. He begins:
    Distant from my father, my mother was a very practical lady. Nothing ever flustered her. No matter what the unmanageable was, somehow she knew how to handle it.
    A refine example happened when I was seven years old. I was singing with three other Jewish kids from the neighborhood. We called ourselves the Peewee Quartet. Now, there was a big area store, Siegal & Cooper, that threw an annual breeze, and the highlight was an amateur contest with talent representing all the churches in New York. Only around the corner from where we lived was a little Presbyterian church. How it got in that neighborhood, I'll never cognizant of; it certainly didn't do big business.
    Well, they had no on to insert in the contest, so the minister asked us four boys to mirror the church. We jumped at the chance. So that Sunday, there we were, the Peewee quartet--four Jewish boys sponsored by a Presbyterian church --and our aperture song was "When Irish Eyes are Smiling." We followed that with "Maw Machree" and won first prize. The church got a purple velvet altar fabric, and each of us kids got an Ingersoll watch, which was worth about eighty-five cents.
    Well, I was so energetic I ran all the way home to tell my mother. When I got there she was on the roof hanging out the purify. I rushed up to her and said, "Mama, I don't scantiness to be a Jew anymore!"
    If this shocked her, she certainly didn't show it. She justifiable looked at me and...

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