Transcript
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Hi, my name is Tony Watley. I have had the privilege of being the chairperson for Earl Palmer Ministries for more than a decade. So I think I know Earl and his family pretty well and they're fantastic people. So I want to start by thanking you all for being here. It's a real honor and it is something that Earl will always cherish to see your faces. Earl is now 91, yes, pretty amazing. So I
want to thank you and there are several others that I want to recognize and have a round of applause for. To start with, Renee Sundberg and Shirley Palmer. I think they're both worthy for you to stand up and give a hand. So it'll be good for you. Get the blood circulating. And it's not good, according to John Medina, to sit very much. Thank you, Earl. Thank you, Shirley and Renee. And while I'm giving special recognition, there
is a missing member of the board whose name is George Nethercutt. I don't know how many of you know George, but he has been a member of Earl's board for also a decade. We met him in Washington, D.C. when Earl was the special pastor to the National Presbyterian Church. So unfortunately, Mr. Nethercutt, George, has a debilitating and long-term illness that is chronic and continually gets worse. He has a sound mind still, but he can
no longer talk, he can no longer walk, he's in an assisted living place, and we all need to pray for George and his dear wife, Mary Beth. But George was very responsible for helping Earl Palmer Ministries get Princeton to put all of Earl's materials on the Princeton Commons. So it's all digitized, and any of us can forever go there on the internet and download Earl's sermons, all of his papers. I don't think his books are there
yet, but you can still get them, of course, on Amazon. And a few of his books, at least one, Laughter in Heaven, you can listen to it on either Kindle or the other audiobook website. So the Palmer family is a great illustration to all of us of the Christian walk. All of them in their own way show us living examples of how to love our neighbors as ourselves and how to have no other gods before the
one that we all worship. So Earl himself is a real luminary in the world of Christianity and Christian thought. He is a preeminent apostle and apologist, if that's the right word. It really doesn't mean he's sorry for anything. It means he's an exponent of Christ and Christ's teaching, and he's truly a biblical scholar. And I think that the title of his book called to be a people of the gospel, if we just changed people to a
person of the gospel, it would really fit Earl. So I have an unusual way of starting the day. I usually drive somewhere and buy a cup of coffee because I like espresso or a cafe latte, and I don't like trying to make it myself because it's never as good. So I go somewhere and while I'm driving, I typically recite to myself scripture that I've over the time learned, because I think it's a great way to start
the day, and it centers me on the right sort of material and thought process. And one of the things that I, one of the scriptures that I have recited for years is out of Ephesians in the fourth chapter, the 22nd verse, put away from yourself your former manner of life and be renewed in the spirit of your mind and put on the new person which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness and also later
in the chapter it says, don't speak in any corrupt communication or negative communication to other people, but that which is good to the use of edifying or building or positive that you might minister grace unto the hearers. So I like to use that as a segue into my prayer, so let us pray. Dear God, thank you for this wonderful gathering. This is old friends coming together to listen at the the feet of our great preacher Earl.
Help us to reflect in our own life edifying words when we communicate with others and in all of our behaviors help us to let your light shine through us that it might show off our good works and glorify you in heaven. Thank you for this day and for this time together. Amen. And with that I'm going to turn it over to John. Well John is, I am according to the schedule to introduce John. John is a
graduate of two of the greatest colleges in the world, Stanford University and the Boat Law School at University of California at Berkeley. He is a senior executive at Microsoft where he is in charge of all litigation, so better beware of John, but he's a great person and he has been a supporter of Earl and Earl's ministry for years. So thank you John. Thank you Tony. Thank you Tony. I've got, I'm mic'd up so I'm okay. And
welcome everybody. This is such a wonderful opportunity to celebrate this book, Dad. That's your 20th book. So it's a very large corpus of work and you know I get the pleasure and the honor of interviewing my father and I have to say I've never, I've asked him a lot of questions over the course of my life but never in front of 250 people. So this is a new and my friend Gordon Stevenson who's on the board
at Earl Palmer ministry said you know are you going to hit him with some really hard cross-examination and I'm tempted to but no I'm not going to do that today. I think this is a chance for me to ask some questions that may be on your minds as well and what a great way to celebrate the book by really celebrating the author of the book and the author of the subject of the book really which
is Saint Paul and his letter to the people at Ephesus and to do that Dad you've chosen an interesting format. You've selected four people each of whom has been important to you at different stages of your life and you've asked them to address a portion of your book and a portion of the underlying subject of your book. So do you want to talk a little bit about that and your choice to do that? Well yes they
are very good friends and they are from eras of my life and Ken Sunu was in my church in Berkeley and I knew that young man very well. I married him to his wife after he graduated from Princeton Seminary and what a great guy and then of course Renee who I first met here at UPC but what a tremendous friend she has been in our life together and then of John we did all these discussion groups
together and we've just been long-standing friends and then I've been privileged in my whole time with the Europar ministry is to have a study assistant every year. The last one is doing all the photography here for today and that is Tate Busby marvelous guy and my second study assistant was Daniel Triller who had grown up as a high school kid in this church and then went to college and then became a study assistant with Europar
ministry and so we had that wonderful time together and so it's just been joyous to have these four and it's true I played a kind of a you know a directive role there saying I wanted Ken Sunu to handle the earliest part of the book and then I wanted Renee to handle the great prayer at the heart of the book and then I wanted John Medina to handle sort of a tough and nails part of the
book where Paul is so he is so concerned about the people of the gospel and how they live their life in the in the rather hostile Roman Empire of that time because book this book is written in the midpoint of the first century and then Daniel I think got the best assignment because at the very end of this book Saint Paul creates a kind of parable it's an analogy of the whole armor of God and I
just felt that was a marvelous ending of the book and I just wanted Daniel to be able to do reflections on that so that's going to happen but by the way just a personal note this this chance I have to say thanks to the university but this chance to be together it kind of is it's a sentimental moment for me is that the last time I was in Larson Hall with all of you was in January
11th of 2020 we were here for a morning with the stories of the marvelous the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis and we had about the same crowd maybe some of you were here then and and that was the beginning of the pandemic that was the last sort of public thing I was involved in for a long time and and so I'm just thinking of that and that's the program we had for that event and
so and now we're in 2023 uh January 21st instead of January 11th isn't that neat and so we are back in in the the chance for people to be together and actually be in in a situation where you can hear people and personally interact and so that is a great moment for this time John asked me to say a little bit about what my goal was in writing the book or why I even did in fact
your first question let me ask the question because I'm the interviewer yeah the I have I'm not the potted plant after all I'm out here doing something uh no I I did I I do have the question I what what happened after this this last meeting in this room we we had the pandemic and during that pandemic was not able to visit mom and dad much with sometimes we were able to peek through the window and
say hi and and come in with a mask and chat from a distance and I will tell you they were busy at work writing this book and I remember my father at Whidbey Island with his yellow pad and mom and computer uh just furiously working away with this book and and so my question is what motivated you at the age of 89 going on 90 after 19 books uh you know in on your resume what motivated
you to sit down and put in that hard work of writing this book well well you know I do love exposition I love expositional study where you really try to understand what the words meant when Paul used them or when John used in whoever wrote a text in the New Testament and then I'm fascinated with the words that were chosen and if you've read this commentary you'll notice that I try to highlight all of those amazing
words that Saint Paul he's has such an ability with words and so it wasn't really a hard work it was kind of a joyous task to do exposition of this book but I my main concern was to talk about Saint Paul I just love Saint Paul and I my very first book I wrote was the commentary on Romans which is his greatest book and now this is one of his last books and it's written from Rome
he is a prisoner of the in the Roman Empire in a very harsh time and so I wrote this book and uh uh I wanted to and you'll notice in the book the first chapters have to do with Paul himself and how there was a transforming moment in his life he was a young extremist and you know that it makes the book kind of relevant for our time in trying to understand what we're facing today because
a lot of people have gone into extremism because of frustration or crisis that are in their lives or in their culture and what they see and so Paul was uh he had become an extremist as a young man and he came from an aristocratic family and became extremist and was actually consorted consulting and consent and consented the very stoning of Stephen one of the first murderous acts that was done as a part of hostility in the
in the in the church against the what were called the people of the way who were following the rabbi Jesus and so Paul on his way to Damascus has any chance has a transforming experience so I wanted to do that and then he becomes a pastor and he goes all throughout the Mediterranean world and has this amazing ability to go from city to city to city in the Roman in the Roman world now as a believer
and he was truly transformed in that Damascus experience and then comes Ephesus Ephesus is the most discussed city in the whole book of Acts there's more written about Paul's ministry in than anywhere else of course they can't mention his ministry in Rome he's a prisoner in Rome but he does write letters from Rome and this is one of his last great letters almost the same size as the Roman's letter and so I just ended up in
Ephesus and that yeah let me let me follow up on that can you can you give us a sense of that great city of Ephesus you and I have been there together actually to see the ruins of that city it's a magnificent set of ruins but can you give us a sense of what the city was like in the first century and what the people were like yeah and the fact that he spent more time there
than anywhere else makes it more interesting to try to understand Ephesus it's most famous in the Roman in the Roman world and and even for several hundred years before the time of Paul because one of the seven wonders of the ancient world was the temple the grand temple of Artemis at the heart of Ephesus 88 pillars huge temple only one pillar remains to this day but it has a stork on top of it but it was
it had 88 of them it was the largest temple in the Roman worlds it was grand and it and its city god was Artemis who's always featured with a bow and arrow she's a huntress so there is kind of a violent edge to her being the city god of Ephesus Ephesus is a cultured city but when Paul gets there he's coming into a city that has that sort of fierce heritage with Artemis which does show up
when the silversmiths began to suffer in their sale of shrines because Paul's message was spreading throughout the Roman world very quickly and it was spreading in Ephesus and then the silversmiths were losing their jobs and they then gathered people in the great 26,000 person arena which I wanted on the cover of our book because that's the entrance to Ephesus is that a great arena and there they shouted greatest Artemis goddess of the Ephesians and they
did that for about four hours because a Jewish member of the of the people of the way wanted to speak to the crowd but when he stood and they saw that he was Jewish and that is part of the crisis of the first century world the discrimination and the persecution of Jews Paul himself had experienced it he was in prison several times because he was Jewish these Jews are upsetting our city Paul was told when he
was in Philippi and so the city of Ephesus has that history of discrimination and persecution of Jews but also they began to persecute the believers the believers that were usually called just a Jewish sect and that would be the followers of Jesus so he enters that city and teaches in it and then finally ends up in Rome imprisoned and writes his final letter to that church so that you're going to journey with with with the book
and journey mainly in that city it's the life of Paul will be the first part and then you mainly journey with that city and try to figure out how Paul would address some of these stresses and I don't know that I think it makes it contemporary to it for us but let me ask you first I want to get to what it means for us today but but before we get there can you say a little
bit about the people that Paul was writing to this is after all a letter he said he's in a prison in Rome he's writing a letter the people that live in Ephesus who are these people well it's going to be there going to be a grand mix he loves the people of Ephesus there's no question about it Paul is a mellow man throughout his ministry he really was and then in the in the there's a lot
of humor in the letter and it's interesting that Paul when he taught there for two and a half years he rented a hall called tyrannous hall and that is in one of the ancient manuscripts that he rented that hall from 11 in the morning till four in the afternoon who can go and hear a lecture between 11 and four the slaves could go Paul loved the Roman slaves and the slaves in Ephesus are very interesting not
like Corinth where the slaves just did the work of dragging these ships from the Adriatic Sea to the to the to the Mediterranean the western Mediterranean so they on people on their way to Rome but this in this city this cultured city of Ephesus the main job of the slaves were teachers of the youth they were the intellectuals of that city and so Paul I think especially loved those people and when he writes to the people
in Ephesus you can sense his awareness of these highly educated people but also they're in a lot of stress because of the point of the century where Paul writes when Nero has become the emperor and the persecution has been zeroed in on the believers and so as well as Jews who are always persecuted in the Roman Empire but now the Christians are being the young believers are being persecuted too so that makes it I think when
you've got a city that is has a lot of hostile groups that are hostile to each other it and then you watch Paul write to that I think it makes Paul better able to cope with our culture right now where there is a lot of built up hostility that happens the pandemic itself did it or played a part in it and people were suspicious of each other even suspicious of should I take this amazing treatment for
COVID-19 what should we do how do we when the church then becomes political trying to say how can we have more power so that we can do what we should do Paul was not interested in that he was not interested in the church and the Christians or the believers getting power he was interested in there being a people of the gospel and that's why I titled the book Saint Paul called to be a people of
the gospel good news a friendly message and a healing message and I think that is needed today and it made me feel that this book is a book I would like to write about that kind of ministry