My father lived nearly all of his life in the analog age, when TV sets came with rabbit ears, music came on vinyl LP's, and all telephones had springy extension cords.
From our vantage point here in the 21st century, it's easy to look back on that world as quaint, idyllic even. But that would be a mistake. My father's world had its share of problems: The rise of communism. Vietnam. Threat of nuclear war. The struggle for civil rights. Recession, gas shortages, labor disputes.... Life was just as uncertain for the average family then as it is for us now; perhaps moreso.
This turmoil was nowhere more evident than in the spiritual arena where my father played his part. Overwhelmed by the sheer pace of technological and social change, western culture was just beginning to drift away from the Christian values that had anchored it for a thousand years. Church attendance in all denominations was falling steadily; traditional morals were increasingly questioned or simply ignored. Christianity itself seemed lost in its own desperate attempts to be trendy, lurching from the Jesus freak movement of the 60's to the prosperity gospel and TV evangelism of the 90's.
In the midst of this cultural drift, my father was one of a handful of men and women preaching what were even then beginning to be called "traditional" sermons: the ones claiming that there was such a thing as right and wrong, that morality was not relative or arbitrary, that love and self-sacrifice were not rom-com movie plotlines but Christian duties.
He preached this way not out of some reactionary aversion to progress, but simply because he could see that society on its current course was headed for shipwreck. The world in his lifetime seemed hell-bent on its own destruction, and my father believed fervently that Christianity was its last, best, and only true defense against that destruction.
I mention this because, to the extent that you read Chaplain Sams's sermons as a product of his times, it is important to understand those times correctly. It is perhaps now too late for anyone preaching the way he did to be taken seriously, but in 1950-1970 it still made sense. Billy Graham was still filling stadiums back then. Concepts such as sin and salvation were still understood culturally, and still mattered.
But there is another aspect of my father's sermons that is uniquely his own. Dad was no hellfire-and-brimstone preacher. He was not sour, or judgmental, or pessimistic in his sermons, nor in his personal life. He was fundamentally an optimist and remained hopeful about mankind's future.
He said once that a preacher is like "a signalman at a train station: you try to steer the oncoming train onto the right track, only in this case the conductor of that train is asleep. Before you can save him, you have to wake him up."
Yes, he preached that if you don't wake up, you are doomed. But if you do wake up, there is the uniquely Christian promise of "abundant life". And that was by far his favorite sermon topic.
Of the sermons preserved here, fully two-thirds are about the positive aspects of the Christian life: assurance of salvation (#457), living together in peace (#1225), experiencing joy (#647), and so on. There are plenty of "doomsday" or "warning" sermons, to be sure, but the focus is always on this better life that awaits you if you can change course. If he preached repentance it was because, as they say in New England, "you can't get there from here." You cannot experience a fuller life without letting go of the weaker one.
* * * * *
The first thing most people notice about these sermons is how organized they are. If you were to arrange them all in chronological order—all 50 years' worth—you would notice very little change in style or structure from 1947 to 1997. His first sermon and his last were written the same way: introduction, 3-5 main points, conclusion. He learned to preach that way in divinity school, and saw no reason to alter it. The entire collection is even written on the same 6" x 8", 3-punch notebook paper, as if he knew from the start that he would need to preserve them all in these notebooks.
Dad may have been one of those preachers who wrote everything out, but he never merely read his sermons. He wrote things down in order to see them clearly before presenting them to his congregation. Even his prayers. He disliked sloppy, extemporaneous delivery, believing that preaching without notes is an open invitation to get carried away with the sound of one's own voice. He always felt that congregants were there to hear the voice of God, not the voice of Horace Sams. So he studied, and prayed, and studied some more ... and then wrote down.
And yet these sermon notes are a poor substitute for the sermons themselves. My father had a great delivery voice—deep and grave in his prime, compelling even in old age—that exactly matched the import of his messages. The outlines in these notes are like the dry bones of Ezekiel in comparison, painfully lacking the sinew and flesh that so animated the living, breathing sermon as it was preached.
That voice is lost now. All that is left are these outlines, which convey the intelligence but not the emotion of the message. Open the notebooks to any random page and you are likely to find more than one tantalizing line such as "tell story of _____", or "like situation in VN [Vietnam] today." In the live sermon these sparse entries would have sprung into a captivating 5-minute anecdote, expertly conveying the listener from point A to point B in the sermon. In the notes, all we have is point A and point B.
So if you intend to merely read these sermons for a little light entertainment, you will be sorely disappointed. To get anything at all out of these notes, you have to approach them in the way they were written. Treat them as study guides. Actually look up and read the scripture references. Pause every few lines and reflect on how the points are related to each other, to contemporary events, and to your own life.
And then maybe, just maybe, you will begin to see some of the great themes that so fascinated my father. You may not always agree with him, but you will at least understand what he was saying. And that, I am sure, is why any preacher goes to the trouble in the first place.
—J. Sams
Boston
July 2012