Loading Record By Predicate / Lambda Via LINQ

I am pretty confused about lambdas. What I am trying to do here is write a function that will return an object from a certain table with a certain criteria. So lets say I can write:
function GetRecord(TableName as string,Criteria as string) as object
'do the linq-stuff
end function

Now I don't care if the parameters are strings or lambdas or whatever, but the end result must be that at runtime I don't know which table and which criteria will be used. As sometimes I need to get a customer record by email and sometimes a product by id etc. If possible I would prefer returning a list of matching objects and then I would just use .firstordefault when I want 1 (such as by id...).