My wife’s favorite television channel is the USA Network. Their slogan is: “Characters Welcome.”

Someone ought to erect signs with those words at every entrance to New Orleans. If there ever was a city of characters in America, this is the one.

In 1990, when we told my parents we were moving to New Orleans from North Carolina, my dad said, “Well good. It’ll be good to get you back down South.” I said, “Dad, there’s something you need to know. The people of North Carolina are just exactly like the people of Alabama and Mississippi. But the people of New Orleans are strange.” Or I might have said “weird.” And I did not mean it as a putdown.

Over these years, I’ve moderated in my views of the folks down here. Most are normal in every way, just exactly like your neighbors in any city in America, even if they do have unusual and foreign-sounding last names like Bourgeois (pronounced boor-zwha) and Melancon (pronounced muh-lah-sah with a nasal ring). They’re great folks.

But characters, that’s what we have down here. And honestly, it may be the best thing about living in New Orleans. Now, I pastored the First Baptist Church of Kenner, which ain’t New Orleans exactly (or at all), but it’s part of the city and people who run New Orleans live all over Kenner and Metairie and it may as well be.

All of this is leading up to saying that we lost a real character last week. Marshall Sehorn died. We had a little service at the Lake Lawn Crematorium early Saturday morning. His ashes will be divided, half taken to Concord, North Carolina, where he grew up, and the other half buried here in Metairie. We’ll be having a real memorial service sometime after the first of the year.

I met Marshall and his wife Barbara in the mid-1990s when they began attending the Christmas programs at our church. They were (and are) about my age, and were the kind of folks you instantly wanted to know better. Marshall was in the music business. The New Orleans kind of music. In fact, he and Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Allen Toussaint were business partners for many years.

Marshall signed Gladys Knight and the Pips to their first recording contract. He told me the story, then I picked up her autobiography in the bookstore, looked up his name in the index, and read her version. He came to the Knight home in Atlanta and, with his cowboy hat and full beard, “He was the biggest white man I had ever seen,” she wrote. Others had tried to get this teenage girl and her cousins to New York City to make a recording, but Marshall pulled it off. He smiled and said, “I just invited Mrs. Knight to go along. That did it.”

Marshall produced an album by Paul McCartney and Wings. In their living room is a large photograph of Paul and Linda McCartney with their two daughters and Marshall and Barbara alongside.

Marshall wrote a song–I found out later several others have their names on that number as co-writers, so have no idea how much anyone did–which the Allman Brothers took to number one. That song, “One Way Out,” became the personalized license plate for Marshall’s van, as well as his personal testimony after he and Barbara came to the Lord.

I baptized them in 1998 and not long after, when they celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary, they renewed their vows in front of many of the same music industry friends who had attended their original wedding which had taken place in City Park. This time, however, it was a thoroughly Christian affair, as they let their friends know of the new changes in their lives.

Every February our church has a men’s wild game supper where we invite our friends for an evening of eating strange birds and animals, hear a hunter or fisherman tell his stories, and give out door prizes such as turkey calls and camouflage equipment. Someone gives his Christian testimony, the gospel is presented, and the men are encouraged to ask Jesus Christ into their lives. Marshall never missed one of these dinners and always brought with him at least a dozen men from all walks of life.

Marshall fought respiratory and heart problems the last few years of his life. When his body lay in that crematorium contraption Saturday morning, it was the first time I’d seen him without tubes everywhere in a long time.

He’ll not be needing any more tubes. He’s doing just fine now. There is indeed “one way out” and Marshall found it. “No one cometh to the Father except by Me,” said Jesus Christ. Marshall has now had the opportunity to verify that claim.

And just think, of all the Heavenly individuals whom he has met since arriving in his new home a few days ago, He is now getting acquainted with Jesus. The original character if there ever was one. One of a kind. No one like Him, ever. How does Peter put it? “There is no other name under heaven given among men whereby we must be saved.” (Acts 4:12)

I’ll let you read I Corinthians 1:26 on your own time, but when you do, please tell me if Paul is not saying that the Kingdom is particularly welcoming to “characters.” Those who do not fit the mold, the outcasts, the “different.”

Pastors are understandably cautious about writing letters to the editors on controversial subjects. Even though they may feel deeply on an issue, they do not want to mislead readers into thinking their position is the church’s position. Nor do they want to take the chance of putting a stumblingblock in the path of a spiritually-lost person over an issue of secondary importance.

My dad was visiting my brother’s church one Sunday a few years back when an evangelist was occupying the pulpit. The guest began his sermon with several jokes about the Democrats, each one being a put-down in one form or the other. Dad was highly incensed. “What if you had some Democrats in the congregation who were lost? They are not going to hear anything the preacher says about Christ because the preacher has turned them off.” He was right. (Leave it to this coal-mining, farming, lifelong union member and father of six to put the preachers in their place!)

That’s why wise preachers are often hesitant about speaking out on political and other controversial matters. And it’s why I phrased my Sunday letter to the editor in the form I did:

“Someone explain something to me…

…how sheriff deputies from Jefferson Parish and the City of Gretna can stand on the Crescent City Connection–both ends of which lie inside Orleans Parish–and prevent New Orleanians from crossing the bridge into another part of New Orleans? It makes no sense. Help me someone.

…why the leaders of Jefferson Parish could not take in New Orleanians for a few days when cities all over this nation have taken them in for over a year now. The residents of Houston and Dallas and Memphis would like to know.

…why a New Orleans couple can go to Memphis and con a church into giving them a house, then sell the house and pocket the money and return to New Orleans and there is no cry of outrage from our citizens. You would think their neighbors–people who know them–would be speaking up, either to defend them or blow the whistle on them. The silence is deafening.

I would just like to know.”

The phrasing of my letter is asking for information, although leaving no question how I feel on these matters. I expect it to generate other letters. I’ll let you know. (I did not identify myself as a minister and I’m not a pastor any longer, so perhaps if readers do get angry, they’ll not take it out on God!)

What about them Saints?

Sunday night’s game against the Dallas Cowboys had them as 7 point underdogs. Even though both teams sported 8 and 4 records, some were saying the Cowboys might well be the strongest team in football. And, other than for a few isolated moments, it was a total dismantling of the Cowboys by the Saints. I have never seen anything like it, not ever, and I’ve been following the Saints since they arrived here in 1967.

Peter Finney, writing in Monday’s paper, says, “…the Dallas Cowboys were buried, left for dead, carved into little-bitty pieces, this by a relentless enemy that played smart, played tough, played with a killer instinct. The final score, 42-17, was every bit as lopsided as the game, if not more so.”

I saw something I have never seen before in any football game. Fully two and a half minutes before the game ended, with the Saints deep in the Cowboys’ red zone and fully able to add another touchdown anytime they pleased, Saints quarterback Drew Brees took the snap and knelt down, ending the play. He did that all four downs, refusing to score any more points. When the ball went over to the Cowboys with over a minute to play, they did the same thing. Everyone was ending this fiasco early. It was like a brutal beating in a boxing ring where the victor and the victim quit early because there’s no longer any point to this.

Finney said those kneel-downs are something you will hardly ever see anyone do against a Bill Parcells team. And yet, the Saints did something never done in the 47-year history of the Cowboys: threw for 5 touchdowns in their home stadium.

Pardon me, Cowboy fans and those who do not care for football. This game will be the subject of more discussions this week than anything in town. For followers of a football team that has been the bottom-dwelling, laughingstock of the NFL for most of its existence, whose hopes have been raised repeatedly and dashed again and again, with only one playoff win to its name in nearly 40 years, this is a bit of delicious.

Some say it’s the coach, Sean Payton. Some say it’s the quarterback Drew Brees. Others mention names like Reggie Bush and Mike Karney and Deuce McAllister and others.

A cast of characters and some of them cast-offs such as this town has always loved. Welcome, characters.