There’s nothing dull going on in New Orleans. Never. Not in politics, entertainment, religion, or sports.

You ready for this?

Start with the new Disney movie, “The Princess and the Frog.” You can see the trailer for this–and that’s all I’ve seen so far; I think it’s out today–at www.nola.com. What makes it fascinating is that this cartoon flick is set in New Orleans.

The city has been beautifully drawn again and again over the centuries, by some of the world’s finest artists. But never more strikingly–and may I say, more idealistically–than in this movie. Don’t look for dirt on the streets or trash in the gutter. This is Disneyland-come-South where nary a speck of dirt can be seen.

It’s gorgeous.

Mike Scott, movie critic for the Times-Picayune, refers to the “loving treatment” of New Orleans, “which ends up being a character in the movie.” He says that when the Disney people came to town last week and showed the first 30 minutes of the movie, “if the rest of it is as good as that first portion, they’ve done it again.”

A local church is in the news. The Church of Christ on Elysian Fields has gone to court to oust their pastor, accusing him of egotism, one-man rule, and money-grabbing. Elders produced an affidavit from a church in Waxahachie, Texas, formerly served by Pastor Jarvis James, as evidence that he’d racked up the same misbehavior there and they too had had to kick him out.

The article by reporter Katie Reckdahl was so sensitive to the religious issues involved and so knowledgeable about scripture’s admonitions about believers going to court against one another, that I wrote a letter to the editor complimenting her. We grieve over the situation; we’re grateful when the media covers it graciously.

What did it for me, however, was nothing Katie Reckdahl wrote. It was a photo that accompanied the article.

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I am surely the least introspective person you know. Something happens to me, I find it a little odd, I move on. Anyone else would analyze it and dig out whatever messages or lessons the event contained and learn from it.

I ignore it, go forward, and make the same mistakes the next day.

One day after many years in the ministry it finally dawned on me that when all those friends or co-workers or colleagues in various denominational offices invite me to lunch where we can a) work on a problem, b) settle a difference, or c) plan a meeting, there is a reason my spirit drags its feet. (Does a spirit have feet?)

I hate working lunches.

Let’s do lunch or have a working meeting, but not both please.

Most definitely, I do not want to go to lunch to work on a problem in our relationship. If I have offended you or you have trod on my sensibilities, then let’s get together and clear the air. But not over lunch.

Lunch is a time to enjoy food and relax. It is an event that calls for happy chatter and good fellowship.

What it does not call for–what intrudes as obviously as a stomach-ache at a banquet or gossip at a concert–is work. We spread out our notebooks, stress out our minds, slave over the problem–all while a waiter is asking whether we want a salad or soup.

No thanks.

There is a reason for this dislike of mine for working mealtimes. A few horror stories in fact.

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Many of us pastors have trouble staying out of the ditches and onto the road.

A scholar friend says, “Truth is a ridge on either side of which are vast chasms to be avoided at all cost.”

It’s one thing to love word-study and to delight in finding a particular word in Scripture that turns out to be a well-spring of insights and applications, and a far different thing to fight over the meaning of some obscure Greek word.

Somewhere in my past I encountered a translation of I Timothy 6:5 that warns God’s leaders of “word-wrangling.” This morning, looking that passage up in various translations and commentaries and other study helps, no one has it that way, but more as “constant striving” and “chronic disagreement.” (The Greek word—ahem, here we go now–is ‘disparatribai,’ a double compound word which according to Thayer, means “constant contention, incessant wrangling or strife.”)

“Thayer” refers to a well-respected Greek-English lexicon used for generations. In the above quote, he used the word “wrangling”. Maybe I got it from him.

What started all this in my mind was two things.

The image of wrangling suggests a cowboy roping a dogie, jumping off his horse, and wrestling the animal to the ground.

Some of us do that with words. We capture them, hogtie them, and put our own brand on them. The result may be to make the word mean something entirely different from the writer’s original intention.

And since our audiences–that would be the men and women of our congregations–are not knowledgeable about the Greek and Hebrew (most don’t have a clue what a lexicon is!), when we start parsing (ahem) these words in sermons, they either shift into neutral intending to catch up when we return to the main highway or they stand in awe, assured we must know what we’re talking about since we use phrases like “the original Greek says” and “my Hebrew professor used to say this word means.”

Why our people put up with this stuff is beyond me.

They shouldn’t.

The other thing that drove me to turn on the computer this morning and drive down this particular lane was Acts 2:40 where Peter told the Jerusalem crowd to “save yourselves.”

Yep. That’s what he said.

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Critics say when President George W. Bush appeared on that aircraft carrier with the words “Mission Accomplished” emblazoned across a banner, he was just asking for a continuation of the war in the Middle East. And when he defiantly said to the enemies of the USA, “Bring it on,” that did it.

He came to regret both.

In this morning’s USA Today, the discussion is whether Bobby Bowden should retire from coaching Florida State’s Seminole football team. This year’s record was 5-5, a vast difference from the championship calibre teams he has usually fielded over his 35 seasons at that school. His 387 victories over 44 years of coaching puts him second on the all-time list, behind Penn State’s Joe Paterno, another octogenarian who arguably needs to hang it up.

Bowden is 80 years old. The FSU fans and alums are calling for him to retire. But the decision is not theirs to make, although they can bring incredible pressure on the president of the university and the athletic director who will be making the call one way or the other soon.

What struck me–I’m no FSU fan and have no dog in this fight, but am always interested in the strangeness of human behavior–is the way Bowden is insisting the school is going to have to fire him to get him to leave. No one knows but the coach, but since the university brought in Jimbo Fisher as his assistant a year or two ago with the understanding he would succeed Bowden, guaranteeing him $5 million if he’s not the coach by January 10, 2011, it would appear that Bowden is maneuvering for one more year, after which he would step down.

Here’s what Bowden said, and then a quote from his wife Ann.

“You can figure it out. Here I am, 80 years old and I’m just as excited now as I was 50 years ago as far as going on the field and looking at film and making decisions here in the office.”

“They’ll have to fire him for him not to go another year….If they’ve got guts enough to do it, let them do it.”

That did it for me.

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One of the online sermon sources is offering a CD containing “30 years of sermons on one disk.”

No thanks. And I wonder who is purchasing these things.

Might as well offer a collection of “what I have said to my wife over 47 years of marriage.” One is as personal as the other.

The sermon I preach today–well, sermons, because I’ll be delivering three–are all things between the Lord and me. Jeremiah 23 warns God’s preachers against getting their sermons from each other.

That’s not to say it can’t do some good to study other people’s sermons. In fact, we can gain a lot from it.

From other people’s sermons, I learn:

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Some twenty years ago, when I was between churches for a solid year, I briefly considered becoming a vocational itinerant preacher. In other words, a traveling evangelist.

The idea excited me for a whole day. Then I talked to one.

Jim Ponder of Orlando, Florida–now with the Lord–was a dear friend who was enjoying a lengthy and effective ministry of itinerant evangelism. If anyone could provide the counsel I needed, it would be Jim. I picked up the phone and reached him.

A half hour later, when the conversation ended, I knew the Lord was not calling me in that direction. In fact, anyone who goes into this work and stays with it for any time deserves our greatest respect and support.

Two cautions in particular from Brother Jim have lingered in my mind all these years.

1) Don’t go into evangelism if you cannot handle being away from your family and alone in a distant hotel room night after night after night.

2) Don’t expect to be able to live on the offerings you receive. You will need a strong board of supporters to supplement your income.

From 1990 until 2004, I pastored a Southern Baptist church in metro New Orleans, then served for 5 years as the director of missions–the SBC version of a district superintendent/bishop–for the 100-plus churches in the same area, before retiring on June 1, 2009.

That’s when I hit the road.

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Nothing reveals the true character of a person–an employee, a boss, a pastor, a politician–like the way he/she exits a position, particularly when the experience has not been a good one.

In one church I served, they’re still talking about the way a former staff member exited–this was before my time, so I have no personal knowledge of him or the event–with great venom. The church was without a pastor at the time and the staffer had filled the leadership vacuum. When he left to go to another church position, he used his final pulpit time to unload on the leadership.

What causes a person to do that? What good do they think can possibly come from it? Or, at they just venting and trying to unburden themselves of their anger?

We have such a situation plaguing the city of New Orleans now.

We’ve written on these pages over the last three years of the so-called Recovery Czar brought in to organize the city’s rebuilding work after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. His name was (and is) Dr. Ed Blakely. The mayor paid him big bucks, he sported a resume that was the envy of every city planner in America, and he walked in making with the big talk.

He became a laughing stock. An expensive laughing stock.

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