Every pastor I know is held by two scriptures at opposite poles–and also torn between them.

On the one hand, “The laborer is worthy of his hire.” That word from I Timothy 5:18 is a quotation of several Old Testament references. The New Testament will not let the super-spiritual among us dismiss the idea of compensating the minister with something like, “The Bible teaches that the ministers should get out and hold jobs like everyone else; there’s nothing in there about paying the preacher.”

Bad wrong. Read your Bible.

But on the other hand, the other reality that Scripture nails down as a line the minister must not cross says, “The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil” (I Timothy 6:10).

On one side, the minister must never put a price on the work he does. He must look to the Lord as the Source for his needs.

On the other side, he should be adequately compensated. The church must do the faithful and responsible thing in providing for these the Lord has called, equipped, and sent into His fields to labor.

He has a hard time saying this. So, I’m saying it for him.

Some thirty years ago, Dr. Bill Prout was a professor of religion on the faculty of Mississippi University for Women in Columbus, MS, where I served the First Baptist Church. I was Bill’s pastor, but he himself was a former pastor of Southern Baptist churches. He often supplied pulpits in the area for absent ministers and took interims when churches were between pastors.

I wrote an article for the old Baptist Program (the wonderful Leonard Hill was editor) based on a conversation Dr. Prout and I had. Fifteen years earlier, when he arrived in the community and began to fill the pulpits, he told me the average check to the visiting minister was 50 dollars.

“It’s still 50 dollars,” he laughed.

A friend who worked at a local bank ran the numbers and informed us that 50 dollars in, say, 1960, would have to be about 125 dollars fifteen years later, in order to have the same buying power. I quoted him in the article and urged churches to be more generous and faithful in taking care of their visiting ministers.

And now, that truth has come full circle for me.

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What started this for me was something a friend said Sunday morning.

We bumped into each other at a restaurant after church. He said, “I’ll miss your sermon tonight. I’ll be in such-and-such a city.” Oh? what’s going on there?

“Fantasy football. Our statewide meeting.”

I said, “You have meetings for these things? If they’re fantasy, can’t you just fantasize you’re there?”

He could tell in a heartbeat that I have no knowledge of how fantasy football works and absolutely zero appreciation for the sport. After all, is it a sport if it exists only in the fantasy world?

He smiled, “I have to be there. I’m the reigning champ.”

Might as well have remarked about weather conditions on Mars.  He lost me.

Readers will understand if I say you fantasy-football people have lost your cotton-picking minds.

Now, real football–well, that’s something else!

Or, then again, is it?

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I made a preacher mad at me the other day. I apologized and he forgave me, but I don’t regret what I did.

Here’s what happened.

I received an email from the man of God telling how a group of liberals is petitioning the Federal Communications Commission to end religious programming in the United States. This would stop Charles Stanley, David Jeremiah, and a whole host of religious programmers from broadcasting their messages.

The e-mail was a “forward,” of course. My friend had not written it, but merely read it with alarm and forwarded it to dozens of his friends.

I clicked on “reply all,” which sent my response to everyone who had received his note.

I said, “My dear brother, where have you been! This is a hoax! It has been around for nearly 40 years. The FCC never was petitioned to stop religious programming and couldn’t if it wanted to.”

I added, “This meaningless petition has been circling the earth for all these decades, causing gullible, although well-meaning, Christians to tie up God’s resources and their time in bombarding the FCC with thousands and thousands of pieces of mail every year.”

“Christians of all people should not pass this stuff along when they can’t verify it,” I said.

That’s how I hurt his feelings. So, I apologized.

Then, last week, that same petition arrived again.

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“But I say to you who hear, ‘Love your enemies; do good to those who hate you.” (Luke 6:27)

Put yourself in the place of the Lord. You want to get across to your people the importance of fellowship inside the body, how to keep relationships strong, and how to correct them when they get out of whack. So, what do you do?

Do you tell your people to love their children? to love their parents? their sweethearts?

They already do. Jesus said even bad people love their own.

Instead, Jesus tells us to love our enemies—the absolute last people on earth we would think of loving. We tend to think of our enemies as completely unlovable, the guy who did us wrong and is planning worse, the kind of people we want to hate or fear or resent and are thinking of getting back at.

Love my enemies? Are you kidding, Lord? I don’t even like them.

The good news is He does not tell us we have to like them. Some of them He doesn’t like very much either. ‘Like’ has nothing to do with it. It’s about love.

We have to love them.

This is not an option. The command to love our enemies is found three times in the gospels–Matthew 5:44 and Luke 6:27 and 35. The principle, however, is planted all through Scripture. We’re stuck with it. This is something our Lord Jesus Christ fully expects from His disciples.

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One day in 1965, John Steinbeck sat at an outdoor cafe in San Francisco with Howard Gossage, a friend in the advertising business. He said, “Yesterday in Muir Woods, Charlie lifted his leg on a tree that was fifty feet across, a hundred feet high, and a thousand years old. What’s left in life for that dog after that supreme moment?”

Gossage was quiet for a moment, then he said in his slight stutter, “W-w-well, he could always t-t-teach.”

At this time of the year when school has resumed, half the people I know are talking about teaching and teachers. Some friends are themselves teachers and another large segment are the students, everything from pre-K to post-doctoral. Some are thrilled to be back in school, others feel they have been sentenced to Angola for another nine months. That period is ideally suited to bring forth new life in other realms, however in the classroom nothing is guaranteed.

It can be time well invested, life-changing even, or it can be a prison-sentence.

As a lifelong student with two full decades in classroom instruction and the rest in the laboratory of life, learning and teaching have been two of my most enjoyable pursuits.

In fact, I’m signing on to teach a couple of classes at our New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary in 2010, one in worship leadership and the other in interpersonal relations, both skills absolutely required in those who would shepherd the Lord’s flocks. Both subjects are dear to my heart. Both classes will be shared with another professor–a real one, I’m tempted to say–to give the students two perspectives and, since the classes are several hours long, to give the teachers some rest.

I’m excited. But I’ve done this before, actually–taught seminary students–and know that it’s real work.

If you think being a student is hard, and my grandchildren do, the teacher’s assignment is far more difficult.

No one lives by faith to the extent teachers do. If they judged the value of their work and the effect of their teaching by what they see sitting before them in the classroom, many would slip quietly into the faculty lounge and slit their throats.

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Cruising down the bayous of lower St. Bernard Parish, Jason Melerine had his crab boat up to 20 mph. Suddenly the vessel caught a piece of sunken hurricane debris, jerking the outboard motor off and giving Jason and his helper the jolt of their lives.

A front-page article in today’s Times-Picayune says there are 6,000 underwater snags in the waterways of our part of the world, remnants from August 2005’s Hurricane Katrina.

It’s a sermon illustration in the making.

The other headline that catches the attention of readers is part of the continuing saga of Michael Jackson’s doctor’s legal predicament. “Coroner: Array of drugs killed Jackson.”

Imagine the prestige MJ’s doctor–Conrad Murray, cardiologist from Las Vegas–must have sported when potential patients learned who his celebrity client was. Wow. Doubtless he had a long waiting list of people wanting him as their doctor. Anything to be that close to their favorite celeb. I expect there’s something inside all of us who are insecure about going to doctors in the first place that says, “If he’s Michael Jackson’s doctor, he has to be the best!”

Preachers, this one has your name all over it.

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My friend Bob has been dealing with a difficult family situation. It’s not as though he needs the grief, because Bob is getting up in years and his health is bad.

Bob said to me, “I can’t wait for heaven.”

I agreed and said, “They don’t call it ‘rest’ for no reason.”

That’s a reference to Revelation 14:13. “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on….that they may rest from their labors.”

When I was a kid, a song we’d hear occasionally was called “The Big Rock Candy Mountain.” We heard it, smiled at its silliness, hummed along and thought nothing more of it.

It turns out that was the hobo’s national anthem during the Depression. And it gives us his idealized picture of paradise.

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