People say it all the time, “I’m praying for you, pastor.”

I suppose they are.

My question to you, as a minister of the gospel, is: Can you tell?

I think I can. And I’m guessing you can also. Particularly if you have ever been the focus of genuine, heart-felt intercessions.

One president of the Southern Baptist Convention said the next day after he turned over the leadership of the denomination to the preacher who succeeded him he felt the difference–people were no longer praying for him. It was a sad day for him, he said.

My friend Bill Hardy tells of the farewelll reception Woodland Hills Baptist Church of Jackson, Mississippi, was giving him and his family as they prepared to move an hour up the state to the First Baptist Church of Kosciusko. An elderly lady went through the line to greet them and said, “Brother Bill, I have kept you at the top of my prayer list all these years.” Bill thanked her and said, “I hope you will keep me there.” “Oh no,” she said. “I’ll be praying for our new minister. Let the people in your new church pray for you.”

Little dose of reality there for my friend Bill.

Over the last few months, I have noticed the difference prayer makes in my own life.

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“Pastor, some of our members are concerned.”

That gets his attention, believe me.

You can say all you want about how the minister is God-called and God-protected and that sort of thing, but he would not be human if he did not want the people he’s serving to be supportive and responsive. After all, since he’s sent to help them, he will want some kind of evidence he’s accomplishing his purpose, otherwise, he feels that he has either failed them or God. Or both.

He is vulnerable as a result.

What makes him more vulnerable to negative influences from the congregation is that he has a family to feed and look after the same way you do if you work at the post office, drive a delivery truck, teach school, or extract teeth. The fact that he needs this job means he opens himself up to pressure from his constituents.

As a result, he reacts–at least emotionally–when he hears some of these lines that have been used on preachers since the beginning of the church.

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I’m a little irked with the younger generation of preachers who get all their news from the internet…or from the Jon Stewart show! Buy a newspaper, friend! You’ll find a hundred things a week that will fascinate you, instruct you, inspire you, and mortify you.

Here are three from Saturday’s “Times-Picayune” which are great preaching values.

“Transocean failures called systemic”

This refers to the explosion a year ago of an offshore rig operation for British Petroleum by Transocean. “The rig was finishing up its work drilling the Macondo deep-sea well for BP when oil and natural gas blew out from the ocean floor a mile down and ignited in fireballs.”

A Coast Guard report has just been issued (Friday) that lowers the boom on Transocean. “Unlike previous reports on the catastrophe that killed 11 rig workers and polluted the Gulf of Mexico, the Coast Guard’s report says almost nothing about the raft of decisions and mistakes by BP personnel that led to the blowout.”

“Instead, it looks at actions and systemic failures after the Deepwater Horizon had already lost control of the well–all in the realm of Transocean and its crew.”

Notice the word “systemic.” It is the key.

The report faults that company, not for a few mistakes or errors in judgements, but for an entire culture of bungling, corner-cutting, safety-negligence. The problems were throughout the system, from top management down to the lowliest hand.

Pastors and teachers, take note of this please. That’s the problem with humans these days. That’s what original sin is all about. Sin is “systemic” within us.

Sin is not a misstatement. Not misspeaking. Not a lapse in good judgment. Sin is not a slipup, not an error, a failure to adhere to otherwise good principles.

Sin is throughout our hearts and lives. It is not a small segment of our lives that needs to be salvaged, healed, redeemed, helped, bandaged, treated. It’s all of us. Throughout.

“Why should you be stricken again? …The whole head is sick, and the whole heart faints. From the sole of the foot even to the head, there is no soundness in it, but wounds and bruises and putrefying sores; They have not been closed or bound up, or soothed with ointment.” (Isaiah 1:5-6)

Second thing from the newspaper.

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What started this for me was a fascination with the fourth of Jesus’ seven parables found in Matthew 13. As I often do when faced with a 7 or 8 hour drive from my hometown in north Alabama back to New Orleans, I picked a scripture that intrigued me and thought of it from every angle.

This may be the most neglected parable from all those taught by Jesus, methinks.

The kingdom of heaven is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal till it was all leavened. (Matthew 13:33)

I had been working on a message–now posted on my blog–on how Christians hide themselves inside their church buildings when the Lord wants us permeating the community with the gospel. This parable seemed a natural.

The way I was interpreting it was with an emphasis on “a woman took and hid” the leaven in the dough. She had some leaven and wondered where to hide it. “I know,” she thought. “I’ll hide it in this dough.” But a few hours later or the next morning, the world knew where she had put it. The power of the leaven to affect everything around it changed the dough and thus gave the presence of the leaven away.

That speaks to Christians wanting to remain secret disciples of Jesus, I was thinking. A quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer has stuck with me for decades and works here: Secret discipleship is a contradiction in terms. For either the secrecy will kill the discipleship or the discipleship will kill the secrecy.

Then, I called a friend on my cell phone (yep, I was on the interstate and making a cell phone call; sorry for the bad example!). Mike knows his Greek. I wanted to know what the Greek New Testament could contribute to my understanding of that fourth parable.

He called me back. “The word in the Greek is ‘hid,’ all right,” he said. “But the commentary I checked said we should not make too much of the fact that she hid the leaven. She just put it inside the dough. The emphasis is not on her hiding it but on the way the leaven influences everything it touches.”

Well, all right, I thought, reluctantly. I had thought I was on to something with the emphasis on the “hid” word.

Then, next morning, with my office next door to the church library, I started pulling out commentaries.

Not a good thing.

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Churches build these great ministries and put on outstanding programs, then fail in one critical area: they hide them inside the walls of their buildings.

Then a leper came to Him, and on his knees, begged Him: “If you are willing, you can make me clean.”

Yet he went out and began to proclaim it widely and to spread the news, with the result that Jesus could no longer enter a town openly. But He was out in deserted places, and they would come to Him from everywhere. (Mark 1:40-45)

I’m always struck by the incongruities–the oddities–in people’s behavior, particularly in biblical stories. Consider these unexpected aspects of our Lord’s encounter with the leper:

–The leper felt free to come to Jesus. The law specifically forbade that (Leviticus 13:45-46). Lepers were to shy away from others and to call out “unclean,” lest they be accidentally touched and therefore unclean.

–Jesus reached out and touched him. Our wonderful Lord did the unthinkable and touched the untouchable. As always, He was driven by compassion.

–Then, after the man was healed, the Lord told him to keep it to himself. These were the early days of the Lord’s ministry and the last thing He needed was crowds mobbing Him as a cult hero.

–The man disobeyed Jesus and told everyone he met. We can hardly blame him. I’ve sometimes felt half-seriously that the only unfair command our Lord ever gave was telling this fellow to keep the news to himself. Like he could! And like no one would notice.

Those are four strange aspects to this wonderful little story. But they suggest an even greater oddity about the Lord’s people today: Jesus told that man to be quiet, but he went out and told everyone he met. He tells us to tell the world and we go home and sit down.

We keep the most wonderful news in the world to ourselves.

Something bad wrong with that.

Even the finest Christian workers in today’s churches have a tendency to clam up rather than share their faith with the outside world. We love the Lord, we’ve been saved, we are grateful for His grace and power and mercy, and we love to worship Him and sing and talk about Him.

To one another.

What we are not doing is telling the world.

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