A Theft In Texas

 

The phone rang about noon on a Sunday.

“Hello.”

“Hi Bob, this is Susan, I’m sorry to bother you but we have a problem.”

Susan was the property manager at an apartment community in my portfolio in Baltimore, MD, for her to call me on a Sunday wasn’t good.

“What’s going on Susan?”

“I was showing a prospect an apartment in building “C” and as we were walking, I happened to look down the street at the shed we use to store window air conditioners. I saw Jeremy’s van backed up to the shed and saw Jeremy, our assistant maintenance manager, loading air conditioners into it. Since I knew he wasn’t working today, and that even if he was, that there are no apartments that have malfunctioning air conditioners right now, I called the police.

“They arrived in just a few minutes and when we confronted Jeremy he told them that he was going to keep them in his van for safety.”

“Say that again please.”

“Jeremy told the police and me that he was loading them into the van so that they would be safe.”

“Then what happened?” I asked.

“The police asked me if he had authorization to take the air conditioners and I said ‘No.’

“They asked me if I wanted to press charges and I said ‘Yes.’ Then they took Jeremy away and I called Don [the maintenance manager] to please come to work and put the air conditioners back in the shed and change the lock.”

“Okay, thanks Susan, unless you need me for something right now, I’ll be over at the property first thing in the morning. Thanks so much for handling this, I really appreciate it.”

A few weeks later Jeremy was before a judge in a Baltimore City court. After Susan and the police testified, Jeremy took the stand. When his attorney asked him why he was on the property on a Sunday morning, when he was not scheduled to work, and why he was loading air conditioners into his van, this is what he said:

“I couldn’t sleep Saturday night because I kept thinking about the air conditioners in the storage shed. I was worried that the lock on the shed was so old that it would be easy for anyone to break it and steal the air conditioners. I decided the best thing to do would be for me to load as many air conditioners as I could in my van for safekeeping.”

The judge asked Jeremy, “Did you get permission from either the property manager or the maintenance manager to do this?”

Jeremy answered, “No sir. I thought that the situation was so critical that I needed to safeguard the air conditioners as soon as possible.”

The judge did not believe Jeremy and found him guilty of grand larceny.

Jeremy’s theft happened many years ago in Baltimore, MD. There was recently a theft in Texas that I want to talk about, a theft which is particularly sad because it was done by a pastor and his congregation. It has been in the media for the past few days and it is yet one more stain on the professing church. I will not go into the deep background or the many details, the basic facts are what I want to focus on.

A church produced the musical Hamilton without permission of the copyright holder. Not only did it produce the musical without permission, it altered the content of the production. When you take something that doesn’t belong to you, it is theft. There may be other legal words to describe what happened, but from a Biblical perspective it is theft. The theft is compounded in that the church altered the property it took, it used the musical to generate money, and it used the musical to propagate a message that is at odds with the intent and philosophy of the legal owner of the musical.

When I was in Massachusetts, our church musical group decided to produce a CD of its music. I still recall how careful they were to procure permissions from the copyright holders for all the songs they used that were not in the public domain. A group in the same church decided to present a production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Again, they were careful to obtain permission from the copyright holder and to pay any necessary fee – and by the way, the production was an astounding success.

During the preparation of Joseph, I asked the head of the group if we could alter a word or two in one of the songs, I didn’t care for words, “Any dream will do.”  She checked with the copyright holder and was told that we couldn’t; we honored that stipulation. Since we couldn’t change those words, I wrote a short piece for the playbill that talked about God having a special plan, or dream if you will, for each of us and that it is found in Jesus Christ. We had a contractual obligation to the copyright holder to present the musical as it was – not as we wanted it to be. The property did not belong to us and we needed to honor the fact that we were simply given a license to produce the property/musical as it was written.

It is important not to steal from people, whether the property is an air conditioner or a musical; and professing Christians, above all others (I hope), ought to know this and to know that nothing justifies such theft, such taking of property that does not belong to us.

Aren’t we already doing enough to disgrace the Gospel? Do we really need theft added to the stain on our garments?