Author: Brant Copeland

What to Say?

/ Brant Copeland / 9 Comments

On Sunday mornings I get to the church between 6:00 and 7:00 a.m.  Last Sunday around 9:00 a young man showed up.  He came into my study and began to pour his heart out.  He’d slept under a bridge the night before, he said.  He’d been staying with some friends, but they were all hooked on crack, and had kicked him out after taking all his belongings.  He had no family save for a 94-year-old grandfather who lived in Miami.  What was he to do?

Then he broke down in tears.

As a downtown pastor I get this kind of visit often.  Sometimes I am able to offer some help by way of referral to a local agency.  Sometimes I can give some small monetary gift.  Sometimes, but only rarely, I can buy a bus ticket.  And I can pray.

I know full well that all the stories I hear might not be true, but I do my best to listen.  I’m not a social worker or an ATM machine, but I am a Christian pastor.  Listening and praying is what I’m called to do.

After praying with him, I took the young man down to the kitchen and turned him over to Julia, our Sunday morning housekeeper. She gave him breakfast.  About 30 minutes later he came back to my study.  By this time I was needing to concentrate on worship preparation.  I explained that he was welcome to come to worship and to stay for the lunch that we host every Sunday for homeless people.

“I have a session meeting right after worship, but after that, we can talk.”  I had already checked the balance in the Minister’s Discretionary Fund and was prepared to buy the young man a bus ticket.

“I’ll wait for you,” he promised.

After the session meeting the young man was nowhere to be found.  I wasn’t really surprised, but I was disappointed.

In the afternoon I made some hospital visits and when I got home, I reached in my briefcase for my laptop computer. Of course you’ve already guessed: It wasn’t there.

About a year ago the Property Council installed security cameras in the Education Building. Along with other downtown churches and businesses, we had a rash of petty thefts and felt we needed to help the police figure out who the culprit might be.  I’d forgotten all about those cameras.

Sure enough, on Monday morning I pulled up the video footage for Sunday morning.  It shows the young man entering the church office (which wasn’t locked at the time) not wearing his jacket and coming out about five minutes later.  As he enters the camera’s frame, he’s putting on his jacket.  He looks around carefully and casually exits the Education  building.

The time is 10:45 a.m. Worship is just beginning in the sanctuary.

Apple computers have an app called “Find My I-Phone.”  It also works for Macbooks.  It allows the owner to locate a phone, Ipad, or laptop on a map.  A little circle shows on the screen shows the location of your device.  If you want, you can tell Apple to lock your hard drive or even wipe it clean as soon as it goes online.

With the app comes another option.  You can leave a message that will appear on your stolen laptop’s screen.  So far my purloined computer hasn’t gone online, but when it does it will become a very expensive brick that will be of no use to its new owner.  In addition, a message will appear.

O.K.  I’m not going to tell you what the message is.

My question is this: If this happened to you, what message would you leave?

Fundamentally Speaking

/ Brant Copeland / 2 Comments

Agnostic Clarence Darrow and Presbyterian William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes Monkey Trial

Fundamentalism comes in all shapes and sizes.  I’m most familiar with the Christian variety, but there are other forms as well.

Recently the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A) changed its constitution.  We removed language that functioned as a bar to the ordination of Lesbian and gay officers (ministers, elders, and deacons) and replaced it with language that states: “Standards for ordained service reflect the church’s desire to submit joyfully to the lordship of Jesus Christ in all aspects of life . . .”

This seems to me to be  a very high standard.  You’d think that submitting to Jesus’ lordship in all aspects of life would be challenge enough.  Some brothers and sisters are not happy about this, however.  One session (local governing body) wrote to Florida Presbytery:

We cannot mold scripture into something it is not simply for political or cultural whimsy, nor can we pervert it to accommodate sinful behavior without fear of impunity.  It is imperative that our church clarify in a righteous manner by putting into practice the teachings of the Bible as it pertains to fidelity and chastity for all leaders of our church.  We believe in the infallibility of the Bible and sacred truths it teaches us, both the Old and New Testaments, where we learn that these sins are clearly not the intended design of God’s perfect creation for a man and a woman.

(I think the writer meant either “without fear of penalty,” or “with impunity” but, you get the drift.)

Fair enough.  Don’t tamper with an infallible Bible.  The problem is, the Bible endorses lots of practices that modern Christians reject (beating your wife, killing your children for disobedience, polygamy, Levirate marriage) and forbids others that modern Christians accept (wearing clothing of differing cloth, touching women while they are menstruating, getting tattoos, divorce).

A little interpretation is called for, isn’t it?  But we tend to be rather selective in our interpretation.  Some bits of the Bible we keep in the file folder marked “infallible” and others get filed under “no longer applies.”  Clearly, the writer of the passage above thinks the Bible contains a blanket condemnation of sexual intercourse outside the marriage of one man to one woman.  The fact that it does no such thing is irrelevant.  We must stick to the fundamentals.

There’s also a political form of fundamentalism.  For the majority of the Florida Legislature, capping tax revenue is fundamental.  Thus, if  lawmakers manage to pass a bill requiring internet giants such as Amazon to collect sales taxes, the Governor won’t sign the  legislation unless it’s “revenue neutral.”  Whatever the right hand collects the left hand has to give back.

In other words, the State can’t possibly bring in more money for Early Learning, healthcare, or education, even if it’s money already owed under current law.  “No new taxes”(or even old taxes collected from internet deadbeats).  It’s fundamental.

I recall a bumper sticker:  “The Bible Says It. I Believe It.  That Settles It.”  Replace “The Bible” with “Grover Norquist” and you’ve got a bumper sticker that would sell like hotcakes.

Life among fundamentalists will always been challenging, no matter where you find them.

Lord, Forgive Us Our . . .

/ Brant Copeland / 2 Comments

There are some pitfalls in this brave new world of social media.  One of them is the fact that when I make a blooper, it is exposed not only to the flock (who are used to my many shortcomings) but also to the entire World Wide Web.

For the past few weeks I have been posting this column as a blog post.  As typos go, the ones in last week’s column were real howlers.   Instead of “Pig in a Poke,” I typed “Pig in a Polk.”  As if that were not bad enough,  I left out the “l” in “public” when referring to “public policy.”   This is more than a little embarrassing.  I don’t really want to get into that particular conversation online.  I get enough unsolicited e-mail already.

I figured out how to fix the blog post, but the newsletter went out uncorrected.  I offer thanks to the many of you, both in the congregation and out there in the ether, who caught the typos and let me know about them.  Humble thanks, of course.  In the circumstances, I could hardly offer any other kind.

This puts me in mind of a young pastor in my grandparents’ church in Coahoma, Texas.  Not long after arriving in that community of cotton farmers, he offered a pastoral prayer imploring the Lord to bless the “hoers in the field.”  He hadn’t quite cottoned onto the local lingo.  Every parishioner who shook his hand after worship whispered, “It’s hoe hands, Charlie, not hoers.”

On another occasion Charlie prayed, “Lord, forgive us our falling shorts.”  Not quite the same thing as the Book of Common Worship’s “shortcomings and offences.”  I’m sure the Lord knew what Charlie was talking about, but the image evoked by his rough equivalent is likely to have left the congregation rather distracted.

Baggy pants are a fashion statement these days, but falling shorts are another matter.  (Come to think of it, the former might well contribute to the latter.)

Typographical errors, as bad as they are, are not quite so embarrassing as liturgical ones.  In by first parish I began the Easter morning liturgy by shouting “Christ is born . . . I mean . . . risen!”  It was not my proudest ministerial moment.

Humility is desirable in my line of work, but if you’re me, it’s unavoidable.

Pig in a Poke

/ Brant Copeland / 3 Comments

When I arrived to serve First Presbyterian Church of Tallahassee in 1985, Florida was coming down with a bad case of lottery fever.  Both conservative Christian groups and the liberal-leaning Florida Council of Churches opposed the establishment of a state-run lottery, even though proponents insisted that funds derived by separating fools from their money would be used to “enhance education.”

I joined Southern Baptists and Unitarians to say that the state should not encourage the something-for-nothing mentality that undergirds “gaming.”  (You can’t say “gambling” anymore.  That word has been stricken from the lexicon.)  We opposed the lottery on moral grounds.

We lost, of course.  The voters of Florida, in their infinite wisdom (or utter gullibility) took the bait.  And guess what!  The pea wasn’t under the shell after all.  Over time, the tax dollars that should have gone to education went elsewhere.  And the Governor is praised for proposing a budget increase for education that barely makes up for last year’s cut.

Meanwhile the ads for the Lottery grow increasingly surreal.  Throwing your money away on lottery tickets is not an exercise in cupidity after all.  It’s a way of “contributing” to education.

Eat your heart out, George Orwell.

The slide down the slippery slope has brought us to Gretna, a town in that is 85 per cent black and has an unemployment rate of 25 percent.  In a few days the residents of Gadsden County will get to vote on whether to allow slot machines to be added to the barrel racing and card games that are already underway at Creek Entertainment Gretna.

There’s not much doubt which way the vote will go.  The allure of jobs and new tax revenues is powerful.   My colleague, The Rev. Mr. Charles Scriven, a man of impeccable integrity, has launched an effort to defeat the slots.  Alas, the momentum is against him.

We can’t put the genie back in the bottle.  “Gaming” is probably here to stay.  The best we can do is to try to contain it as best we can.  Still, I can’t relinquish the dream of a system that uses equitably-derived tax dollars to further the public good.

“Gaming” is a social evil, no matter how many voters approve it.  It’s bad for families, bad for individuals, and bad public policy.  Dress it up anyway you want, it’s still a pig in a poke.

Courage Today

/ Brant Copeland / 1 Comment

My son Adam gave me the new biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer by Eric Metaxas for my birthday.  At 542 pages, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy made  for good reading at the beach following Christmas.

As Metaxas guided me through those chilling years of Hitler’s rise and the ever-increasing persecution of Jews, I kept asking myself, “If I had been a Christian in Germany at that time, what would I have done?”

Would I, like Bonhoeffer and that small band of pastors in the Confessing Church, signed The Theological Declaration of Barmen, rejecting “Nazi Theology,” or would I, like the vast majority of “good” Christians, gone along with what was termed “German Christianity?”  Metaxas points out that many,  many Germans opposed the Third Reich, but felt it their patriotic duty  to serve in the military and not to resist the government openly.

Last Sunday Glenda Rabby gave a wonderful talk to the Inquirers’ Class at First Presbyterian Church, Tallahassee, about the role of churches and church leaders during the Tallahassee Bus Boycott and the Civil Rights Movement.  I was too young at the time to make adult decisions, but I remember the pressure my father faced as a pastor in Texas.

When Dad stood for Civil Rights, even in a modest way, he was vilified by some church members as a Communist dupe and a disloyal American.  Members of the John Birch Society came to our church and took notes during his sermons to make their case against him.  My parents received anonymous phone calls at the manse accusing them of being “nigger lovers.”

If I had been the pastor of a church in the South in those days, would I have had the courage to speak out?  To march with Dr. King?  To insist that racial segregation was contrary to the gospel?  To drive black voters to the polls?

In hindsight, the issues facing Christians in the 50’s and 60’s seem crystal clear.  At the time, however, things seemed more complicated.  The same is true today.

Leon County Supervisor of Elections Ion Sancho has become a voice crying in the wilderness regarding the recent restrictions on voter registration and early voting passed by the Florida Legislature  He told  a crowd on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day,

We are facing a time that few of us thought would be possible.  History tells us we have been here before.  (The legislators) have another plan they want to implement, to make sure the people who voted in 2008 are not the same people who voted in 2012. (Quoted in the Tallahassee Democrat, January 17, 2012)

The argument that the new restrictions are merely a hedge against fraud by voters is an obvious sham.  It requires a willing suspension of disbelief to see the new law as anything but a means of suppressing votes by those who traditionally vote Democratic.  The effect of the law is to limit the votes of blacks and other minorities.  The law is not overtly racist, but then again, neither were the old poll tax laws.  These days you don’t have to be Bull Connor to keep non-whites from voting.

Preach on, Brother Ion!  You are a profile in courage.

Dissing the Saints

/ Brant Copeland / Leave a comment

A colleague sent me an article by Tom Ehrich, dated January 5, which offers an interesting take on the changes churches will have to make to avoid fading into obscurity.  Erhrich, who I gather is an Episcopalian pastor, writes about the decline of so-called “Mainline” churches on his website MultiChannelChurch.  He offers lots of helpful suggestions, but he strikes me as a bit too enamored of the marketplace.

Ehrich begins by lamenting the demise of Eastman Kodak, using this company as metaphor for all institutions, especially the church, that fail to adjust to fast-changing realities.   He then offers these two lists:

For clergy

  1. Clergy will need to become strong, assertive entrepreneurs, even in polities that believe in constraining clergy power.
  2. Institutions built on Sunday worship will need to channel resources away from Sunday worship.
  3. Constituents will need to embrace “harvest giving.”
  4. Leaders will take a fresh look at facilities – a long and strategic view, not a “survivor” view.

 For churches:

  1.  Constituents who have seen church as a place to get their needs met will need to become servants, self-sacrificial and radically inclusive
  2. Laity will need to let beloved institutions change radically, and allow leadership to pass to risk-takers, upstarts, new and younger constituents
  3.  Judicatory heads trained to manage institutional processes will need to become advocates for a movement.
  4. Seminaries will need to stop preparing ordinands for a church that no longer exists.
  5. People will need to let their faith be more than convenient religion, a comforting engagement with affirming fellowships, and instead wade boldly into disorderly gatherings marked by diversity and neediness.

The article is helpful in many ways, but apart from the word “servants,” I note a decided lack of theological content.

I agree with much of what Erhrich says, but disagree strongly that clergy should become “entrepreneurs” while members should become “servants.”  His implies that people of faith in mainline churches possess only “convenient religion.  This strikes me as downright insulting and a form of bearing false witness against his neighbors.

The people I “serve” (and I use that word on purpose) at First Presbyterian Church are not focused entirely on “comforting engagement with affirming fellowships.”  The are true servants of the living God who are engaged in God’s mission.

While I appreciate constructive criticism, I don’t appreciate condescension.  The Apostle’s advice to the church in Rome seems appropriate  “ . . . do not claim to be wiser than you are (Rom. 12:14).

Surely the church can change without “dissing” the saints who are currently in the pews.

Turning the Tractor

/ Brant Copeland / 1 Comment

Frank Loveless was born in 1901.  He grew up in Spade, Texas, which is less than a wide spot in the road; it’s just a junction were farm roads intersect.  When Frank was a 16 years old, he was working his father’s cotton field with a horse-drawn plow when a tractor salesman appeared.  The vendor was driving a truck and towing a trailer on which was perched a brand new McCormick tractor.  He backed the newfangled thing off the trailer and asked Frank if he’d like to give it a go.

Frank had never driven a tractor.  I’m not sure he’d ever driven a car.  He climbed up on the contraption and started down the row of cotton he’d been working with his horse-drawn rig.  When he got to the end of the turn-row, he pulled back hard on the steering wheel and yelled “Whoa!”

The tractor, obviously hard of hearing, continued on its course, crashed through the barbed wire fence and came to rest in a ditch.  Steam gushed from the punctured radiator.

The salesman managed to the tractor back on the trailer and drove away.  Frank went back to his horse-drawn plow.  So much for technology.

Frank Loveless was my grandfather.

Although I’m not exactly a Luddite, it’s clear that I am not genetically predisposed to technological innovation.   My son Adam has been blogging for years.  He must get it from his mother’s side of the family.  It was Adam who convinced me to enter the blogosphere,  and I do so with considerable trepidation.

For one thing, I’m not sure I have to time to keep this up.  For another, I have serious doubts that anything I would write would be worth reading.  Most of all, I fear that, having expended my full allotment of words on a weekly sermon, I won’t have any left for a blog.  Or at least no words worth posting.

Oh well, I’ll give it a go.  I can always go back to the horse.