The Rev. Jason Poling is Pastor of New Hope Community Church in Pikesville.

The good citizens of San Francisco have managed to tear themselves away from a crippling state budget crisis long enough to place a ballot measure outlawing circumcision. Being represented by Nancy Pelosi would unbalance me, too, so I don't want to be too judgmental.

Nah, I do.

What is at stake here is nothing less than the choice between the French and American visions of the social good. Liberté or liberty, sometimes the choice is clear. In San Francisco it couldn't be any clearer.

Our revolutions took place within a stone's throw of one another, chronologically. But while the French sought to institute a creedal secularism, we set out a constitutional vision of church protected from state, and vice versa. Our experiment was a lot less bloody, and a lot more successful.

Fast forward to today and in France Muslim girls are prohibited from covering their heads in school. This approach reflects an understanding of secularism as a militant opposition to religion, a strict requirement of conformity to prescribed standards however much said conformity might violate the consciences of citizens.

When our founding fathers pointed us toward a novus ordo seclorum, they had in mind a worldliness that allowed a variety of religious movements to express themselves in virtually any way that wouldn't impinge upon others. So while we don't allow the recreational use of peyote our society allows it as an expression of Native American religious observance. We'll make you take off the veil for your driver's license picture, but we'll let you wear it in class. And we'll allow you to raise your children according to the dictates of your religion, unless doing so presents an imminent threat to the child's physical health.

How is this definition adjudicated? With care, and with great respect -- at least in this country -- for the deeply held religious convictions of the people involved. If there's no overwhelming medical reason to oppose a practice, we're going to defer to the scruples of our fellow citizens. We do so in part because we would want them to do the same to us; we do so in part because most of us have a hard enough time making difficult decisions for ourselves, let alone for others. But mostly we do so because to be American is to be free to exercise, or not, our religious beliefs, and to have that free exercise protected against the prejudices of our neighbors.

Continue reading "Poling: Plus ça change ..." »

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UPDATE: NPR President and CEO Vivian (no relation) Schiller has resigned. And I’ve renewed my WYPR membership.

The Rev. Jason Poling is Pastor of New Hope Community Church in Pikesville.

James O’Keefe has struck again. The guerrilla filmmaker, famous for posing as a pimp seeking tax advice from the Baltimore chapter of ACORN, managed to catch NPR’s top fundraiser Ron Schiller on tape expressing his contempt for vast swaths of America. NPR is no doubt relieved that Schiller had already left NPR for the Aspen Institute when the story broke.

NPR claims to be “appalled” by Schiller’s comments, describing them as “contrary to what NPR stands for.” As a longtime NPR listener and sometime (I was about to renew when Juan Williams got fired) member of my local station, I think this statement is patently absurd. There’s a reason you don’t see a lot of NPR tote bags at Tea Party rallies, just like there’s a reason you don’t see a lot of Fox News bumper stickers on Priuses. I do believe that NPR strives to be accurate and evenhanded, and that for the most part it succeeds. But it is also the case that its business model depends on the voluntary financial support of a demographic that by and large sympathizes with the sentiments Schiller expressed on tape.

What caught my attention about the story was Schiller’s description of the Tea Party as “fanatically involved in people’s personal lives and very fundamentalist Christian – I wouldn’t even call it Christian, it’s this weird evangelical kind of move.” If Schiller had listened to his own network’s coverage of the Tea Party, he’d have learned that the significant differences between its core libertarian impulses and the social conservatism of traditional Republican constituencies presented a tension that was more managed than resolved during the last election cycle. That such disparate factions are seen as similar by a person in such a senior position in such an influential media organ is troubling to me, but what is more troubling is the suggestion that evangelicalism is Christian fundamentalism gone wild.

If anything it’s the opposite, and perhaps Schiller just had his labels mixed up. For those of you just tuning in, evangelicalism as we know it today started in the aftermath of World War II when fundamentalists decided they wanted to follow Jesus without being a jerk about it. They held onto their high view of Scripture, their orthodox Christian theology, their belief that Jesus is good news worth telling and their commitment to follow him in every aspect of their lives. But they left behind the anti-intellectualism, the closed-mindedness, the insularity, the paranoia, the parochialism and the overall backwardness that they believed would consign fundamentalist Christianity to the ash heap of religious history. It used to be you could tell the difference between a fundamentalist and an evangelical by asking what he thought of Billy Graham: The evangelical loved that he was bringing people to Jesus, and the fundamentalist thought he’d gone apostate because he’d welcome the local Methodist (or Catholic!) bishop on stage with him.

Continue reading "Poling: On weirdness and evangelicalism" »

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The Rev. Jason Poling is Pastor of New Hope Community Church in Pikesville.

Saturday saw the funerals of two men who took their own lives earlier this month. One was famous, the other known only among his family, friends and coworkers. I may well be the only person in the country to have known both, and I knew neither of them well enough.

I met Dave Duerson while in New Orleans for a conference in mid-November of 2009. Finding a cigar bar a few blocks down from my hotel, I settled in with a Romeo y Julieta. The TV was replaying the New England-Indianapolis game from Sunday night, the one where Belicheck went for it on 4th and 2 and lost. I made a comment or two to the mustachioed African-American gentleman next to men, but he was busy with his smart phone and didn't seem too sociable. But as we watched a crucial play, cigars smoldering, he suddenly broke out with the kind of analysis I'd heard only from the guys on TV.

"You really know your stuff," I said. He replied with practiced humility, "I used to play the game." Two minutes later I learned that I had been coughing up my very amateur opinions on a big game in the presence of an All-Pro safety elected to the Pro Bowl four years in a row, a member of the legendary "Super Bowl Shuffle" 1985 Chicago Bears squad.

Dave talked with pride about his children, and with sorrow about the failure of his marriage. He had come from a long line of Baptist pastors but converted to Catholicism to marry his wife Alicia, and between that and his success as a captain (and, later, trustee) at Notre Dame he spoke with profound affection about his Catholic identity even as he affirmed the spiritual force of his Baptist forebears. "I tell you what," he said as he ordered another Hennessy, "if I had it to do over again I'd go to Pope school. Those priests at Notre Dame, they drank more Chateau Lafite than I do, and I drank a lot of it." We exchanged a couple of emails the following week, and though from time to time I thought about dropping him a note I never did get around to it.

Continue reading "Poling: Two funerals, and one regret" »

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The Rev. Jason Poling is Pastor of New Hope Community Church in Pikesville.

This week I read two very different articles in two very different publications that made the same point crystal-clear: Sometimes when you are dealing with a difficult ethical question, a useful short-cut is to figure out what the jerks think and pick the opposing view.

The Jewish Times carried an article describing the conversion of state Sen. Jim Brochin from con to pro on the gay marriage bill that his committee moved out of committee this week. Brochin had opposed same-sex marriage in favor of civil unions, and indeed lost out on an effort to amend the current bill accordingly. Still, he now supports same-sex marriage, and if you take him at his word the credit for his switch goes to the anti-gay marriage activists.

"Ideally," he told the JT's Phil Jacobs, "I support civil unions, not marriage, but I can't side with these people." By "these people," he meant the activists who spoke up at his committee's hearing "calling gay people androids and pedophiles ... saying that gays were beneath us, that they were second-class citizens." However uncomfortable Brochin is with legalizing same-sex marriage -- a position he opposed publicly as recently as two weeks ago -- Brochin was more uncomfortable with "be[ing] on the side on the senate floor demonizing homosexuality." The bottom line for Brochin: "I'm not backing hate and divisiveness."

Public Discourse is a publication of a quite different sort, featuring heady articles that often involve traditional conservatives arguing with one another about topics from philosophy to religion to ethics to aesthetics. I confess that many of its articles sail well above my head, but I always work to understand the pieces written by Hadley Arkes, an esteemed professor of Constitutional law at Amherst College. (That a Williams grad thinks well of an Amherst prof speaks volumes in and of itself.)

Arkes wrote in response to a few recent pieces in Public Discourse arguing that lying is always wrong. Hang on there, Arkes said. If you're not careful with this sort of absolute proscription of telling falsehoods you're going to have to say that the people who hid Jews from the Nazis and lied to the Gestapo were guilty of an immoral act. What's more, you have to say that a moral person could never serve in a position of authority, say, the presidency, that requires complicity with the sort of disingenuousness that enables an agent to infiltrate a terrorist cell.

Continue reading "Poling: Guilt by Association" »

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The Rev. Jason Poling is the pastor of New Hope Community Church in Pikesville.

A church service was held at New Hope on Sunday morning. This would be unremarkable were it not for the fact that it wasn't supposed to happen.

As the weather predictions grew more and more alarming on Saturday night, I tore myself away from the "A Christmas Story" marathon on TBS to email some of our leaders to get their thoughts on whether we should call off services the next morning. The response among those close to email was unanimous, and I figured we'd get ahead of things and call it early.

For a lot of us with young kids, Saturday night can look a lot different if you're not planning to get up in time to get everybody off to church in the morning -- all the more so if you're serving and need to show up early. So I sent out the email, changed the website, changed the phone message and alerted the media. I knew I'd have to figure out how to combine two sermons into one, but I decided to put off thinking about that and enjoy the evening with family.

Come Sunday morning I was nestled all snug in my bed, imagining a winter wonderland outside but not bothering to confirm it by opening the blinds. Bad move. Around ten -- when our service usually starts -- my parents came to say goodbye and mentioned that the weather outside was anything but frightful.

Meanwhile, seven or eight folks had shown up for church.

Continue reading "On snow closings ... and the idiots who call them" »

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The Rev. Jason Poling is pastor of New Hope Community Church in Pikesville.

It’s that time of year again, and if you’re dreading the prospect of throwing the same old discs into the changer while you tend to the roast, here’s a rundown of several 2010 holiday offerings.

The Good

Erin Bode: A Cold December Night

This disc is by far my favorite of this year’s new holiday music, and I think Erin Bode is my favorite discovery of the year. With a voice and style reminiscent of Norah Jones, Bode displays both greater musical range and a deeper sense of perspective. The opening track, “Skating,” which Bode co-wrote with backing musician Adam Maness, establishes the mood right away: comfortable but not lazy, relaxed but not apathetic, friendly but not garrulous, thoughtful but not brooding, cool but not self-consciously hip. Much credit is due to Bode’s band; Syd Rodway’s basswork establishes a musical foundation that flows when it needs to and sits still when it should. The entire ensemble seems to be taking the music seriously, themselves not too.

Bode’s album succeeds where so many other solo female holiday albums fall short: Shawn Colvin’s Holiday Songs and Lullabies is heavy and over-produced, Sarah McLachlan’s Wintersong is thin and over-produced, and Sara Groves’ O Holy Night bears an unrelenting intensity that just doesn’t fit the artistic form. This is an album I wanted to listen to again after it was done, and I’ve kept coming back to it as often as possible.

The December People: Rattle and Humbug

What would your favorite Christmas carols sound like if they were played by the bands you hear on classic rock stations? Bassist Robert Berry gathered some of California’s top session and touring rock musicians to produce “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” as it would have been played by Boston, “Angels We Have Heard On High” as Peter Gabriel would have done it in the ‘80s, and a ‘90s U2 rendition of “What Child Is This?” Santana gets aped on “Feliz Navidad,” of course.

Continue reading "2010 Holiday Music: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" »

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The Rev. Jason Poling is pastor of New Hope Community Church in Pikesville. He is traveling in Israel with the Maryland Clergy Initiative, sponsored by the Baltimore Jewish Council and the Institute for Christian & Jewish Studies.

JERUSALEM – I don’t know what I was expecting, but somehow it wasn’t what I expected.

Earlier this week I walked on the Temple Mount, the site where the first and second Temples stood. Today it houses the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. For all the controversy that surrounds it, the Temple Mount is a very peaceful place – it’s a broad plaza populated by tourists, most of them apparently on organized tours.

For years I’ve studied various biblical passages about the events that took place on this site; I’ve looked at pictures and satellite images and helicopter flyovers to try to get something useful in my mind’s eye. It looked from a distance about how I thought it would, but the feeling of walking on it was the feeling of walking on an alien world. That’s not all too unusual, as that’s what walking through the rest of Jerusalem felt like too. But whatever connection I may have with the place spiritually, theologically … I don’t know that any connection was an experiential reality for me.

Some of this disconnect may come from the fact that I know enough about the history of the place to know that there is virtually no place one can stand that is as it was in the first century. Jerusalem has changed hands a number of times since then, and as we walked through the tunnels next to the Western Wall of the Temple Mount we learned about the ways successive administrations carried out massive building projects that would be impressive today but are stunning in scope for a pre-industrial age. The result of these building projects, though, is that streets in the neighborhood aren’t at the same levels they were two thousand years ago. So in a couple of days when we walk the Via Dolorosa, the path of Jesus’ journey carrying his cross, we will not be walking the same stones he walked.

Continue reading "Poling: A mountaintop experience…maybe" »

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The Rev. Jason Poling is Pastor of New Hope Community Church in Pikesville.

This week I have the privilege of joining two dozen of my colleagues on an interfaith clergy trip to Israel. Rabbis, ministers, scholars, priests and a bishop ... we have the makings of unlimited jokes as well as deep theological intercourse.

This trip, called the Maryland Clergy Initiative, is being co-sponsored by the Baltimore Jewish Council and the Institute for Christian & Jewish Studies. In addition to visiting major sites in Jerusalem and Galilee, we will meet with several of the leading voices on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

I look forward to posting to In Good Faith as often as our schedule and wireless connections allow. My colleagues will also be contributing on the MCI trip blog.

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Jason Poling is pastor of New Hope Community Church in Pikesville.

Things Clergy Would Appreciate You Taking Note Of

(a.k.a. Things We’d Like To Say But Don’t Because It Would Be Awkward)

In Good Faith readers may be aware that October is Clergy Appreciation Month. (One of my colleagues was surprised to hear this news; evidently at her synagogue every month is clergy appreciation month.) So I thought it might be useful to make readers aware of some things that we robed types would appreciate…specifically, things we have a hard time letting you know that we’d appreciate because it would be awkward to say so personally.

The following posts are the result of inquiries to dozens of clergypersons of various faiths, male and female, in various positions, from congregations of various sizes. They were assured of anonymity; if you think one came from your spiritual leader, the polite thing would be to chalk that up to coincidence and take heed nonetheless.

Work
• Just because I’m not physically at my desk doesn’t mean I’m not working. If I’m meeting a congregant for coffee, that’s work. If I’m meeting a colleague for lunch, that’s work. If I’m at the library researching a sermon (sermons usually take 10 to 20 hours to prepare, by the way), that’s work. If I’m at a conference, that’s work, even if the conference is someplace you’d like to go on vacation. If I’m at a denominational meeting, that really is work.

• If you see me out somewhere during the week, it’s nice for you to say hello. But don’t get into a 20 minute conversation; just because I’m alone doesn’t mean I’m not doing something worthwhile that requires my attention. This goes for dropping by my office during the week too. When we run into you at the grocery store, please remember we went there to buy milk and we have to get it home; we might not be able to have a long conversation about your grandson right then and there.

• We want you to talk to us about our sermons. Call us, email us, invite us to talk about them over coffee. Ask questions, listen, tell us what you heard. Read the text beforehand and let us know the questions it raises for you. Challenge us if you think we missed something. Give us your honest feedback, both positive and negative. But please be sensitive about the timing. Directly before we preach is not a good time to tell us what you want us to talk about. And directly after is not a good time to offer negative feedback. Apart from that, please bear in mind that sermons are designed to start conversations, not end them.

• “Well, you only work one day a week: ”Not funny. Never was, never will be.

Continue reading "Poling: If we might have a word ... (continued again)" »

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The Rev. Jason Poling is pastor of New Hope Community Church in Pikesville.

Things Clergy Would Appreciate You Taking Note Of

(a.k.a. Things We’d Like To Say But Don’t Because It Would Be Awkward)

In Good Faith readers may be aware that October is Clergy Appreciation Month. (One of my colleagues was surprised to hear this news; evidently at her synagogue every month is clergy appreciation month.) So I thought it might be useful to make readers aware of some things that we robed types would appreciate … specifically, things we have a hard time letting you know that we’d appreciate because it would be awkward to say so personally.

The following posts are the result of inquiries to dozens of clergypersons of various faiths, male and female, in various positions, from congregations of various sizes. They were assured of anonymity; if you think one came from your spiritual leader, the polite thing would be to chalk that up to coincidence and take heed nonetheless.

Congregational Life

· Buy life insurance. Funerals and bereavement are difficult enough for everyone involved without having to figure out who’s paying for the burial, and where a family can relocate now that there’s nobody to pay the mortgage.

· Our congregation cannot get involved in every worthwhile project our members are involved in. Don’t commit our congregation to your pet cause without asking, or you may end up putting everybody involved in a very awkward position. Instead, ask our leadership what can be done, but be prepared to hear that money and energy are already fully committed.

Continue reading "Poling: If we might have a word ... (continued)" »

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The Rev. Jason Poling is pastor of New Hope Community Church in Pikesville.

Things Clergy Would Appreciate You Taking Note Of

(a.k.a. Things We’d Like To Say But Don’t Because It Would Be Awkward)

In Good Faith readers may be aware that October is Clergy Appreciation Month. (One of my colleagues was surprised to hear this news; evidently at her synagogue every month is clergy appreciation month.) So I thought it might be useful to make readers aware of some things that we robed types would appreciate … specifically, things we have a hard time letting you know that we’d appreciate because it would be awkward to say so personally.

The following posts are the result of inquiries to dozens of clergypersons of various faiths, male and female, in various positions, from congregations of various sizes. They were assured of anonymity; if you think one came from your spiritual leader, the polite thing would be to chalk that up to coincidence and take heed nonetheless.

Part I: Boundaries

· Respect the reasonable boundaries we need to place around our own home and family life. Don’t call our cell late at night, or our home phone any time, unless it’s an absolute pastoral emergency. If you aren’t sure if it’s an emergency, it isn’t.

· Don’t tell us we “absolutely have to” read a certain book/see a certain movie/visit a certain museum. If we did everything we were told we had to do, we’d never get anything else done. Tell us what you experienced and what you liked about it, and let us decide whether it’s a must-see.

· If we inquire after somebody’s health, please don’t feel the need to provide exhaustive detail. We have not yet encountered the scenario where we have a pastoral need to know how many centimeters an expectant mother is dilated, or the percentage she is effaced.

· We have also not yet encountered the scenario where we have a pastoral need to view a surgical scar.

Continue reading "Poling: If we might have a word ..." »

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The Rev. Jason Poling is the Pastor of New Hope Community Church in Pikesville.

Her tragic death notwithstanding, the career of Anna Nicole Smith delighted plastic surgeons, dieters and reality TV fans, not to mention readers of Playboy magazine and patrons of strip clubs. It was one of these last, J. Howard Marshall II, who became Mr. Anna Nicole Smith in the waning years of his life.

The facts are well-known to most readers: Ms. Smith, then 26, married Mr. Marshall, then 89, in 1994. Upon Marshall’s death 13 months later, his son E. Pierce Marshall contested Ms. Smith’s claim to half of his estate; the case ultimately wound up in the Supreme Court, which decided in Ms. Smith’s favor in 2006. Although both Ms. Smith and Mr. Marshall are now deceased, Mr. Marshall’s estate continued to pursue the matter, and the Supreme Court has announced that it will once again hear the case.

Oddly enough, this turn of events presents us once again with the reality that for a brief, shining moment, Ms. Smith replaced Michael Schiavo as the poster child for family values.

Obviously the disposition of a will can involve complicated decisions, and family tension is by no mean unknown in this sort of situation. Probate lawyers can explain all of the variables to anyone who’s interested in them, but the basic principle of law and the clear message of the Supreme Court’s 2006 ruling is this: If the choice is between a spouse and another family member, the spouse wins.

Much the same conflict was operative in the Schiavo case: Ultimately the courts decided that when Terry Schiavo’s husband and parents disagreed over her medical care, it was her husband’s right as her spouse to make decisions for her despite her parents’ disagreement with his choices.

Continue reading "Poling: Two Cheers for Anna Nicole Smith" »

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The Rev. Jason Poling is Pastor of New Hope Community Church in Pikesville.

It’s been a tough year to be an evangelical pastor with a small congregation. The two best-known examples are Fred Phelps of Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, and Terry Jones of Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida. The former is best known for protesting military funerals and running www.godhatesfags.com. The latter is known for a plan to burn copies of the Qur’an on Saturday to commemorate the 9/11 attacks.

Well down the list would be me. Like Westboro and Dove, New Hope is small and independent of a denomination. One difference would be that the only thing we burn is cigars when our guys get together to play poker.

There are plenty of other differences as well. But every time I turn on the news and hear about a small evangelical church that’s planning to burn copies of the Qur’an I realize that there just isn’t room for the reporters to describe it as “fringe,” or “cult-like” (see their “Discipleship Manual” at The Smoking Gun), or “nutty.” No, they have to call them something, so “small evangelical church” it is.

I’m getting a taste of what it’s like for many of my Muslim colleagues.

A couple of years back I asked a local Imam what he thought about the blasphemy laws in many majority-Muslim countries that prescribe the death penalty for those converting from Islam to another religion. He told me he thought it was outrageous. I referenced the passages in the Qur’an used to justify the practice, and asked why other imams would endorse it on that basis. “Because they’re idiots,” he said.

Continue reading "Jason Poling: I'm with stupid" »

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The Rev. Jason Poling is Pastor of New Hope Community Church in Pikesville.

The commentary page in this morning's Baltimore Sun carries a piece I wrote on the major gubernatorial candidates’ low levels of charitable giving, as first reported in the Sun over the weekend.

One issue that space didn’t permit me to explore was the question of whether one should give based on pre- or post-tax income. Some teach that we should give a percentage of our take-home pay, since that’s really the only money we have any control over. Others say that we should give a percentage of pre-tax income, since we are called to give of our “first fruits,” that is, of the first and best that we yield.

I incline strongly toward the latter view, for two reasons. Theologically, I can’t get past the idea that Uncle Sam would get his cut before God does. But from the perspective of personal responsibility, I think it’s essential for us to recognize that the big number on our pay stub is in fact what we’re getting paid — and that what we take home is that amount less the money that we have withheld as payment for other things.

In regard to some of those things we have no choice: our employers are required to deduct payroll taxes and to withhold income taxes. On others we do, and most of us should choose to have money withheld for retirement plans, health care and disability premiums, etc. Some employers even allow us to make charitable contributions directly out of our paychecks. But in all cases, the amount we take home is simply the number that ends up on our checks (or deposited directly in our bank accounts) after certain payments have reduced the amount we actually got paid. We might take home, say, $1000, but that doesn’t change the fact that we got paid $1,500.

Some people believe that the amount one gives should be reduced in accordance with the fact that some functions covered by the “tithe” as directed in the Old Testament are handled by government — after all, ancient Israel was a theocratic nation-state. Others respond that if you add up the various “tithes” commanded the actual amount God instructed his people to give is closer to 27 percent than 10 percent, and involves giving a combination of a portion of both income and assets.

Continue reading "Give it away, give it away, give it away now" »

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The Rev. Jason Poling is Pastor of New Hope Community Church in Pikesville.

I, for one, am glad to see that the Sun is selling enough advertisements to necessitate the abbreviation of wire stories. But I was disappointed to see that the piece in today's paper ("Man arrested on terror charges," page A10) relating the arrest of one Zachary Adam Chesser failed to mention the infamy he earned by threatening the creators of South Park for their depiction of Muhammad.

No doubt Chesser's alleged association with notable terrorist figures like Anwar al-Awlaki and Nidal Hassan had earned him a spot on the no-fly list (and a federal wiretap) before he put Trey Parker and Matt Stone in his sights. His defenders at the time tried to portray him as a harmless blogger, parroting his statement that he was simply observing (rather than threatening) that Parker and Stone might end up like murdered Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh.

Chesser was picked up at JFK earlier this month when he allegedly tried to fly to Somalia in order to join up with the terrorist organization al-Shabaab, presumably not in the role of harmless blogger. Indeed, according to his own statements to FBI investigators, Chesser traveled with his infant son in order to deflect suspicion. Anyone who has attempted air travel with an infant knows that you don't do this unless you absolutely, positively, have to be there on an airplane. So clearly the guy was pretty serious.

What's especially sobering about this story is that Chesser is all of 20 years old. According to his interviews with the FBI, Chesser's commitment to the violent propagation of Islam was in considerable flux during the exactly two years between when he became interested in Islam and when he set off to another continent to join a terrorist organization. At times he was personally committed to violence, at times he was opposed; at times, Cuomo-esque, he supported others' violence but didn't want to perpetrate it himself.

Continue reading "Goin' after South Park? Goin' down to court" »

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The Rev. Jason Poling is Pastor of New Hope Community Church in Pikesville.

Every once in a while I encounter something that forces me to question some of my most deeply held beliefs. Sometimes it's being told about an experience I don't think ought to be able to happen. Sometimes it's a person doing something totally unexpected that somehow works out for the good. And sometimes it's a bunch of bigoted jerks disrupting a military funeral.

For a small church in Kansas, the Westboro Baptist Church has a presence that looms large over our area. Their 2006 protest at the Westminster funeral of Marine Lance Cpl. Matthew A. Snyder prompted a lawsuit which will make its way to the Supreme Court this fall. For those who are unfamiliar, WBC's membership consists primarily of the pastor's relatives, and its activities consist primarily of stretching the limits of First Amendment protections and going to court against their opponents.

This spring WBC announced that it would protest at the funeral of University of Virginia lacrosse player Yeardley Love at the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen. Apparently a young woman's violent death presented an opportunity to address the issue of pedophilia in the Roman Catholic Church by waving signs and shouting slogans with content unsuitable for a family blog.

I couldn't have been prouder that someone from our congregation was on site to hold up sheets and tarps to protect Love's family from seeing the WBC protesters (who, as it turns out, never showed). Much the same service was provided to Snyder's family by the Patriot Guard Riders, a corps of motorcyclists who fire up their Harleys at military funerals to drown out the voices of WBC protesters.

My libertarian streak runs deep and wide. Generally speaking I'm inclined to note that it's the right to free speech, not the right to not be offended, that is enshrined in the First Amendment. So on the question of offensive South Park episodes, as I argued on this blog several months back, a person who doesn't like how his prophet is being portrayed should change the channel rather than threatening violence against the show's creators.

So when people want to protest outside a political event, or a rock concert, or a Wal-Mart, or even an abortion clinic, I see that as an exercise of free speech that the people who don't like it have to tolerate anyway -- in this country, that's how we roll. To have true freedom of speech means to allow speech that is inconvenient, that is unwanted, that may be upsetting.

Yet at the same time there's a lot of sense in carving out space for civility and decorum in the midst of these freedoms in a few circumstances. And if there's any place where speech might legitimately be curtailed, I have to say as a pastor that it's at a funeral. I'd probably want to include weddings as well. It's not unreasonable for a free society to say, "You don't have the right to not be offended. But you do have the right to bury your son in peace," without people yelling across the street that his death should be celebrated as God's vengeance on America for its various moral failures.

Continue reading "Jason Poling: Barbarians well outside the gates" »

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The Rev. Jason Poling is Pastor of New Hope Community Church in Pikesville.

No doubt my fellow In Good Faith readers have donned their tuques and opened up a can of Elsinore in honor of Canada Day, our northern neighbors' July 1st version of Independence Day. As my family has recently suffered at the hands of the land I often think of as America's Hat, I thought I'd invite the denizens of this blog to weigh in on the ethical question being hotly debated here at my grandmother's house in Milwaukee.

Back in the spring, somebody called my grandmother claiming that he was me, that he had been arrested for DUI in Canada, and that he needed her to wire bail money right away. My grandmother, a 95-year-old teetotaller, is sharp as a tack and wasn't going to fall for the scam, which has apparently been popular in recent months (Google "Canadian DUI grandson scam").

But the question arose whether she should have called my parents to let them know about the call. She figured that in the unlikely event this wasn't a scam, I would eventually have had to make them aware of my transgression. That was my business and my responsibility; she wasn't going to get involved. My parents felt she should have called them to let them know (and be reassured that I wasn't anywhere near Montreal at the time).

I'm with Grandma on this, and not just because I'm staying at her house right now. My view is that under normal circumstances if an adult family member calls another adult family member for help, the person called should keep that private while encouraging the person in trouble to let people close to him know that he needs help.

What do you think?

Either way, I blame Canada. If it weren't for the lovely honeymoon my wife and I had in Nova Scotia, and lobsters from New Brunswick, and mussels from Prince Edward Island, and the nice Mountie in Banff who patiently posed for a picture with my daughter the last time I was in the 51st state, and my Canadian friends, and Sarah McLachlan, and John Candy, and most of all Rush ... well, I'd be pretty bitter right now.

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The Rev. Jason Poling is Pastor of New Hope Community Church in Pikesville.

Amid the many difficulties faced by anyone writing about the events in the Middle East of the past few days is what to call those aboard the Gaza flotilla. Many news outlets have referred to these “passengers” as “pro-Palestinian activists.” In its plainest sense, the term denotes someone advocating a political or social cause by means of deliberate “action.” But in common parlance the term connotes a particular type of action -- namely, non-violent action. (We do not refer to the 9/11 terrorists as “activists,” though they certainly were taking deliberate action to advocate a political cause.)

For those aboard five of the six boats, this name makes some sense. According to reports from both sides, the passengers on these boats did not offer violent resistance to the Israeli armed servicemen who boarded their ships. Their ships were commandeered and sent to the Israeli port of Ashdod, where the humanitarian goods on board were unloaded and prepared for shipment to Gaza. The activists were processed to ensure they did not present a terror risk, and released.

This, I submit, is exactly what John Lewis would have done if he had planned the mission.

Most readers will remember that John Lewis, currently a Democratic congressman from Georgia, was among the “Freedom Riders” who through their fearless activism brought down legal segregation in the Southern states. Though he was arrested and beaten on multiple occasions, he held unswervingly both to his political goal and to his nonviolent principles. For good reason President Obama gave him a signed picture from his Inauguration declaring, “Because of you, John.”

Now, I do not know anything about Congressman Lewis’ position on the State of Israel beyond the fact that he co-sponsored a resolution congratulating Israel on its 60th anniversary (along with over half of his House colleagues, including Roscoe Bartlett, Albert Wynn and some 264 others in between). His few public statements on the Middle East have stressed the need for peace in the region, and urged all parties involved to seek nonviolent resolutions of their differences. I had the privilege of taking a class on the civil rights movement in college with Julian Bond, whom Lewis defeated in a 1986 Democratic primary to win that House seat; Bond had a number of things to say about Lewis but I don’t recall that any of them involved Israel. So I could be wrong about this, and I will gladly clarify if the Congressman or his staff say so.

The point of the Freedom Rides, as with all nonviolent action in the civil rights era, was to demonstrate the injustice of Jim Crow laws by firmly, respectfully and nonviolently breaking them, then suffering the consequences. The idea was that by receiving unjust punishment for breaking unjust laws, they would shame the nation into upholding the civil rights of all its citizens.

Many trace this strategy to the Sermon on the Mount, in which Jesus says that if someone tries to sue you for the shirt off your back you should give him your pants, too (Matt. 5:40, my (broad) translation) – standing there naked, the interpretation goes, will demonstrate how outrageously you are being treated and shame your persecutor (or a just judge) into ensuring that the basics of human survival aren’t wrested from you in a parody of justice.

Continue reading "Jason Poling: WWJLD?" »

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Categories: International, Islam, Jason Poling, Judaism, People, Politics
        

The Rev. Jason Poling is Pastor of New Hope Community Church in Pikesville.

If memory serves, Oriole Park and the Light Rail opened the same year. Every morning that summer of ‘92 I took it from Lutherville to catch the MARC train down to my summer internship in D.C. When work or socializing (OK, usually socializing) put me on the night’s last train back to Baltimore, I often trudged up the hill to the Mount Royal stop only to find myself having to squeeze into a train full of suburbanites going home from that night’s game.

Times have changed.

Yesterday I pulled into the parking lot at the Falls Road stop and was afraid I had the wrong day printed on my ticket. Not an hour before game time, I hopped onto a half-empty train that still had open seats by the time we got to the ballpark. After the game, I pushed my way through a throng of despondent Red Sox fans waiting for the southbound train to take them to their airport hotels, and hopped onto the northbound train just as it was pulling out. Again, half-empty. Which was a relief, since a 10-inning game on a sweltering day makes for ripe-smelling fans you really don’t want standing next to you holding the overhead bar.

But, boy, was it depressing.

That first summer my friends and I would get to the ballpark 2 hours early to score standing-room tickets, and we were glad to have them. Camden Yards was the hottest ticket in town, and even after the novelty of a new ballpark wore off they were still packing them in during the last years of the Ripken era. Now, less than a month into what will likely be the O’s 13th losing season in a row, an overwhelming number of those officially in attendance are disguised convincingly as empty seats.

At a fundraiser this weekend I spoke with a local media personality whose career in Baltimore stretches back decades. He told me he was done. He’d still support the team and get down to the Yard once in a while, but he just couldn’t muster the emotional energy to care about the O’s any more. Not long after Cal Ripken retired I asked a guy who’s well connected at the highest levels of Major League Baseball what he thought of the prospects for turning the team around. He just shook his head and said, “There’s no vision, and as long as that’s true of the club’s leadership the Orioles will be a losing team.”

That was eight years ago.

But this post really isn’t about the Orioles. (This is, after all, the religion blog.) Tufts University recently did a study on clergy who have lost their faith but remain in the pulpit. The miniscule sample size and the strong anti-religion bias of study author Daniel Dennett should give pause to anyone looking to extrapolate too much from what the researchers conclude. Surely there are clergy whose doubts have led them to conclude that they cannot stand by the convictions of their faith tradition even as their mortgage statements have led them to conclude that they can’t afford to just walk away.

Continue reading "Jason Poling: The Oriole Way (church edition)" »

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Categories: Christianity, Culture, Evangelicalsm, Jason Poling, People
        

The Rev. Jason Poling is pastor of New Hope Community Church in Pikesville.

When the 2005 publication of the Mohammed cartoons in a Dutch newspaper made headlines, I felt torn. As a libertarian, I wouldn’t want to say it should be illegal to publish such cartoons. But as someone who tries to be sensitive to the religious views of others, I would also not want to publish them in order to avoid giving offense. Perhaps it’s cowardice for me to want a world where they can be published but where I don’t publish them.

The same angst returned for me when South Park’s portrayal of Mohammed in their 200th episode was censored by Comedy Central. A pornographic from the Bible, of all things, has resolved the tension for me.

A few years back I preached through the book of Ezekiel. For those unfamiliar with it, it’s one of the longer prophetic books in the Bible; it’s also one of the most outrageous. Not once but twice (in chapters 16 and 23, if you’re interested) God describes the unfaithfulness of his people with language that would make a sailor blush. Naturally, I was pretty fired up to preach these passages.

When I got to chapter 16, I was five minutes into my sermon when a family with young kids slipped into the back of the church and sat down without hearing the warning during our announcements that the sermon would be dealing with some R-rated material. Rapidly downshifting from R to PG, I still managed to get my point across. (But I never saw them again.) When I came to chapter 23, I gave strict instructions to the ushers not to let that happen again. I also made sure that folks were aware that the sermon that day would deal with some mature subject matter, providing warnings in our bulletin, in the announcements, and at the beginning of my sermon.

The sermon was not well received by everyone. One visitor contacted the senior pastor of the church that planted us to express her disapproval, and wrote a long letter excoriating me for…well, preaching the text that I had in front of me. She said she would not be returning to New Hope until we changed our ways. I had the good manners not to ask if that was a promise or a threat.

You won’t find these passages preached in most churches; most aren’t willing to go into that kind of territory, even when the Bible does. At New Hope, we believe that having a high view of Scripture means that we treat all of it as inspired — the red letters, the black letters, and the purple prose, too. And I must say that I feel no responsibility whatsoever for the offense our visitors took that day: They were made aware of what was coming three different ways. They were warned that they were about to be exposed to offensive material, so they really couldn’t complain when it happened as promised. Even if the [WARNING: Gratuitous male nudity ahead] Pompeiian fresco of Priapus was projected on the front wall of the sanctuary. Which it was.

Continue reading "Jason Poling: You bastards!" »

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The Rev. Jason Poling is pastor of New Hope Community Church in Pikesville.

On Monday morning the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, a case that has the potential to set tremendously important precedents for the exercise of First Amendment rights. Or for the protection of people from discriminatory treatment. It depends how you see it.

In a nutshell, the situation is this: A Christian student group at Hastings, a law school in the University of California system, was denied recognition because it requires that members sign a statement of faith and abstain from "unrepentant participation in or advocacy of a sexually immoral lifestyle." Without recognition, the group was treated like any other non-campus group: No preferential scheduling of meeting spaces, no access to campus-wide email, no access to student organization bulletin boards, no (modest) allocation for expenses.

So, they sued. (Remember, these are law students. Really, what better way to make use of an expensive education than a test case that would ultimately go to the Supreme Court?) The students claimed the school was infringing on their right to free association (and exercise of religion); the school claimed the students could only constitute as a student group if it followed the school's non-discrimination policy, which the organization's by-laws transgressed.

It's a difficult choice: Should a publicly funded institution provide support to an organization that operates against its principles? Should an organization be required to compromise its principles in order to function as a recognized student group? Do we really want to live in a world where the Folk Music Society can’t kick out its treasurer for being photographed in the front row at a Black-Eyed Peas concert?

Continue reading "Jason Poling: Free to believe, you but not me?" »

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Categories: Christianity, Church and State, Guest Posts, Jason Poling, Law and Courts
        

The Rev. Jason Poling is Pastor of New Hope Community Church in Pikesville.

Five years ago, Terri Schiavo was pronounced dead more than 15 years after a heart attack put her into a persistent vegetative state. The battles leading up to that conclusion originated in a struggle between her husband Michael Schiavo and her parents Robert and Mary Schindler over who would determine proper care for her; they eventually managed to involve all three branches of the federal government, and hastened the political demise of Sen. (and Dr.) Bill Frist's once-promising Presidential candidacy.

As I watched the story unfold like a slow-motion car wreck, I was struck by the difficulty of the ethical issues involved. Does a feeding tube constitute "extraordinary measures" used to sustain life? Some liken it to the technological intervention of a ventilator, while others consider it basic nutrition and hydration which no-one could humanely deny. Did the widely disseminated videos of Schiavo reflect genuine intelligent response to people known to her or simply an involuntary reaction to external stimuli? Was Schiavo a living human being, or simply a metabolizing organism? Did she begin to rest in peace five years ago, or twenty?

The profound ethical questions raised in this case will continue to be debated, as well they should. But as long as they are unresolved the more pressing question for most of us is how a situation like Schiavo's is to be handled. Schiavo's autopsy revealed that she had indeed suffered massive and irreversible brain damage, but decisions about her care had to be made without this evidence. Absent a clear advance medical directive, does her husband make decisions for her? Do her parents have the right to trump her husband? Do the courts have the right to trump both? Congress?

Every day difficult medical decisions are made without certain knowledge about what will happen, or what would happen if a different path were taken. And every day these decisions are made among differences of opinion as what the “right” — or at least best — choice is. At the end of the day someone must make the call, and we as a society must have ways of ensuring that the appropriate person is making these decisions when the patient is unable to and has not authorized someone else to.

Among the most important things we learn from Scripture about the nature of marriage is that every wedding involves two funerals. “A man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24). Jesus commented on this verse, “So they are no longer two, but one” (Matthew 19:6). When I officiate at weddings I always point out that from that day forward the people being married are entering into a change in the very essence of their being: no longer will either be himself or herself apart from the other. (I then sign the marriage license, and hope to snag a few crab balls on the way out. They then spend the rest of their lives working that out.)

What surprised me the most about the controversy over the Schiavo case was that the same people who ordinarily defend traditional understandings of marriage — people who in the course of pastoral ministry and teaching emphasize to couples (and their parents) the importance of “leaving and cleaving,” who encourage couples to work out their problems rather than running to their parents, who really do believe that the two become one — were the ones who wanted Terri Schiavo’s parents, rather than her husband, to make decisions about her medical care. No doubt if the roles had been reversed, they’d have been taking loud and strong stands on the right of a husband to make decisions for his disabled spouse, and decrying efforts by the government and her parents to remove the feeding tube.

Continue reading "Jason Poling: Terry Schiavo, five years on" »

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Categories: Catholicism, Church and State, Ethics, Guest Posts, Jason Poling, Law and Courts, People, Politics, Science
        

Rev. Jason Poling is the Pastor of New Hope Community Church in Pikesville.

Over on the Midnight Sun blog the illustrious Owl Meat Gravy has offered a critique of some conventional understandings of St. Patrick. Although I'm a recovering political science major, I don't buy his imperial reading of the Saint -- "St. Patrick's missionary' work was a Roman-supported campaign, an act of political domination by Romano-Britons, probably with all the attendant brutality that comes with conversion at the point of a sword" -- because I think that picture better fits the practices of a later era when derivative hagiographies of Patrick (quite possibly conflating his life with that of another Christian leader, Palladius) were produced.

The institutional memory of Patrick, it seems, highlights his success in making disciples of Jesus especially among the women of Ireland. Patrick's own narrative (preserved in one of two extant works) recounts his kidnapping from Britain, six years of adolescence and young adulthood spent as a slave in Ireland, and a successful escape by boat prompted by a supernatural nudge toward the dock. But it doesn't stop there: Like the apostle Paul, who had a vision of a beckoning Macedonian, Patrick has a vision of an Irishman bearing a letter pleading with Patrick to come to Ireland.

A call to return to the place where he was enslaved, that’s no slouch as a plot turn (ineffective as it was in the third Matrix movie). And Patrick’s influence as an evangelist is rightly celebrated by those who celebrate that sort of thing.

But more significant, I think, and of more lasting importance, was Patrick’s firm stand against the Arian heresy that Jesus was and is not fully God. During Patrick’s time the Church came to agree on some vitally important theological tenets that survive in the great Creeds of the Christian Church and are still held today (at least on paper) by all Christian traditions. Although it is merely attributed to him, having been composed centuries later, the hymn known as “St. Patrick’s Breastplate” reflects the robust Trinitarian orthodoxy for which St. Patrick stood so firmly. Join me in enjoying a pint while you meditate on these words:

St. Patrick’s Breastplate
trans. C. F. Alexander, 1889

I bind unto myself today
the strong Name of the Trinity,
by invocation of the same,
the Three in One, and One in Three.

Continue reading "Jason Poling: Thank God for St. Patrick's Day, Part III" »

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Categories: Christianity, Culture, Holidays, Jason Poling
        

The Rev. Jason Poling is pastor of New Hope Community Church in Pikesville.

The Anglican pastor and theologian Robert Farrar Capon notes, "Practically the only place where people now sing when they are cold sober is in church; and, to tell the truth, it sounds like it." Truth is, there aren't many places people sing together in any state of inebriation. Watch a European soccer match and you hear partisans lustily singing songs at each other, but here it seems that it's become too much to expect people to put their hands over their hearts at ball games, let alone sing along with the National Anthem. Sure, fans will sing along with their favorite artists at live concerts, but that doesn't really count.

Stop by an Irish bar on St. Patrick's Day, though, and you're in another world. I don't claim to be any sort of expert on the musical genre; I developed a mild appreciation back in college when two friends featured an "Irish Song of the Week" on a radio show otherwise devoted to political talk. While I was working in St. Paul one evening shortly after graduating, my boss handed me a twenty and told me I had to spend the evening somewhere other than the office; at the Half Time in St. Paul I met a duo that called themselves the Irish Brigade. (I didn't know at that point that pretty much every other band playing at Irish bars goes by that name as well.) Sean and Mike were either true Irishmen from Cork or able to sustain a convincing accent between sets as well as behind the microphone.

One evening I gave them a mix tape I'd put together featuring a mess of obscure singer-songwriters they'd never heard of but I thought they'd like. Apparently they thought I was the one on the tape, because the next time I saw them they asked me to play through a break between sets that weekend. I did so Friday night. I was not invited back on Saturday.

Still, every year as St. Patrick's Day approaches I dig out an old collection of Irish drinking songs entitled "Irish Drinking Songs" and spend a happy few days whistling "All For Me Grog" until my wife tells me to stop.

Continue reading "Jason Poling: Thank God for St. Patrick's Day, Part II" »

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Categories: Christianity, Culture, Guest Posts, Jason Poling
        

The Rev. Jason Poling is the Pastor of New Hope Community Church in Pikesville.

Those of us in the clergy have a strained relationship with the holidays enjoyed by the rest of our neighbors. Christmas for me is the day I recover from staying up late assembling Christmas presents after getting home from the midnight Christmas Eve service. Easter is the day I get up early to throw lamb in the oven so that after preaching I can serve it to several dozen international students, then go home and collapse. Thanks to an ill-considered dalliance with campaign politics in my youth I always associate July 4th with an all-day sweat earned by running up and down parade routes handing out stickers and candy. Even my birthday is usually a disappointment, falling as it does in the middle of December when nobody, including me, has time or mental bandwidth for anything but the demands of the holiday season.

So when my kids asked me last week what my favorite holiday was, I was glad to have St. Patrick’s Day coming up right around the bend. What’s not to like? I do have a wee bit of Irish ancestry on my father’s father’s mother’s side, not that any of us really needs it to celebrate March 17th. Like St. Patrick himself, I’m a good Trinitarian, so I offer my fellow In Good Faith readers these three points of appreciation. I begin with the fare.

The first beer I drank outside of a college dormitory was enjoyed at an Irish pub in Washington, DC after some friends and I had made the trek from New England to mark the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. Sitting with a pint in one hand and a cigarette in the other, I felt very grown up as I assaulted my senses with dark, rich smells and flavors. At the time I wasn’t aware that Guinness is actually less alcoholic than the keg swill to which I had grown too quickly accustomed; I just knew that it was a beverage that demanded respect, if not a knife and fork.

Since that day I have had Guinness in innumerable cities, from the sacrilegious joint in San Antonio that served it in a frosted mug to the “English Pub” at Epcot where I was allowed to repair while my wife chaperoned her youth orchestra around Disney World. Invariably I find my fellow Guinness drinkers to be a genial lot, whether they be introverts or extroverts (or progress from one to the other after a few pints). Three months out of college, having fled to St. Paul to avoid the embarrassment of an involuntary separation from my employer in Baltimore, I found solace and fellowship in a few pints and a few games of pool (and indigestion in the White Castle burgers I threw down on the way home).

Continue reading "Jason Poling: Thank God for St. Patrick's Day, Part I" »

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Apologies, real and imagined, Part III

The Rev. Jason Poling is Pastor of New Hope Community Church in Pikesville.

Now that’s what I call an apology.

No "I deeply regret that the citizens of Baltimore have had to go through this ordeal with me," no sideways allusions to a prayer of confession for “any words or deeds of mine that may have” stigmatized Israel. This was the real thing.

In brief: All of you have every right to be mad at me, because I screwed up. I hurt a lot of people in a lot of ways, and I’m sorry. Nobody else is to blame for this pickle that I’m in. It’s my fault, and I’m sorry. I’m embarrassed, as I ought to be. So I’m taking responsibility for my actions, I’m doing what I need to do to try to fix what I’ve broken, and I’m doing so even though I don’t know if I’ll succeed. I know I need help and I’m getting it, as in right now, so I’m leaving to get more help. I’ll see you when I see you.

Some found Woods’ apology a bit too thorough — "the best words ... money could buy," as David Zurawik put it. Clearly his statement was not scribbled on the back of an envelope on the limo ride over; it reflected what must have been a long and arduous editing process. Woods had a lot to say, and his transitions between topics were often anything but smooth. No doubt there were times when he said (as all of us who’ve done any writing have done), “Well, I gotta have this in there and this is as good a place as any to put it.”

Was Woods’ apology ghost-written? One can only hope that the people with whom he has been working had a hand in coaching Woods on his apology. It was not by surrounding himself with people who had permission to speak into his life that Woods entered into a pattern of betrayal. The “money and fame” that made it easy for him to go after those “temptations” to which he felt “entitled” also made it easy for him to insulate himself from criticism.

But his statement bears every mark of being a painfully and personally wrought stake in the ground that is and will continue to be significant as a declaration of his understanding of the causes and results of his behavior, and his intentions to amend it. Certainly it is the product of the work he has been doing in rehab, and a frank posturing of himself as someone who is still very much in recovery. (And it was admirably frank without being inappropriate for something being broadcast live at 11:00 am.)

Continue reading "Jason Poling: Tiger, Tiger, shame burning bright" »

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Categories: Christianity, Culture, Ethics, Guest Posts, Jason Poling, People
        

Apologies, real and imagined, Part II

The Rev. Jason Poling is the pastor of New Hope Community Church in Pikesville.

On Wednesday we Christians begin the season of Lent. Starting with Ash Wednesday, we enter into a time of reflection, of self-examination, of confession, of penitence.

Or at least some of us do. Some are so put off by religious rigmarole that they will have no part of irrelevant rituals. Others think themselves above this sort of morbid negativism; they could not imagine singing along with Augustus Toplady’s classic hymn “Rock of Ages:”

Nothing in my hand I bring
Simply to the cross I cling
Naked, come to thee for dress
Helpless, look to thee for grace
Foul I to the fountain fly
Wash me, Savior, or I die.

Naked? Helpless? Foul? No, they say, I don’t think I’m that bad off. I’m not the best person, but I’m pretty good, and I don’t think I really need anybody else’s help.

But traditionally the Church has taken quite a different view: We are sinful from birth, we are sinful by our own choices, we are sinful by ingrained habit and that’s no surprise since everyone around us is too. We live in a world where the effects of sin are seen all around us, where the very institutions that sustain us are thoroughly shot through with human frailty at best, Infernal evil at worst.

As the great 20th century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr put it, “Religion is very easily used to obscure rather than to reveal the primitive forces which control so much of human nature. Religion without a constantly replenished force of penitence easily becomes a romance which brutal men use to hide the real sources of their actions from themselves and from others.”

Therefore our church, like many others, will begin Lent with an Ash Wednesday service during which we will be reminded that we are dust, and to dust we will return. We will wear ashes on our foreheads as a reminder of our mortality. Mindful of the fact that our life is but a vapor, we will confess to God and to one another that when it comes to examining our consciences during the six weeks of Lent none of us will run out of material that ought to provoke repentance.

Of course, Christianity is not the only religion to focus the attention of devout on the reality of human depravity (original sin being, in the words of the great Roman Catholic apologist G. K. Chesterton “the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved” by the obvious reality of human experience). Our Jewish neighbors recite during Yom Kippur (day of atonement) services the Al Het, a prayer of confession arranged in acrostic format so as to accomplish the work of admitting sins “from A to Z.”

The Al Het is an impressive piece of liturgical work. In the Book of Common Prayer, we Christians are led to confess “that we have sinned by our own fault, in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone.” Oftentimes we will allow for a period of silent confession after mentioning a few specifics. But in the Al Het the worshipper begs God’s forgiveness for “the sin we have sinned before You under duress or freewill, and for the sin we have sinned before You in hardness of heart” — and then likewise for 22 other pairs of sins.

So I was struck by the news that during Chanukah Jimmy Carter had offered an Al Het. President Carter has been an outspoken critic of Israel, and has been accused of anti-Semitism by many not ordinarily prone to throwing such a term around lightly. Most recently, his book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid drew a furious response from Jewish leaders in Israel and America for likening the government of Israel to the racist government of South Africa under the National Party.

Continue reading "Jason Poling: Jimmy Carter and the Jews" »

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Apologies, real and imagined, Part I

The Rev. Jason Poling is the pastor of New Hope Community Church in Pikesville.

Our long metropolitan nightmare is nearly over. Today marks not only the first day of a new administration in City Hall but the last day of the old one. Practically speaking, Sheila Dixon’s ability to exercise real power as Mayor ended with the announcement that a jury of her peers had found her guilty of misappropriating gift cards. But today the formal reins of power will be transferred to Stephanie Rawlings-Blake. The apostle Paul wrote to his lieutenant Timothy that “first of all, I urge that prayers be offered for kings and all those in authority,” words that all of us living in or near Baltimore would do well to heed.

But in many respects the more important terminal time for Sheila Dixon is not noon, when her successor will be sworn in, but 9:00, when she will be formally sentenced according to the plea agreement reached with prosecutors. Wednesday’s Sun carried an op-ed by Dixon that was remarkable only for its resolute refusal to take note of the elephant in the living room. There is nothing at all unusual about politicians singing their own praises and boasting of their accomplishments, but in the present context it had the feel of Tiger Woods telling his wife about the great putts he made on the tour last year.

Arising from Dixon’s conviction was the strong sense among virtually all constituencies that she owed the city an apology. Yet shortly after the jury’s verdict was announced in early December she offered a statement that bore only a faint resemblance to one: “I deeply regret,” she said, “that the citizens of Baltimore have had to go through this ordeal with me.”

She expressed regret, but she did not express any remorse for the ways in which her own ethical failings had put “the citizens of Baltimore” in the position where they “had to go through this ordeal.” You can regret all sorts of things without owning any personal responsibility for them — I will say, “I’m sorry” to someone whose pet has died, but we both know that I’m expressing sympathy rather than admitting guilt. But to express regret when remorse is in order…well, that’s basically saying that you’re sorry not for what you did but for getting caught doing it.

Continue reading "Jason Poling: Regret, but no apparent remorse" »

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The Rev. Jason Poling is pastor of New Hope Community Church in Pikesville.

It’s been said that if you give an infinite number of monkeys with typewriters an infinite amount of time they will eventually produce the works of Shakespeare. Then again, this scenario may explain the genesis of the blogosphere.

There’s a basic principle to keeping blogs healthy: Don’t feed the trolls. Every blog has them, the people who delight in vituperative attacks on others (known as “flaming”), obnoxiously long screeds, and monopolizing the virtual conversation. But if you engage the actual content of his remarks, you will find yourself sucked into a black hole of back-and-forth posts involving bad logic, worse grammar and endless frustration. It’s a lot like arguing with a four-year-old: the minute you start, you’ve lost, because in doing so you have effectively declared that a rational adult ought to seriously debate the merits of sleeping under all of the blankets in the closet sorted first by color then by texture.

But there is a remedy: the universal shorthand “Dude, STFU” which translates to “Kindly be quiet.” This treatment, which only works if applied sparingly, essentially declares: “What you are saying makes absolutely no sense. Nothing good will come of discussing it with you. You’re annoying everyone on this blog. So cut it out.” Such an approach steadfastly and resolutely refuses to reason with the unreasonable, to join a battle of wits with the unarmed, to punch the tar baby.

Much the same principle applies to the outlying voices in our media landscape. There may have been some gaps in my seminary education, for I cannot begin to fathom how I might evaluate Pat Robertson’s claim that the entire nation of Haiti in the course of its battle for independence made a pact with the devil. What would be the text of such a pact? Would everyone in the nation need to agree to it? Every adult? A majority, or perhaps a super-majority? Would it need to be signed in blood? The mind boggles.

In much the same way, I have difficulty finding handles with which I might begin to grapple with other ideas promoted by Robertson: that Hurricane Katrina constituted an exercise of God’s wrath against New Orleans for its wickedness, or that 9/11 happened when God withdrew his protection from America when some obscure ACLU lawsuit was filed somewhere that morning and he decided he had simply had enough.

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Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 11:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (128)
        

The Rev. Jason Poling is the Pastor of New Hope Community Church in Pikesville.

I wouldn’t describe myself as a Disney fan, in much the same way that I wouldn’t describe Bob Ehrlich as a Martin O’Malley fan. But I was deeply impressed by The Princess and the Frog.

It wasn’t the animation, though having been exposed to far too many of Disney’s “dreck-to-video” offerings it was a pleasure to see an animated film produced with such care. Nor was it the story, with its predictable Disney-esque plotlines. It wasn’t even the brilliant minor comic figures, though they were outstanding: one of the virtues of animation is that characters may be literally overdrawn, achieving comic effect that would be tiresome in a formulaic live-action movie. (So that I don’t spoil anything for folks who haven’t seen the movie, let’s just say that the show was stolen by a firefly named Ray who could have been the love child of Sir Mix-A-Lot, Thomas Edison and the Cavity Creeps.)

No, I was most impressed by the quality of the film that will no doubt emerge as the most controversial: the spiritual. And I don’t mean spiritual in the “believe in yourself” sense that pervades so much of the Disney cosmology; this film features real-live demonic activity and otherworldly malevolence that deserves a G rating as much as the original (un-Victorianized) Grimm tales do.

The villain in The Princess and the Frog is, like every Disney villain, rotten to the core: egotistical, manipulative, deceitful and power-hungry. Yet while Dr. Facilier exhibits enough nastiness to frighten Disney’s core audience, what strikes real terror into the hearts of men is his shadow side …literally. We see on the screen not merely Dr. Facilier but what my Jewish friends would call his yetzer hara, the evil essence of his soul, portrayed as a shadow that manifests the true intentions behind his sneering grin.

Photo courtesy of Disney

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Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (24)
Categories: Christianity, Culture, Evangelicalsm, Guest Posts, Jason Poling
        

The Rev. Jason Poling is the pastor of New Hope Community Church in Pikesville.

Over 2,500 years ago Isaiah raised the question. Today we have an answer.

“Who can fathom the mind of the Lord, or instruct the Lord as his counselor” (Is. 40:13)? The Conservative Bible Project, that’s who. Led by Andy Schlafly, this intrepid band is on a quest to correct the “liberal bias” inherent in the Bible.

I am not making this up.

To be fair, the CBP claims that they are not seeking to correct the Bible itself, only the “liberal distortions” introduced by every English translation since the 1611 King James Version. Thus they are seeking to produce a “fully conservative translation” that will satisfy the following ten principles:

1. Framework against Liberal Bias: providing a strong framework that enables a thought-for-thought translation without corruption by liberal bias

2. Not Emasculated: avoiding unisex, "gender inclusive" language, and other modern emasculation of Christianity

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Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
Categories: Jason Poling
        

The Rev. Jason Poling is the pastor of New Hope Community Church in Pikesville.

For all the agonizing people do over theoretical ethical quandaries, few of us are likely often to find ourselves in genuine ethical dilemmas. Sure, we find ourselves in dilemmas, but our choice is usually between doing the right (but difficult, painful and/or costly) thing and taking a seemingly easier way out. Many of the dilemmas we encounter are self-inflicted: a husband looks at pornography and then must decide between confessing it to his wife (thus making her feel violated) or not (thus hiding something from her). We’re in a bad spot, but we put ourselves there, and we have ourselves to blame for having to lie in the bed we made.

The truly wrenching dilemmas, though, are the ones that are brought upon us by others. You see the neighbor kid smoking dope: Do you tell her parents? A coworker speaks abusively to you in a meeting: Do you object? A preacher delivers a sermon you know was cribbed from somebody else’s: Do you blow the whistle? In every case there are uncomfortable practical implications to either choice, and you’re aware that whatever path you choose will have negative consequences for you personally, but you have to choose. Even if you want very much to do the right thing, even if you work hard to keep your own interests from coloring your decision, it’s not easy. Beyond the harm inflicted by the bad behavior itself is the moral burden placed on those in a position to respond to it.

And sometimes you don’t have much time to make a choice. The adrenaline is flowing, the atmosphere is charged, the play is to you and you’ve got to make the call. This seems to have been the case for John Pontolillo, the Johns Hopkins student who encountered Donald Rice in his yard in the wee hours of Tuesday morning.

That Mr. Rice was guilty at the very least of trespassing is beyond question; that he was preparing to commit more serious crimes is beyond doubt. “Even burglars,” the Sun editorialized today, “don’t deserve to be killed with a razor-sharp sword.” No, of course not; burglary is not a crime that merits the death penalty in civilized societies. (And in the uncivilized ones I’d still prefer a sharp sword to a dull one, but that’s neither here nor there.)

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Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 12:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)
Categories: Culture, Ethics, Evangelicalsm, Guest Posts, Jason Poling, People, Politics
        

The Rev. Jason Poling is the pastor of New Hope Community Church in Pikesville.

It was three years ago that I shared a room with Ted Kennedy. (True, the room held a couple hundred people, but I did share it with him.)

Among the ministries our church has supported since its inception is World Relief, the Baltimore-based international humanitarian arm of the National Association of Evangelicals. Given that we have always had at least one of our members working at World Relief, it would be awkward not to. But we are happy to support their work, and grateful that our proximity affords us opportunities to be involved with World Relief that small churches elsewhere wouldn’t have.

Political views at our church run the gamut from reactionary to libertarian to conservative to moderate to liberal to socialist to Canadian. Given the poor reputation evangelicals have earned for our movement by ham-handed political activism, we are loath to advocate for our views on policy issues without being asked to offer them. Yet we have chosen to join with our friends at World Relief in supporting comprehensive immigration reform, an advocacy position that stems from World Relief’s compassionate work with refugee populations. Aside from protecting the right of pastors to smoke cigars in their studies, it’s about the only cause on which we feel we should speak out.

Thus I found myself on a very hot summer day surrounded by other religious professionals in a large conference room (auditorium? cafeteria?) just off Capitol Hill. I had traveled to Washington, my intern in tow, to learn about how our church could support the goal of passing legislation to reform immigration policy in a comprehensive manner. (That my intern had spent a good month working with me and was still in the dark about my political views led me to believe that I was supporting this cause in a suitably nonpartisan fashion.)

What I realized quite early on in the day was that there was very little I could do: the elected representatives serving our area were already on board as favoring reform, and besides were probably not waiting up at night to hear a small evangelical congregation weigh in with their views. So as a recovering political science major I became a fascinated observer of the process in which I was, however tangentially, involved.

Charles Dharapak/Associated Press

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 6:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (13)
Categories: Jason Poling
        

The Rev. Jason Poling is pastor of New Hope Community Church in Pikesville.

As I prepare to celebrate my eighth Father’s Day (as an honoree) I join so many of my colleagues in realizing that I am turning into my father.

It’s the little things: eating food past the sell-by date, cutting dead limbs off of trees, hitting rest stops at the last possible moment. And energy conservation.

Fathers, I think, must have been the first conservationists. No doubt it was somebody’s dad who wondered aloud, and repeatedly, whether the cave needed the fire to be so hot.

And so I tromp about the house turning off lights and yelling at my kids about leaving doors open (Are you trying to air-condition the back yard?) and closing blinds on the east side of the house in the morning and on the west in the afternoon. I admonish my wife to load the dishwasher without rinsing the dishes first so we don’t strain the well. And let’s not get into septic system management.

Growing up I remember looking forward to my grandparents’ visits because the house would be heated above freezing and the fridge would be stocked with real milk instead of the powdered skim stuff my dad mixed up every few days in a harvest gold Tupperware pitcher. Until my dad installed an attic fan that sounded like a jet engine taking off and slammed every open door in the house we sweated the sheets every summer; the window fan in my room was supposedly set on low for respiratory health but I knew it was about the electric bill.

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Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Christianity, Guest Posts, Holidays, Jason Poling
        

The Rev. Jason Poling is the pastor of New Hope Community Church in Pikesville. He's writing today on marriage and the reality show Jon and Kate Plus 8.

In my line of work, I see marriages erode the way bridge inspectors see trusses rust. I have presided over dozens of marriages and, in a different way, a small handful of divorces.

Yet even I was taken aback by Monday night’s episode of Jon and Kate Plus 8. My free-spending habits have led my wife to take over the grocery shopping, but the occasional run for bread and milk has exposed me to the tabloid headlines about the Gosselins’ marital difficulties. Sure enough, the season premiere of the show about their family put this conflict front and center.

I felt physically uncomfortable watching the Gosselins’ marital problems unfold in much the same way I felt watching Steve Carell’s character on The Office take control of a diversity training session necessitated by his misconduct … except that The Office is faux-reality TV, and Jon and Kate Plus 8 is about real people whose real actions will have real consequences for themselves and for their eight children.

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Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 7:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)
Categories: Guest Posts, Jason Poling