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.Yet for every pastor or rabbi who has turned conclusively to atheism there are hundreds if not thousands who have slid into a sort of theological agnosticism (however firmly they still hold to their convictions about needing to draw a paycheck). And so our landscape is littered with the shells of churches once strong and vibrant. Denominational officials play the role of emergency room surgeons, triaging congregations as they try desperately to stanch the bleeding. Seminaries merge, and merge again, to the point that they carry more names than an English nobleman.
An oft-quoted verse from Proverbs reads in the old King James translation, "Where there is no vision, the people perish." Years of vision-less leadership in the Warehouse have gotten the O's to a point where two wins in a row is celebrated as a streak, and sweeping a series as an epic event. Tom Landry used to tell his players not to showboat after touchdowns, saying, "You're a Dallas Cowboy. You need to act like you've been in the end zone before." But the O's of the teens are not the Cowboys of the '70s, and you can't fault a young team for being giddy after a big win when they're so rare. But it's hard to ride a half-empty train on a Sunday afternoon and not fear for the future of baseball in Baltimore.
In the 400 years since the King James translation, scholars have gotten a better handle on the original languages and now say that Prov. 29:18 should read not "the people perish" but "the people cast off restraint." Many commentators ascribe the woes of today's O's to the loss of "The Oriole Way," an attitude toward the game that stresses disciplined execution of baseball fundamentals. In much the same way, many churches have cast off the restraints of maintaining orthodox theology, respecting the traditions of our predecessors, practicing the spiritual disciplines that have nurtured the faithful over the centuries, and treating the Bible as inspired and authoritative, not in need of some serious editing.
Time and again the history of the Church has demonstrated that when you abandon the Oriole Way, when you cast off restraint, you get chaos. Whether it's the corruption in a Catholic order or the demise of a once-strong denomination, the surest path to destruction (however eventual) is the abandonment of discipline. That doesn't mean perfection -- far from it. It means the willingness to confess imperfection -- sin, we call it in less polite circles -- and receive forgiveness and grace to move forward. If we confess our sins, John tells us in his first letter, God is faithful and just and will forgive us. But if we say we haven't sinned, he also says, we make him out to be a liar, and his truth is not in us.
And as much as we may insist that we're rebuilding, those empty seats year after year get tougher to explain away.