The slippery liberties of consumer capitalism.

Imagine preaching in front of a crowd of protesters holding a banner: “HOW DARE YOU?” That’s what Mark Labberton did every Sunday preaching in the clear, glass-walled sanctuary of First Presbyterian Church in Berkeley, California.
In this Conversing Short, Mark reflects on this foundational, animating question that defined his public leadership during his sixteen years as senior pastor of First Pres.
Mark Labberton: Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment Magazine and Fuller Seminary.
I’m Mark Labberton. Welcome to Conversing.
In between my longer conversations with people who fascinate, inspire, and challenge me, I share a short personal reflection—a focused episode that brings you the ideas, stories, questions, ponderings, and perspectives that animate Conversing and give voice to the purpose and heart of the show. Thanks for listening with me.
One of the things I most loved about being the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley was that it was a church with a sanctuary that had clear glass walls. I loved that. It had come about because there was a time when there was a riot in Berkeley every 13 days for four years, and there was a month when we could only get to church through the arms of the National Guard. It was right then that the fire marshal declared that the old sanctuary, a huge stone church with a horseshoe balcony and all the trappings of stained glass and everything else, was condemned.
The church decided to stay boldly, to take down the old church, and to build right in the middle of that riot scene a clear glass-walled church. Suddenly, here I find myself being the regular preaching pastor at First Pres. One of the first things that is just so mind-boggling is that you’re doing everything that you’re doing in public.
I remember early on realising that this was like a great gauntlet and that I wanted to welcome the outside inside. The implications of what we were doing really belonged to the city of Berkeley and beyond. The way this got distilled in my mind was a classic lineup of Berkeley protesters. You can imagine every kind of colour and shade and type of personality and racial group and every other kind of difference that might be there.
A lineup of around 10 or 15 of these people, and they’re holding an imaginary poster. I saw it every single Sunday. I would stand up to start preaching and I would look out the back windows and imagine these protesters with this one banner that said every week, “How dare you?” And I felt like it was exactly the right question.
Absolutely, we should be accountable for what we were doing inside this room. So, in one sense, it was simply, what are you up to? And what gives you the grounds to think that in this amazing town with all of its eclectic diversity and outrageousness, but also its intellectual brilliance and thoughtfulness and academic orientation, in the middle of all the politics and all the hostility that exists in Berkeley, the arrogance that’s there, but also the humility that’s there.
What does it mean to be a church that in the middle of that town declares that there is a God, that that God can be known because of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ, and that a community of people can gather together in this clear glass-walled sanctuary and dare to worship God, and as the preacher, to actually speak in some sense in God’s name as I am doing this preaching act?
And it felt like the question was legitimate. How dare you get this land? Why should it be given over to this purpose? What is it that you’re worth? What are you actually bringing to the city? On what grounds can you make such outlandish claims? What are the implications of it? How will it show up that you actually live what you’re saying?
And therefore, how dare you do this both intrinsically? How dare you do this existentially? How dare you do it theologically? But also, how dare you do it culturally, politically, and socially? And I felt like if, in the end, the sermon that I was preaching on any given Sunday didn’t in some way attempt to address the reality of that gauntlet, and if there wasn’t a sense that somehow the life that we were going to go out and live as a community of faith wasn’t going to respond to that, then I should just give up and go away and either someone else should preach, or in the worst of scenarios, no one should bother. It was really, really an important question to me.
It motivated me and inspired me, and it made me realise how much I really believed was at stake—not just for me as a preacher, one of millions and millions of preachers, let’s say, on any given Sunday all around the world, but what does it mean in this place at this time, surrounded by this community of believers and unbelievers, skeptics and critics of every kind?
How is what we’re doing here actually defensible? And what does it look like when it actually gets lived out? That was, to me, the most important question every Sunday morning. And if we didn’t grapple with that, if I didn’t grapple with that as I was preaching, as I was preparing, as I was talking to people afterwards, and if the implication of the sermon didn’t in some way lead people toward their living answer to that, then it would be time to just close up shop.
One of the reasons why the question “how dare you” came to me was because I had admired so much the approach of a 19th-century theologian named Friedrich Schleiermacher, who in his well-known work called “The Christian Faith” said that he was writing for the “cultured despisers of the faith.” That felt like that was my home base—the cultured despisers of the faith. So much of my background, having grown up largely outside the life of the church, having not really had much interest in that at all, stumbling into a discovery of faith when I was in college—all of that happened because I was drawn to the question of what it means to actually be a cultured despiser. I was among the cultured despisers, and I think one of the reasons why I fit in a context where I represented classic Christian faith in an entirely unclassical community like Berkeley was that it put me in a community of sceptics and doubters and people who certainly despise the faith in many, many cases.
And I felt like if the Christian faith can’t show up and make some kind of intelligent, purposeful, meaningful, transformative difference, then there is no case to be made, and again, I should just walk away. But if in fact there could be a way over time, that working on that question could somehow unfold into a reality that included my sermon but was much more than my words, that really involved how a community lives the gospel in a community of sceptics and doubters, then that was worth giving my life to.
Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment Magazine and Fuller Seminary. Evan Rosa is our producer. For more information about Comment Magazine, visit comment.org, where you can subscribe, read the current magazine issue, and browse their archive.
Fuller Seminary is an evangelical, multidenominational graduate institution committed to providing indispensable formational education for diverse Christian leaders everywhere. For information, visit fuller.edu.
I’m your host, Mark Labberton. Thanks for listening with me.
Mark Labberton hosts the Conversing podcast and is the Clifford L. Penner Presidential Chair Emeritus and Professor Emeritus of Preaching at Fuller Seminary.
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