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 to the ideas, stories, questions, pondering, and perspectives that animate Conversing and give voice to the purpose and heart of the show. Thanks for listening with me.
I can’t tell you how amazing it is to preach in a glass-walled sanctuary where you can see everything outside it and everything inside can be seen by those outside. It meant that the church was in the world and the world was in the church. The only cross in the original building was actually outside on the public platform. It was not inside the sanctuary. The idea was it’s one cross that’s in the world and for the church but it’s for everyone. And the idea of preaching in a clear glass-walled sanctuary, at first, it was a little unnerving, but what really was more amazing to me than that by far was the visual dynamic of seeing people within inches of being inside who were outside. And sometimes in the summer seasons, those windows on that side of the church would be rolled back, and so there would be some interaction between the people on the street and the person preaching.
So it was not wholly unexpected that if I was preaching and somebody walked by who was in a condition that caused them to want to interact with me, they could just shout into the sanctuary and it would all be real-time live theatre. And it gave me this sense that even if the glass closed, it still feels like live theatre and the lives that are passing by I believe are lives that are made and loved by God with every intense dimension that I would claim for myself or anyone else that I most loved, for the congregation I was serving, for the wider world. And it gave me also a different sense of the urgency that the sanctuary was filled with. People who during the sermon according to usual sociology sit quietly and relatively still, but outside there’s all these people moving. And so there’s this dynamic of realizing no, we live in a church and in a world of stillness and of movement and we need both kinds of activities in our lives.
And the intersection between the relevance of what I’m saying needs to be true for people when for whatever reasons they are at rest and then for other reasons when we are in movement. And that connection, that essential connection, which I think is what Jesus’s ministry so clearly expresses and embodies is one of the reasons why I was compelled to want to speak into this question. Because it felt right that people walking by would go, “How dare you do this stupid thing inside there?” If people are not believing, if they just feel like this is, as it were, enemy-occupied territory inside the precincts of the city of Berkeley, then it’s just an offence. If they’re disappointed, they’re angry at the church, our church, or some other church or the church was immaterial. It was all still living in real-time and probably behind a lot of their objections and the offence that they take were probably some very specific reasons which I wanted to know.
I wanted to understand. I wanted to listen to. I wanted to internalize. I wanted to feel like what I was doing in the sanctuary would land as much with realistic speech and tone and assumption in the streets of Berkeley as it would land inside the sanctuary. And it was a good way to hold my feet to the fire. Would I say this if I was standing exposed, as it were, on the street outside, or would I only say this inside the closed walls of, yes, a clear glass-walled church? So it became a metaphor, a reality, a vivid visual play that was part of every Sunday. And frankly, it was one of the most unspoken of but prominent features for me as a preacher in that context. So one of the things about a clear glass-walled church is its utter transparency. And that was its own major challenge then where instead of the old stone sanctuary with beautiful and ornate stained-glass windows and old-style wooden pews and impenetrability of its stones and its enormous bell tower and all of those things.
Now the church said, “Nope, we’re staying right on this block. We’re not going to move to someplace with less violence. We’re going to stay on the corner of Channing and Dana and we’re going to tear down the old stone sanctuary. And we’re not just staying, we’re going to build a clear glass-walled church.” That was at a time when every bank in town to this day has bricked up windows. But First Press said, “No, we’re staying here and we’re building a church with clear glass walls.” And it was the church saying, “This is a transparent reality. We are not doing something here which does not belong in the world and we’re not thinking the world doesn’t belong here. We’re acknowledging that in this, yes, sacred space there is a transparency.” So part of the challenge was, “Gosh, you guys,” I’m saying to the church inside, “are we really paying attention to the meaning of what we’re doing here? Are we really understanding how much of a peculiar reality this is that we’re trying to lift up to name to celebrate to celebrate a baptism in public space where anybody walking by could see this important sacrament occurring?”
Or on days when we were celebrating the Lord’s Supper and you would lift up the cup and the bread and you would say, ‘This is the body of Christ broken for you.’ You’re thinking I’m saying these words in a world that is surrounded by people who not only don’t believe any of that but consider it a major offence against their own sensibility about what is most true. Whereas in this context, transparently, we are saying right in the same world that you are in, we are in the same kind of tyranny against faith exists inside us but also around us. And now we’re together going to share in the celebration of the Lord’s table, ‘Come all you who are hungry, eat and drink of this body and this bread.’
We’re doing that in public view. Let’s be understandably self-conscious because this is actually making a claim on not just us on the inside of the glass but by the world that we see just outside it whether recognized, rejected or whatever it might be. And then how do we actually live that in a way that’s going to be humble, not arrogant, not presumptuous, not full of pride, not insider-outsider, not us versus them but orienting ourselves toward we are the us and some have chosen today to be inside the glass and some have not. But the gospel is for all of us and that expansiveness is part of what authenticates the real gospel.
