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 and inspire and challenge me, I share a short personal reflection, a focused episode that brings you to 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.
I was around the campus of the University of California Berkeley for almost 25 years. Spent hours and hours and hours on the campus looking and watching the faces there, people’s park where so many anti-war demonstrations had occurred in the sixties. SPR Plaza, which is the place of a lot of demonstrations to this day, looking at the faces, trying to understand who are these people of Berkeley, what causes them to protest? And in my mind, to stand outside our church and protest?
And I often found that what I wanted to do was not get another megaphone to somehow bark back at them from a distance. That was not what I was trying to do in my preaching, was to out megaphone them. I was instead trying to spread some salt that might intensify their curiosity or intensify their thirst. And then what I really wanted was actually just a conversation. I didn’t want to have my own rally, and I didn’t see what we were doing in the sanctuary as a rally. I saw it as a chance to more humbly, first listen to God, which is the understanding of what Christian worship actually is, and then to live a life of listening, which I think is central to all of Christian discipleship. So as I would picture various faces on these protesters, I would picture them with some of the faces that I had seen on campus or in the park or wherever it might’ve been.
And then what I imagined was the hope for a personal conversation. And that was partly because I had lots of those conversations with such people over the years that we were in Berkeley. And they sometimes pursued me, but I often pursued them just being in a plaza full of protestors, asking people what they were up to, what the protest meant to them, why they were part of it, what was their background, how had they come to this particular concern, how was it affecting them? And sometimes they would ask back, why are you here? I didn’t find that was all that often. But when it did happen, it felt like, well, I’m here partly because I just want to understand why you are here. I’m here because you are here and I want to know why. And I want to understand that because probably a great deal of it, I would really empathize with.
And there may or may not be boundaries, what I would think or places where we would disagree of course. But that was much less interesting to me. It was primarily about what is it that motivates and how have you come to be motivated in this way, and how does that shape my understanding of the lineup of protestors. Now, in actual fact, I wish there had been a lineup of protestors outside First Pres asking, how dare you? And I was sometimes also aware that I was disappointed that there wasn’t a real lineup, nor would there be, because frankly, there would be the presumption of such deep irrelevance that they wouldn’t show up to make a protest. And I would often think, why are we not gathering protestors? Why are we not actually having people stand outside the church and protest about our sheer existence or any given thing or claim that we might be making for not doing anything that’s really getting people upset?
Then are we doing anything that really matters? Now, of course, I can argue myself out of that little conundrum, but I don’t want to do it for any reason other than its legitimacy, not as a way of blowing a smokescreen about why everybody should somehow automatically come and just see things the way we did inside the walls of the church. That’s not what I was after. I was wanting to actually so authentically speak and preach and live the gospel, that we would be the peculiar people that would cause people to say, why are you so peculiar? Not just in that sense of church oddness, but in that deeper sense of why are you the peculiar people of unexplained mercy, unexplained forgiveness, unexplained passion for justice, unexplained sensitivity to individuals, and to societal, social, and systemic needs.
