Full Transcript for 013. Surrendering Ambition, Facing Despair, and Living a Bigger Life ft. Mark Labberton

00:01:58.000 He was for many years the president of Fuller Theological Seminary. 00:01:58.159 --> 00:02:01.920 We actually pastored right across the bay from each other in Northern California. 00:02:02.159 --> 00:02:04.079 Mark has a PhD from St. 00:02:04.239 --> 00:02:05.120 Andrews University. 00:02:05.439 --> 00:02:06.079 Cambridge. 00:02:06.319 --> 00:02:07.359 From Cambridge. 00:02:07.519 --> 00:02:08.240 I'm so sorry. 00:02:08.319 --> 00:02:11.680 I think I was thinking about your predecessor and then Steve Hayner. 00:02:11.759 --> 00:02:12.000 Yes. 00:02:12.159 --> 00:02:13.439 And I conflated. 00:02:14.159 --> 00:02:14.639 Thank you. 00:02:15.039 --> 00:02:16.719 Cambridge is a much better school than St. 00:02:16.800 --> 00:02:17.120 Andrews. 00:02:17.520 --> 00:02:19.120 I've insulted you already. 00:02:24.719 --> 00:02:26.800 Almost a what they call a red brick school. 00:02:27.039 --> 00:02:28.400 Yeah, that's exactly right. 00:02:28.560 --> 00:02:32.560 I think it's it pretty much just like a degree mill or something. 00:02:32.639 --> 00:02:34.000 Yeah, I think that's I'm sure that's it. 00:02:34.080 --> 00:02:34.159 Yeah. 00:02:34.400 --> 00:02:34.560 Okay. 00:02:34.639 --> 00:02:35.280 Cambridge. 00:02:35.439 --> 00:02:36.080 Thank you. 00:02:36.319 --> 00:02:44.639 And uh uh you uh have had the opportunity and still do to talk with folks, you do a podcast. 00:02:44.960 --> 00:02:53.680 So your ability to look at the church and the world and what's going on uh is informed in really unique ways. 00:02:53.759 --> 00:02:54.960 Thank you for being willing to join me. 00:02:55.199 --> 00:02:56.560 Oh, it's a total honor and joy. 00:02:56.719 --> 00:02:57.680 Thanks, yeah. 00:02:57.840 --> 00:02:58.400 Thank you. 00:02:58.639 --> 00:03:13.120 Um, the whole point of these conversations called formation, behind the idea that the most important process going on in the universe is the formation of human character and uh of the human spirit. 00:03:13.919 --> 00:03:16.879 And uh so how does that take place? 00:03:17.280 --> 00:03:18.560 Where does faith fit in? 00:03:18.719 --> 00:03:19.919 Where does God fit in? 00:03:20.080 --> 00:03:23.439 Those are the questions that are most important. 00:03:24.479 --> 00:03:26.879 I I want to just plunge into the middle of it. 00:03:26.960 --> 00:03:36.159 So I'll put the question this way, because clearly I think we think that the church is tasked by Jesus with that process. 00:03:36.319 --> 00:03:36.800 Right. 00:03:37.280 --> 00:03:43.520 In the United States, what grade would you give the church in that regard these days? 00:03:43.840 --> 00:03:44.240 Uh-huh. 00:03:44.800 --> 00:03:49.120 I would give it a grade of uh something like maybe a C minus. 00:03:50.080 --> 00:03:50.800 Wow, wow. 00:03:50.960 --> 00:03:52.479 And and then say why. 00:03:52.800 --> 00:04:02.479 Yeah, I let me let me start by saying, first of all, my own premises as I come to questions like this, because I I didn't really grow

up with a Christian identity. 00:04:02.719 --> 00:04:04.879 Because it wasn't until I was in college that I became a Christian. 00:04:04.960 --> 00:04:18.800 And one of the things that shocked me the most, and it was really the core of what drew me to Christ, was that he had a vision and a plan and a set of actions and teaching that was going to actually reorder reality. 00:04:19.199 --> 00:04:20.560 That was what was actually happening. 00:04:20.639 --> 00:04:22.480 That was the nature of what the kingdom is. 00:04:22.639 --> 00:04:26.639 It's reordering reality into the likeness of Jesus Christ. 00:04:26.879 --> 00:04:28.160 I love that language for it. 00:04:28.480 --> 00:04:34.959 And and as a consequence, when I come to questions of formation, it's well, where is the church in its likeness to Christ? 00:04:35.120 --> 00:04:35.519 Yes. 00:04:35.680 --> 00:04:38.160 It's not where is it financially? 00:04:38.240 --> 00:04:45.120 Well, how are the numbers showing who's publishing what, what uh video is being broadcast? 00:04:45.439 --> 00:04:50.319 It's not necessarily terribly visible or um uh revealed by metrics. 00:04:50.720 --> 00:04:50.959 Right. 00:04:51.120 --> 00:05:00.959 Now there is an enormous amount of faithfulness to Christ, which I think does just in the most ordinary context show up as the likeness of Christ. 00:05:01.279 --> 00:05:12.240 The ordinary Christian living an ordinary Christian life that shows up in their neighborhood, in their family, in their in their town or city, and seeks to live in the name of Christ. 00:05:12.319 --> 00:05:17.600 That that is a pervasive effort of many, many, many millions of Christians. 00:05:17.839 --> 00:05:28.639 But when I say C minus, what I mean in the United States is that our faith has really become so shaped by things that are other than the gospel itself. 00:05:28.879 --> 00:05:30.800 That's true about the challenge, right? 00:05:32.079 --> 00:05:43.600 The nature of reality is that it's all things, not just some things, and that we can't actually simply filter in and filter out the influences, and it does and doesn't, therefore, have a consistent pattern. 00:05:43.680 --> 00:05:50.000 So that what we're relying on is the power of the Holy Spirit to do something which is really beyond human capacity. 00:05:50.160 --> 00:06:00.560 So it's it happens in ordinary human history, but it happens because of the empowerment and direction and guidance of the Holy Spirit through, I would argue, the teaching of Scripture. 00:06:00.720 --> 00:06:10.720 And it's that combination that is meant to cause us to grow up into Christ, to be mature, to be conformed, to be uh brought into the likeness of Christ. 00:06:11.040 --> 00:06:22.800 And when I look at what seems to be driving so much of the American church, it's really a set of secular values, much more than it has to do with anything that's distinctly Christian. 00:06:23.120 --> 00:06:34.560 And we have come as a society, largely a secular society, to then tack on faith to the driving currents of culture and society. 00:06:34.800 --> 00:06:37.439 And then we hope that that's what Christian looks like. 00:06:38.240 --> 00:06:41.519 We begin in the wrong place and we're conformed to the wrong things. 00:06:41.759 --> 00:06:56.720 So we try to get conformed to a culture, a subculture, a subsubculture of people that are tribally familiar and like us, and we want to be conformed to them, and we give up the task of actually being conformed to Christ. 00:06:57.040 --> 00:07:03.920 We need one another to be formed, but the shared vision, I think the New Testament gives us, is this much more radical sense. 00:07:04.319 --> 00:07:04.480 Yeah. 00:07:04.959 --> 00:07:17.360 Let's let's let's go there for a moment, because I was kind of taken when you said when you became a Christian uh and you didn't necessarily grow up in the faith, you were gripped by this notion of the reordering of reality. 00:07:17.600 --> 00:07:17.839 Right. 00:07:18.240 --> 00:07:20.879 Just personally, how did you see that? 00:07:21.040 --> 00:07:24.160 What uh what happened, what triggered it, where were you exposed to it? 00:07:24.240 --> 00:07:25.279 What what captured you? 00:07:25.600 --> 00:07:32.720 Well, my dad uh had grown up in a context where he'd had some really dramatically negative religious experience. 00:07:33.040 --> 00:07:44.000 And and it was it largely led him to the conviction, philosophically, historically, and personally, that what religious people are prone to do is to take great things and make them very small. 00:07:44.560 --> 00:07:50.160 That's not about making them personal or making them intimate, but making them small, reductionist. 00:07:50.399 --> 00:08:11.680 Take, he would say, for example, you take the normity of the cosmos, and then you end up having pathetic uh 1920, 1930 debates about the exact means by which Krishna had come into existence, and the whole thing shrinks down to a small debate that occupies the nation at the time that over a relatively insignificant issue. 00:08:11.920 --> 00:08:13.839 Over a relatively significant issue. 00:08:14.000 --> 00:08:21.439 It's not about the cosmos, it's about this little detail of how do we actually describe how this came into being. 00:08:21.600 --> 00:08:25.199 Those are important questions, but they're not the first order questions. 00:08:25.439 --> 00:08:26.079 Who is God? 00:08:26.240 --> 00:08:27.600 What is God doing in the world? 00:08:27.759 --> 00:08:28.319 All of that. 00:08:28.560 --> 00:08:41.440 So when I started reading the New Testament, I was just shocked first at how much Jesus and my dad had in common on this theme, that Jesus was also really concerned about the people of God taking great things and making them small. 00:08:41.600 --> 00:08:45.600 You study the law as though you think in it you will find life. 00:08:45.840 --> 00:08:59.919 As opposed to what I saw Jesus doing, which was going into these contexts,

which as little as I knew, you could tell that Jesus was uncomfortable with the kind of subculture of the Judaism of the first century that he was living within. 00:09:00.000 --> 00:09:04.559 And he clearly saw something much bigger, reordering, challenging that. 00:09:04.799 --> 00:09:13.360 You see this uh obviously right off the top when you start reading the New Testament in the book of Matthew, where it's just again and again, you've heard it said, but I say to you. 00:09:13.440 --> 00:09:15.279 So clearly he's an agent of change. 00:09:15.440 --> 00:09:30.240 And then he's an agent of change that actually goes to the very core of what it means to be human, of how to operate, how to think about our relationships with ourselves, with God, with our neighbor, and even more dramatically, our enemy. 00:09:30.879 --> 00:09:40.320 So you're just in five chapters into Matthew, and all of a sudden, Jesus is reordering how people are meant to think about everything. 00:09:40.480 --> 00:09:42.399 It is an upside-down world. 00:09:42.559 --> 00:09:43.440 It shocked me. 00:09:43.519 --> 00:09:45.679 It was like, oh, this wasn't what I was expecting at all. 00:09:46.080 --> 00:09:49.759 Can I ask again on a personal level, what what prompted you to read that stuff? 00:09:50.000 --> 00:09:50.960 Because it wasn't your dad. 00:09:51.279 --> 00:10:04.399 No, I think it was really my sense that what was happening was that I was beginning a quest to be formed into a mature, healthy, functioning adult. 00:10:05.200 --> 00:10:08.159 And and I thought, therefore, I should read all the great literature. 00:10:08.480 --> 00:10:10.159 So you weren't dating a cute Christian girl. 00:10:10.480 --> 00:10:10.960 I wasn't. 00:10:11.039 --> 00:10:16.559 I didn't I didn't hang out with Christians, I wasn't in a Christian context, I didn't, that was not my crowd. 00:10:41.620 --> 00:10:44.820 But what I kind of like about that in that there would be quite a lot of freedom for you. 00:10:45.140 --> 00:10:47.540 Yeah, especially if you were supposed to believe something. 00:10:47.780 --> 00:10:48.260 No, no, no. 00:10:48.340 --> 00:10:49.300 I had no presuppositions. 00:10:49.460 --> 00:10:49.620 Wow. 00:10:49.780 --> 00:10:51.940 In fact, I had anti-presuppositions and just whatever. 00:10:53.780 --> 00:10:59.300 I just was captivated by the person of Jesus, and it drew me again and again and again. 00:10:59.540 --> 00:11:04.260 So I just spent months just reading the four gospels over and over and over again. 00:11:04.340 --> 00:11:18.740 And each time it was this, oh my gosh, Jesus is not about this small myopic thing, like, for example, getting people to go to church or getting people to be a very specific person. 00:11:18.900 --> 00:11:30.340 It was more like, oh gosh, there's a whole array of people that Jesus was relating to, and he engaged them and saw them and heard them and loved them in ways that clearly the surrounding culture wasn't prepared for. 00:11:30.980 -->

00:11:42.260 And that was compelling to me because I had had the privilege of traveling the the summer before my senior year of high school in Europe with a friend for the for the summer. 00:11:42.340 --> 00:11:46.500 It was something I couldn't ever imagine our kids doing that many decades later. 00:11:46.660 --> 00:11:52.500 But at the time, we just wander off as 17-year-olds to do Europe, whatever we think that means. 00:11:52.820 --> 00:11:55.860 And and I was taken by the big ideas. 00:11:56.020 --> 00:12:13.140 I was taken by the vision of of the cosmos, the vision of of religion, of course, but also the vision of politics, the enormity of the drama that had played out for centuries, of course, uh in Europe and and all around the world. 00:12:13.300 --> 00:12:15.380 But in this case, it was focused on Europe. 00:12:15.540 --> 00:12:18.660 And I came home with two art uh prints. 00:12:18.980 --> 00:12:42.340 One was a monumental picture of of the scene where uh in David's huge painting where Napoleon is crowning himself, and the other one was a Picasso painting in this blue period where there's three figures on a beach standing in close proximity, but each looking in a different direction, disconnected, existential angst, isolation, etc. 00:12:42.820 --> 00:12:51.620 I put it on the wall opposite the end of my bed, and I thought, so there's not just two choices, but what are these two choices? 00:12:51.780 --> 00:12:52.100 Right. 00:12:52.340 --> 00:12:55.700 One was a world entirely centered on yourself. 00:12:55.860 --> 00:12:56.100 Right. 00:12:56.500 --> 00:13:00.980 And you do it in a small form or you do it on the on the stage of Napoleon. 00:13:01.700 --> 00:13:09.140 Is life really about just naming and claiming your greatest desires, hungers, influences, etc. 00:13:10.340 --> 00:13:17.700 Or is it really giving up that project for all of its potential failures and and disasters and egocentrisms? 00:13:18.340 --> 00:13:21.220 But then do you just are you just left with yourself? 00:13:21.540 --> 00:13:22.260 Just despair. 00:13:22.500 --> 00:13:23.460 Just despair. 00:13:23.700 --> 00:13:24.100 Yeah. 00:13:24.420 --> 00:13:34.900 And so I had looked at these pictures every night and every morning when I woke up for that school year, trying to figure out what is the big project of life? 00:13:35.140 --> 00:13:35.860 What is this? 00:13:36.180 --> 00:13:47.220 That's a remarkably uh heavy and profound uh uh set of possibilities in front of a 17-year-old. 00:13:47.460 --> 00:13:49.220 I know it was a little bizarre, I'm sure. 00:13:49.380 --> 00:13:51.860 But but it was not bizarre at all. 00:13:51.940 --> 00:13:53.060 It's just very mature. 00:13:53.140 --> 00:13:57.300 When I was 17, those who are probably not the pictures I was looking at. 00:13:59.300 --> 00:14:03.780 I've I grew up Baptist, so I wouldn't have been allowed to have other pictures up on the wall. 00:14:04.500 --> 00:14:04.900 Yeah, right. 00:14:05.060 --> 00:14:05.300

Yeah. 00:14:05.540 --> 00:14:20.660 Well, I do think it's it was just an amazing thing to me then when I started reading the gospels, that these were the very questions that the whole gospels, all four, were grappling with. 00:14:20.740 --> 00:14:20.900 Yeah. 00:14:21.140 --> 00:14:23.860 And they were offering completely different alternatives. 00:14:23.940 --> 00:14:24.180 Yeah. 00:14:24.420 --> 00:14:28.180 And it was a world where you absolutely had a meaningful self. 00:14:28.420 --> 00:14:41.940 Our lives intrinsically matter, made in the image of God, clearly this strong language of the value of human existence and of community and of relationship and of the of the natural world as well, right? 00:14:42.020 --> 00:14:43.460 All of these things really mattered. 00:14:43.540 --> 00:14:48.740 And then in Christ, seeing the the a clarity around what is the crisis? 00:14:48.980 --> 00:14:54.340 Because Napoleon had a crisis he was working on, Picasso had a crisis he was working on. 00:14:54.500 --> 00:14:56.340 Um, those crises are real. 00:14:56.500 --> 00:14:57.620 Then they were in me. 00:14:57.780 --> 00:14:58.900 Was I egocentric? 00:14:59.060 --> 00:15:01.940 Like every teenager, I was highly egocentric. 00:15:02.180 --> 00:15:05.700 Was I potentially prone toward isolation and alienation? 00:15:05.860 --> 00:15:06.260 Absolutely. 00:15:06.420 --> 00:15:11.300 I mean, either one of those two things could have been um aspirational to me. 00:15:11.700 --> 00:15:32.660 Uh, but what I discovered instead was that there was this amazing uh sense that all of this could be recreated, where you took the same material but you remade, refashioned, reordered, recreated human beings in the likeness of Jesus. 00:15:33.780 --> 00:15:43.460 What really additionally added to this, this was, you know, at the time, this was in the early 70s, and the Vietnam War was still going on. 00:15:43.940 --> 00:15:49.540 Um, the civil rights movement was was fresh, it was still vividly alive. 00:15:49.700 --> 00:15:57.540 I was too young to be really directly involved in either of those two things, but they were close enough that it felt like I was living in that reality. 00:15:58.340 --> 00:16:11.060 And military power, which had had no appeal to me, but it did such destruction everywhere it touched, uh, and was unjustified as I would have felt at the time. 00:16:11.460 --> 00:16:13.380 So there was there was that dynamic. 00:16:13.620 --> 00:16:18.100 But there was also this sense that the question was ultimate. 00:16:18.340 --> 00:16:20.340 What are you prepared to give your life for? 00:16:21.460 --> 00:16:24.260 Napoleon was prepared to give his life for himself. 00:16:24.660 --> 00:16:35.220 And in the Picasso painting, your life just atrophies and implodes on the weight of its own existence, right? 00:16:35.780 --> 00:16:42.340 So what stunned me was that Jesus had this vision and that it was a call to death. 00:16:42.580 --> 00:16:51.460 I mean, I didn't know

Bonhoeffer at the time, but what I could see was this is like a a life or death thing. 00:16:52.100 --> 00:16:58.260 This is like you are you gonna decide to live, and if you are, it will mean a certain kind of dying. 00:16:58.820 --> 00:17:04.660 And if you are going to live that way, then it will mean more kinds of dying than I could even imagine. 00:17:05.059 --> 00:17:07.619 Now, again, at 17A, I had no death wish. 00:17:07.779 --> 00:17:12.740 This was not like trying to find some way of of being uh uh a martyr. 00:17:12.900 --> 00:17:19.779 It was more that it was like this is the degree of ultimacy uh around which these questions of faith were actually folded. 00:17:20.019 --> 00:17:22.420 And it was almost the opposite of both of the paintings. 00:17:22.740 --> 00:17:24.019 Right, completely the opposite. 00:17:24.180 --> 00:17:24.500 Yes. 00:17:24.660 --> 00:17:30.420 And gave me a an inspiring vision then of thinking, oh my gosh. 00:17:30.660 --> 00:17:38.820 So, yes, you could give your life to the greatest extreme that you have it to have to give it, and whatever it is that might unfold in the course of your life. 00:17:39.140 --> 00:17:40.340 And it is more than worth it. 00:17:40.580 --> 00:17:44.500 And it was more than worth it, and that it was worth it on every ground. 00:17:44.580 --> 00:17:49.380 So the more I read it, the more I became convinced that this was not a fantasy. 00:17:49.860 --> 00:18:04.660 Then I had to come back to the church, which sort of terrified me, which has always been why it's been so ironic that in the end I would become it was unbelievably ironic to me that I became a Christian, let alone a pastor, let alone a professor at a seminary, let alone the president of a seminary. 00:18:04.740 --> 00:18:09.700 These are not things that I grew up even wildly imagining or in any way wanting. 00:18:10.340 --> 00:18:26.100 But they were part for me of the consequence of how this vision of the reign of God in Christ by the Holy Spirit unfolded and called me beyond myself, out way out beyond myself. 00:18:26.259 --> 00:18:48.180 Um, that I could see that it was a new sociology, that if you're gonna be part of the kingdom, then it's not just relating to people who are your type and your background, but people who are coming into this same communion that Christ is creating from places and tongues and languages and cultures and races and views completely outside my own personal experience. 00:18:48.740 --> 00:18:52.900 So I had not anticipated asking this question at all. 00:18:53.299 --> 00:19:02.660 But when you're talking particularly about that notion finding something big, and one of the questions it answers is Is there something worth giving your life to? 00:19:03.059 --> 00:19:03.779 Is there something? 00:19:04.019 --> 00:19:14.660 I think about the kind of conversation we're having, long-form podcasts, how many people in our society, particularly young people, particularly young men, seem to be kind of wrestling with that? 00:19:14.820 --> 00:19:16.660 Is it looks maxing? 00:19:16.900 --> 00:19:23.620 Uh uh people tuning into Jordan Peterson, who's at least asking some of those questions, or Joe Rogan. 00:19:23.700 --> 00:19:24.019 Yes. 00:19:24.259 --> 00:19:36.740 How do you see what you went through then speaking to what seems to be an enormous cultural hunger, but the dots to Jesus don't seem to be getting connected much in all right? 00:19:37.140 --> 00:19:39.940 Well, I think again, home influence is big. 00:19:40.019 --> 00:19:45.059 And I think in in my family, there was a strong sense that life really mattered. 00:19:45.299 --> 00:19:57.940 Homesteading families, deep sense of place, deep sense of family, deep sense of commitment, deep sense to of commitment to geography, uh to being people who made a difference in the world. 00:19:58.100 --> 00:20:08.740 Now I grew up in a small town, Yakima, Washington, right in the center of Washington State, agricultural family, agricultural background in an agricultural uh community, I mean. 00:20:09.059 --> 00:20:23.380 And and in the context of that, my both of my grandparents had were first generation immigrant children, and they they had dramatic back childhoods of the frontier. 00:20:24.100 --> 00:20:44.900 My eventually my father's family would own the first electrification company in eastern Washington, which is not an electric store, like going in and buying lamps, buying electrification materials to do cities and towns and houses, like putting electricity into places that had never had electricity. 00:20:45.140 --> 00:20:52.100 So the point was their trajectory was this place and these people really matter, and you should give yourself to that. 00:20:52.340 --> 00:21:00.820 So I grew up with that sort of so so you grew up with big questions, but one of them wasn't, if I understand right, is life worth living? 00:21:01.059 --> 00:21:01.140 Right. 00:21:01.700 --> 00:21:04.340 You know, William James says that's the ultimate question of philosophy. 00:21:04.420 --> 00:21:04.580 Right. 00:21:04.740 --> 00:21:07.220 But that was kind of a foundation that was there for you. 00:21:07.380 --> 00:21:09.380 But then you're left with, well, why? 00:21:09.539 --> 00:21:10.580 And for what purpose? 00:21:10.820 --> 00:21:11.380 For what purpose? 00:21:11.620 --> 00:21:14.500 Why do I live and and to what end? 00:21:14.820 --> 00:21:24.420 And I think that's where the gospel captured my imagination because it felt like oh, this is about something way bigger than reality. 00:21:24.580 --> 00:21:35.059 We have a mutual friend who used to say uh for years and years in his professional life, whenever it was time to plan something, he'd say, Well, let's begin with the universe. 00:21:35.380 --> 00:21:42.420 Now, that is a wonderful way of, in a way, describing what I felt the gospels were saying to me. 00:21:42.740 --> 00:21:43.460 Let's begin with the universe. 00:21:43.620 --> 00:21:44.420 Let's begin

with the universe. 00:21:44.660 --> 00:21:45.140 Oh, yes. 00:21:45.220 --> 00:21:45.460 Yes. 00:21:45.940 --> 00:21:52.660 Let's begin with for all the legitimacy of my own individual life, your life, the individual lives of every human being. 00:21:53.220 --> 00:22:09.059 There was also this sense that the individual person actually existed in this enormous, unbelievably expansive reality called the universe, but also called even more grand than the universe is the God who made the universe. 00:22:09.299 --> 00:22:12.180 And that that just stretched my imagination. 00:22:12.259 --> 00:22:14.420 It challenged me in every possible way. 00:22:14.660 --> 00:22:23.380 It felt imaginative, it felt creative, it felt intellectually daunting, it felt socially disruptive, it felt transformative. 00:22:24.580 --> 00:22:27.220 So to me, it was intoxicating. 00:22:27.380 --> 00:22:30.420 Like that is the great road that I want to be on. 00:22:30.740 --> 00:22:37.539 And I want to be on it initially alone because that I didn't hang out with Christian friends, so I didn't have that background. 00:22:37.779 --> 00:22:46.900 I stumbled in by God's grace into a community of Christian students that were to this day some of the most remarkable Christian people I've ever known. 00:22:47.220 --> 00:22:54.100 And the consequence of that was then suddenly being in a context where they two shared this vision. 00:22:54.259 --> 00:23:04.660 Now, because I was one of the early converts in the fellowship, I was even more enthusiast for understanding the enormity of what we're talking about. 00:23:04.900 --> 00:23:11.860 Never trying to do that to the exclusion of the most particular, the most intimate, the most ordinary. 00:23:12.100 --> 00:23:15.140 It's just that all that exists on this much bigger stage. 00:23:15.539 --> 00:23:29.700 So how do you how do you walk into life as an as an emerging adult holding on to something that probably has been one of the greatest influences in the world across all millennia is the Christian faith? 00:23:29.940 --> 00:23:30.500 Yes. 00:23:31.059 --> 00:23:35.380 What is that about in the biggest possible sense? 00:23:35.860 --> 00:23:40.980 And how does it stretch and reorder my understanding of myself and my neighbor and God? 00:23:41.059 --> 00:23:49.700 But how does it also reorder everything about the material existence, everything about social political existence, everything about economic existence? 00:23:49.940 --> 00:23:54.340 These are all things that amazingly the God of the universe cares about. 00:23:54.500 --> 00:24:10.740 You know, the poet uh George Herbert, 17th-century metaphysical poet, um, in one of his poems describes how the God of the universe uh span that Jesus on the cross, his hands span the spheres, he said. 00:24:10.980 --> 00:24:23.140 And in that image, he was using that medieval vision of a universe of spheres that were held together by the by the by the hands of Christ, but they were pierced. 00:24:23.220

--> 00:24:30.420 So it was this incredible sense of compression, like the the universe and then the piercing of Jesus' hands. 00:24:30.580 --> 00:24:36.340 That combination was completely uh completely caught me. 00:24:36.500 --> 00:24:36.660 Yeah. 00:24:36.820 --> 00:24:37.940 So and has never left me. 00:24:38.259 --> 00:24:41.460 All kinds of yeah, cosmic scale and very, very small. 00:24:41.620 --> 00:24:41.860 Yeah. 00:24:42.019 --> 00:24:45.940 And uh this glorious project and yet suffering in pierced hands. 00:24:46.180 --> 00:24:46.660 Absolutely. 00:24:46.820 --> 00:24:47.220 Yeah. 00:24:47.539 --> 00:24:56.259 So uh is a wonderful description of something that is doesn't often, I think, get named, but is so powerful. 00:24:56.660 --> 00:25:01.460 And you find it in Jesus, and then you find a community, and then what happens? 00:25:01.539 --> 00:25:04.259 How how do you decide to be a pastor? 00:25:04.500 --> 00:25:12.820 Did it feel like it was just straight line advancement into this glorious project, or like you started to get disappointed pretty early on? 00:25:12.980 --> 00:25:14.740 What what what then happened? 00:25:15.140 --> 00:25:25.860 The the primary thing that happened was meeting people in whom the God of the universe had been living a far longer presence and life and influence than I had grown up knowing. 00:25:26.100 --> 00:25:31.779 So it was partly just being stunned again and again and again by who they were and who they were becoming. 00:25:32.259 --> 00:25:35.299 And so that was the first thing. 00:25:35.460 --> 00:25:54.980 I think the second thing was realizing that the trajectory beyond Christian community was the impact of all of these reality claims on the ordinary students that I was working with or studying with or doing sports with, whatever, whatever it might have been, that that God cared about all of this. 00:25:55.059 --> 00:25:57.779 So the question that became how do you live in community? 00:25:58.019 --> 00:25:58.980 How do you grow personally? 00:25:59.140 --> 00:26:01.620 How do you live in deep and deepening community? 00:26:01.779 --> 00:26:09.380 And then how does that spill over into a real world where there's ordinary narratives, just like my ordinary narrative? 00:26:09.539 --> 00:26:11.860 How does that actually all begin to intersect? 00:26:11.940 --> 00:26:14.980 And how does it intersect in pain and in suffering? 00:26:15.380 --> 00:26:23.059 How does it intersect with with privilege, but also how does it intersect with the poverty that can exist inside privilege? 00:26:23.380 --> 00:26:29.059 And I think all of that was was what really began to change me. 00:26:29.220 --> 00:26:39.140 What I realized, though, was that I needed, I needed to enlarge the tent in which my imagination was able to play. 00:26:39.779 --> 00:26:43.539 Partly that had been the trip that I had taken before my senior year. 00:26:43.860 --> 00:26:48.580 Part of it then began to unfold where I started reading the newspaper differently. 00:26:48.660 --> 00:26:53.700 I started wanting to read different newspapers because I wanted to understand more about what was happening actually in the world. 00:26:53.860 --> 00:26:59.700 And I wanted to For people who don't know, newspapers, this whole thing where a bunch of information written down on pulp. 00:27:00.180 --> 00:27:02.019 Touche, touche, touche, yeah. 00:27:02.259 --> 00:27:07.539 For it actually got your fingers dirty, uh as the stories often did. 00:27:07.779 --> 00:27:21.940 So so I think the thing about all that that was so um important to me was the God that I'm worshiping in my private devotions, my prayer life, my reading of scripture is the God who holds all things. 00:27:22.340 --> 00:27:29.700 And while I'm not pretending that I'm becoming the God who holds all things, I want to share more and more in the heart and mind of God. 00:27:30.100 --> 00:27:47.539 So my heart, my mind needs to be stretched, reordered and stretched, my body needs to be reordered and stretched, my capacity for empathy needs to get far beyond the box of just the universe bounded north, south, east, and west by Mark Labberton. 00:27:47.779 --> 00:27:56.820 It's like, when does it become actually a world of relationships and people and circumstances that I carry in my life? 00:27:56.980 --> 00:27:58.820 Then, but that was just information. 00:27:59.380 --> 00:28:12.820 The transformative part, of course, that comes in time by God's grace is just the invitation and opportunity to do everything possible to expand and deepen in intimate relationships with people who are not like me. 00:28:14.180 --> 00:28:19.140 I think some of those relationships have absolutely been the most transformative. 00:28:19.299 --> 00:28:25.460 We don't share sociology, education, economics, background. 00:28:26.019 --> 00:28:29.220 We see the world from utterly different angles. 00:28:30.259 --> 00:28:40.500 They are not they are not right or wrong in some objective sense anymore than I'm right or wrong in my non-objective sense of looking at the world. 00:28:40.740 --> 00:28:58.100 But I get the privilege, partly through Christian community and then partly through just personal pursuit of serious relationships, to actually be able to see the world refracted in a completely different way than it was refracted for me. 00:28:58.259 --> 00:29:02.019 And I just remember the way that scaffolding began to change. 00:29:02.180 --> 00:29:08.100 Now, at this time, I'm also beginning to discover things about my gifts or abilities, I guess. 00:29:08.420 --> 00:29:15.220 But as the scripture tells us, that's mostly something that we see through the eyes of how others respond to you. 00:29:15.299 --> 00:29:18.259 But I don't, I wasn't particularly aware of things. 00:29:18.340 --> 00:29:31.620 And there were several people, again, people that you and I have in common, who were able to name things that they saw about me that I was just not entirely oblivious,

that would not be true. 00:29:31.940 --> 00:29:34.660 But I didn't at all see the way that they did. 00:29:34.980 --> 00:29:43.700 And so that began to then enlarge my sense of, oh gosh, I'd always been a leader, I'd always been involved and active and all that kind of stuff. 00:29:43.860 --> 00:29:55.700 Not that wasn't new, but what was new was the fear actually of being a Christian leader, because the failure rate I could already see was extremely high. 00:29:56.259 --> 00:30:02.660 And even if it wasn't a bust, there was just a lot of ineffectual Christian leadership. 00:30:02.980 --> 00:30:03.380 Yes. 00:30:03.700 --> 00:30:12.340 And and more than that, because that can still just be monitored on a horizon of Christians look comparing themselves to other Christians. 00:30:12.580 --> 00:30:14.660 That wasn't the horizon I was interested in. 00:30:15.059 --> 00:30:22.660 If you're called to be a Christian leader, then somehow we are actually called to become like Christ. 00:30:22.980 --> 00:30:40.660 And in a certain way, while Christian leaders are never substitutes for Christ, we are people who can represent Christ in contexts where we might be the closest thing tangibly to the presence of Christ in a person's life. 00:30:40.900 --> 00:30:42.820 Now that's true regardless of Christian leadership. 00:30:43.059 --> 00:30:44.580 That's just true of discipleship. 00:30:44.740 --> 00:30:45.220 Yep. 00:30:45.700 --> 00:30:48.259 But you're gonna elevate that. 00:30:48.580 --> 00:30:49.860 Why are you gonna do that? 00:30:50.019 --> 00:30:52.180 Why do you think this is even a good idea? 00:30:52.900 --> 00:30:54.820 I didn't think it was a good idea. 00:30:55.140 --> 00:31:01.380 I I knew my own clay feet only too well. 00:31:01.539 --> 00:31:01.779 Yeah. 00:31:02.420 --> 00:31:15.779 My capacities for denial, for pretense, for imitation, all of those things that were the traps that I could see, well, they were vividly alive in me. 00:31:16.100 --> 00:31:36.340 So the main thing was how do I take daily steps now, not with any aspiration of a certainly no aspiration of a job or a role or a title, but just how do I get close to people who seem more Christ-like than I am, to discover how they have been formed. 00:31:36.660 --> 00:31:39.860 And in the context of that, they became formative to me. 00:31:40.180 --> 00:31:45.700 So in a way, it sounds like it's a kind of a series of steps, which I love, into a larger world. 00:31:45.940 --> 00:31:46.340 Right. 00:31:46.580 --> 00:31:56.500 And as a larger world of vision for the globe, a larger intellectual world, a larger relational world where you're with people who have been to places you've been and experienced depths that you've not yet experienced. 00:31:56.740 --> 00:31:56.820 Right. 00:31:56.980 --> 00:32:00.180 And all of that keeps calling you, yeah, Mark, keep going, keep going, keep going. 00:32:00.500 --> 00:32:03.700 And then, you know, some surprising things happen along the way, right? 00:32:03.779 --> 00:32:06.340 That in that pop your world open in a bigger way. 00:32:06.580 --> 00:32:13.140 You meet you meet certain particularly transformative characters, and you're thinking, how did that person get that come like that? 00:32:13.539 --> 00:32:17.700 Like what was the background that brought them into that moment? 00:32:17.940 --> 00:32:19.940 I remember an experience of this. 00:32:20.100 --> 00:32:22.180 Again, I I it was in college. 00:32:22.259 --> 00:32:31.460 There wasn't an intervarsity chapter where I was attending school at Whitman, but I was aware that there was this thing that people went to called Urbana. 00:32:31.700 --> 00:32:40.180 And by the time I graduated from college, I there was an Urbana coming around and a bunch of people that I knew were going. 00:32:40.340 --> 00:32:44.980 I tend to be a non-group think person, so when there's a big event, it's like, oh that's not what I'm doing. 00:32:45.140 --> 00:32:45.380 Right. 00:32:45.539 --> 00:32:50.019 I'm gonna do something else over here rather than nobody else would think of doing that. 00:32:50.580 --> 00:32:54.340 But in this case, it felt like, hmm, interesting. 00:32:54.500 --> 00:33:04.740 Um, and at the first Urbana that I attended, this guy named John Stott, who I didn't really know, I think I had read uh one or two of his small books. 00:33:04.900 --> 00:33:12.900 I had been in a Bible study where the guy who led the Bible study imitated John Stott every time we got together. 00:33:13.059 --> 00:33:22.980 Uh it was a study I remember in what he called one Timothy, uh, which was uh a faint imitation of John's English accent. 00:33:23.380 --> 00:33:35.539 Um but now suddenly we're at this enormous conference, tw over 20,000 students, and I'm I'm just fascinated by who is this person? 00:33:36.340 --> 00:33:49.460 How did this uh English, obviously English upper cra upper crust guy become so like the fruit of the spirit? 00:33:50.340 --> 00:33:51.460 How did that happen? 00:33:51.860 --> 00:34:07.220 And for anybody who's listening or watching and they don't know him, John Stott in the latter part of the 20th century, as a pastor, scholar, writer, would have been as influential, certainly in the church in England, maybe in the English-speaking church, as just about anybody. 00:34:07.539 --> 00:34:08.340 Right, right. 00:34:09.299 --> 00:34:11.699 An extraordinary person, but the real thing. 00:34:11.860 --> 00:34:12.659 This was the thing. 00:34:12.739 --> 00:34:15.940 It was like he actually is credible. 00:34:16.099 --> 00:34:17.779 He's on this huge stage. 00:34:18.259 --> 00:34:23.059 There's every possible way in which it could just become entertainment. 00:34:23.619 --> 00:34:26.259 Thoughtful entertainment, but entertainment. 00:34:26.500 --> 00:34:32.179 And he was not interested in entertaining, he was interested in transforming, and he was interested in teaching. 00:34:32.500 --> 00:34:40.099 Now, every personality doesn't have to be every

other personality, and John uh appealed to a certain kind of audience, I'm sure. 00:34:40.340 --> 00:34:50.019 But that audience happened to extend all around the world, and it was an audience that rung true, like he really believes this. 00:34:50.260 --> 00:35:00.740 And the more I got to know him, eventually, many years later, becoming one of his study assistants, he was more impressive the more you knew him. 00:35:00.980 --> 00:35:05.700 And how his own formation had happened was even deeper than I could have. 00:35:06.340 --> 00:35:07.139 Which is often not the case. 00:35:07.220 --> 00:35:15.139 A lot of times you know somebody who's well known publicly, and behind the curtain, they don't actually believe the same things or think in the same way that they try to get you to believe. 00:35:15.460 --> 00:35:15.619 Right. 00:35:15.700 --> 00:35:18.340 Or they're really cynical, actually behind the scenes. 00:35:18.420 --> 00:35:18.740 Yeah. 00:35:18.980 --> 00:35:20.500 Not a shred of cynicism. 00:35:20.579 --> 00:35:21.220 Yeah. 00:35:21.700 --> 00:35:26.820 He was, you know, he had he had become a Christian when he was a schoolboy. 00:35:27.139 --> 00:35:33.940 He'd been discipled, that is, taught, encouraged in his formation, uh, by someone who worked for Scripture Union. 00:35:34.099 --> 00:35:37.860 His uh colloquial name was Bash. 00:35:38.019 --> 00:35:49.940 And Bash had a vision that if we could reach the top ten private schools in England for the gospel, that you could change the face of England because such a high percentage had of prime ministers had been in one of those schools. 00:35:50.179 --> 00:35:51.940 John was in one of those schools. 00:35:52.179 --> 00:36:05.139 He wrote to John every single week for five years, these long, handwritten letters discipling him as a young boy at 15, 16, 17, 18. 00:36:05.300 --> 00:36:13.139 Just this amazing pouring out of love, of care, of theological teaching and instruction. 00:36:13.300 --> 00:36:17.380 I mean, he was really truly uh a mentor. 00:36:17.940 --> 00:36:20.179 And so that was impressive. 00:36:20.260 --> 00:36:28.420 And and I John gave me those letters to be able to read at one stage, which was a pretty mind-bending thing to read. 00:36:28.820 --> 00:36:30.820 This is all during the war, by the way. 00:36:31.059 --> 00:36:32.019 World War II. 00:36:32.179 --> 00:36:33.059 All of that. 00:36:33.460 --> 00:36:34.260 Oh my gosh. 00:36:34.500 --> 00:36:36.820 So it's all it all becomes formative. 00:36:37.059 --> 00:36:54.260 But John's father worked for the for the uh was the head of the Royal College of Surgeons, and he naturally wanted a son who was a patriot to Britain and the and the anti-Nazi effort, but John declared himself a pacifist. 00:36:54.420 --> 00:36:57.220 Now suddenly the schools are closed, he's living at home. 00:36:57.460 --> 00:37:03.059 His dad won't talk to him, though they live in the same house for almost four years. 00:37:04.659 --> 00:37:09.539 This was an early experience of the cost of discipleship, right? 00:37:09.860 --> 00:37:13.220 John later uh gave up his pacifism. 00:37:13.539 --> 00:37:28.900 But at that period, so I was watching, the more I got to know John, I was watching all of these really ordinary events that just come along in the course of anybody's life where an influence appears, great in the case of his mentor, not so great in the case of his dad. 00:37:29.460 --> 00:37:34.900 And yet all of it ends up forming this person who sees reality more clearly. 00:37:35.139 --> 00:37:46.740 And so then you end up with this guy who's born into a blue-blood background, who has probably one of the most broken hearts for the realities of the world. 00:37:46.900 --> 00:37:53.059 This is all happening at a time, of course, when when decolonization is unfolding, right? 00:37:53.380 --> 00:37:56.260 The empire is is unraveling. 00:37:56.579 --> 00:38:06.659 And John's heart is for those people that have been affected, good, bad, and otherwise, by both not just the British Empire, but even more by the Christian faith. 00:38:06.820 --> 00:38:08.420 And he began to travel. 00:38:09.059 --> 00:38:31.460 And when I this was exactly sort of in a way, my my best kind of dream, really, that I could actually go along with him in these places and see and hear and come to know, and and now form 50-year relationships with people who who are have lived in utterly different realities than the one that I have lived in. 00:38:31.539 --> 00:38:31.940 Yeah. 00:38:32.179 --> 00:38:34.340 And they have shaped me. 00:38:34.659 --> 00:38:45.460 So all of this cumulatively then comes down to granular things like people said, gosh, you seem like maybe you could why don't you speak at the fellowship this week? 00:38:45.539 --> 00:38:47.300 And it was like, oh, I don't think I could do that. 00:38:47.380 --> 00:38:49.380 No, no, no, no, no, not possibly. 00:38:49.539 --> 00:39:03.539 Not because I didn't have public speaking capacities, but the sacredness, the utter sacredness of daring to think that you're gonna stand up and speak for God when I've been a Christian for about a minute. 00:39:04.260 --> 00:39:08.740 Uh that was not that was not a good idea, I kept saying. 00:39:09.139 --> 00:39:21.780 So what what finally triggered your decision to say yes, I will move towards Christian leadership, whatever that will look like a few selective moments, right, where I would feel like, okay, I do feel like I should say yes here or there. 00:39:22.179 --> 00:39:31.780 Um and it was again these voices of people in the community, Christian community that I was part of, who would say, no, that was that was that wasn't just you getting up and giving a talk. 00:39:31.860 --> 00:39:32.980 That was more than you getting up. 00:39:33.139 --> 00:39:34.420 They would identify God at work. 00:39:34.659 --> 00:39:36.500 There was God that was at work in that. 00:39:37.460 --> 00:39:44.260 And I was very apprehensive about wanting

to believe that. 00:39:44.420 --> 00:39:50.980 Um because I saw too many people being deluded in any kind of power, right? 00:39:51.139 --> 00:39:53.860 I was not drawn to easy power. 00:39:54.019 --> 00:39:58.579 I was not, I could have had it because that was sort of how I was bred, you might say. 00:39:58.820 --> 00:40:00.019 But that was the Napoleon picture. 00:40:00.260 --> 00:40:01.300 That was the Napoleon picture. 00:40:01.460 --> 00:40:04.019 It's like that is not my idea. 00:40:04.099 --> 00:40:12.420 And if there's anything that is not a self-crowning empire, it's life as a disciple in Jesus' name, right? 00:40:12.900 --> 00:40:13.860 I wanted that. 00:40:13.940 --> 00:40:16.500 Yeah, and I didn't want something else. 00:40:16.820 --> 00:40:26.900 So everywhere along the way, when it, you know, whether whether it came to be ultimately being ordained, which was to me like the greatest possible irony that I would actually be ordained. 00:40:26.980 --> 00:40:28.500 I didn't go to seminary planning to be ordained. 00:40:28.579 --> 00:40:36.099 I went to seminary to have more theological education to enter the foreign service and and enter, uh probably come back and enter American politics. 00:40:36.500 --> 00:40:42.099 That was actually sort of my early late high school, early college kind of vision. 00:40:42.340 --> 00:40:45.380 But then I go to seminary, I'm beginning to feel God's call. 00:40:45.539 --> 00:40:55.380 I do a couple of internships that were required, and God met me in ways that just completely reordered, again, my expectation. 00:40:55.539 --> 00:41:05.220 It was like, oh no, I actually want you to be trained much more deeply than just a little bit of theology to go and then do whatever you're gonna do around the world. 00:41:05.460 --> 00:41:08.179 I actually want you to be on a much deeper journey. 00:41:08.340 --> 00:41:35.460 It would involve confronting even more fully my own uh uh my own inadequacy, finitude, but also just my own failures, my own psychosis, my own unprocessed development, my own self-alienation, as well as my uh the all the shutters that you know keep us from really seeing other people more freely. 00:41:36.340 --> 00:41:38.980 So it was it's been a journey toward freedom. 00:41:39.380 --> 00:41:41.539 The question was how do you move toward freedom? 00:41:41.700 --> 00:41:58.820 Not freedom that's about me, but freedom that will that has to be worked out in me, but it's freedom for the sake of what God is wanting to do beyond so the destination is not personal freedom uh any more than self-care, is about being self-centered. 00:41:59.139 --> 00:42:00.980 It's about something much bigger. 00:42:01.139 --> 00:42:09.139 I want to take care of myself because I want to ultimately take better care of the planet and the people that I'm around that I love and that I'm seeking to serve, right? 00:42:09.460 --> 00:42:11.860 So I want to steer back to the church a little bit. 00:42:12.260 --> 00:42:25.059 I don't even know quite how to formulate this question, but I'm I'm just thinking about drawn by uh the the being captivated by something very big, very larger than myself. 00:42:25.139 --> 00:42:30.740 Yes, and the beauty of that, and then how whatever is small fits in. 00:42:31.300 --> 00:42:38.900 And on the one hand, there is the way that the church often, we often make Jesus and his projects small in negative ways. 00:42:39.220 --> 00:42:39.619 Yes. 00:42:39.780 --> 00:42:44.740 And then at the same time, Jesus very often talks deliberately about very small things. 00:42:44.980 --> 00:42:45.460 Very small things. 00:42:45.700 --> 00:42:50.500 The kingdom of God is like the mustard seed, smallest of all seeds, like a tiny little lump of yeast. 00:42:50.659 --> 00:42:51.780 How do you put that together? 00:42:51.860 --> 00:43:01.940 What is what's what's the difference between shrink wrapping in a negative way and then the mystery of the mustard seed yeast nature of the kingdom? 00:43:02.260 --> 00:43:06.659 That you just have to hold on to both dimensions because it's all one thing, because it's the reality of God. 00:43:06.740 --> 00:43:06.900 Yeah. 00:43:07.059 --> 00:43:09.139 So I don't get God without smallness. 00:43:09.220 --> 00:43:09.619 Uh-huh. 00:43:09.700 --> 00:43:15.860 And I don't get large S and capaciousness without God either, right? 00:43:16.179 --> 00:43:19.460 So, in the detail, I could get lost in the detail, right? 00:43:19.539 --> 00:43:22.740 I I have the potential to get lost in some details. 00:43:23.220 --> 00:43:31.139 But I could also see, but in that micro picture, there is something much, much bigger that's actually at stake. 00:43:31.380 --> 00:43:34.260 So this matters because the cosmos matters. 00:43:34.420 --> 00:43:37.700 The small detail matters because of the cosmos. 00:43:37.860 --> 00:43:40.340 And the cosmos matters because of the small detail. 00:43:40.740 --> 00:43:45.059 I was thinking when I went through Fulloi, the fellow who was teaching Puija was Ian Pitt Watson. 00:43:45.139 --> 00:43:45.460 Yes, right. 00:43:45.700 --> 00:43:47.460 Became a big influence in my life. 00:43:47.539 --> 00:43:48.740 He was also a great musician. 00:43:48.900 --> 00:43:49.380 Yes. 00:43:49.619 --> 00:43:54.019 And uh he would talk about sermon composition much like composing music. 00:43:54.500 --> 00:43:59.139 And one of the aspects of it is much like with music, you take a theme and then you augment it. 00:43:59.300 --> 00:43:59.619 Yes. 00:43:59.780 --> 00:44:00.900 How big can you make it? 00:44:01.139 --> 00:44:01.300 Yes. 00:44:01.460 --> 00:44:02.340 And then you diminish it. 00:44:02.420 --> 00:44:02.659 Yes. 00:44:02.820 --> 00:44:04.019 How small can you make it? 00:44:04.099 --> 00:44:04.260 Yeah. 00:44:04.500 --> 00:44:09.700 And it is not one or the other, but precisely in the capacity to do both, right? 00:44:09.860 --> 00:44:11.460 That the beauty and the goodness of it. 00:44:11.619 --> 00:44:14.260

And it's in the church, it's almost like we do it the opposite. 00:44:14.420 --> 00:44:18.340 We take something small, my little ministry, and make that really big. 00:44:18.420 --> 00:44:18.659 Yes. 00:44:19.139 --> 00:44:21.059 How many people can go to my church, whatever it is? 00:44:21.139 --> 00:44:23.700 And when you take something really big, what is God doing in the universe? 00:44:24.179 --> 00:44:24.260 Right. 00:44:24.340 --> 00:44:25.539 We don't talk about that much at all. 00:44:25.860 --> 00:44:26.500 Right. 00:44:26.740 --> 00:44:27.780 That's the tragedy. 00:44:28.019 --> 00:44:28.260 Yeah. 00:44:28.420 --> 00:44:34.579 This is the myopia that's gotten the American church, gotten such a chokehold on the American church. 00:44:34.820 --> 00:44:40.579 I remember, you know, Pascal said, do great things as if as if they're small because of Jesus Christ. 00:44:40.820 --> 00:44:45.059 And do small things as if they're great because of Jesus Christ. 00:44:45.619 --> 00:44:46.900 That dynamic. 00:44:47.220 --> 00:44:48.019 Say that once more. 00:44:48.260 --> 00:44:52.179 Do great things as if they're small because of Jesus Christ. 00:44:52.420 --> 00:44:56.420 And do small things as if they're great because of Jesus Christ. 00:44:57.059 --> 00:44:58.900 It's that that holds it together, right? 00:44:58.980 --> 00:45:01.539 It's the Christological hymn in Colossians 1. 00:45:01.700 --> 00:45:17.220 It's this, it's this the God who spans the universe, who also holds all things, which I really do think is meant to be all of the most particular, particular things that there are, and all of the greatest and most expansive things that there are. 00:45:17.460 --> 00:45:22.099 And I just find that that has to be cultivated, right? 00:45:22.260 --> 00:45:25.059 We will fall by entropy, if nothing else. 00:45:25.220 --> 00:45:30.019 We'll fall into just the smallest and and most manageable life that we can have. 00:45:30.260 --> 00:45:34.900 And frankly, for a lot of people, that is its own gigantic effort. 00:45:35.059 --> 00:45:51.539 I mean, I I just want to absolutely acknowledge that that in some ways the terms I'm talking in could only be the terms of somebody who has had opportunity and uh access and privilege of different kinds. 00:45:52.420 --> 00:46:06.099 But I want to just pause and say that universes exist within people whose physical, material, economic, social, emotional world may be very small, but actually it holds the whole universe. 00:46:06.340 --> 00:46:12.820 There's this very, very life-shaping relationship with a young boy who I met when he was about 16 years old. 00:46:12.980 --> 00:46:15.860 He was born with very dramatic cerebral palsy. 00:46:16.019 --> 00:46:17.300 His name was Dustin. 00:46:17.780 --> 00:46:21.619 And he was told, his parents were told, you shouldn't even take him home. 00:46:21.700 --> 00:46:22.500 He'll never know you. 00:46:22.579 --> 00:46:24.099 He'll never have a relationship with you. 00:46:24.260 --> 00:46:27.380 There will never be a way that he'll understand or attach. 00:46:27.539 --> 00:46:33.700 It's really better that he just be immediately institutionalized and that you don't even take him home from the hospital. 00:46:34.019 --> 00:46:43.300 This family, who are just remarkable heroes of faith in my mind, were people who absolutely determined that that for them was not going to be the way this was going to go. 00:46:43.460 --> 00:46:54.340 And it turns out that Dustin, in future tests, uh had an intelligence that was within the top 1% of all people population, right? 00:46:54.579 --> 00:47:02.900 It wasn't just of people who have dramatic cerebral palsy or any other kind of uh physical or uh biological disability. 00:47:03.220 --> 00:47:05.700 It was that he was unbelievably brilliant. 00:47:05.860 --> 00:47:15.539 So in this body, which was, in one sense, almost unable to do anything, was a universe of this mind. 00:47:16.340 --> 00:47:23.940 And he wrote this amazing essay when he was about, I think, about 14 or 15 years old, called My Most Important Decision. 00:47:24.019 --> 00:47:34.179 It was an assignment in a school that was uh enabling him to grow in his capacities and his ability ultimately to communicate through electronic means and so forth. 00:47:34.420 --> 00:47:36.980 Anyway, my most important decision. 00:47:37.220 --> 00:47:45.780 And and in that he goes through the collapsing tiles of despair that his condition could reduce him into. 00:47:46.500 --> 00:47:51.139 And then he says, But but God has made me a writer. 00:47:51.460 --> 00:47:53.059 I long to run. 00:47:53.860 --> 00:47:58.260 And then at the very end, he says, I need to remember Easter. 00:47:58.900 --> 00:48:03.700 Today is my time to write, eternity is my time to run. 00:48:05.139 --> 00:48:10.740 Now in that is the answer to your question, right? 00:48:10.900 --> 00:48:17.860 Being around people who hold he held the God of the universe in his heart and mind. 00:48:18.500 --> 00:48:35.780 He held it in a physical prison that was so dramatically limited, but all the way to his death until uh at about 43, 44, he he held that dynamic together. 00:48:36.260 --> 00:48:43.139 If Dustin can do that, I believe I can make a better effort at doing that. 00:48:43.860 --> 00:48:47.460 So I'm gonna get to the church, but I just I gotta stop here. 00:48:47.700 --> 00:48:54.579 You're also, among other things, a pastor, and just let you address for a moment, particularly young people who are listening. 00:48:54.820 --> 00:49:09.860 I was talking to somebody last week and they were talking about uh young men who are in cell involuntarily celibate and frustrated because they'll feel like women are not paying attention to them, and now gratification is available through other ways, and it can become again a very small life. 00:49:10.019 --> 00:49:10.420 Right. 00:49:10.659 --> 00:49:14.340 And so many people wrestling with does my life matter?

00:49:14.659 --> 00:49:16.420 Who will tell me that it matters? 00:49:16.659 --> 00:49:18.179 How does it matter? 00:49:18.340 --> 00:49:21.139 Uh, who are just waiting for someone to speak to them. 00:49:21.300 --> 00:49:26.340 So would you just take a moment and for particularly young people who are wondering, what should I do? 00:49:26.500 --> 00:49:27.380 Does my life matter? 00:49:27.539 --> 00:49:31.380 Is it worth what does Jesus have to say to them? 00:49:31.619 --> 00:49:32.260 Yeah. 00:49:32.740 --> 00:49:43.539 Well, I do think that a lot of what you've just described, which is very familiar to me too, is something which is really a reflection of the cultural moment that we're living in right now. 00:49:43.780 --> 00:49:46.900 And it's brought on, of course, by many different influences. 00:49:47.220 --> 00:49:54.420 But I think what is less visible when you're when we're immersed in culture of any kind, is that we can't see the culture. 00:49:54.500 --> 00:49:56.099 It's like a fish not seeing the water. 00:49:56.659 --> 00:50:18.340 So, so it's worth at least trying to understand that wherever we are, at any point in our life, we are inside a contextual reality that has is and has shaped a great deal about the plausibility horizon that we live in, what we think is possible, what matters, why it matters. 00:50:18.740 --> 00:50:32.980 And it just turns out that no humanly constructed context is anywhere near being able to hold the full, robust character of what a human individual life is about. 00:50:34.260 --> 00:50:41.619 So I think one of the great promises and hopes of the gospel is letting it explode and crack open your whole universe. 00:50:41.860 --> 00:50:46.900 Like absolutely admit totally the reality of exactly where you are. 00:50:47.380 --> 00:50:52.659 And then the constellation of factors, the people, the technology, the cultural moment. 00:50:52.900 --> 00:50:57.380 All of that, of course, shapes an individual lives and a person's sense of plausibility. 00:50:57.539 --> 00:51:06.980 I mean, I went through two very, very dark periods in my life where I felt as though I was that in one case, I was in a very suicidal place. 00:51:07.139 --> 00:51:11.139 I could really have imagined and had a plan for how I would end my life. 00:51:11.380 --> 00:51:20.820 It was all around a despair where the circumstances that I was in had locked me into a kind of straitjacket existence. 00:51:21.059 --> 00:51:23.300 And I had to get free from that. 00:51:23.460 --> 00:51:29.220 Like it was not that it was telling me the truth, is that I was wrongly imprisoned. 00:51:29.380 --> 00:51:34.980 And I needed, by the grace of God and Christian community, to be broken out of that. 00:51:35.139 --> 00:51:38.820 It's like Lazarus walking out and being unwrapped. 00:51:39.780 --> 00:51:42.659 I believe there was a resurrection. 00:51:43.539 --> 00:51:50.179 And I believe that God had been calling me out of my own self-imposed imprisonments of various kinds. 00:51:50.500 --> 00:51:53.539 But I needed to be unwrapped. 00:51:53.780 --> 00:52:04.659 And that's the work of the community Christian community that's authentic and honest and not in any way pretentious or self-righteous or self-interested. 00:52:04.900 --> 00:52:10.980 It's really about uh finding people who have and call can call you out into a bigger reality. 00:52:11.539 --> 00:52:14.099 And that is what the gospel does. 00:52:14.179 --> 00:52:17.300 That's absolutely intrinsic to the work of Jesus. 00:52:17.539 --> 00:52:28.179 It's not often intrinsically the work of the church, which often is myopic, and it's all about come in, be here, do this, and do it in these particular ways, or we will kick you out. 00:52:28.579 --> 00:52:33.059 Instead, it's it's really about this expansive gospel. 00:52:33.220 --> 00:52:48.980 And I would say to anyone that's in circumstances like the ones you're describing: be sure that you're in a context where the full nutrients of human life, existence, experience, and spiritual dynamism are actually operative, not a perfect world. 00:52:49.380 --> 00:53:00.260 There's no such thing as that, but something which is free from the boundaries and instead living in a context of what I think you and I, John, would call a centered set life. 00:53:00.420 --> 00:53:11.220 A centered set life that's focused on Jesus Christ, who holds all things and therefore invites us back out into the expansiveness of being fully human. 00:53:11.460 --> 00:53:20.420 Some of that expansiveness, of course, has to do with how we relate to anybody and in particular, how we relate across genders, romantically or otherwise. 00:53:20.740 --> 00:53:26.019 But often the world that we're living in is being scripted by people who have a small vision. 00:53:26.900 --> 00:53:28.900 Jesus does not have a small vision. 00:53:28.980 --> 00:53:29.460 Yeah. 00:53:29.700 --> 00:53:31.619 He didn't die for myopia. 00:53:31.700 --> 00:53:32.500 He died for freedom. 00:53:32.820 --> 00:53:43.539 We keep coming back to the same kind of core dynamic and hopelessness also will try to convince you that you and your existence and your prospects are very small. 00:53:43.780 --> 00:53:44.019 Totally. 00:53:44.179 --> 00:53:44.900 And it's not true. 00:53:45.139 --> 00:53:45.539 Totally. 00:53:45.700 --> 00:53:46.019 Yeah. 00:53:46.179 --> 00:53:48.179 I understand that very well. 00:53:48.420 --> 00:53:48.740 Yeah. 00:53:48.980 --> 00:53:53.780 Was that when you were, if I can ask, in that dark place, was that before you became a Christian? 00:53:53.940 --> 00:53:54.900 Was it after you became a Christian? 00:53:55.139 --> 00:53:56.260 No, after I became a Christian. 00:53:56.500 --> 00:53:57.860 It was I was in seminary. 00:53:58.019 --> 00:53:58.340 Okay. 00:53:58.900 --> 00:53:59.940 And it came out. 00:54:00.500 --> 00:54:01.220 And did it surprise you? 00:54:01.300 --> 00:54:03.619 Because if you know Jesus, you're not supposed to have to go

there. 00:54:03.940 --> 00:54:07.139 Yeah, that is not what I didn't have that script. 00:54:07.380 --> 00:54:12.500 Those kinds of scripts, that was not in my understanding of how I'd encountered Jesus. 00:54:12.740 --> 00:54:16.579 It was like Jesus encounters a world of people that are a wreck. 00:54:16.820 --> 00:54:19.139 And wherever we are is where we are. 00:54:19.300 --> 00:54:24.980 And then the question is, how do I discover the reality of Jesus in relationship to whatever it is that I'm experiencing? 00:54:25.139 --> 00:54:25.380 Right. 00:54:25.619 --> 00:54:31.940 So if I'm experiencing this dark, dark period, then the question becomes, so where are you, God? 00:54:32.099 --> 00:54:36.500 But also what does what happens in a season like this? 00:54:37.059 --> 00:54:45.300 Now, I had found myself withdrawing relationally out of a despair that had taken hold of me. 00:54:45.940 --> 00:54:53.619 And I've told this story before, but what happened in seminary was that I was reading, I was studying, I was learning a lot. 00:54:53.700 --> 00:54:55.539 I benefited enormously from all that. 00:54:55.619 --> 00:54:59.940 I didn't feel like it was disconnected from the crisis, but it was just a separate project. 00:55:00.179 --> 00:55:02.740 But in my inner project, it was despair. 00:55:02.820 --> 00:55:03.139 Yeah. 00:55:03.380 --> 00:55:06.420 I cannot be the Christian leader that I would want to be. 00:55:06.579 --> 00:55:10.740 I will, I will fail God, I will fail myself, I will fail my friends. 00:55:10.900 --> 00:55:18.659 I will, I will, I am not capable of being a person more than the despair that was gnawing me. 00:55:18.740 --> 00:55:19.059 Yeah. 00:55:19.300 --> 00:55:25.380 Um, and it happened that during that period of time, there were friends that invited me to a Thanksgiving dinner at their house. 00:55:25.619 --> 00:55:31.619 And um I wasn't, I said yes, but I wasn't sure that I would even be alive by that Thanksgiving. 00:55:31.780 --> 00:55:39.380 I had a very specific plan, I knew how to go and a time frame, and you know, a means, etc. 00:55:40.179 --> 00:55:49.300 And somehow somehow like can happen in the context of suicidal ideation. 00:55:49.619 --> 00:55:52.820 Having a commitment can be a very important thing. 00:55:53.539 --> 00:55:57.860 So, as simple as what I'm about to tell you happened and it was transformative. 00:55:58.099 --> 00:56:08.740 So I didn't have a car, so these friends picked me up to take me to their house with a group of about 15 other people that are gonna have Thanksgiving lunch together. 00:56:08.980 --> 00:56:21.700 And I walked in off of their driveway into a pantry area where all kinds of food that had spent days being made was beautifully laid out, not yet on the table. 00:56:22.019 --> 00:56:36.179 It was like people had imagined there was going to be a future that Thanksgiving would arrive, that they wanted it to be marked by beauty and by love and by nourishment. 00:56:36.340 --> 00:56:40.420 These were not words, these were not the words that you were living in. 00:56:40.500 --> 00:56:40.740 Yeah. 00:56:41.059 --> 00:56:47.460 I'm living in despair and darkness and isolation and fear and uncertainty. 00:56:47.780 --> 00:56:54.500 And all of a sudden, oh my gosh, here's this again, in the small detail is the cosmos, right? 00:56:54.820 --> 00:56:56.500 Or is the fullness of God. 00:56:56.579 --> 00:56:58.980 It was like all this food. 00:56:59.619 --> 00:57:04.820 They dreamed about it, they'd shopped for it, they'd made a menu, they decided this recipe, not that recipe. 00:57:04.900 --> 00:57:07.539 They had spent time doing this. 00:57:07.780 --> 00:57:16.340 So I walk into this room, uh, their living room, which was also their dining room, and this amazingly beautiful table is laid out. 00:57:16.500 --> 00:57:25.059 Not because there was a lot of wealth anywhere in the in the picture, but there was attention to beauty, yeah, to welcome, to hospitality. 00:57:26.019 --> 00:57:29.619 And I was in a room of people who believed again there would be a future. 00:57:29.780 --> 00:57:31.220 Like tomorrow would actually happen. 00:57:31.780 --> 00:57:33.780 I was not convinced tomorrow would happen. 00:57:33.940 --> 00:57:36.260 Or that it was a good idea if it did happen. 00:57:36.500 --> 00:57:41.380 And that might be better for all of them if I wasn't in that picture. 00:57:42.500 --> 00:57:44.980 But I couldn't get away with that being in that room. 00:57:45.139 --> 00:57:45.380 Wow. 00:57:45.619 --> 00:57:58.740 It was like I cannot say this world, now defined by the 15 people in this Thanksgiving meal, this world that I'm in is not better if I'm not in it. 00:57:59.700 --> 00:58:01.780 Not because it's better because I am in it. 00:58:01.940 --> 00:58:04.980 Yeah, but it is not better by my not being in it. 00:58:05.539 --> 00:58:07.539 Another reality revealed itself to you. 00:58:07.780 --> 00:58:08.099 Exactly. 00:58:08.260 --> 00:58:10.260 And it was like, oh my gosh. 00:58:10.420 --> 00:58:27.220 So apparently you can be intention, in despair, and be loved and known and seen in a way that just continued that trajectory that I'd been on by this stage for a while. 00:58:27.539 --> 00:58:31.380 But it was a transformative, completely transformative moment. 00:58:31.619 --> 00:58:36.340 And by the time I went home, I was picked up, as I remember, at midday. 00:58:36.579 --> 00:58:43.619 By the time I went home at nine o'clock or ten o'clock at night, something had changed. 00:58:44.500 --> 00:58:54.820 And it was like again, as I've said about discipleship and God's purposes, God had been reordering reality for me that day. 00:58:55.460 --> 00:58:57.619 And I did not see the same despair. 00:58:57.780 --> 00:59:02.260 I was not out of that depression for probably another year and a half. 00:59:03.139 --> 00:59:06.900 But I was not in that degree of despair. 00:59:07.860 --> 00:59:12.099 I held the possibilities, I

didn't deny them. 00:59:12.420 --> 00:59:16.820 I went to the place where I had planned to uh kill myself. 00:59:17.700 --> 00:59:22.099 I faced it down like I am not choosing this. 00:59:22.260 --> 00:59:22.900 Wow. 00:59:23.539 --> 00:59:30.340 Um and by God's grace and the surrounding love of these dear friends. 00:59:30.659 --> 00:59:31.220 Thank God. 00:59:31.460 --> 00:59:32.659 There was a future and a hope. 00:59:32.900 --> 00:59:33.139 Thank God. 00:59:33.300 --> 00:59:33.619 Yeah, yeah. 00:59:33.700 --> 00:59:34.019 Amen. 00:59:34.099 --> 00:59:34.260 Amen. 00:59:34.500 --> 00:59:44.500 And anybody who's listening, if you're struggling with suicide, you are not alone, you are not the first, tell a mental health professional, tell a pastor, tell a friend, contact us at formation. 00:59:44.820 --> 00:59:45.220 Totally. 00:59:45.539 --> 00:59:48.500 Um uh there is a larger reality. 00:59:48.659 --> 00:59:49.139 Yeah. 00:59:49.619 --> 00:59:51.220 And uh thank you. 00:59:51.380 --> 00:59:52.980 That's very, very moving. 00:59:53.300 --> 01:00:00.179 Um, you know, Dallas Willard used to say sometimes that a single soul is bigger than the universe. 01:00:02.579 --> 01:00:10.900 Uh, and there's something about spiritual reality which is real, it's not physical, and some way in which it's clearly true. 01:00:11.139 --> 01:00:20.179 And for a person who's ready to end their life, to have some switch flipped inside saying, no, I will not do that, is somehow ultimate. 01:00:20.340 --> 01:00:23.059 It's you can't put a price on it. 01:00:23.539 --> 01:00:31.940 And uh again, it's being put in touch with a reality that's enormous, but in this one little body. 01:00:32.179 --> 01:00:32.820 Right. 01:00:33.539 --> 01:00:41.619 And uh that's the that's that's the treasure the church is to steward that brings us to the church now. 01:00:41.780 --> 01:00:42.179 Right. 01:00:42.420 --> 01:00:48.340 And uh particular topic that I had planned on getting to way earlier, but we'll we'll get to it now. 01:00:48.659 --> 01:00:57.700 It seems to me like we're living in a day where it's almost the assumption, no, no, no, the really big realm is the political realm. 01:00:57.860 --> 01:00:58.179 Right. 01:00:58.340 --> 01:00:58.579 Right. 01:00:58.740 --> 01:01:02.740 And if you want to have impact, then that's where you got to play. 01:01:02.980 --> 01:01:07.539 And if you're not taking political positions, you're not relevant. 01:01:07.780 --> 01:01:32.500 And so uh the it feels like the church is kind of caught up in a tidal wave in many ways, where uh uh it seems often in congregations that people's sense of identity or emotional allegiance is stronger to a political party than it actually is to Jesus. 01:01:32.900 --> 01:01:43.460 And uh it's hard to hold on to the belief that him and this odd little thing called the church, you know, is the steward of the biggest thing going. 01:01:43.780 --> 01:01:47.460 So talk a little bit about why do we find ourselves here? 01:01:47.619 --> 01:01:48.179 What's going on? 01:01:48.500 --> 01:01:56.579 Well, of course, I, you know, as I said earlier, my trajectory into the church was with this fear of myopia. 01:01:56.820 --> 01:01:57.460 Yeah. 01:01:57.780 --> 01:02:02.900 Don't give me a small God, don't give me a small church, don't give me a small heart, don't give me a small mind. 01:02:03.139 --> 01:02:05.139 And you were gonna go into politics at one point. 01:02:05.619 --> 01:02:06.260 Totally, yeah. 01:02:06.500 --> 01:02:16.900 Um and I think one of the things that that that again back to the two pictures, the despair was real to me, and the egotism was a possibility. 01:02:18.900 --> 01:02:29.539 Through the work of God's grace, I think what became apparent to me is that the really big thing, the really, really big thing is God and God's love. 01:02:30.420 --> 01:02:31.700 That's the big thing. 01:02:32.500 --> 01:02:38.019 We think it's poor, but actually, it turns out not in the kingdom of God. 01:02:38.179 --> 01:02:39.539 The big thing is not power. 01:02:39.700 --> 01:02:43.059 The big thing, the really big thing is love. 01:02:43.780 --> 01:02:46.420 It is the most transformative thing in the world. 01:02:47.539 --> 01:03:02.740 Meanwhile, there's lots of ballistics that are possible in all sorts of different forms of human power, whether it's in a personal relationship, in a family, in a marriage, in a in a community, in a church, in a in a town, whatever it might be. 01:03:03.059 --> 01:03:16.579 And and I think one of the things that has happened periodically through American history and through really global history is the tendency of the church to mistake the attractions of power for the attractions of love. 01:03:17.220 --> 01:03:21.220 And we are occupied right now with great fear. 01:03:21.460 --> 01:03:30.579 So behind the preoccupation around politics is fundamentally fear, anxiety, that there's a huge something that is at stake. 01:03:30.820 --> 01:03:41.940 A huge sense of identity, a huge sense of safety, a huge sense of belonging, a huge sense of getting life the way we want it. 01:03:42.579 --> 01:03:44.820 There's lots of things that are at risk. 01:03:45.139 --> 01:03:47.460 It feels like they're even more at risk. 01:03:47.619 --> 01:03:57.860 And there's for different people, different sociologies, take different signal systems that say to them, yikes, yikes, yikes, danger over here, danger over here. 01:03:58.179 --> 01:04:10.900 And we have ways now, technologically and otherwise, of inflating danger by volume and by pervasiveness and many, many other kinds of ways that fear can be stimulated. 01:04:11.059 --> 01:04:14.659 And the political environment that we live in, both right and left are full of fear. 01:04:14.740 --> 01:04:14.900 Yeah. 01:04:15.059 --> 01:04:19.380 The severe right and left are absolutely fear-mongering organizations. 01:04:19.860 --> 01:04:24.579 Folks who are in that field will say the quickest ways

to raise money are either fear or outrage. 01:04:24.820 --> 01:04:25.619 Yes, that's right. 01:04:25.860 --> 01:04:27.220 And they're really the same thing. 01:04:27.380 --> 01:04:27.539 Yeah. 01:04:27.700 --> 01:04:30.420 I mean, they're all intertwined, they're inextricable from each other. 01:04:30.500 --> 01:04:30.659 Yeah. 01:04:30.820 --> 01:04:39.059 So fear and outrage are a great pair that gives us a personal sense of fear responding to whatever we think is the danger. 01:04:39.220 --> 01:04:47.139 Then we find a community that shares that fear and outrage, and we're at home, and we understand that to be reality. 01:04:47.380 --> 01:05:00.579 It's actually not reality any more than the incel world is reality, or any more than our individual psychological universes are reality, or that the politics of some other vision is reality. 01:05:00.659 --> 01:05:01.700 It's not, none of it is. 01:05:01.860 --> 01:05:05.940 This is why the church and the gospel can never be captive to the right or the left. 01:05:06.260 --> 01:05:13.780 Because both right and left, at their core, hold on to things that are fundamentally concerning to God. 01:05:14.500 --> 01:05:23.380 The right tends to hold on to things that have to do with individuality, personal freedom, a sense of control. 01:05:24.179 --> 01:05:31.940 The left holds on to a much stronger sense of the place of the community, society at large, the large picture of social operations. 01:05:33.619 --> 01:05:33.780 Right. 01:05:34.420 --> 01:05:35.940 We need both of those two things. 01:05:36.179 --> 01:05:38.340 God is concerned about both of those two things. 01:05:38.579 --> 01:06:04.579 God has addressed in Jesus Christ the things that actually make for functioning healthy systems and communities and for redemptions of why is it it seems really hard for folks, especially if they're on the far extreme, on the far left to talk about issues like agency character, accountability, or on the far right to talk about the fact that there are deep systemic problems and that it gets woven into economics and issues of justice. 01:06:04.740 --> 01:06:11.940 And so why it it doesn't make sense to me that it would be so difficult to hold on to both, but it seems like it is. 01:06:12.340 --> 01:06:16.340 Well, because fear drives us towards action, right? 01:06:16.659 --> 01:06:23.700 I mean, the the fear button in our brains uh is is you know, operates in the tiniest amount of time. 01:06:24.099 --> 01:06:29.220 Time and sets us down a trajectory of protection and self-defense or running away. 01:06:29.460 --> 01:06:46.659 And I think that a lot of what's happening is that if I believe that the cornerstone of the life that I believe I am entitled to or should have is under needs to be controlled by me as an individual agent, bringing that reality into existence. 01:06:46.820 --> 01:06:54.340 Then anything that's going to tr threaten my sense of empowerment, my sense of identity, freedom, et cetera, that's going to undo. 01:06:54.579 --> 01:06:58.900 I have no interest in systems because that's actually not even what the world's about. 01:06:59.460 --> 01:07:03.619 So the paradigm already eliminates the other side. 01:07:03.860 --> 01:07:05.940 So of course it can only be a danger, right? 01:07:06.579 --> 01:07:15.139 Then you have the people on the on the left that are more interested in talking about social systems and practices and uh the social realities of the world. 01:07:15.300 --> 01:07:33.139 And what happens on their side is that they're completely anxious about the way that whatever you could do as an individual will, if it doesn't extend to other individuals with power and without power, then that's going to take away from their ability to actually be able to live fully human lives. 01:07:33.460 --> 01:07:36.260 So both look at the other and says, I don't want a system. 01:07:36.420 --> 01:07:37.860 That's the last thing in the world. 01:07:38.019 --> 01:07:39.300 Give me Wyoming. 01:07:39.460 --> 01:07:41.539 I do not want a system. 01:07:42.260 --> 01:07:50.659 But if on the other hand you're saying, no, but it has to be a we, and it does include me, but it's so it's more of a we orientation. 01:07:50.900 --> 01:07:56.500 I don't want to be in a world where just the individual survives and thrives. 01:07:56.579 --> 01:08:00.340 I want to be in a world where I look out and see in relationship with other people. 01:08:00.500 --> 01:08:08.500 So don't let the individual rights of individual people trump the corporate reality, the collective reality, the communal reality. 01:08:08.740 --> 01:08:14.579 And and so they literally do not see the value in either either the other side, right? 01:08:14.900 --> 01:08:19.059 And that ends up creating this terrible blindness. 01:08:19.380 --> 01:08:19.539 Yeah. 01:08:19.779 --> 01:08:20.099 T.S. 01:08:20.179 --> 01:08:25.859 Elliott wrote, uh, uh, we our problem is we want a system so perfect we don't have to be good. 01:08:26.099 --> 01:08:26.500 Yes. 01:08:26.659 --> 01:08:27.059 Yes. 01:08:27.300 --> 01:08:30.340 And then the other side is like, we want to be so good that the system doesn't matter. 01:08:30.500 --> 01:08:30.819 Right. 01:08:30.979 --> 01:08:31.619 Yeah. 01:08:32.179 --> 01:08:32.659 Yeah. 01:08:32.899 --> 01:08:41.139 How do you so you worked as a pastor, president of Fuller for many years, so you talk with pastors a lot. 01:08:41.299 --> 01:08:45.379 Uh Kerry Newhoff uh does a lot of work in the church space. 01:08:45.539 --> 01:08:53.139 He was saying 20 years ago, if a pastor got a call from somebody, you know, we just started attending the church, I want to get together and talk with you about X. 01:08:53.379 --> 01:09:01.939 20 years ago, could be what's your view on women in ministry or infant baptism or the authority of scripture exactly. 01:09:02.179 --> 01:09:05.939 Now he said, pretty much every time the pastor knows it's gonna be politics. 01:09:06.019 -->

01:09:06.179 Right. 01:09:06.339 --> 01:09:07.460 Where does the church stand? 01:09:07.619 --> 01:09:08.019 Right, right. 01:09:08.179 --> 01:09:16.659 And that it's much easier for a church if it's a red church or a blue church, a lot harder if it's purple, fuller kind of a purple place. 01:09:17.139 --> 01:09:26.179 How do you talk with pastors about how to navigate a church these days, particularly if it's not all either red or blue? 01:09:26.419 --> 01:09:27.059 Right. 01:09:27.859 --> 01:09:37.779 You and I have done a lot of memorial services, and in memorial services, uh, you hear people often speculate about specifically what the nature of the afterlife is about. 01:09:37.939 --> 01:09:38.179 Yes. 01:09:38.339 --> 01:09:43.699 And you realize that the moment to have the conversation about the afterlife is not at the memorial service. 01:09:44.579 --> 01:09:51.139 This is not the moment to say, actually, let's let's just think through what the Bible actually teaches about the afterlife. 01:09:51.379 --> 01:09:58.339 Um, and likewise, in this moment, it's it's the hardest moment to have conversations right in this crisis. 01:09:58.579 --> 01:09:58.739 Yeah. 01:09:58.979 --> 01:10:00.099 So you have to understand that. 01:10:00.179 --> 01:10:06.339 So I think the question becomes how do you diffuse that and take that as seriously as you can? 01:10:06.899 --> 01:10:11.619 Acknowledging that you have to read your culture, but not be shaped by your culture. 01:10:11.939 --> 01:10:21.219 Pastors that are shaped by their culture more than they're shaped by the gospel will not be fruitful in this season. 01:10:21.859 --> 01:10:39.219 They will yield to the culture that has shaped them and maybe find satisfaction, uh be able to retain their job instead of getting fired, being able to uh, you know, I often think that caution uh is a is a Christian word for fear, really. 01:10:39.539 --> 01:10:42.579 Uh and I I think it's not about being cautious. 01:10:42.899 --> 01:10:44.819 Caution is a Christian word for fear, that's good. 01:10:45.059 --> 01:10:49.299 I think it's about understanding what is really at stake. 01:10:49.539 --> 01:10:50.019 Yeah. 01:10:50.339 --> 01:10:54.419 Now, no claim to omnipotence or omniscience about that. 01:10:54.500 --> 01:11:01.059 All of it has to be worked out in real time, all of it has to be worked out with great care around the study and reflection of the Bible and otherwise. 01:11:01.219 --> 01:11:12.579 But from my point of view, part of the way you work this out is by realizing that you have to be a uh committed to a diffusion of authority and power in order to have a constructive conversation. 01:11:12.819 --> 01:11:24.419 So in some uh churches where authority is given to the mouthpiece of the preacher, then everything is thought that what the preacher says is going to set the reality of the people in the room. 01:11:24.579 --> 01:11:25.219 Right. 01:11:25.539 --> 01:11:39.379 You and I have been in Presbyterian traditions where the pulpit as is free actually from the governance of the session, the governing board, and you are always free as a pastor to say what you think you can do. 01:11:39.460 --> 01:11:47.699 But many pastors yield that authority, not to their own self-interest necessarily, but to simply satisfying the people. 01:11:47.859 --> 01:11:48.179 Yeah. 01:11:48.339 --> 01:11:50.899 Now that's not distinct to Presbyterians. 01:11:50.979 --> 01:11:53.139 That's just true of pastors in lots of settings. 01:11:53.299 --> 01:11:58.579 No one wants to lose their job, no one wants to go into pastoral ministry to have lots of fiery arguments about politics. 01:11:58.659 --> 01:12:00.819 That's not the trajectory. 01:12:01.059 --> 01:12:02.339 So, how do you diffuse it? 01:12:02.419 --> 01:12:04.899 I think you diffuse it by having personal conversations. 01:12:05.139 --> 01:12:17.699 You diffuse it in part when those people come in to see you in your office to say I really would love to understand how you came to the conviction that you have about this because you're very, very impassioned about it. 01:12:17.859 --> 01:12:21.379 I just want to be sure that I'm understanding what that's about for you. 01:12:21.460 --> 01:12:23.619 Because there's lots of reasons people might hold that opinion. 01:12:23.699 --> 01:12:23.939 Right. 01:12:24.099 --> 01:12:26.339 What are your reasons for holding that opinion? 01:12:27.299 --> 01:12:34.819 I do find that, and other such questions, that you can move into something that's underneath the conviction, not just the conviction. 01:12:35.139 --> 01:12:49.059 So don't be stopped by the conviction or the harassment, which it can often be, or even worse, the abuse uh of pastors by their by their parishioners by trying to understand what's really underneath. 01:12:49.219 --> 01:12:54.819 Like if so, if the worst things to were to happen in your understanding, what would those things be? 01:12:54.979 --> 01:12:57.699 And why is that such a bad outcome? 01:12:58.579 --> 01:13:00.819 So I think that there's lots of different ways. 01:13:00.979 --> 01:13:03.379 And why does that trigger you in particular? 01:13:03.699 --> 01:13:05.859 Narrative, personal narratives, et cetera. 01:13:06.259 --> 01:13:23.460 I think I always believe that if it was a social, complicated social political issue, that it should go next really to a conversation in a in an independent setting from worship where where there is I'm not the pastor. 01:13:23.859 --> 01:13:25.539 Claiming the authority of scripture for the case. 01:13:25.699 --> 01:13:26.339 I'm not doing that. 01:13:26.500 --> 01:13:27.939 I'm inviting us into a community. 01:13:28.099 --> 01:13:28.579 Yep. 01:13:28.819 --> 01:13:31.379 If I'm the right leader, then I'll be the leader. 01:13:31.460 --> 01:13:44.339 But if I'm not the right leader, if I need to be augmented by the voices of other people who hold different opinions, how do we have a legitimate hearing

of contested views that might be held by people in the same community? 01:13:44.500 --> 01:13:50.819 And how do we do that in a way that is not finding the hottest issue to learn how to do this in, right? 01:13:51.059 --> 01:13:56.419 I mean you don't choose the fire to decide how how how and in what way are you going to do it. 01:13:56.579 --> 01:13:57.699 So it's a muscle you have to grow. 01:13:57.939 --> 01:13:58.500 You have to grow it. 01:13:58.739 --> 01:13:59.939 You've got to pick the right areas to do. 01:14:00.099 --> 01:14:00.979 Can we learn to do it? 01:14:01.139 --> 01:14:06.899 Now, sometimes I've done that with exemplars where um people that I know who hold opposite points of view. 01:14:06.979 --> 01:14:07.299 Yeah. 01:14:07.539 --> 01:14:20.259 I'd like you to just have a conversation in front of us about this particular issue, knowing because of having chosen them, that they each really do hold strongly the view that they're going to defend. 01:14:21.059 --> 01:14:33.699 But they are of such character because of the transformation of Christ and the spirit of Christ in them, that they can sustain having a passionate, loving, honest, truth-telling conversation. 01:14:34.099 --> 01:14:38.419 So letting the converse the congregation have exposure to that. 01:14:38.579 --> 01:14:46.500 Part of the reason for my own podcast is I'm not I'm not doing a podcast for the sake of straddling this sphere. 01:14:46.659 --> 01:15:06.099 What I am interested in doing a podcast for is that people who hold completely different positions and social locations are going to have conversations with me where we're going to have a fair hearing of what their deepest convictions are about whatever the subject is that we're pursuing. 01:15:06.339 --> 01:15:06.819 Yeah. 01:15:07.139 --> 01:15:18.500 And I will, at times, in the podcast that I host conversing, I will say to them, um, now what what I'm interested in here is that our our listeners are thoughtful people. 01:15:18.579 --> 01:15:20.339 They come from all kinds of different places. 01:15:20.419 --> 01:15:23.299 They're around the country and around different parts of the world. 01:15:23.539 --> 01:15:29.059 I want us to think again about what you just said, but put yourself now in another position. 01:15:29.779 --> 01:15:47.219 Because if a person can only explain their position inside their own cultural presuppositions, their own racial status, their own economic status, their own class, their own economic agenda, let that just become visible, please. 01:15:47.939 --> 01:15:49.219 So that we can now go. 01:15:49.699 --> 01:15:54.979 Thank you for sharing your predecessor fuller Rismao used to talk about uh convicted civility. 01:15:55.219 --> 01:15:55.619 Exactly. 01:15:56.019 --> 01:16:09.859 And part of what uh he measured it by is uh if you are communicating a position you disagree with, you communicate it in the best possible version in a way that the person who holds that position would agree with. 01:16:10.179 --> 01:16:10.819 Yes, that's right. 01:16:10.979 --> 01:16:12.419 As opposed to a caricature. 01:16:12.659 --> 01:16:12.979 That's right. 01:16:13.139 --> 01:16:17.379 And this strikes me an awful lot of our political discourse fails the test right there. 01:16:17.619 --> 01:16:18.739 Right, right there. 01:16:19.219 --> 01:16:42.099 I worship frequently now at a church in Oakland called Allen Temple Baptist Church, which is a black Baptist church, phenomenal church, incredible history, amazing pastoral leadership, and a community of black people in Oakland that are that encompass the full economic range, educational range. 01:16:42.419 --> 01:16:46.899 It's positioned just on the edge of one of the most dangerous parts of Oakland. 01:16:47.059 --> 01:16:52.419 It takes the living reality of urban poverty with the greatest possible seriousness. 01:16:52.500 --> 01:16:56.259 And it has people that are CEOs of major corporations. 01:16:56.819 --> 01:17:41.299 So being in that setting, as I am now so frequently, I'm just being tutored again and again and again and understanding how you take some of the most desperate needs and the most passionate feelings and the longest history of injustices and watch the wisdom of a pastor that's not in my social, my my primary social world show me how to be a pastor to a diverse group of people where the terms are completely different than the classic paradigms of a of a can you give an example to anything come to mind of the things that you better do it? 01:17:41.539 --> 01:17:47.539 Yeah, a lot of black churches, as many will know, uh of course, are welcoming to politicians. 01:17:47.619 --> 01:17:47.779 Right. 01:17:47.939 --> 01:18:08.419 In this case, the way that plays out is that they have a uh before the election, usually it's uh two weeks before the election, they invite anybody that's running for local office to come and be present in worship if they wish to be present in worship, and that after that there will be an open forum, and everybody will be given 10 minutes to say whatever they want to say. 01:18:08.579 --> 01:18:13.939 They'll take at least five to ten minutes worth of questions, and and then we simply move on. 01:18:14.099 --> 01:18:16.899 There's never any endorsement from the pulpit. 01:18:16.979 --> 01:18:20.419 There's nobody saying this person's in, that person's not in, etc. 01:18:20.819 --> 01:18:24.899 Anybody who's running can come and have a platform to hear this. 01:18:25.059 --> 01:18:25.299 Yeah. 01:18:25.539 --> 01:18:31.139 Now, the amount of oxygen that creates, just this simple thing of hospitality. 01:18:31.299 --> 01:18:31.539 Yes. 01:18:31.779 --> 01:18:33.619 Gosh, we're thoughtful people in our church. 01:18:34.019 --> 01:18:35.619 We care about what's happening in our community. 01:18:36.099 --> 01:18:40.739 Let's invite people who are saying they want to hold offices, come and tell us. 01:18:40.979 --> 01:18:43.219 And that's part of our life

together as a spiritual community. 01:18:43.460 --> 01:18:46.500 As a spiritual community, because of Jesus Christ, who is Lord of all. 01:18:46.659 --> 01:18:49.699 Of course, it would matter to us what's happening in our community. 01:18:49.779 --> 01:18:49.939 Yeah. 01:18:50.179 --> 01:18:52.979 Come, you people who want to talk about and lead our community. 01:18:53.059 --> 01:18:53.219 Yeah. 01:18:53.460 --> 01:18:54.259 Tell us who you are. 01:18:54.419 --> 01:18:55.299 Tell us what matters. 01:18:55.460 --> 01:18:56.899 Let us ask you some questions. 01:18:57.139 --> 01:18:58.819 They they linger afterwards. 01:18:58.979 --> 01:19:03.539 So people can have as much conversation as the politicians are willing to stay and talk to you. 01:19:03.619 --> 01:19:06.339 It diffuses the whole array. 01:19:06.419 --> 01:19:08.979 And there is an array of politicians, fish. 01:19:09.219 --> 01:19:14.579 No, what strikes me is in the white church, it tends to be the opposite of where political preoccupation tends to be global, not local. 01:19:14.739 --> 01:19:15.139 Yes. 01:19:15.299 --> 01:19:17.379 And outside the church, not inside the church. 01:19:18.339 --> 01:19:20.419 This is so wonderful. 01:19:20.899 --> 01:19:32.819 A lot being written now about uh uh echo chambers, yes, right, and uh uh how social media will often reinforce uh outrage. 01:19:33.059 --> 01:19:33.619 Right. 01:19:33.859 --> 01:19:40.579 And, you know, in thinking about formation and spiritual formation, it goes on 24-7, whether we want it to or not. 01:19:40.739 --> 01:19:44.659 And some folks are saying the algorithm is now the busiest pastor in America. 01:19:45.059 --> 01:19:45.699 Right, right. 01:19:45.939 --> 01:19:54.339 How do you think about and and counsel people in terms of um social media, online presence? 01:19:54.819 --> 01:20:07.139 Uh, how much do folks need to know and be aware of quote unquote current events, political uh uh activity and so for growth to live in a large world with a healthy soul? 01:20:07.939 --> 01:20:09.379 What a gigantic question. 01:20:09.460 --> 01:20:10.899 And what a That's why you're here. 01:20:10.979 --> 01:20:12.179 That's why you're in the big books. 01:20:12.500 --> 01:20:14.819 What an important question. 01:20:15.219 --> 01:20:26.259 I do think that that in the past, in history, the the nature of culture has always been visible, touchable, hearable, feelable. 01:20:26.419 --> 01:20:32.179 You you were in the cultures that you were in, and you could see and experience a shared reality. 01:20:32.419 --> 01:20:46.179 And there would be people at different places in that reality, of course, and some who were quite removed, and the majority of people by far, of course, like all of us, were just part of the hoy polloi, just the the people in the in the place, doing whatever the work of the day is. 01:20:46.500 --> 01:20:58.099 Now we've created this surreal, technologically fabricated kind of culture, which is an online culture, and it's not, of course, one culture, it's microcultures. 01:20:58.259 --> 01:20:58.419 Yeah. 01:20:58.579 --> 01:21:17.619 And in those microcultures, which we sign up for by subscribing or regularly listening to or whatever it might be, or simply letting our algorithms feed us, whatever our algorithms have discerned we're most interested in or curious about or tantalized by or whatever it might be. 01:21:17.859 --> 01:21:24.019 And then we just get fed stuff, and that creates, whether we're aware of it or not, the culture that we're living in. 01:21:24.259 --> 01:21:53.619 And especially at a time when there's so much obsession around uh so certainly social media, but increasingly AI as well, there's this uh amazing sense that we've now we're now living in a fabricated culture where only parts of ourselves are ever exposed, only particular opinions, certain angles, certain hot buttons, whatever, for certain passions, whatever it might be. 01:21:53.859 --> 01:21:58.659 And in that context, we get a very, very distorted picture of reality. 01:21:59.379 --> 01:22:08.419 So it's been said many, many times in the last decade and more that we need to tend our cultures, like what are the cultures that are really influencing us? 01:22:08.579 --> 01:22:10.819 This is where the Christian question becomes so clear. 01:22:10.979 --> 01:22:11.619 Oh, yeah. 01:22:11.859 --> 01:22:30.339 Because the cr the Christian question, the Christ-centered, Christ um-filled culture that we're meant to really be experiencing and centered on, is a culture that is created by and looks like the character and love and mercy and justice of Jesus Christ. 01:22:30.579 --> 01:22:37.460 Now, that doesn't mean all we should be listening to is Christian content and all we should be doing is talking about Jesus 24 hours a day. 01:22:37.619 --> 01:22:38.659 That's not what I'm meaning. 01:22:38.739 --> 01:22:54.579 I'm meaning that the lens by which we come to see all other things is a lens that's informed by the vivid reality of a full, as full a vision of Jesus as we can hold in our being and in our community. 01:22:54.739 --> 01:23:00.579 And we come then to these artificial communities online, which can become real communities. 01:23:00.739 --> 01:23:01.939 I do want to acknowledge that. 01:23:02.019 --> 01:23:05.539 There is a reality, but it is a selective reality. 01:23:05.859 --> 01:23:09.699 The reality of the kingdom of God shatters selective realities. 01:23:09.779 --> 01:23:11.859 Oh, very nature of it. 01:23:12.419 --> 01:23:19.939 Like, no, I am not meant to be a certain kind of blue, a certain kind of red who only thinks and acts and does certain things. 01:23:20.099 --> 01:23:21.699 That's not a full human being. 01:23:21.939 --> 01:23:30.099 That's a person that has bought off on a very small narrative, a myopia again, which is counter to the whole being of Jesus. 01:23:30.259 --> 01:23:33.699 You can't read the gospels and say, let's shut it all down. 01:23:33.779

--> 01:23:38.739 We're just going to do one thing, it's going to be just like this, and everybody's going to jump on board. 01:23:39.699 --> 01:23:42.739 You do not see any of that in Jesus. 01:23:42.819 --> 01:23:51.059 This is the awkwardness of everything from cleansing the temple to the Beatitudes to uh the encounter with the woman at the well. 01:23:51.139 --> 01:23:53.379 I mean, these are all reordering events. 01:23:53.539 --> 01:23:53.859 Yeah. 01:23:54.179 --> 01:24:02.659 So what Christians theoretically can bring is using the images that you gave, uh yeast is what Christians can bring. 01:24:02.899 --> 01:24:04.899 What is the Christian yeast? 01:24:05.299 --> 01:24:39.139 Not because we're trying to be churchy, but because we're trying to be evidently credible Christ followers, that we show up as people who ask questions that emerge out of the character and love and vision of God's kingdom, where every person matters, where nobody is outside the grace of God, where the vision of otherness is about a community that in fact is made up of every tribe and tongue and nation, that otherness is exactly the character of what the people of God is meant to be about. 01:24:39.299 --> 01:24:42.019 The people who are not like us are the people that get invited. 01:24:42.099 --> 01:24:46.819 That's the only reason we can get invited because other people have been invited. 01:24:46.979 --> 01:24:49.299 We are other, not the insider. 01:24:49.379 --> 01:24:51.460 We are as other as anyone else is other. 01:24:51.859 --> 01:24:56.019 And we're all invited into this new communion or the new humanity. 01:24:56.259 --> 01:24:57.939 Where are we living at? 01:24:58.259 --> 01:25:01.219 Again, some of it is direct evangelism, I want to say. 01:25:01.299 --> 01:25:08.899 There's a legitimacy of bringing direct evangelistic Christian claims to online sociology. 01:25:09.139 --> 01:25:16.339 But the more insidious thing that's rewriting our internal script, our presuppositions, those are the most dangerous things. 01:25:16.419 --> 01:25:16.739 Yes. 01:25:16.899 --> 01:25:22.259 And that has to do less with overt evangelism and more with what is it? 01:25:22.579 --> 01:25:34.659 Principally, what are the fears, what are the anxieties that are corralling you into a posture of self-protection where you feel as though this is actually what's going to make life. 01:25:34.979 --> 01:25:41.460 When over here, Jesus is saying, Oh my gosh, I've come to set you free. 01:25:41.859 --> 01:25:56.979 This this last week, Nancy had been telling me about a young woman, Dartmouth grad influencer, uh, who had some time ago been diagnosed with cancer, diabuck cancer, I think, uh, bile duct cancer, and had kind of shared that online. 01:25:57.939 --> 01:26:06.659 And there was a group of people, TikTok and Reddit, that were just convinced that she was a fraud and trying to uh manipulate people. 01:26:07.059 --> 01:26:12.179 And the vitriol was just intense, and she died this past week. 01:26:13.059 --> 01:26:32.579 And it's just heart-wrenching to read it and then to think, what is it that goes on uh in settings like that, and then in my own heart, where that kind of I don't even have the right words for it, just mean mess, bitter, cruel, yeah, is present. 01:26:32.739 --> 01:26:36.339 And how can the church say there is another reality? 01:26:36.739 --> 01:26:43.139 And how often does the church become another place where that small smallness of mind mean-spiritedness takes over? 01:26:43.460 --> 01:26:44.099 Right. 01:26:45.699 --> 01:26:48.659 Well, we have to cultivate that as a church culture. 01:26:48.819 --> 01:26:49.139 Yeah. 01:26:49.299 --> 01:26:51.539 Are we interested in cultivating mercy? 01:26:51.779 --> 01:26:52.979 An alternative community. 01:26:53.219 --> 01:26:55.219 Are we interested in actually being that? 01:26:55.299 --> 01:26:55.619 Yeah. 01:26:55.859 --> 01:27:02.339 Or are we really mostly interested in imitating culture and then sort of baptizing it with a little Jesus? 01:27:02.419 --> 01:27:02.739 Yeah. 01:27:03.219 --> 01:27:08.099 And if we say Jesus enough, then surely it must be that he's in it. 01:27:08.419 --> 01:27:11.219 Whereas it turns out that's not the way it actually works. 01:27:12.019 --> 01:27:32.339 Uh and I think that's where the seriousness of human sin, of of of the the deep taproot of our resistance to the idea that God alone is God and that we are not, that life works best when we are not finally in charge, when we don't see the world through Mark Laberton's lenses. 01:27:32.659 --> 01:27:32.899 Yes. 01:27:33.059 --> 01:27:41.699 Say a word uh about the church as it relates to Jesus and why did Jesus refuse the crown when they tried to press it on him? 01:27:42.259 --> 01:27:46.500 Because there's nothing about the kingdom of God that resembles that kind of earthly crown. 01:27:46.659 --> 01:27:49.139 There's nothing about it that's like a total non-sequitur. 01:27:49.299 --> 01:27:51.139 Why would Jesus rather than why? 01:27:51.779 --> 01:27:55.539 But that's but in our day, that's what relevance appears to look like. 01:27:55.779 --> 01:27:56.019 Exactly. 01:27:56.339 --> 01:28:03.859 If our side just could grab all of the levers of power, then we could legislate what needs to be and everything would be good. 01:28:04.179 --> 01:28:04.339 Right. 01:28:04.419 --> 01:28:06.659 It's called delusion from a Christian point of view. 01:28:06.739 --> 01:28:09.779 It's called a complete fabrication of reality. 01:28:09.939 --> 01:28:10.179 Yeah. 01:28:10.339 --> 01:28:19.539 It's a uh a sense that somehow we are still individually, collectively, our tribe, our power, our money is going to r run the day. 01:28:19.699 --> 01:28:23.379 It actually turns out in history that's true that human power actually does. 01:28:24.179 --> 01:28:27.859 And do the because can do and does do those things. 01:28:28.099 --> 01:28:35.699 However, this is the shock again of Jesus not really

being taken up with that. 01:28:35.939 --> 01:28:38.659 It's going to choose a different way. 01:28:38.819 --> 01:28:39.139 Yeah. 01:28:39.379 --> 01:28:43.299 And it turns out that you might get you might lose your job as a pastor. 01:28:43.460 --> 01:28:47.460 It turns out you you might find yourself at odds with your neighbors. 01:28:48.179 --> 01:28:57.219 It turns out that people who are claiming your faith don't really share your sense of what it is that God is doing in reordering reality. 01:28:57.460 --> 01:29:01.619 And that reordering of reality requires the death of the Son of God. 01:29:02.019 --> 01:29:07.539 So we should not blithely go on thinking transformation's not that big a deal. 01:29:07.699 --> 01:29:13.059 Let's just have a few meetings and whip the crowd together and we'll all be on the same page and down we go. 01:29:13.219 --> 01:29:16.419 That's the sure sign that it is not the kingdom of God. 01:29:16.579 --> 01:29:16.979 Wow. 01:29:17.219 --> 01:29:25.539 It's it's frankly just way, way more challenging than we in the church typically ever want the gospel to be. 01:29:25.779 --> 01:29:26.979 Well, this has been so rich. 01:29:27.059 --> 01:29:30.899 I've not gotten to most of the questions that I wanted to, so maybe another time. 01:29:31.139 --> 01:29:32.259 But one more question. 01:29:32.500 --> 01:29:32.979 Please. 01:29:33.219 --> 01:29:38.419 Um to come back to personal life, I like to ask this one in your own life. 01:29:38.500 --> 01:29:42.899 Now you've been following Jesus for many years, you've been in many leadership positions. 01:29:43.059 --> 01:29:49.299 Um, for better or for worse, what do you find shaping and forming you these days? 01:29:50.019 --> 01:29:51.219 Yeah, several things. 01:29:51.379 --> 01:29:54.339 Um, really, really important things in it in a new chapter. 01:29:54.500 --> 01:29:57.779 I don't have an employer for the first time in decades. 01:29:58.579 --> 01:30:14.979 That repositions my sense of time, my gifts, my freedoms, and the way to try to be a steward of this new opportunity, which can also at times feel like a burden, but it is mostly an opportunity, especially because I'm healthy. 01:30:15.299 --> 01:30:25.299 I'm not desperate for food, I'm not having to face racial uh prejudice every time I go outside the door. 01:30:25.779 --> 01:30:31.379 I have many helpful things in place that allow me to have the life that I have. 01:30:31.619 --> 01:30:35.619 But it is a reordering of how do I think now about myself? 01:30:35.859 --> 01:30:37.939 What does my agency mean in the world? 01:30:38.099 --> 01:30:40.099 What does my will mean in the world? 01:30:40.339 --> 01:30:50.179 What do how do I understand my relationships when when structures that have held so much of that over the years are now gone? 01:30:50.419 --> 01:30:52.659 The second thing is I'm in a new age of my life. 01:30:52.739 --> 01:30:54.099 I'm 73 years old. 01:30:54.339 --> 01:30:58.739 I'm in good enough health

that I don't have any particular health concerns. 01:30:58.899 --> 01:31:04.579 My I'm ambulatory, I'm functional, uh, I'm mostly uh clear-minded. 01:31:04.659 --> 01:31:08.179 Uh, my memory is uh a surprise at times. 01:31:08.419 --> 01:31:22.419 Um, but I'm also finding that I have a new sense of urgency about personal relationships, that I have a new sense of urgency about relationships with younger people, which I've actively pursued through my whole life. 01:31:22.500 --> 01:31:26.419 So it's not like I have to go anywhere to think about where those people are. 01:31:26.659 --> 01:31:29.219 I know in many cases who they are. 01:31:29.460 --> 01:31:34.019 And I also know that I don't want to become um entropic. 01:31:34.099 --> 01:31:36.179 I don't want to withdraw into myself. 01:31:37.059 --> 01:31:45.460 I want to be uh globally minded, I want to be socially engaged, I want to be, and this is another part of it. 01:31:45.619 --> 01:31:59.219 I now can see a horizon where whatever plausibility of change on a macro picture I would have hoped and wished would have occurred in the course of my life, not because of me, but just in the period of history that I've been living in. 01:32:00.179 --> 01:32:05.059 I would wish that we were not at one of our most precarious periods. 01:32:05.219 --> 01:32:05.379 Yeah. 01:32:05.539 --> 01:32:11.219 And right now, globally, we are at one of our most precarious periods in history. 01:32:11.619 --> 01:32:14.259 And there's so much that's unknown. 01:32:14.339 --> 01:32:33.059 And then the nutrient-rich ballast and reordering that the gospel might and belongs to place in the heart of the Christian church does not seem to be as present as I would wish, whether I'm talking about the United States or frankly around the world. 01:32:33.379 --> 01:32:35.299 Lots of good God is active. 01:32:35.460 --> 01:32:37.219 People's lives are being changed. 01:32:37.379 --> 01:32:40.659 Individually, I have a that's a completely different thing. 01:32:40.979 --> 01:32:48.739 Systemically, or across organizations, societies, cultures, habits of life. 01:32:49.939 --> 01:32:52.979 I'm it's a C minus, yeah, in my view. 01:32:53.139 --> 01:32:53.460 Yeah. 01:32:53.619 --> 01:32:57.219 And and it's a C minus with great risk. 01:32:57.460 --> 01:33:03.379 Now, I have been around old people my whole life, from the time that I was a little tiny boy. 01:33:03.539 --> 01:33:08.819 And older people always feel more despairing and more anxious about the future than younger people do. 01:33:08.899 --> 01:33:10.979 That's that's to be predicted. 01:33:11.219 --> 01:33:17.939 What I think I'm talking about is not that sort of random, I just feel more anxious because of a certain thing. 01:33:18.179 --> 01:33:30.179 I feel more anxious because uh when people ask me, you know, name name the top 10 emerging young pastors that that are for you just the absolute bellwether. 01:33:30.259 --> 01:33:30.419 Yeah. 01:33:30.579 --> 01:33:36.019 I can do that because I'm in a very privileged position to know that many and more than that. 01:33:36.339 --> 01:33:43.859 But it is not because I have 35 or 40 that I would be able to say, yep, you know, so there's that. 01:33:44.019 --> 01:34:02.019 And then in society and culture, it's really unclear what the end of this era is going to, this particular political era is going to look like, and how much the entrails uh as well as the trade, the tail of this era continues to go with us. 01:34:02.259 --> 01:34:05.059 The entrails are coming and the tails are coming. 01:34:05.460 --> 01:34:10.019 So whether they whip us uh or not really remains to be seen. 01:34:10.339 --> 01:34:11.699 It's very vivid imagery. 01:34:12.179 --> 01:34:13.619 Well, Mark, thank you. 01:34:13.779 --> 01:34:16.019 This has been a very, very rich conversation. 01:34:16.179 --> 01:34:19.460 I would love to do it again, but um I'm deeply in your debt. 01:34:19.539 --> 01:34:19.699 Thanks. 01:34:20.019 --> 01:34:21.939 Well, John, it's a great gift to be with you. 01:34:22.019 --> 01:34:33.699 And I am so thrilled for the ministry that you've had in my life over all the years and the ways that your life and your thinking, as well as your pastoral wisdom, has shaped my life and the lives of countless other people. 01:34:33.859 --> 01:34:35.379 So it's a great honor to be here. 01:34:35.460 --> 01:34:36.899 Thanks so much for your friendship. 01:34:37.219 --> 01:34:37.699 Thank you.