The name Mark Labberton won’t be new for many Radix readers; his name has graced our pages more than once, and he always has worthwhile words for head and heart. In his role as pastor, author, and current president of Fuller Theological Seminary, Dr. Labberton has proved to be a prescient voice replete with both timeless wisdom and timely insights. Inspired by his book, The Dangerous Act of Loving Your Neighbor: Seeing Others Through the Eyes of Jesus, in this conversation with Radix Mark Labberton speaks to reflections on passion, purpose-finding, and worship by cultivating a heart that listens.
To hear his voice on matters of theology and culture – an absolute pleasure to the ears and heart – visit Mark’s podcast, Conversing.
[Radix] What’s the one question that you wish you were asked more often?
[ML] Actually, the question I would like to be asked is, “What is the center of your passion?”
And this is my answer: The center of my passion is Jesus Christ. That is not a confession of faith; it’s a center of gravity for me. I like to think that the course of my life after I became a Christian, when I was just a college freshman, was the thing that unlocked the other things. I would like to say most of all the other things in my life are related to that center. To ask that question brings me to the core. The most comprehensive way to know me is actually to know what the center of my passion is, because it explains what I’ve done, why I try to live the way that I try to live, how I understand and embrace my weaknesses and failures, and how I find the greatest joy.
[Radix] That is one full answer! Thanks for that. As to the book we are talking about, The Dangerous Act of Loving Your Neighbor, I found your instruction at the beginning, to read it more slowly and with intention, so useful. I often ask myself if I am merely consuming a book, thereby participating in another form of the vita activa, rather than fully engaging. The way your book was written, however, resists a passive reader. It invites reflection. Would you mind giving us some thoughts on how to improve our reading, in general?
[ML] Yes, but it’s part of a broader question, which is how do we bring together what we think and how we live? The purpose of reading is connected to a certain kind of thinking. How do we reflect and engage cognitively and then let it become tangibly present in how we live?
There are a couple of psychologists at Fuller Seminary who are committed to an emerging conversation around what they call “cognitive embodiment.” I like that phrase because I think what we’re trying to do is acknowledge that as human beings with exceptionally capable brains, we know the disconnect between brain and body; we know the disconnect between hopes and actions. I would call it a New Testament vision of what holistic human life is about. And it has to do with the question of how we perceive. Following that, how do we let our perceptions, freshly reformed and always reforming, shape and change how we actually live in the world. But the thing is, we don’t know what we know until we can live it. If we can’t live it, then we might not know it.
As for books, we don’t want to merely consume books. Every reading and learning experience gives us an opportunity for cognitive reflection that increases our understanding and challenges us. And it has to do with more than what our brain does in the abstract; it’s how all of it informs our hands, feet, and heart.
One reason why I love fiction is because it takes me to places that I might not otherwise be able, or even know, to go. It takes me to that place where I can see the world in a different way that changes my perception. That experience, in turn, changes my capacity to live in the world because I am changed in the way that I perceive. By perceive, I mean to cognitively categorize and frame, as well as internally integrate. For example, I love reading fiction about characters and storylines that are not in my cultural frame. I am taken to places deeply human and completely outside my human experience. By living alongside, almost inside, various characters, I see people differently when I go back out into the world. It helps me to think about their questions and intensify my empathy
[Radix] My background comes from a place that was suspicious of the imagination. The imagination could be dangerous. Thus, just stick to “facts” and to the “real.” But, as you said, fiction allows a person to go to previously unimagined places.
[ML] A favorite novel of mine is Where the Crawdads Sing. It’s lodged in me in a really deep way. For many years I read King Lear, for example, every year. I also read Augustine’s Confessions every year. Well, there’s a whole list of books that I tend to read almost every year and those stories and those perceptions just come back into me again and again and again. I have the same thing with non-fiction books, but I’m saying there are some that are really definitional books whose stories are held by the passion of God. And I want to empathize with the heart and mind of God about people who are like me and not like me; about ideas that are natural and unnatural to me.
[Radix] “Empathizing with the heart of God” is so good. Speaking of heart, in your book you use the word calibrated. You say that our hearts have the capacity to seek justice, but that they are usually not calibrated to do so. Later you state that the Imago Dei is what the taxonomy, the classification, of God’s heart is calibrated to see and to love. It calibrates the vision God has for each human being in relation to creation, to themselves, to their neighbor, and to God. Would you speak more about calibration?
[ML] Okay. Let’s take an example of implicit bias. Implicit bias is in many ways both a gift of God and a curse from Satan. It’s a blessing from God in the sense that we are vulnerable creatures living in a world of violence and danger. So we need implicit biases for our own safety. Those implicit biases tell us that we shouldn’t touch the fire or that we shouldn’t walk in traffic or do other dangerous things.
Then there is the other side, the negative side. This includes the implicit biases that limit and exclude. They put people in and push people out. This is an example of an overlay of a wrong calibration that comes out of our sociology, our family, and trauma. These kinds of biases are formed prenatally. While it’s true that we are knit together in our mother’s womb with the image of God, our mother’s womb is also our mother’s womb. Meaning that we are in genetic and epigenetic ways formed for both good and for distortion. This is an example of a problematic calibration. The work of being recalibrated by the Gospel, by the passion of God, is that we are meant to perceive ourselves, our neighbor, and God in a way that reflects less about our own implicit biases and much more about the heart and mind and perception of God. When we see the way God sees, we get recalibrated by the Gospel.
At the beginning of the book, I tell a story about Doris when she was kidnapped. Her story is about recalibration. Why does she see Jesse as more than her perpetrator and violator, but instead, right in the midst of the crisis, sees Jesse as a person? That is something that most people would be unable to do. But Doris does. That’s why it’s a perfect opening to the book. Her story is what the journey of the book is about. It’s answering the question, how do we learn to perceive differently? The work that is required to do this requires a certain degree of tirelessness and it’s a long work. Whether that work is taking place in our public or private worship every week, we’re constantly working at recalibrations.
In the companion book, The Dangerous Act of Worship, I talk about how worship, as a personal and collective experience, over time and in every way, is meant to recalibrate everything about how we see ourselves, our neighbor, and God. That’s why we need worship so much.
[Radix] Touching on worship again, you say in your book that it does a number of things: it exposes injustice, humbles human power, delivers us from the need to make our neighbor in our own image, and unmasks self-interest. Then you also talk about worship’s ability to heal us from myopia. Considering where we are at in the West, and some of the narratives that we internalize which have made us short-sighted, can you speak to the issue of myopia?
[ML] Well, part of being delivered from myopia is being delivered from what my perception of reality is; knowing that it’s just not the whole reality, only my perception of reality. Reality is first and foremost and ultimately and finally – beginning and end – the reality of God’s love, grace, and justice. Anything in worship that helps us continue to deepen and expand our understanding of the significance of God’s love, truth, and justice— those things are central to true worship. They are central to how worship can recalibrate us. It’s also about our perception of ourselves alongside other people, which is why corporate worship is so valuable. It allows us to see ourselves in the context of a new humanity.
My central way of understanding the community of God’s people is really Ephesians 2— the evidence that we have been made alive, that we were dead, and that we’ve been raised because Christ died and rose. The evidence is that we live in a new humanity of unlike people who are now together. Not because we share a common history, ethos, ethnicity, race, gender, or sense of economic and social location, but that instead, we now find our home in the communion of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in unity and diversity. He calls and invites us into a new humanity of unity and diversity. Therefore, when I come to church, I want to be in a place where I’m acknowledging that unity in diversity. This doesn’t have to mean that every congregation must be a multicultural, multiethnic church. It does mean that I come into a room with other people, large or small, where everyone is both like me in the sense that we share a common Imago Dei, and yet wholly unlike me, and that we are all uniquely knit together.
In worship, and in the experience of worship, I realize that I find myself together, not alone. My identity is not individual. In the first and primary instance, it’s actually collective. I belong to a communion of God, Father, Son, and Spirit. I find my tribe, my unexpected new humanity tribe. I come to worship to meet with God, who recalibrates everything I need in a community of worship, rather than only doing it privately. Because I need to meet my neighbor, who is now my brother and sister, and because of a new humanity in Christ. I grow in that community and understand that my life is meant to be a “we,” not just a “me.”
[Radix] Yes. Yes.
[ML] And that’s what worship is meant to do. This is why personalized worship songs that only use individual pronouns are the bane of what I would call truly Christian worship. Not because you couldn’t have a verse or two like that, but when the verbiage of our hymns and sermons is all about how it relates to “me” and not about how it relates to us, to a “we,” then we’re not actually doing the recalibrating work that collective corporate worship is meant to do.
[Radix] Why do you think that the word worship has become so truncated for most of us?
[ML] As you can see from what I’ve written, it drives me crazy when leaders say in a service, “First, we’ll have some worship and then we’ll have a sermon.” Biblically speaking, that is an incomprehensible sentence. If we use that language, we fail to recalibrate. This is where our language, or as a friend of mine says, our “grammar of theology” is only as good as our grammar. And when our grammar reflects that, we use words in ways that actually subvert the Gospel that we’re supposed to articulate and embody. I am not trying to be a fussy grammarian or a person who is constantly working at semantics. I do think we’re just trying to give speech (which is both our words and our actions) to the whole story, or as much of the whole story as our limited speech can convey. And we don’t want to settle for a cheap imitation.
So, because we have articulated worship wrong, we understand it wrong. And then, of course, it gets truncated. The best thing about a High Church liturgy is that it has a better chance of rescuing us from some of that. The problem is that High church liturgy can seem less personal. This is where I’ve sometimes said that one of my favorite orders or styles of worship is a charismatic Episcopal service with really great evangelical preaching.
[Radix] [Much laughter]
[ML] So, ideally, it’s the movement of the Father, Son, and Spirit; it’s the affirmation of all of those dimensions. It’s [why] I totally get the instincts that are behind [why] the American Anglican Communion has come into existence. Typically, the American Episcopal Church has some of those dimensions, but it doesn’t always have a very strong connection to the centrality of Christ or the teaching of the Bible. It has a strong place, stronger than an evangelical church does in the importance of the Bible. But it doesn’t then necessarily articulate that or listen to that when the preaching happens. But also, as you know, any of these sorts of traditions can be bereft of the presence of the Spirit. This is why I love a charismatic Anglican or Episcopal church with great liturgy, which is almost always “we” rather than “me.” They have a great practice of preaching with a wonderful embodied expression of the sacraments. Together, this heightens an awareness and flexibility about the movement Spirit. Now that’s pretty awesome worship, as far as I’m concerned.
[Radix] You speak about empathy a number of times in the book. And that if we can’t imagine ourselves in someone else’s shoes our perspective is going to be seriously limited. And that, in turn, will have a limiting impact on our empathy. I also really appreciated you emphasizing the need for us to not just see the other as some kind of far-off individual – especially when it’s someone who is disadvantaged in some way – but to try to imaginatively bring them into the sphere of family. So, for example, not the sex trade worker, but my sister. I am to bring myself into closer proximity in order to change my perspective.
[ML] Right.
[Radix] So how can we facilitate our imaginations to perceive more inclusively and help us get past the “us versus them” and into the “we” that you have been talking about?
[ML] Here is something that relates. In 1996 Mary Gordon started a Canadian program called the Roots of Empathy. Concerned about rising levels of violence and conflict in grade school children, she felt she needed to develop a way to help teach empathy in schools. Her view was that violence often resulted from broken families where empathy was not taught in the home environment.
So she began by bringing a two-to-four-month-old baby from the neighborhood into the school. Mary has developed a whole curriculum around how you learn to pay attention to the baby. Then there’s the important work to be done when the baby’s not in the room; this is where empathy and imagination come in. Once the baby is known, but not physically present, conversations around awareness and empathy are facilitated. For example, a number of questions were asked: What is the baby doing now, even when we can’t see her or him? When last here, what was happening to her or him developmentally? How did things change before that? What might he or she be feeling right now? These kind of questions. This goes on throughout the whole school year. Now, double-blind tests show that this has a long-term enduring impact on the empathy of all the children in the curriculum. And it makes sense, right?
Back to your question. There’s a certain amount of instinctive empathy that perhaps we’re born with because we’re made an image of God. But we need parenting. We need siblings or friends. We need the formation of a community that teaches us how to see and feel. That’s the family unit, the surrounding family, neighborhood, the Church, and wider community. Ideally, it keeps extending in concentric circles as we grow.
Tragically, the Gospel, in an evangelical context, has often been truncated to a personal salvation story. Knowing this limitation is absolutely critical to our ability to enter into empathy. Also, I am never near an ending point in developing sufficient empathy because empathy is a lifelong development. I’m convinced there are all kinds of things that inhibit empathy, including fatigue or distraction. We need to remain as open and as genuinely present to a person or a system or a dynamic or a public event in order to fully lean into them. Thus, the very heart of worship and what the love, mercy, and justice of God in Jesus Christ is meant to recreate in us is being hospitable to the reality of others, whether in pain, suffering, or glory.
[Radix] I love how you frame empathy as being a lifelong and habitual development; so meaningful. In your book you reflect on the phrase “icon of vulnerability.” You instruct, “Find a photograph of someone in need that especially captures your attention. Using this picture as a kind of icon of vulnerability, spend five to ten minutes each day this week meditating on the photograph. Try to imagine, feel, share in what you can infer about that person’s life.” This really moves us to actively participate, stretch and grow.
[ML] I have a collection of such images on my computer. Some days I will just focus on one image. Sometimes I’ll accompany my meditation with music or sometimes I will do it in silence. Sometimes I will read a biblical text as I’m looking at the image of the person. Then I do some journaling, where I write and make even more concrete what I imagine, making note of what I really can’t imagine. I try to recognise what I don’t know enough of or how I don’t care enough and how I’m not capable of instinctively being able to move into their space. I think about what it would be like to really have the opportunity to know them and ask any and every question I wanted to in order to understand their experience of the world. What would I need to know or ask in order to be able to get at the back wall of that?
Recently I was talking to a good friend who I’ve known for a long time. There was a whole chapter of their life which we had never talked about. There was no particular reason they would have talked about it before. It wasn’t a deep, dark, secret kind of thing, but it was a really important, influential shaping experience. I reflected on how many years I had known them and had never known about that experience. Being “let in” on that part of their life was like being handed a key. In community and communion with one another, we give each other the potential of taking the keys that we offer and saying, “you could put this in the keyhole and turn it if you really wanted to know me.”
[Radix] To think that someone gives us the gift of a key to their story is so illuminating. Do you have any last thoughts?
[ML] I’ll share one final thing. When I read Ephesians 2, I understand it to mean that the Gospel brings me back to life. The Gospel gives me the assurance that I, as a part of the whole creation, will be reordered in light of the love and mercy and justice of God. The first explosion in our life is the Gospel itself, which might be a quiet explosion, or not, based on our life. The next explosion is a reordering of our sociology. Ultimately, our faith must lead to a reordered sociology. Part of a reordered sociology includes being part of this new communion that scripture talks of. Part of that is finding more access to conversation. This means sustained friendships. But we have to welcome into ourselves a reordered sociology. This isn’t an easy, quick project. It’s a long project. In that long project I have to ask myself, am I taking steps to get to this new communion that I’m invited into? If the answer to that in really living, embodied terms is no, then we need to change that. I suppose what I am saying is that we need to gradually unfold and extend our being in the world so that we are eventually seeing, hearing, feeling other people’s stories living inside us. I am privileged and changed dramatically as I realize how much of my story is about carrying other people’s stories.