Bishop Wright: 0:00
We saw a man on a hunt, with his life and his profession and all of his gifts and all of his warts, to know who God is. And what we saw in Jimmy Carter was the overflow of that wisdom, revelation, eyes of his heart, enlightened as a white Southerner came to the governor’s mansion in Georgia and talked about a South that was free from discrimination.
Melissa: 0:40
Welcome to Four People with Bishop Rob Wright. I’m Melissa Rau and this is a conversation inspired by For Faith, a weekly devotion sent out every Friday. You can find a link to this week’s For Faith and a link to subscribe in the episode’s description. Happy New Year, bish.
Bishop Wright: 1:00
Happy New Year. Happy New Year.
Melissa: 1:03
You named this week’s devotion Lucin, inspired by the first chapter in Ephesians, and we will have rung in 2025 by the time this episode airs, and you’ve got some good insight into what these passages might be inviting us to consider. Maybe, Well we’ll see Ray, I think you do, let’s see.
Bishop Wright: 1:24
Let’s see.
Melissa: 1:25
Can you further unpack your takeaways Like what really jumped out for you in this passage?
Bishop Wright: 1:31
Well, I’ve been having a couple of days off and I had a Sunday off and I was watching CBS Sunday Morning, which is a staple, I mean, even though I’m often on the road Sunday morning, we record it and I love the journalism that happens there and it’s eclectic.
Bishop Wright: 1:56
And they were talking about the word resolution and it struck a chord with me and of course you know this is the time of year that we’re talking about resolutions, we’re taking them up, et cetera. But they brought us back to the Latin root of the word, you know, which means to loosen, with intense force, intensive force to loosen, and so you know, we’re taking up practices and projects and certainly some of that is good, laudable, wonderful, necessary. But I got really hooked on the idea that perhaps, going forward, we might need to loosen our grip in the new year on old ways and some dated conclusions and some lifeless alliances that have been our default. You know the line I use, which I think I hope catches people’s attention, which is maybe not so much we double down on things in 2025, but that we pare down.
Melissa: 3:31
So that’s where I started. We just lost a giant of giants, a centenarian and incredibly important human being, a civil rights activist, former President Jimmy Carter. And you know, I really like the idea, the concept of loosening up or letting go or putting things down, kind of like a lot of people try to take on things for Lent while others will say you know what I’m going to let this go rather Right. Take on things for Lent, while others will say you know what, I’m going to let this go rather right. I’m curious about how you might see how Jimmy Carter lived his life in a way that might encourage people to think about how they might want to live going forward, especially since it’s in the new year. Whether we call it resolution or whatnot, what might a life of Jimmy Carter inspire us to consider taking up or putting down?
Bishop Wright: 4:10
Well, first of all, let me just say that Jimmy Carter makes me proud to be a Georgian, and Jimmy Carter and Rosalind Carter make me proud to be both Georgians and Americans. Jimmy Carter makes me proud to be a Christian. Jimmy Carter makes me proud to be a board member of Habitat for Humanity. Jimmy Carter makes me proud to be someone who loves the Word of God and tries to apply it in the real world. And so you know, I guess you know ap does one have to let go of to orient one’s self. You know, by scripture to scripture. You know, and so I think about you know. And so I was a kid, I suppose, when he was president. I remember him as I remember his fireside chats, I remember him speaking, I remember the hostage situation, I remember him being a first-term president, a one-term president rather, and I remember him and people saying that he was a failure. I remember President Reagan came in and he went out and people said that he was a nice man, christian man, but he was a mediocre leader. I think what he could have spent his next series of decades doing is licking his wounds from all of that and to decide that he was going to be the person that we’ve come to know him to be, which is someone who, on a global scale, was for peace, was for human dignity, was for justice, was for health, someone who was quietly courageous, who let his deeds speak for himself. I was listening, as many others are, at sort of the tale of his life, and I was really interested in this one part of the conversation. So where did he decide to be the Jimmy Carter that we have come to lift up and celebrate?
Bishop Wright: 7:11
It was about two years after the presidency, after he’d returned back to Plains, georgia, and he decided, he said in an instant, that what he wanted to do was be about the business of global problem solving and that, you know. So he had to loosen whatever grip he had on what other people said about him. He had to loosen the grip of his own, you know, sort of comforting his wounds and, in some people’s eyes, his failures. He had to let that go to some degree to move into this next chapter of life, and I wonder if that isn’t also true for many of us. There are things that we’ve got to sort of.
Bishop Wright: 8:06
You know, relinquish a white knuckle grip that we have on some things, whether they be wounds or whether they be former glories or whether they be, you know, shoulda, woulda, couldas, you know, and get on with it and say how can I bear witness that’s been the word that we’ve been using here in Atlanta how can I bear witness to God now? And I think he has, in a wonderful way, with his last breath, breathed a refreshing breath over us. His going is helping us to remember, I think, and maybe to recenter, what unselfish love looks like. And if you’re going to be a celebrity, then be a celebrity for decency, be a celebrity for justice, be a celebrity for a long and abiding marriage with a partner Apparently, rosalind was quite the advisor to him someone who stood up and said things that needed to be said.
Bishop Wright: 9:15
Stood up and said things that needed to be said, and though those things weren’t always popular and he paid great political costs for some of those things, I think the measurement is integrity, and so maybe we ought to loosen up those things that we have a hold on or that have a hold on us, that somehow are siphoning off our integrity.
Melissa: 10:05
Gosh, wow, that just took me down a nerd trail. You know, to me integrity and integral and integration, they all come from the same root, and when I was reading the passage of Ephesians that you did your devotion on, there was a phrase that jumped out to me, and it’s this he destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will. Apparently, this is supposedly Paul right addressing the Ephesians, and I had the privilege of being on a pilgrimage to Ephesus, ancient Ephesus, this past fall, and Paul was Jewish, right, already God’s chosen and he’s using us, so he’s addressing the Ephesians who are not Jewish, hebrew people, and he is putting himself in that us position and he’s making the Ephesians part of right, so he’s using us language. He didn’t say you, because he’s already in right, and I feel like Jimmy Carter did that little bit of that too. You know, um the integrated, he put himself into other shoes and adopted them and went along.
Melissa: 11:26
And I only say this because I saw a social media post by a priest who was a diplomat, political diplomat, before becoming a priest, um, and there was a picture of him with Jimmy Carter shaking his hand in Jerusalem in the early, early, early turn of the century, in the early 2000s, and he said that they didn’t buy what he was, what he was preaching, what he was selling. And Jimmy Carter was so frustrated that he didn’t even want to pause and take a picture with this priest, who wasn’t yet a priest, but he did anyway because he realized that he was a part of us right. And so now this guy, matt, knows that Jimmy Carter was right, but I don’t know. There’s something to be said about, instead of the us versus them, bishop, and the way that Paul and, I think, jimmy Carter lived their lives. It’s kind of inspiring.
Bishop Wright: 12:25
It’s a lot of inspiring and just in that little vignette that you just shared, I think that life with God I’ve said this before, a close walk with Jesus means that you’re going to have to give away. You know clutching tightly to a couple of ideas superiority, separateness and smallness and you know it’s a funny kind of thing that you have to give that stuff away. You have to loosen your grip on that, and so in Paul’s letter, he’s giving away what was given to him, which is an exclusive idea that by virtue of his ethnic and religious heritage he’s in the inner tier of relationship with God, and he’s acknowledging that he has been grafted in and therefore he can loosen his stance and include other people. Right, and I think this is one of the things that we see in a lot of people that we are inspired by, and that is that they are bigger than the conventions of their day. They tread the road, trod the road that is unpopular. I can imagine it was very lonely for President Carter for a number of years that he took solace in his wife and his family and in scripture. He found himself there and thereby was able to fend off other notions of himself, and I think that’s what we all have to do. Not all of us will be Jimmy Carter, not all of us will be able to convene world leaders and invite them past legitimate differences. I mean it’s interesting to me that the peace that he was able to facilitate through his hard diplomatic work still holds between Egypt and Israel. Diplomatic work still holds between Egypt and Israel, and so the measurement of his commitment to peace and the measurement of his integrity.
Bishop Wright: 14:49
There’s a number of examples. He wrote 30 books. Not all of them were popular. He found a way to talk about the terrible situation in Gaza between Israel and Palestine. He was roundly criticized for it. So apparently he might have had to loosen his idea of popularity and come down on the side of fairness. He saw suffering by the Jewish people, suffering also by the Palestinian people. He talked about them both. He called what was happening in Palestine apartheid. The Anti-Defamation League, you know, roundly criticized him, etc. And so there is this path that is set for us.
Bishop Wright: 15:40
I think, when we start walking with Jesus, that calls us to sort of hold more loosely the world’s measurements of us in service to the gospel. I was reading the book of James the other day, just a personal devotion, and it was talking about. You know, to be friends with the world is to be an enemy of God. And we don’t talk about how Jimmy Carter was a friend of God, as demonstrated by his care for the poor around affordable housing, bringing health to a nation. You know, nations in Africa to obliterate the Guinea worm devastation happening I mean, he doesn’t have to care about that, he doesn’t have to care about that.
Bishop Wright: 16:32
So I think you have to loosen your idea of nation state borders too and realize that somehow this is a human family and that if you have a gift of celebrity or whatever your gift is, that you can apply that for the good of other folks. And so there are so many things to say, I think. And Jimmy Carter lived a life that cannot be easily eulogized because of its breadth and depth. Some of us will get about a nine-minute eulogy, and some of us I used to say this when I was a pastor of a congregation and then some of us will have to employ hyperbole to the life of the deceased just to make it palatable. But for Jimmy Carter and others there’s not enough time to go down the jot and till about the way in which they lived out their Christian commitment.
Melissa: 17:39
Well, you wrapped your devotion with an incredible prayer, which is taken right out of Ephesians.
Bishop Wright: 17:45
Right out of Ephesians, yeah.
Melissa: 17:47
You make it your prayer. Paul made it a prayer first for the people over, in his opening lines of his letter to the Ephesians, that the God of our Lord, Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him. It goes on, but it wraps and says and that what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe? Bishop, what is? Can you articulate the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe? Like what is that immeasurable greatness?
Bishop Wright: 18:20
Yes, Well, in some ways it’s connected to what I just said. I mean, how does one really articulate, you know, immeasurable greatness, right? I mean, I think that, you know, jimmy Carter gives us an opportunity to ponder a life lived that is not easily definable or describable. A life lived that is not easily definable or describable. And if you notice in Paul’s prayer that the God of our Lord, jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation. But notice that next couple of words as you come to know him, as you come to know God. So I think that what we saw for as much as we could as a society, as much as we could glean, we saw a man on a hunt, with his life and his profession and all of his gifts and all of his warts, to know who God is. And what we saw in Jimmy Carter was the overflow of that wisdom, revelation, eyes of his heart enlightened. You know Jimmy Carter as a white Southerner, as a white rural Southerner who grew up on a farm, you know, came to the governor’s mansion in Georgia and talked about a South that was free from discrimination.
Bishop Wright: 19:53
As a white Southerner, ambassador Andrew Young, as I’ve said before, is a friend, and I take my measure of President Carter through Ambassador Young’s eyes too, someone I know who speaks very candidly, who sat with the best and the brightest on the planet, and Ambassador Young has nothing but praise for this man and what some will call simplistic. You know, in Jimmy Carter, ambassador Young lifts up as holy. Now, we’re not talking about perfect people. Obviously, all of us are cracked vessels. But he had a sense, having sat very close with him for a number of years in very difficult situations, on good days and bad days, that this man was on his way to know more and more and more about who God was and that he was duty-bound to sort of reveal that in ways. I think perhaps, if we can say anything, president Carter was a bit overwhelmed when he saw what he was up against when he went to Washington Some of the worst of the ways that we can be configured, which is just about grift and the denial of other people’s dignity and injustice, which passes itself off as status quo.
Bishop Wright: 21:25
So I guess what I want to say at the end of all of this is that you know, maybe you need to let something go for 2025. Maybe you need to take something up. I’ll leave it to you. I think one of the things I want to say is you know what we read. You know in 2 Corinthians, say is what we read in 2 Corinthians, and that is where the spirit of liberty is right, the spirit of freedom is there. Also is God, and so I think that God is a God of freedom.
Bishop Wright: 22:00
The writer of Hebrews wants us to keep our eyes on Jesus as we move through the sin that so easily entangles us. So I think we have to do an entanglement audit. In what ways am I entangled with lifeless alliances and dated conclusions and what’s got a hold on me? And so all of that. But it’s a prayer ultimately. You know this podcast, you know Our Time Together, promise for their lives, healing, courage, all of the gifts, and so that’s my prayer for you, melissa, and for me and for anybody who’s listening, and for all the spheres of influence that we find ourselves in, that we might know the immeasurable greatness and that power for those of us who believe.
Melissa: 23:15
Thanks be to God for that, Bishop. Thank you, and thank you for listening to For People. You can follow us on Instagram and Facebook at Bishop Rob Wright. Please subscribe, leave a review and we’ll be back with you next week.
