Bishop Wright: 0:00
When we don’t embrace Jesus’s way forward. We’re wasting time, this most precious thing. When we do that as we do, it actually costs us time and peace and joy that can never be replaced, and so on those things that are difficult for us. My invitation is let’s not waste any more time. I think this is one of the greatest things is that to bring intention, maybe to 2025 in ways that we’ve not brought intention previously.
Melissa: 0:40
Welcome to For 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 devotion and a link to subscribe in the episode’s description. Good morning, bishop.
Bishop Wright: 0:55
Morning, good morning.
Melissa: 0:57
This week’s devotion. You named TikTok and really you’re highlighting the importance of the word immediately in the story of when Jesus recruits his first disciples after John the Baptist had been arrested. Yes, that James and John immediately dropped everything that they were doing to follow Jesus.
Bishop Wright: 1:21
Right, that’s what Matthew said.
Melissa: 1:23
Yeah, right, and so I see what you’re doing there. Bishop, you want to say more about the timing of things?
Bishop Wright: 1:31
Sure. Well, you know I listen, like lots of people. I listen to lots of other folks who are writing and thinking about things right now, and right now you know there’s a lot of conversation about you know the social media app, tiktok right, and you know, being a gentleman of a certain age, I remember when TikTok used to refer to you know the second hand on, you know a watch or a clock, you know the literal TikTok right. And so I’m always just sort of looking for something creative to catch somebody’s attention and have them look again at scriptures. And so when Matthew tells his story, one of the signature sort of words of Matthew is, as he writes, immediately. And so that’s all that’s about is just trying to get people’s attention to having to looking at something differently, putting a different emphasis on different words that might invite us to think about faith and Jesus and our own life with Christ differently.
Bishop Wright: 2:40
Jesus is walking down the beach and he invites James and John to follow him, to become fishers of people, recruiters of others to join Jesus’ friend-making campaign, and they did it immediately. That’s pretty striking for me, knowing a little bit about church and how people sit and think, and it takes people a while sometimes to come to faith. I’m just struck that it was something in Jesus’s invitation, maybe it was something in James and John’s life at the time, that made them really open to leaving. They left their family business, they left their dad, as it says, and joined Jesus on his you know, in this enterprise, in his purpose and in his truth, and that’s just really striking for me.
Melissa: 3:32
You know, when I read TikTok, of course I figured you were referring or making a parallel to the TikTok thing. But, I also got the imagery of Peter Pan and the, you know, the crocodile and the TikTok, tiktok.
Bishop Wright: 3:45
Yeah right, exactly, look at that.
Melissa: 3:48
Well, it just hit me. You know it’s about children and adults who are wasting their time, Like children are seizing their opportunity in Peter Pan to be more of who they are, and you’ve got the old dude who is almost like wasting his time. I’m just saying right. So I don’t know. This imagery of Peter Pan came to mind and it’s like all right, what are we doing here, Bishop? We just had an incredible thing happen. We had the inauguration of President Donald Trump, yes, and the next day he had a service at the National Cathedral, of which it’s actually an Episcopal Cathedral.
Bishop Wright: 4:28
That’s right.
Melissa: 4:29
And the Right Reverend, Mariann Edgar Buddy, is the Bishop of Washington and the greater metropolitan DC area and there’s a lot of controversy right now because of how she addressed the president from the pulpit in a pleading sort of way, and some folks are just thinking it was just horrible that she disrespected him, and others are saying she seized her opportunity to address the most powerful man in the world and implored him to be merciful. Where do you stand on the matter?
Bishop Wright: 5:04
So that is a good and a timely question. Yeah, I think half of the people who heard Bishop Budde’s plea from the pulpit to the president and the congregation thought it was exactly the right thing to do and half of folks thought it was perhaps an abuse, perhaps some sort of liberal talking points woke and all those kinds of words. I tell you what we’ve done in the Diocese of Atlanta. You know, we just recently had a Dr. King holiday and Dr. King really, if you look at his work, he neither excoriates or idolizes presidents but seems to see them as partners for the advance of the work. I think that tends to be. My strategy is that I want to make sure that I leave space with all kinds of folks so that we can have conversation and maybe I can even come alongside them and exert some influence, gospel influence. I’ve learned that from Ambassador Andrew Young most profoundly. But you know, I would say you would say my sort of understanding of sermons is that they’re for the entire group and I think that we can make our pleas, which I think are entirely appropriate. We can make our pleas for mercy, we can talk about those in our care who are experiencing fear, et cetera, et cetera, without an individual conversation with one person in the midst of an entire congregation. And so again, I take my cues from Dr. King and people like Ambassador Young and even Desmond Tutu who, whenever they mounted the pulpit, were always working on the system.
Bishop Wright: 6:39
I know Bishop Budde. I know her to be a faithful and good leader. I’ve had dinner at her house. I know her to be a faithful and good leader. I’ve had dinner at her house. I know her husband, paul. I think that this was her sincerely trying to care for folks.
Bishop Wright: 6:53
But immediately is what we’re talking about, and immediately has to do with appreciating time. And I’m now a gentleman of a certain age. Looking back, we talk about wasting time and killing time and all those kinds of things, and then it suddenly dawns on us in life that the most precious thing that there absolutely is is time. You know, the point I make in the meditation is is that time is this wonderful thing, that we don’t have a lot of it’s fleeting and that for some of us there are parts of Jesus’s purpose and truth that we did immediately embrace, you and I and others who are listening. There were parts of it his love, his purpose, his truth, his kindness, his forgiveness, his generosity of spirit and soul. There are parts of Jesus’s life that many of us come to easy. We seized easy right. There was no big time between when we heard and when we tried to implement.
Bishop Wright: 7:53
The point I want to make, however, is at the beginning of this, still at the beginning of this new year, is that we mustn’t rest, you know, self-satisfied in that that there are other parts of Jesus’s purpose and truth that we are slow to embrace and embody, and indeed we may even be rejecting, and so, nevertheless, the clock is still ticking, and not like a shame and guilt and ominous sort of thing, but the truth of the matter is is that when we don’t embrace Jesus’s way forward, we’re wasting time, this most precious thing.
Bishop Wright: 8:31
When we do that as we do, it actually costs us time and peace and joy that can never be replaced. And so, maybe, james and John, when they heard Jesus’s invitation, they realized that, hey, we want to just. So, maybe, james and John, when they heard Jesus’ invitation, they realized that, hey, we want to just, we’re going with you and we don’t want to waste any more time, and I think that Jesus’ invitation to them is Jesus’ invitation to us now, and so, on those things that are difficult for us, my invitation is let’s not waste any more time, let’s intentionally move forward. I think this is one of the greatest things is that to bring intention, maybe to 2025 in ways that we’ve not brought intention previously.
Melissa: 9:37
Yeah, you know that word intention came to mind a number of times while you were talking. I was also reflecting on James and John and what their families might have thought when they just dropped things to follow this, I just have to say a slow adoption of picking up Jesus’s ways. And yet Jesus’s pace, I don’t know, was fast, furious and frenzied, but had kind of a slower a way of being that James and John and many of the disciples really felt drawn to. And yet I wonder what people might have thought when they dropped everything to go follow Jesus.
Bishop Wright: 10:15
Well, they probably thought of James and John, what people think of us, which is, when we’re out places serving the poor, when we’re using our time to do various other good, charitable acts, being mindful of other people’s needs and using our time in that regard, some people might say, oh, that’s nice up to a point. And then, when they see that you really are dedicating your time to these matters, at some point people probably wonder you know what’s come over you? You know you’re wasting time. Aren’t there other things to do in life with your time? Or they wonder, you know, have you become some sort of religious zealot? Have you become some sort of religious guy or gal? This, you know, some sort of antiquated, small-minded religious kind of person. And so, yeah, there’s always a public sort of interrogation when they see us. You know, sort of giving our time to service. And yet, you know, at some point we are always invited to make a choice, right? Is that what is real for us, what feels like integrity for us? And so, you know, the journey to integrity when it comes to our life with Christ, is always about closing the gap between what we say on Sunday and how we live on Monday, right, and the thing about Jesus’s pace is that it does seem natural and graceful. I mean, though, matthew described, you know, people’s response to Jesus as immediately, or that Jesus was seemingly to be in one place and then in another place. Immediately, he has this human pace. The conversations with people are human. His ability to account for people’s suffering is human, it’s at the pace of life, and I think that’s wonderfully graceful. He prioritizes relationships, he prioritizes conversations. All through the gospel lessons, his disciples wonder why does he waste time talking to people who seem to have no real impact or import, you know, who are on the fringes of things, and so, yeah, at the end look I think I’ve said this before at the end of the day, I’ve done lots of funerals, you know. Just, you know, being a clergy person, I’ve done lots of funerals and in some ways, you know, it’s always instructive to me to listen when the people who stand up to speak about the you know, and people who stand up to speak about the one who was recently deceased, to talk about the way in which they used time Right, I mean, from that same pulpit in the Washington National Cathedral, we heard how Jimmy Carter used time.
Bishop Wright: 13:02
In fact, we were baffled to see how he could be the world’s most powerful man, the President of the United States, and at the same time make time to teach Bible study, and we wondered why he would leave. You know the prominence of Washington DC. Go back to Plains, georgia, and take the time to make tables for Sunday school children, I mean. So you know, there is something amazingly holy about, you know, balance of life. But a time that says a way to hold time, that says you know God is truly first, that’s really worship. What we do on Sunday, we call it worship and I suppose we should continue to call it worship. But how we prioritize things with our calendars is really worship, you know, is really worship, because that’s, I think. When someone stands up to speak over our casket, you know what will they say about how we used our time? I think a lot about that, me personally, and I think about that when I’m with other folks me personally, and I think about that when I’m with other folks yeah, okay, yes and right.
Melissa: 14:13
So to me it’s all about you said balance, which is a really important word, especially in today’s time, when I think there are a lot of people who are on fire for Jesus, who do want to do the justice work, and yet they’re burning the candle at both ends, which leads to burnout, and so how would you address those folks?
Bishop Wright: 14:30
How would I address it is I would invite people to read a book called the Attention Merchants the Attention Merchants, and basically what this book is all about is the development process of you know advertising and you know sort of some of the coordinates that social media and advertising is still using and the commodification of distraction, right, and it’s interesting. People know that our attention matters and now they’ve figured out how to monetize it right, and so I think what we’re invited to do is really hard countercultural work. And so I still, you know, every week I think it’s on Sunday usually I get a weekly accounting of my time on my iPhone. It tells me how many hours I spent, and I’m always mystified at you know how many hours. But we say to each other I have no time. And then we look at our iPhones and our iPhones tell us we spent five, six, seven hours on our phone and we’ve picked up our phone so many times. You know, I think we’re going to have to just do some counter-cultural work all of us, and turn off the TV and put down the phone.
Bishop Wright: 15:46
You know, I like the practice of Sabbath. Sabbath day is that holy practice that we get from our Jewish brothers and sisters about not engaging in work. Sunday is not a time to catch up on emails. Sunday is a time for food and for family and for marriage and even for intimacy, as we understand Sabbath. It’s a time to get outside. It’s a time to be human again. It’s a time to fend off all the other definitions of what it means to be human and get back to what God called us to be, which is human in this way. It’s to slow down, and I understand that that’s countercultural. You know, at my age, that still is enlivening for me to do that.
Bishop Wright: 16:31
But I look at young people in particular and this kind of a conversation sounds like Mandarin Chinese to them. It’s like what do you mean? Number one, go outside. But then what do you mean by? You know not using all these social media resources? You know to be part of my day and life, but I think this is what worries me most about modern life is that you know to be part of my day in life?
Bishop Wright: 16:50
But I think this is what worries me most about modern life is is that you know God does time in a way? Seasons, uh, those sorts of things. There’s a, there’s a movement there and I think part of a faith. Life is getting in touch with um, the way God does time, um, and but yet we I think what’s the word I would use so utterly sort of enfolded into the way that we have decided to do time, and I think it has negative effects.
Bishop Wright: 17:25
Look, the doctors and all the smart people know this already, and it’s interesting to me that some people who are actually even in the internet business and so on and so forth, they don’t even want their children to be involved in the very product that they are selling. So clearly, one of the things we’ve got to do is to try to get back to a way to do time that fortifies the very best of who we are Reflection, conversation, friendship, listening, quiet, all those sorts of things service. I think these are the better ways to use time, and this is what Matthew is trying to point out that Jesus is doing this, and there’s something about Jesus and the way that he does time, as recorded in Matthew, mark, luke and John, that is enigmatic to people, that is enthralling and compelling to people. That is enthralling and compelling to people.
Melissa: 18:28
Well, one thing that you have said in the past that has really helped me, bishop, and it’s a question I ask myself a lot because of the way you articulated it. You asked me one time well, it’s not, or I think you said one time like it’s not so much what we’re going to do about it, but how are we going to be about it. And I think it’s kind of a both and that happy medium of doing and being and being intentional about both.
Bishop Wright: 18:53
Yeah, I think that’s right. I think that’s right. I think the immediate is today. Look, what we have is today, that’s what we have, that’s what we can be certain of we have today for right, now, right. And so how can we take up agency to make today look like the words we pray, that we have time for each other, that we have time for ourselves, our marriages, our loved ones, that we have time for those people on the margins, that we have time to engage the word of God, that we have time to speak to God. I mean whether you’re speaking for you, to God is sitting in a church with your hands folded or whether it’s walking the dog out in our cold January weather right now, but it is. How are you using time to embrace it, enjoy it, because this part of life on this side of heaven is fleeting, but it’s all gift.
Melissa: 19:56
And tick tock to that Bishop. Thank you and listeners. Thank you for listening to Fr 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.
