Bishop Wright: 0:00
The devil leads with. If what helps Jesus navigate is that those are not ifs for Jesus, and there are some things that don’t need to be ifs for us. You are my sibling. You have value, dignity and worth. I have value, dignity and worth. God does not delight in you and us looking in the mirror and not seeing someone who is valuable, has dignity and worth. But when we finally embrace who we are, as told to us by God’s word, and so once my dignity and your dignity are settled, then that can send us off in a different trajectory.
Melissa: 0:40
Welcome to For People. With Bishop Rob Wright, I’m Melissa Rau and over the course of this Lent, Bishop and I will be having a conversation based on Growing Up in Christ, a Lenten curriculum and video series produced by the Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta. You can access the videos and accompanying material at www. episcopalatlanta. org. These resources are perfect for your individual Lenten devotion or small group study. Good morning, Bishop.
Bishop Wright: 1:10
Good morning.
Melissa: 1:11
So this week in Lent, your devotion you called Settled and it is based off of Luke 4, verses 1 through 13,. When Jesus is tempted.
Bishop Wright: 1:25
Right.
Melissa: 1:26
And you talk about Jesus’ identity and purpose being tempted by the devil and you kind of drop a big phrase. You talk about the big word if yeah. What’s hitting you right now, before we go into the big if word.
Bishop Wright: 1:42
Well, I think what’s hitting me is what’s always hitting me, and that is that I try to read my Bible and watch the news and live my life and what I realize is is that, you know, we’re in a time now, as I listen to people and listen to, you know, the media we’re in a time of profound volatility. You know there’s a lot of anxiety in the system. Some of it comes from Washington DC, some of it comes from the economics of things, some of it comes from just sort of personal anxiety in the people that I meet. And so, as I take all of that to scripture, what emerges for me, especially when I look at Luke 4 and Jesus’ encounter with the devil in the wilderness, is that Jesus is settled.
Bishop Wright: 2:29
Jesus is fully divine, we believe, and also fully human, and yet some things for Jesus are settled. You know, jesus is a great companion in this regard in this Luke 4 chapter, because the devil is not able to come for him around identity and purpose. Jesus is settled in his identity and purpose. The world is moving fast around him and what helps him to be anchored is that the devil’s sort of tip of spear, if you will, is to have Jesus to question his identity if you are the son of God and that is settled for Jesus, and so Jesus is able to fend off temptation. And it occurs to me that while we have to deal with lots of vicissitudes in life the ups and downs of life, you know the sinking sand of things one thing we can be settled on is that we are the children of God, that God loves us, that we are forgiven, that we have dignity, worth and value in God’s eyes, and that ought to take some of the anxiety of modern living away from us. We ought to be able to stand secure in that.
Melissa: 3:42
Okay, so how then does being settled in our identity and in our purpose reflect maturity?
Bishop Wright: 3:51
Yeah, I mean, I think all of us. You know, one of the greatest things about getting a little older is you start to get settled in things you know, and you’re in your twenties and maybe even your thirties you’re still trying some stuff, you’re still thinking about some stuff which way shall I go? And then something miraculously happens. As you get a little older, you start to know that, hey, I love strawberry ice cream. There’s lots of different kinds of ice creams out there, but I love strawberry ice cream. Or you know, I don’t know, jamaican food is my favorite.
Bishop Wright: 4:18
You know, bar none, whatever you sort of land on things and you know some of the gray goes away. Not all of the gray, because gray stays with us our whole life, but some of the gray starts to go away and you start to sort of integrate lots of parts of yourself and you start to know your own mind. It’s not to be confused with being rigid either, but your sort of certain things become bedrock for you and I hope that that happens in terms of our faith, while we always have to be growing and maturing in Christ. In fact, that’s the purpose of the whole Lenten meditation is to invite people to figure out what does it mean to actually grow up in Jesus Christ? So we are growing up, but at the same time, parts of our growing that actually give our growth sort of flourishing and vibrancy is we’re settled in a few things, and so my self-worth is settled. Now I may struggle with all these external forces in the world, but in terms of God’s eyes, my identity and my value is settled. As I’ve said thousands of times, you know, there’s nothing that I can do that’s making me, that’s going to make God love me less. There’s nothing I can do that makes God love me more. It is what it is.
Bishop Wright: 5:26
I am, who God says I am, I am beloved, and so, you know, jesus seems to walk around in that, you know, and that settles him and it actually helps him to parse all of the things that are happening in front of him, not the least of which, in this encounter in Luke 4, is the devil. And you know, when you look at this text, the devil is actually working on really sort of fine shades of meaning with Jesus, and so Jesus is a great companion for us as we try to figure out our purpose. You know our identity and our contribution to the kingdom of God and on all of these things, you know the devil leads with if. Yeah, and I think what helps Jesus navigate is that those are not ifs for Jesus and there are some things that don’t need to be ifs for us.
Bishop Wright: 6:17
You are my sibling. You have value, dignity and worth. I have value, dignity and worth. God does not delight in you and us looking in the mirror and not seeing someone who is valuable, has dignity and worth. God delights when we sort of finally embrace and I understand it’s a journey but when we finally embrace who we are, uh as uh, as told to us by, uh, by God’s word, and so that gets settled. And once my dignity and your dignity are settled, then that can send us off in a different trajectory.
Melissa: 6:47
Well, okay. So the thing I’m holding in tension right now is the concept of being settled in my identity, my worth, my belovedness.
Bishop Wright: 6:56
Yeah.
Melissa: 6:57
And then the big juxtaposed by the devil’s well, prove it, yeah. And so like I don’t want to conflate the notion of settled and comfort together, so what would you say to that Bishop?
Bishop Wright: 7:10
Well, I mean, that’s an important distinction, right? So I’m not saying complacency, right, but I am saying to be settled is to understand that I am who God says I am and I can do what God says I can do. That matter is settled, yeah, I mean, we don’t want to grow complacent, and that’s the other side of the spectrum. Where I want to start people off with is you know where the gospel lessons start off with this Lent, which is Jesus’s settled approach to identity. Right Now, the truth of the matter is, if we go to the extremes in the other direction, it becomes complacency and maybe it even becomes abuse. Maybe we start to say to ourselves oh, I have more value, worth and dignity than you, right, we can become puffed up. And, of course, st Paul talks to the church in Corinth the first time he talks to the church in Corinth about, in many ways, they’re being puffed up about their gifts. So we’re not talking about that. We’re talking about something much more central, not talking about extremes, not talking about complacency.
Bishop Wright: 8:08
The truth of the matter is is that when I’m settled in who God says I am and I can be who God says that I can be, there’s a great deal of humility that actually comes over us, right? So it’s the humility that helps me, from the quiet of prayer in the beauty of nature, in the gift of service, as I try to live a generous life, remind me of this great inheritance that I have, and so that keeps me actually humble. Humility is actually more nimble than we think it is. It actually helps me to stay more elastic because I encounter the word, the world, as good and gift, and then that causes me to hold myself sort of differently. It occurs to me that you know, in encountering the devil, jesus must have said devil, you cannot offer me more than God has already offered me. Right, devil, you want me to bow down and worship you, but you’re false, right, the world is not even yours to give. And because Jesus had this sort of posture of humility about you know the majesty of the Father, you know he was able to understand what is actually a good gift and what appears right to be a good gift, so he’s able to hold himself that way. And for me at least, that kind of humility and that kind of sort of ability to go deep in thanksgiving helps me to fend off complacency, because I don’t take it for granted, now do seasons happen? Certainly, we’re humans, we fall, we stumble, but as a general matter, it really sort of keeps me in a worshipful attitude.
Melissa: 10:18
Well, I love this phrase that you said. Doing flows from our being, and one of the things that I think we worship or value, in the world at least, is productivity.
Bishop Wright: 10:31
Yeah.
Melissa: 10:31
And sometimes, I think we’re so busy being productive that we forget that we are human beings and not human doings. And so, Bishop, how do we hold that intention right? How do we put being first and have our doing flow from our being?
Bishop Wright: 10:48
Yeah, I mean this is the $64,000 question especially in this country, in America, where so much of our identity is really caught up in what we do and what we’ve achieved and what we produce right. And when we meet people out we say, what do you do Right? And so we participate in a culture that prioritizes doing, and I understand that those questions are not from a bad place. We’re just trying to get a sense of who the person is and so, you know, even maybe as a matter of spiritual discipline, maybe we start asking other kinds of questions when we meet people. You know, tell me what you love, what do you like, what really you know sort of what gets your energy going, what fires your best smiles.
Melissa: 11:27
How you be yeah how you be.
Bishop Wright: 11:30
You know, I don’t know if the English teachers who are listening will allow us to get away with that, but I mean, I think that’s the way we do this right. I mean this is that we’ve developed and participated in a culture that prioritizes doing over being, and then we find ourselves, after many years of taking that approach to life, you know, in its extremes, that we’re empty. We’re exhausted and consumed by a quest for approval, and really approval, by people who don’t even know us and maybe not even care about us, right? And so what a terrible treadmill. Here’s Jesus, by example, helping us to get off the treadmill.
Bishop Wright: 12:09
The reason why I think that that sort of exchange between the devil and Jesus is really important for us to hear with our modern ears is because it helps us to reflect on, you know, a lifetime of just achieving even if it’s sort of for good purposes. Is that all there is to life? You know and here we might go back to Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and his idea of the Sabbath and his idea of practicing each week our humanity just for humanity’s sake, and so I think that’s one of the things that really afflicts us as a culture. I think human dignity has gotten really flattened out, what it means to be human has really become flattened out and to be a consumer has really sort of rounded out and become more robust and this, out of balance, I think, leads to this sort of epidemic of anxiety, of depression, of loneliness.
Bishop Wright: 13:10
I think it sort of fuels the worst that is happening to us, which is that we’ve bought to some degree or been taught to some degree that what I have and what I make is what I am, and without that I’m lost. We see that when people get into retirement and they really will have to work really hard to sort of cough up this approach to life and get down into every day is a gift. I’m a gift. I have some add value. I also want to celebrate my life and enjoy my life, and it’s hard for people to get off that treadmill. And it’s hard for people to get off that treadmill. And so for Jesus the way he models humanity, even though he is both divine and human, I think is instructive.
Melissa: 13:59
Yeah, I do too, and I was just thinking of the word worth. Oftentimes we will lump in what we produce as our worthiness, and so I don’t know, Bishop people over product, I think is a good mantra, and I think process over outcome might also be a good thing. I just when we talk about worth, I think this is really what this is all about. Right, Jesus knew his worth and didn’t feel like he had to bow down.
Bishop Wright: 14:29
Well, this is the point of the word settled. You know which I work hard to try to give you a word to chew on with the meditation. So it started off with the one word settled. So what would it mean if some of that was settled for us? You know, yeah, from time to time I have an opportunity to talk to really bright, brilliant therapists, both professionally and personally.
Bishop Wright: 14:51
I have over the years, and I think that the average one of us, certainly in this culture, has really got to think deeply and thoroughly about this notion of self-worth. To have that as a real solid bedrock to stand on. Your self-worth as settled, it can really increase the joy of life. I think it can increase the insight into what life is about. I think it can put us beside other people when those matters are settled for us. Otherwise, again, we’re just on this tragic, tragic gerbilbil wheel, hamster wheel in life, trying to win approval. And I just, I know that god loves us more than that. God doesn’t want that for us.
Bishop Wright: 15:38
You know, and I think scripture begins to help us with this is is that? Look, what would it be like if you could just stand in this? I mean, I understand, I understand the brokenness of our family of origins. I understand that by and large, many of us were loved by people who struggled to know love, because the people that loved them struggled to know love, and on and on and on. And yet here comes Jesus, this great liberator, to help us to break those cycles, to change the dynamics of our family tree.
Bishop Wright: 16:12
And maybe that’s the greatest gift that God is endeavoring to give to us through the ministry of Jesus Christ is to be settled about who we are and who our brothers and sisters are, and then begin to solve problems in that way. Hey, look, just a second here. What would it be like if we began to solve problems in this way, like it’s not just about me, over and against you, but it’s about us, because not only do I have worth, but you have worth equal, and so we don’t have to be in this competition for this. So I think Jesus begins to move us in that direction, not only for our personal sort of growth and flourishing, but for the growth and flourishing of everywhere, of the human family, rather of wherever we find ourselves.
Melissa: 16:54
Bishop, you talked about winning approval, and I think one of the ways that we try to make people proud, the people who we want to be proud of us, is by doing more. And I’m getting the sense here that that’s not what we’re talking about. Can you be a little bit not that you’re not clear.
Bishop Wright: 17:12
Yeah, no, I mean all of these sort of things, I mean deserve more than we can do in our you know, 17, 19 minutes here. But I guess where I want to point us to is a step in the direction of moving away from earthly approval in all of its measurements and into divine approval. And so what we want to do is we want to please God, and it’s ironic, isn’t it, that the way that God wants us to please God is by trusting God. Right, the Bible tells us that it is impossible to please God without faith, and faith requires me to believe about myself. What God says about me Isn’t that interesting. And so here God shows God’s loving character to us, that what God really wants, what God needs to make God smile, if you will, is for us to finally realize that when God looks at us, God says, for us to finally realize that when God looks at us, God says good, right.
Bishop Wright: 18:16
And so what would it be like, again, for all of us to come out from some of the burdens that we carry around all of this and move into this settled notion of you know, I love a God who loves me and has already breathed into me life and healing, and all that, and all I have to do is move in that direction. And what I’ve got to do is I’ve got to believe God more than I believe the news or more than I believe the fashion magazines or more than I believe the Wall Street Journal not picking on the Wall Street Journal but more than I’ve got to believe God about me, more than what my portfolio says about me. I’m not diminishing those things, but they’re just not ultimate and primary for us. This is an invitation back to what is center, primary, core, and that is I am. Again, I’ll say it again, I am who God says I am, and that is settled. Now, for me, it’s just about living into that.
Bishop Wright: 19:08
Morehouse College is here in Atlanta and they have a wonderful, wonderful phrase or story that they tell, and that is there is a crown over each of our heads, and so the work is simply to grow up in stature until that crown sort of rests on our head. And here for us, that’s the journey, right, the crown is already over our heads. It’s already over our heads, right. All you have to do is sort of just live up into that crown that’s already over your head. And so what would it be like to have that settled for yourself today.
Melissa: 19:45
Well, that settles it, Bishop. Thank you.
Bishop Wright: 19:46
I hope so.
Melissa: 19:48
Thank you, listeners, for tuning into For People. You can follow us on Instagram and Facebook at Bishop Rob Wright, or by visiting www. fourpeople. digital. Please subscribe, leave a review and we’ll be back with you next week.
