For People with Bishop Rob Wright
For People with Bishop Rob Wright
Repent
What does it mean repent and embrace change? It is more than acknowledging past mistakes! It includes confronting deep-seated fears and behaviors that prevent us from living fully as God intends.
In this episode, Melissa and Bishop Wright have a conversation about John the Baptist and how his radical message of repentance encourages us to use our faith to change the world. Listen in for the full conversation.
Read For Faith, the companion devotional.
You called this week's devotion based off of Luke chapters, chapter three, verses one through six repent, which means that, since the passage of scripture is John the Baptist's cry out of Isaiah to prepare ye the way of the Lord and for any God spell fans out there. You know the song we're singing about today. Bishop, there are two main themes in today's devotion change and repenting. Can you unpack that a bit for us?
Bishop Wright:Sure, well, the season has changed, right? I mean, the weather knows it's changed, my trees know it's changed, the animals that live all around in our yard, they know that the season has changed. And you know, we in the church we say that now the season has changed because we know what's coming. Jesus is coming, his birth is coming, god is doing a new thing, and so this is an opportunity for us to get ready for that. We know that God amazing thing is happening, that God's self is coming into the world to live beside us, to show us how to love, to love us, to forgive us, to give us an invitation to thriving. So we know that all that this is coming. We call that Christmas and so, four weeks ahead of that, we want to make ourselves available. We want to worship God by saying that God is first. And if God is first, that means that some realignment has to happen in our lives.
Bishop Wright:And John the Baptist, jesus' big cousin, jesus' older cousin, jesus' cousin, with the one-word sermon repent, is one of the voices that we use at this time in the church. We use John the Baptist twice, and then we use Mary, who will become the mother of Jesus. We use her voice. And so we have these people for whom change is real, change is worship, change is life, change is faithfulnessness and changes future. And we listen to those voices now. And so John says repent, which is that one word that invites us to think about ourselves as we are. It's a courageous word. It means that I can face, you know, my warts. I can also see what is wonderful about me, but I can find the courage to face my warts and I can also understand that God is calling me to something new and different, and I'm going to have to give up some things and make room for some other new things.
Melissa:So you say your last sentence in the devotion is six letters referring to the word repents, six letters that invite us to face what we have become and simultaneously tells us who we are meant to be. Right. So how, I guess, are you saying that we should change to turn back, change to do something new, like where do repent and change kind of come together?
Bishop Wright:Well, when we repent, it simply means to turn around right Metanoia. It means that I can turn around and take a good look, a good look. I can interrogate, I can investigate and take a good look, a good look, I can interrogate, I can investigate. And the truth of the matter is, most of us, if we get way down into our hearts, we're honest about, we can find honesty about how we've missed the mark, about the thing, and I'm not talking about superficial changes. I'm talking about wounds that cause some behavior in us that doesn't track with the way that Jesus taught us to live. I'm talking about some deep-seated fears that cause us to be the most truncated I like to use the word squoze compacted version of ourselves. And so repent is not only have I been a bad boy and this is my, you know, this is my Christian talking to. No, this is not that. This is the ways in which my life is not unlocked, that God would have me to be unlocked, that God would have me to be free.
Bishop Wright:You know, the thing about repentance is and this is why John the Baptist gets a bad rap I mean, john the Baptist comes on the scene and people sort of write him off as this sort of zealot finger wagger, you know, unreasonable dude. It doesn't understand compromise. I see him altogether different. I see him as the guy who has courage enough to name the thing. You know, it's interesting to me when you go to organizational life, whether corporate or church, we have the meeting and then oftentimes we have the text meeting where we say some things that we either didn't have the courage to say or were afraid to say. Or in the church, we have the parking lot meeting, right.
Bishop Wright:So John creates a space for real authenticity and that's a gift. Think about it. It's a gift. It's a gift because you know why I brought up this whole notion of change theory is that, look, companies are thinking about change theory, governments are thinking about change theory. It's that strategy, that set of actions, that plan that's going to lead to us becoming, as an organization or a nonprofit. You know what we want to be. Well, god has a change theory as well, and it has to do with somebody finding the courage to be authentic, model authenticity so that the rest of us can see that is a better way to live. That's repentance. That's repentance. It's not a you're a bad boy or you're a bad girl, quite the opposite it's come and be free.
Melissa:Yeah, Well, there's also, I think there's an invitation to truth telling in that right, Like self-aware enough to be able to see where we're at, what we've become, in order to understand, I guess, what the healing needs to take place in order for us to be authentically who we are meant to be, which I mean. Your last sentence is like hugely packed with meaning, Bishop.
Bishop Wright:Just say it. Well, I mean, I like John. You know I like John. John is a little boy whose mom and dad had a real life struggle with God. You know infertility, they struggle with infertility and they bet on God's promises over many years. And so John is the fruit of that marriage. And so you know it's not a surprise and we don't talk about this nearly enough about how these faith families formed these youngsters. How did Mary and Joseph's adventure form the young Jesus? How did John the Baptist's you know, zechariah and Elizabeth? How did his mom and dad's journey with God form him?
Bishop Wright:And so I think that all of that is in the story, and I think what these people come to say to us that is, john now and later Jesus and St Paul and I mean there's a whole host of figures they come to say is that you can stand in front of God as you are, seek God's face, mercy and power, to be who you need to be, to be who God wants you to be. Look, it takes an immense amount of courage to say I want to be who God wants me to be rather than I want to be who, you know, commercial society wants me to be. That takes a lot of courage, and what it means is is that some things are going to get refined, some things are going to get tweaked, some things are going to get purged. New capacity is going to have to be taken up, new vulnerability is going to be have to be at work.
Bishop Wright:But here's what I like about John and John's invitation to repent, to see myself as I am, warts and wonder at all, is that when you do that, when you do that, when you and I do that, it is amazing how much easier it is to be beside other people, not over and against them, not above them, not beneath them, but literally beside them, because you understand that they are fellow travelers. You understand that you have received the grace of being set free and moving into a more authentic space, and you know this. You exude this before you ever open up your mouth, and people want to be what we used to call when I was growing up down to earth. People want to be that right. Pretense is a wearisome enterprise. It's exhausting to perform who you are not right To be at odds with your own self. And so when we talk about repentance, we're talking about coming home to God, about coming home to ourselves, yeah, and finding the courage to live alternatively in the world.
Melissa:Yeah, I really like too that you just said about coming alongside others authentically. There's a really fabulous author their name is Prentice Hemphill, who just published a book called what it Takes to Heal. And they're also an activist, an organizer and um a therapist who specializes in embodiment and healing, and what you just talked about too. You didn't talk about it directly, but you talked about the, the generational thing you know um.
Melissa:John's parents and Jesus's parents, and generational trauma is real, especially when we're talking about justice, social justice and change on a more corporate level. So we're talking about two different things, right, we're talking about personal healing and repenting, turning back to God, individual relationship with Christ and divine, and that we're also talking, I think, about hopefully a global or a more collective sense of healing. How does an organization, bishop repent?
Bishop Wright:Yeah, well, I mean, let's start, let's build to that, let's start off where you started off, right, so you know you're talking about, you know family of origin stuff, right? So culture is. Edgar Schein, great organizational thinker, said culture is how the leaders behave. Right, and that's also in the family. So there's some repentance that all of us need to do in our family system. Right, we participated in family systems, we've gone along to get along, and there are going to be kinder, more candid ways that we can get along. So we have to acknowledge that. And this is look, people are making boatloads of money in therapy for creating space where people can say you know just that, right, people can interrogate and find the courage to say, oh, I'm colluding with that or I'm participating with that, right, and so move right on up to, you know, outside of the family, into organizations. Right, it's about acknowledging the elephant in the room. This is what John does does, right, I mean, you can go to harvard and take a leadership class on what it means to get the elephant in the room so that the organization can find new square footage. Can, you know, grow and innovate. I mean, this is, this is time tested.
Bishop Wright:What's interesting about jesus is. Jesus's change theory is to send the gen genuine article among us, in john right to an embodiment. So he doesn't send an idea, he sends flesh and blood. He doesn't send a perfect person, he sends someone who can understand what it means to be set free and communicate that right. Freedom is a communicable disease, right. We saw that in Harriet Tubman, we saw that in Frederick Douglass. We see that again and again and again. We see this in people. We see this in people, people. You know, again and again and again we see this in people, elie Wiesel, we see this in people, people. You know again and again and again. This flesh and blood thing is better than any corporate memo. It's sort of a. When we see it, we can be it, as someone has said, but organizationally it's the same thing. I mean organizationally it is, you know, the person exerting leadership at the top, finding the capacity to say the thing, to name the thing and to keeping the organization focused on it. You know it's interesting. It'd be a little controversial here.
Bishop Wright:It's interesting to see now that so many corporations are walking away from DEI, diversity, equity and inclusion work and there's a list of corporations now who said they're not going back, and I understand, I must say, even as an African-American, I understand that a lot of the DEI work is not really good, it doesn't pass muster, it doesn't pass real good intellectual scrutiny. But we can't walk away from telling our real American story, and that is that for many centuries in some cases, many decades in other cases, we have excluded people based on their gender, based on their race, based on lots of different things, from enjoying all the blessings of liberty, as we like to say here. And so what's interesting about John is that John comes to reassure us that you can face these hard things and there is a future going forward. I love that wonderful little turn of phrase every saint has a past and every sinner has a future. I think what happens with us sometimes is that we don't believe if we tell the real story, if we dare to investigate the ways in which we've missed the mark. I think we're worried that forgiveness is not real, that equity is not real. And so other people in the business world are telling us and demonstrating for us that when we have a diverse group of thinkers around the table working on a difficult problem, that leads to, you know, wonderful new solutions that would have never occurred to us if we were a homogenous group. So you know, thinking about getting lots of different kinds of people with lots of different kinds of experiences around the table is actually advantageous to real, serious business and innovation. So I think that we see this in the real world.
Bishop Wright:But somebody's got to find the courage to be able to say, yeah, those letters D, e and I may be too politically charged for us to tend to, but we can't lose the spirit of that work. And the spirit of that work says that as Americans, as diverse as we are, we're stronger and better together. John is going to always get the elephant in the room. He's going to find the courage to get the elephant in the room and he's not going to I'll talk about this next week and he's not going to give quarter to any insincerity. And that's because he loves this process of telling the truth, of coughing up all the mucus, of getting rid of all of the perfunctory business and getting down to it. I love John.
Bishop Wright:John must have been from my hometown, pittsburgh, because you know I grew up saying you know everybody, you know we valued hard work. I mean lots of places do, but since I got the microphone. I'll talk about Pittsburgh. We valued hard work. It wasn't a perfect place, but there was a down-to-earthness where you could just get it said. And John does that on God's behalf. And what does he create? Let's say that really quickly by doing this, because we've been talking about process right now. By doing this, he gives that sinner a future right. And how do you give the sinner a future? You let them know that in God's eyes they are more than their worst day, worst deed, worst decision, right. And so repentance is really on the way again to freedom.
Melissa:Yeah, I love that, I love that you highlighted that. I guess my last question too is like all right, where's the good news in this right? Because here's the thing when I read Isaiah's words that John the Baptist was quoting in chapter five I'm sorry, verse five of this, it says every valley shall be filled and every mountain and hill shall be made low and their crooked shall be made straight and the rough ways made smooth, and all flesh shall see the salvation of God. I mean that's wonderful, and there are different ways that you can look at that passage. I'm thinking healing.
Melissa:And yet some folks might be like well, wait, someone's going to make me straight, kind of like enforce it, and it's like I don't know if that's the spirit that John the Baptist was going for, and certainly not the spirit that you were just alluding to.
Bishop Wright:No, I mean, look, isaiah especially. You know we're using poetic language to talk about this great reversal that God is up to right. That's what we're using, right? You know, some of the Bible is literal, Some of the Bible is hyperbole, some of the Bible is poetry, metaphor, but we're trying to contain in words the majesty of God. And so, yeah, all the poets, all the historians, you know all the hyperbolists, you know we fall short at trying to point to a thing. And this is what John is trying to do. He's trying to point to a thing.
Bishop Wright:Look what Isaiah and John both agree is is that there is a second chapter that we can't give ourselves. There is a breath, a deep breath that we can't generate for ourselves. That somehow, in tracking with God, walking with God, coming alongside God and acknowledging that God wants to be alongside of us, we get that second breath. And in Isaiah's passage, all creation is going to get it. So we serve in love of God of the second chance and the chance and the fifth chance and the 17th chance, and this is why the psalmist says that God's mercy endures to the end. And so you know the good news of John. You know, I mean people get caught up in John's delivery system right and the packaging. You know his outfit and what he eats and you know where he's hanging out. But isn't it amazing that in a muddy stream it's more like a creek? In a muddy creek, john makes new beginnings right, and this has to be underscored as the way in which God's majesty touches ground. God can make a future for us out of water in a muddy creek.
Melissa:Okay, so one more question. I promise you know I was like reading it and I was like wait a second. What is the way of the Lord? What are we preparing?
Bishop Wright:Yeah.
Bishop Wright:Our hearts our hearts, our hearts. We're preparing our hearts and our lives. Look, you know what we have. We talked about Christ being king, and the only throne that Christ ever said that he wanted was the human heart, right, so, the king of hearts. And so when our heart is seduced into falsehoods and our heart is overcome by woundedness and our hearts are overcome by fears right, you know that soil can be prepared by a loving God. We can give those wounds and fears and brokenness, we can give all of that to God, and that is the way of the Lord comes and touches our own selves, right? And so, look, we want to think that Washington can fix us. We want to think that politician X can fix us. We want to think that even Bishop X can fix us or Pastor X can fix us.
Bishop Wright:Look, all of those folks have a role in local and national change. But the individual in John's economy and God's and John's economy and God's economy also has a role. And so it is ridiculous to point to, you know, things that we can't control and desire change from them, when we ourselves have no flesh in the game. And this is John's things, that all creation needs to be moving in this direction. What's amazing to me is God's immense patience in this regard, that God has decided to do change theory over eons right. And so we have a patient God, and thank God God is patient. I don't know about you, melissa, but when I think about my own self and my own chapters, I'm so glad that God is a patient God who, nevertheless, is inviting me to change.
Melissa:Hear, hear, we'll turn back. Friends, it's Advent. Thank you, bishop, 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.