For People with Bishop Rob Wright
For People with Bishop Rob Wright
Growing Up in Christ! | Maladjusted
To grow up in Christ will make you maladjusted to the world. St. Paul was a Roman citizen - the platinum standard for the age. Yet, in Paul's letter to the Philippians, he reminds us that we are citizens of heaven living on earth. What are the costs of this heavenly citizenship? As we grow up in Jesus, we get a glimpse of how we have adjusted ourselves to a world in open opposition to truth, peace, love and justice.
In this episode, Melissa and Bishop Wright have a conversation about becoming maladjusted to the world as it is. To become maladjusted, Bishop Wright outlines three essential movements in spiritual formation: the upward reach to God, the inward alignment with God's will, and the outward push toward the world God loves. When we neglect any of these dimensions, our relationship with God becomes deficient. Listen in for the full conversation.
This episode is based on part 2 of Bishop Wright's 5-part Lenten series "Growing Up in Christ!". Learn more about this year's series, watch the weekly videos, and download the reflection guides here.
I have to decide that my life is bigger than just me and I have to decide that God wants more than just my personal relationship with God. Right, that's a start, but any real relationship with God will find you positioned in your devotional life beyond yourself. I mean. I always say there's the upward reach to God, there's the inward alignment with God and there's the outward push toward the world that God loves.
Melissa:Welcome to For People. With Bishop Rob Wright, I'm Melissa Rau and, over the course of this season of 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 wwwepiscopalatlanta. org. These resources are perfect for your individual Lenten devotion or small group study. Hey, hey, bishop.
Bishop Wright:Hey, hey.
Melissa:So this week's devotion you called Maladjusted.
Bishop Wright:Yeah.
Melissa:And it is based off of the citizenship that Paul speaks about in Philippians.
Bishop Wright:Right.
Melissa:Yeah, so do you want to just give us a broad overview about your understanding of what the word citizen of the kingdom of heaven looks like?
Bishop Wright:Well, I'll leave. I'll point to Paul. Paul was a Roman citizen. You know, roman citizenship back in the day was the platinum standard. It wasn't even the gold standard. It came with protections and privileges and certainly in the then world it was an important distinction, it was premium.
Bishop Wright:Here's Paul, you know, looking out his window and living his life and thinking about citizenship, and then he begins to write right, and so he writes but our citizenship is in heaven, of course. So there's the overview. So I want to know what Paul thinks about citizenship. And so you know, and I will, you know spoiler alert the end of this is that our citizenship here and now is downstream of our citizenship which is in heaven, and heaven not meaning the by and by, but how we live out heaven, sort of right now. And so I like that.
Bishop Wright:Paul is thinking about the Pax Romana, the peace of Rome, and he's thinking about the peace of Christ, and he's saying, you know, he's implying certainly, that the peace that we're able to conjure up for ourselves is inferior to the peace of Christ and that any peace that we want to make here has got to be informed, influenced and really transformed into the peace of Christ to be sustainable, the Pax Romana, of course, was built on abuse and slavery and extraction from peasants, and the peace of Christ is not, and so Paul is working on all of that and he's trying to help us. He's making this contrast, which should inform the way we try to live in our citizenship now.
Melissa:Okay, so being maladjusted then you would say, or Paul would say, that to be maladjusted for Christ would be to not sell out to the status quo.
Bishop Wright:Well, yeah, I mean, I think that's one way to come at that. I think that when I'm thinking about maladjusted, I hear Dr King in my ear who says, basically, to live as a Christian, therefore, is to be maladjusted to the society as it is. And then Dr King goes on to say I am proud, I am maladjusted. And I think that what he's trying to say there is is that I understand the difference between the way the world is now and how Jesus is calling us to live.
Bishop Wright:Look, one of the greatest things that Scripture does for us, as it helps us to grow up into heavenly citizenship lived out on the earth now, is that it helps us to see the gaps right. So it's not condemnation, right, but it's loving us enough to show us the gaps in our common life, because we can become complacent and we can begin to think that you know, you know, wherever we find ourselves in the world is the fullest expression of democracy or equity, or justice, et cetera. But that's not the measure of the scriptures. The measure of the scripture is helping us to see the gaps so that we can make our union more so. But we have to start off with the courage to see the gaps.
Bishop Wright:And so Dr King says look, I understand that, you know, the kingdom of earth is not the kingdom of heaven, and I am willing to say that there are gaps over which we can make some progress. And so, until such time as there is, you know, symmetry between the kingdom of heaven and the kingdom of God, I will live a maladjusted life. I will acknowledge the fact that people sleeping in the street and people denied medicine, and violence and hatred and division is not what God has in mind, and I will, as gently as I can, but as boldly as I can, advocate for those things that afflict the human family, uh, to be overcome and defeated. And so I will live in that tension.
Melissa:Yeah, and I think um you quoted, uh, being creative, um trans like creatively transformed for good.
Bishop Wright:Yeah, all that's Dr King.
Melissa:Yes, but I guess you said gaps. Can you just name a few gaps for us?
Bishop Wright:Of course I can. Of course I can. The gaps are, you know, we say we love our children. We say we love our children, and yet we haven't taken up any real, demonstrable action to combat what kills many of our children, which is gun violence. And so it's incumbent on us to stay maladjusted to the status quo. Nowhere in the Bible are we told that thoughts and prayers are a substitute for justice-making actions. So that's one piece. We live in a society that has so much, and I love this country, I serve this country, and at the same time I love this country enough to point out the gaps. And so, you know, we say that we love our veterans, we say that we're grateful for their service, and yet they have a hell of a time getting the benefits and the medicines and the care they need when they come home. And that's not a Democratic problem and that's not a Republican problem. That has been a consistent and pernicious problem in this country, whether a Democrat or a Republican has been in the White House or has controlled the Congress. And so we have to live maladjusted in that regard. We have to say something and we have to do something here in Georgia right now. Say something and we have to do something.
Bishop Wright:Here in Georgia right now, we continue to put men and women on death row who have intellectual disabilities, profound intellectual disabilities, despite what the Supreme Court has said Justice in Georgia we are last to begin to have the conversation about exempting people with demonstrated intellectual disability from the death penalty, and so we have to speak up. If we say we believe in the dignity of every human being, we've got to find our voices. I mean, I could go on like this all day and you know I'm not. You know I don't think the Bible is inviting us to be some sort of religious Debbie Downers, if you will, but I think we've got to be serious people. I think the gospel calls us to be serious people, and that is to be more than just interested in our own personal piety. If we've had experiences of God, it ought to call us out into the world in amazing ways. We don't have to condemn other people, we don't have to disparage other people, but we can actively, right and even, I would say, gently and aggressively work towards a day where these changes take place.
Bishop Wright:We celebrate the fact that, you know, women now have the vote in America. Well, there was a time that was not the case. And so thank God for the women and their advocates and allies who were maladjusted until such a time that women were fully embraced as voting members of this society. I'm 61 years old. In my lifetime as an African American, I have just, you know, people like me have just begun to enjoy all the rights and privileges of citizenship 1964, all the rights and privileges of citizenship 1964, right Civil rights 1965, voting rights. And so thank God for the men and women, black and white alike, who advocated for a time when we lived out the words of our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution. So you get the gist here. So all along there have been men and women who have saw the gaps and seen it as part of their faithful journey with God to close those gaps. But they were very clear that they were not going to do violence to their conscience by acting like everything is okay.
Bishop Wright:What I love about Walter Brueggemann, a great theologian, a wonderful scholar, he says the prophets, the great prophets of the Old Testament he's thinking of specifically, and later maybe even Jesus, he would say is that they refuse to participate in the cover-up Right. And so I think that's what it means to be maladjusted. I don't hate my country, therefore I point these things out. I love my country, therefore I point these things out. I love my church, therefore I point out her shortcomings. I love myself, therefore I can sit and bring myself to scripture and to church and begin to acknowledge and recognize the ways in which I live out of step out of alignment with the gospel.
Melissa:pronouns I me and I to we, us and ours, and I was reminded that, yeah, this work is important on the individual and the collective level and that Jesus never did anything by himself and so tending to the gaps, bishop, is not an individualized endeavor.
Bishop Wright:One of the things that I think that we pick up from scripture and from all the freedom fighters in this country from the beginning of this nation until now, is that because they saw the dignity in others, they acted right and then they found a way to act together. They figured out a way to organize with people, they figured out ways to adapt, they were resilient in the face of setbacks. I mean there's a whole sort of a masterclass when it comes to how do you stay motivated when sort of the odds are against you. I think what we have done is we've sharpened individual appetites such that it makes it hard to even think about, you know, finding consensus and purpose and mobilizing groups. Mobilizing groups, as I've said before, we could not do now what we have done in the past in terms of mobilizing churches and faith people to get things done. I mean, think about it the Montgomery bus boycott. People stayed off the buses for over a year until they broke the back of segregated public transportation. I don't know that we could do that, but there are things that we can do and there are things that are being done.
Bishop Wright:So it's just I have to decide that my life is bigger than just me. I have to decide that, and I have to decide that God wants more than just my personal relationship with God. Right, that's a start, but any real relationship with God will find you positioned in your devotional life beyond yourself. I mean, I always say there's the upward reach to God, there's the inward alignment with God and there's the outward push toward the world that God loves, and all three of those movements are part and parcel of a relationship, a thriving relationship with God. The absence of one of those is a deficiency in the relationship with God. Right, and so all three are the relationship with God that actually make not only me better and more aligned, but also make the world better.
Melissa:Okay, so then how do communities do maladjustment better together?
Bishop Wright:Yeah. So we have a congregation here in Atlanta that has decided gently that we're wrong recently on how we understand immigration and how we understand our neighbors who have to flee countries for safety. And they have decided legally, they have decided that they're going to be a congregation that's going to support refugees. And so they have dug down deeply financially and found friends who want to make contributions for them to support immigrants. So where the federal aid has dried up, the Christian aid is now overflowing so that they can support these families.
Bishop Wright:You know Will Willimon, another great theologian who's been on this podcast. He said before you know, the immigration crisis is really no crisis at all. The biblical solution to that is to baptize people and bring them into your homes, and so that's where the bar is for us. And so if we're going to stay maladjusted to the way things seem to be going hostility toward immigrants, etc. Now I'm not talking about demonstrated dangerous criminals, I'm not saying that there's a line to draw here, but I'm talking about other folks. If we decide that, as the Bible has said, that we are to care for the stranger, that we are to care for the immigrant, if you believe that, then that's going to put you in a maladjusted position to the way things are being sort of spoken about now, and so then the question is what to do. And this congregation has decided that we are going to make you family, and so they have welcomed two families now, and it exceeded the minister's expectations. She had thought that they would do one family and that was a good thing.
Bishop Wright:But the people of God in that congregation said, oh no, we want to do more. And they have dug down deeply financially and they just have all my praise and all my support. But they're not railing against any particular political figure. It's not about that. It's about they have decided that we are maladjusted to these executive orders and to this tone in the country, and we see the dignity in people and we're going to help, and I think that's the way we do it.
Bishop Wright:There are pastoral what we call pastoral responses to any political misadventures that we might want to quote, and I think that's where the people have got. Look, here's a great opportunity in God's economy. If you hate the way things are going right now, do something different, right? I think the imagination, we're only limited by our Christian imagination, and so you know, I think that in God's weird kind of way that, as things are becoming hard and perhaps even more hate-filled, some would say it might be creating the next generation of real, robust Christian expression. It may be that this is the crucible that creates the next generation of real Christians.
Melissa:So tying in last week's lesson of being settled and then having our doing flow from our being and then having our doing flow from our being. How do we make sure that we are doing the both and work of showing up for other and yet also filling our own cup up before putting the oxygen mask on another?
Bishop Wright:Yeah, I'm not so sure that it works that way. I mean, I understand the analogy, I'm not so sure it works that way. I think, you know, out of worship flows service, right. If service does not flow out of worship, one wonders if you just don't have a religious habit rather than worship right To worship a living God is going to put you next to people and when you're next to people you can see needs and it's amazing how the heart grows right. So I think we do both and I think they flow together, and so I don't know about the middle ground. I think it's a package deal, you know. I think you know the great commission I mean not the great commission, but the great commandment helps us to understand this in God's mind. Love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, mind, soul and strength. And right. Linking two ideas conjunction mind, soul and strength and right. Linking two ideas conjunction neighbor as self. And so it flows.
Bishop Wright:I find that my own personal spiritual life becomes more buoyant when I do the things that I know are extensions of worship, right, when my mind and my behind are in line, as I like to say. I find that that's where my joy starts to peak, right. And so you know, as one theologian has said, we've arrived at a moment now where there's no more middle ground, where you know we can sort of have our cake and eat it too. Either we sign on uncritically for what he calls totalism right Totalism he calls totalism right totalism or we take we take on the task of what he calls a dangerous oddness, and that's all dr king is talking about.
Bishop Wright:I have decided that I want to be called odd by the world. I have decided that to follow jesus. That means that people are going to label me odd because I'm going to pray for people who hate me, who want to despitefully use me. I are going to label me odd because I'm going to pray for people who hate me, who want to despitefully use me. I'm going to try, at my level best to love enemy, and when I struggle loving enemy, I'm going to ask Jesus to help me. I'm going to try to be generous beyond my small definitions of generous. I'm going to try to live that life, and if the world calls me odd, that may be the indicator that I'm doing something right.
Melissa:How very maladjusted of you, bishop. Thank you, and thank you for listening to For People. You can follow us on Instagram and Facebook at Bishop Rob Wright, or by visiting www. for www.4peopledigital. Please subscribe, leave a review and we'll be back with you next week.