For People with Bishop Rob Wright
For People with Bishop Rob Wright
Growing Up in Christ! | Loss
Loss hits hardest when we love deeply. How do we face it without denial or paralysis? In John 12, at a dinner for Jesus after Lazarus' resurrection, his friends respond to impending loss differently—Lazarus with nostalgia, Martha with busyness, and Judas with business. But Mary offers a different way: acknowledging a loss that draws her closer to Jesus.
In this episode, Melissa and Bishop Wright have a conversation about loss. They use the dinner party to unpack how people respond to loss. Bishop Wright reminds us that Jesus is equipped to guide us through loss because he understands betrayal, rejecting, and unjust suffering. Jesus' loss offers wisdom for navigating not just death, but all forms of loss—including the losses that accompany change. Listen in for the full conversation.
This episode is based on part 5 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.
We don't have a Jesus who never went through anything. You know. This Jesus understands betrayal. This Jesus understands how he goes to his tradition, and even his tradition can't receive him. This Jesus understands how doing good has gotten him in a lot of trouble and even, in fact, doing good has gotten him lynched. So this Jesus is someone that we can sort of get beside and he can help us to deal with all the things that we're gonna deal with in life, and so, loss being one of them, death being one of them, this is Four People, with Bishop Rob Wright.
Melissa:Welcome to For People. With Bishop Rob Wright, I'm Melissa Rau and over the course of this Lenten season, Bishop and I have been having conversations 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. Bishop, you rounded us out with this fifth week. You call loss based upon Lazarus's death among other losses that Jesus followers will undoubtedly experience, because life happens to life Right. What would you have to say overall about what was impacting you? Why did you choose this theme as a means to growing up in Christ?
Bishop Wright:Well, you know, we've been talking about for this whole season of Lent what it means to grow up in Christ, what it means to become a more mature Christian. Right, that's what we've been trying to talk about and I've tried to figure out, you know, based on our Bible lessons for this season, a couple of indicators of Christian maturity, and one is loss. How do we handle loss? And I talk about, in the meditation, ways that we avoid the reality of loss, and so all that's in the meditation.
Bishop Wright:But you know, how we deal with loss is that we acknowledge it, right, we love, and therefore loss hits us hard, and so we don't have to deny loving or the loss that we endure and have to suffer through. We can name it and we have a friend in Jesus to help us to process it. Nor do we have to say that, uh, you know, life with Christ means we're just going to suck it up and uh and not acknowledge, you know, the legitimate feelings of grief, uh, and loss that we actually feel. So I'm trying to thread a needle here, and this whole story about the death and resurrection of Lazarus and this dinner party that happens after he's resurrected gives us a great opportunity to talk about it.
Melissa:Yeah, you know, I really love your reflection guide, especially this week. It's simple and it's succinct and direct. I appreciate that you highlight the fact that every single person in this story deals with the loss of Lazarus differently.
Bishop Wright:Yeah, and we all do, right, I mean that's why the story is so powerful. You know, scripture gives us not only an insight into sort of our ancient tradition, but we find ourselves in scripture nowadays, right, and so you know all of the characters in the story. They all handle imminent loss in their own way. Lazarus with nostalgia and we do that. Judas with business, right, he wants to focus on just the dollars and cents of things. And Martha with busyness. Sometimes we believe we can just stay busy, we can outrun. You know the feelings.
Bishop Wright:But Mary in this story not Jesus's mother, but Mary, you know, she acknowledged and faced that. You know the coming loss and it literally brought her closer to Jesus, right, and I think that's an invitation for us to think about the way in which we handle death. You know I've been an ordained person, you know, in ministry a long time and I see us really struggle with all of these sorts of things. I was a school chaplain way back at the beginning of my ministry and I watched parents who loved their children really struggle to talk about grandma and grandpa's sickness and death and I saw kids be really bewildered by the way that their parents sort of handled it or didn't handle it at all. And so I think this is really important, this whole notion of loss, and to talk about it and to process it using the very best of our Christian tradition.
Melissa:Yeah, well, you also dropped the C word, the dreaded C word. Okay, change. Yeah, well, you also dropped the C word. You know, the dreaded C word.
Bishop Wright:Okay.
Melissa:Change. You said we say we don't want change. But it's not change. We fear it's the loss that change represents.
Bishop Wright:That's right, that's right.
Melissa:Yeah, tell us more about that.
Bishop Wright:Well, yeah, we talk about change all the time, and change, of course, is hard. But what we? If we go a little deeper in this idea of change? What we're really talking about is we don't want to lose the ways that have been familiar for us. We don't want to lose something that we have to give up to embrace the change. We sort of blunt it, we reject it or we try to say to each other well, we're looking for a win-win.
Bishop Wright:Well, the truth of the matter is that in many situations, there is no win-win. In many situations, everybody has to give up a little something, everybody has to lose a little something in service to a new reality, a new way forward. And so I just find that it's much more helpful and, I think, healthy to talk about how we process loss. I mean, I think it's a bridge that we all have to cross in life, whether we're talking about jobs or families or relationships or just our familiar. I think that's what's happening in our nation to a degree for some people, that we're losing things that have been familiar to us. And I see that, you know, we're trying to sort of hold on to things you know, sort of with our, you know, white till our knuckles turn white. And I think part of what we're dealing with, you know, whether we're talking about small systems, or even national systems, or even international systems is a refusal to to embrace the loss that comes along with life.
Melissa:Yeah, you know this is really compelling because my parish is doing a Lenten study as well and our theme for the last week was forgiveness. Go figure, yeah, and you know it's really interesting. Someone in my small group mentioned that when someone is say, sinned against, if you will, or they feel harmed or wounded, traumatized, whatever, that they often grieve a sense of identity and I thought that was really compelling. And so when we lose things, when we're harmed, or things change for any reason or another, it's kind of a stripping away and that our identity and the way we relate to ourselves and to others is thereby changed.
Bishop Wright:Absolutely. And so you know, the case I'm trying to make is just that growing up in Christ, that is, using all the tools of our faith to deal with real life, is really the preferred way, right? Because, look, loss and grief are a part of real life and Jesus is standing there in the middle of real life to say I'm with you. And if we aren't engaged in real life, then we're engaged in some sort of fantasy. And the thing about Jesus is Jesus does his best work when we want to engage in real life. I think this is why this whole notion of Good Friday and the silence of Saturday and then the Alleluia of Sunday is an important way to think about life. You know that the loss gets processed, that God can hold it all and that we can give it to God and that we can use God's way that we find in scripture and in our traditions. We can use those ways, those competencies, to make our way. Look, we don't want to blunt life, we don't want to outrun life, we don't want to fend off reality. We want to go through it, and that's the invitation, and that's why it's hard and that's why people don't want to do it, because there's a going through. There is a stripping away that comes with life, and the good news, you know, in our tradition, is, is that Jesus says I can use all of that, follow me through it.
Bishop Wright:And what I like about Jesus why Jesus is persuasive as far as I'm concerned is that, you know, we don't have a Jesus who never went through anything. You know, this Jesus understands betrayal. This Jesus understands how he goes to his tradition and even his tradition can't receive him. This Jesus understands how doing good has gotten him in a lot of trouble and even, in fact, doing good has gotten him lynched right. So this Jesus is someone that we can sort of get beside and he can help us to deal with all the things that we're going to deal with in life, and so loss being one of them, death being one of them, feeling forsaken being one of those, you know.
Bishop Wright:And so, again, this is an invitation for us to not to sort of try to outrun loss, not to build a wall around our lives, not to use indifference as a coping strategy, but to use sort of Jesus's strategy and our relationship to him as a way to move through the loss we lose.
Bishop Wright:I mean, you know, in loss we feel lost because we love right and we feel lost because we're human beings. And we feel lost because, you know, the familiar has been the familiar and has been a support to us. And now those supports, they change as we get older. You know, I was young and athletic at one point in my life. Now, not so much right, things change and we can stay trapped in sort of nostalgia or we can decide to move forward, you know, in life, understanding that I am all of those things you know, the things that I was previously and now I am these new things, and that causes me to amend my life and define different strengths and different parts of life, all of which are part of this wonderful plan that we call life.
Melissa:And so, bishop, I'm looking at the big, bold words growing up in Christ, and okay. So the juxtaposition of that is being immature, right, and I can't help but lament or worry or wonder about people who often get stuck in their grief cycles and will often fall into the trap of blaming God for the loss that they've experienced in life.
Bishop Wright:Yeah, I mean, this is really difficult, right, because you know this is so disorienting for people. So, if God is good, you know, goes the question why did God give someone I love cancer? Or you know, why was someone suddenly taken away in a catastrophic accident, etc. And then there is a legitimate I would say a legitimate anger at God. And you know, what I say to those folks is is that, you know, some people just need the permission, need to hear that it's okay to be angry for a season, it's okay to rage, it's okay to say all those things, it's okay to ask those questions. And we can say that because we have read our Bible and we know that the Psalms, those 150 wonderful, emotionally vulnerable Psalms, we can locate ourselves, no matter what season we're in, in those psalms. There are psalms where people wonder out loud you know, god, where were you? Even this dinner party with Mary and Martha and Lazarus, not, you know, not long before this dinner party, in Scripture, mary and Martha are upset with Jesus because they say to Jesus if you would have been here, man, you know, my brother would not have died, right. And so, you know, even in this dinner party, there's an evolution. So I think we have to start with how we honestly feel and then I think you know we have to not tend to these kinds of feelings all by ourselves. You know, a good therapist, a good you, a good pastoral counselor, a good spiritual director can help us come to grips with how we feel about all these things and then direct us deeper and into a conversation with God.
Bishop Wright:But a lot of times we're angry with God because we have these sort of with God, because we have these sort of panacea ideas about who God actually is, and we say that God is some sort of, or we've been taught that God is somehow some sort of Superman or super being who's sort of standing atop all the high skyscrapers waiting to dive down and rescue us from every little bit of peril. Well, that's just not the relationship that we have with God. That's not who God is. People love God and they still will die. Some people love God and still will become sick. You know, going to church does not guarantee us, you know, a clean report from the doctor. That's simply not how this works. We have a God who wants to go through things with us and so you know, we die because we're human. We get diseases because we're human. We get sick because we're human. Catastrophe befalls us because we're human and Jesus tends to all this in Scripture and all these kind of questions are all in Scripture.
Bishop Wright:So I think what it's very human and very legitimate to wonder, to rage, to be upset and, at the same time, what we don't want to do is be stuck. We don't want to prolong that. We don't want our evolution, our relationship with God, our relationship with ourselves and perhaps even loved ones to stall. And that's one of the reasons why we did the series was just to hopefully unstuck some of us. And that's one of the reasons why we did the series was just to hopefully unstuck some of us, because it's really easy to get stuck there and it's really easy to just sort of check out.
Bishop Wright:You know my own mother.
Bishop Wright:When I was a, when I was a child, my father died and left her with two children and rather than leaning into her church community, she leaned out and thank God for the young people in the neighborhood when she was not able to take us to church because of her own crisis emotional and financial and otherwise other people took us to church and my sister and I would tell you now, after many years, we're so grateful to have been invited forward into relationship with other people and into relationship with the church and with God because of other people.
Bishop Wright:So maybe there's an invitation for some of us If we know someone who is stuck, we get alongside them and, with good love and good care, we offer them sort of an invitation to join us moving forward. Thank God that happened to me and I hope that I'm doing some of that with this series, but it is very hard and very bewildering for a lot of people. But I think that what we want to do, and at least what scripture says, is that we want to move towards maturity, and maturity always wants us to engage and never to withdraw. I think that's what I want to say.
Melissa:Well, I would say gosh Seneca said it before, semisonic sang it Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end, and Isaiah says that God is doing a new thing. So on the other side of loss there are new beginnings.
Bishop Wright:Yeah, well, here's the hopeful part, and maybe we can end with this. The hopeful part is is there's no loss that we can endure, that we can't bring to God, and there's no loss that we can suffer that, in a relationship with God, we can't process Right, that in a relationship with God, we can't process right, and there's no loss that we can endure that God can't find a way to plant, you know, the next season's flowers, and I think that's the invitation. So to know that God can make something out of what feels like a dark dead end, is the good news of Jesus Christ. That is the resurrection. That it looked like Good Friday, it looked like it was over, it looked like loss was going to get the last word and after a season and with God's intervention, new life sprung forward. And so that's the invitation for all of us, and I know that takes faith, and sometimes we're going to have to lend our faith to others who can't have faith in the midst of their loss.
Melissa:Indeed Bishop. Thank you so much and thank you, listeners, for listening to For People. You can follow us on Instagram and Facebook at Bishop Rob Wright, or by visiting www. forpeople. digital. Please subscribe, leave a review and we'll be back with you next week.