For People with Bishop Rob Wright
For People with Bishop Rob Wright
Vengeance
When we've been hurt or rejected, vengeance may be something we desire. Christian maturity helps us build capacities to defer and fend off the need for vengeance.
In this episode, Melissa and Bishop Wright have a conversation about vengeance. Using Luke 9:51-62, they unpack Jesus' response when his disciples wanted to "rain fire and brimstone" on a Samaritan village that rejected them. Jesus rebukes their desire for vengeance suggesting that vengeance distracts those who have decided to pursue the kingdom of God. Whether we're discussing global conflicts or personal relationships, the space between being triggered and responding represents our opportunity for growth. "Whatever triggers you is trying to set you free," Bishop Wright notes, suggesting our reactions point to places where healing is needed. Listen in for the full conversation.
Read For Faith, the companion devotional.
The issue I think in front of us in lots of ways now is vengeance. Some people describe the world as dog-eat-dog, you know, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, etc. And I like to think of Christian maturity really as a set of practices and a capacity to defer, delay and even fend off our need for vengeance.
Melissa:Welcome to For People. I'm Melissa Rau, your host, 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 For Faith and a link to subscribe in the episode description. Howdy Bishop.
Bishop Wright:The hostess For the mostest.
Melissa:All right, so let's dive deep into this. I love the name of this devotion you call vengeance. I don't love vengeance, I just love the name. It's based off of Luke, chapter nine, verses 51 to 62. It's basically the disciples are following Jesus into the Samaritan town and the Samaritan town didn't want to receive Jesus. So the Samaritan town and the Samaritan town didn't want to receive Jesus and they wanted to. They asked Jesus if they wanted, if he wanted them to rain fire and brimstone upon their heads.
Bishop Wright:Right and consume them.
Melissa:Consume them, and so, of course, jesus admonishes them. This, of course, is what you centered your devotion this week on. Want to say more.
Bishop Wright:Yeah Well, I mean, as we look out at the world you know, and you read these stories it's I always like to challenge myself to find sometimes I do a good job, sometimes I struggle to find the one word that sort of aptly, sort of connects what I think the major idea is it's a great practice actually, if you're a Bible reader and especially a preacher is to look at a lesson and see if you can distill it in a word. I had a great teacher in seminary. He would always ask me, rob, so what are you preaching on? And I would always come in and I'd be so effusive and I'd have all this. I'd basically respond to him in a paragraph and he said oh so I see, you're not quite sure what you're preaching on yet, and of course I walk out of there tail between my legs. But I've come now over the years, to realize the real wisdom in that, and so, yeah, that's one of the reasons why I do a one word distillation of this over these last series of years is because I think there's a major idea, and oftentimes it's a word that gets repeated again and again in a story.
Bishop Wright:But you know, looking at the world, looking at the New York Times, at the newspapers, wall Street Journal, whatever paper we read, looking at the world and looking at scripture, you know, the issue, I think, in front of us in lots of ways now is vengeance. It is, you know, some people describe the world as dog eat dog. You know, eye for eye, tooth for a tooth, et cetera. And I like to think of Christian maturity really as a set of practices and a capacity to defer, delay and even fend off our need for vengeance. That would be one indicator of Christian maturity. But forget what I say.
Bishop Wright:I mean here's what the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu say. The real secret of freedom, they say, may be in extending the brief space between stimulus and response. He goes on to say meditation, and for the Christian we would say prayer. He goes on to say meditation, and for the Christian we would say prayer. Contemplation seems to elongate the pause and help expand our ability to choose our response, or better, choose a response. And so the disciples are like hey, man, we've been rejected, jesus, you've been rejected. We're quite upset about that.
Bishop Wright:And so it's interesting that the disciples now want to exercise power and on other occasions they act like they didn't have any power right and Jesus was inviting them to exercise power. But now what they want is they want to be turned loose to exercise sort of vengeance, call down fire from heaven and consume these people who have rejected them. And so what I wrote in the meditation is that I think that what they're doing is they're exploring Jesus's sort of capacity for vengeance. They want to know if vengeance is a part of how Jesus wants to respond. And notice also, it does not seem in the story that there is a lot of space between their offense, them being offended, and their response. And you think about that, you think about us. In marriages, in relationships, in the world. We get really caught up in these loops. Somebody pokes us, we poke them back and then off, we go to the races and we don't ever break the cycles and then it's just it ends up being, you know, catastrophic.
Melissa:Yeah, I love the book, the Desmond Tutu Dalai Lama book. I think it's Finding Joy and Happiness that they kind of co-wrote together. Yeah, I love that. It's a great, great book, highly recommend. You know, bishop, that pause thing is so apt, you know, taking the time and having the fortitude and the awareness to know when you've been triggered into something. Maybe Because we just, I don't know, sometimes I feel like people, people want, when they hurt, they want other people to hurt.
Bishop Wright:Yeah, that's right, and.
Melissa:I, you know, it's that meditation, that contemplation, the prayer that gives people, I think, a longer fuse.
Bishop Wright:Yeah, you know you're using a word now that's really popular today. It's a word I never really grew up with, but you know growing, you know living now you hear the word trigger a lot, right, trigger. And you know I was reading something really interesting the other day about triggers, you know, and it says whatever triggers you is trying to actually set you free. Right, it's an indicator of where you might be bound, where the flow is obstructed. And so you know, maybe the invitation here is that to notice in this story that Jesus was not triggered by rejection in the way that his disciples were triggered by rejection. And we might say there was forbearance there. We can name all other kinds of things, forbearance and forgiveness. Maybe Jesus had some understanding, maybe Jesus could empathize with what they might be afraid of by welcoming him and his disciples to their village. I mean, it's just interesting to me that if you just sort of click on Jesus a little bit and go down, even with sort of our best learning now, you see that, yeah, he may have been triggered, certainly the disciples were triggered, but what you do in triggers, you know, in that triggering moment, is the opportunity, invitation for growth.
Bishop Wright:And I don't say that, let me just say because you know we get on this podcast and I get to say all kinds of things. You know I'm not saying certainly not that I have this mastered, and even when the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu are talking about it, they're not saying that they've got it mastered. What they're saying is is that this is the truth and the invitation to our better, more regulated, maybe even more benevolent selves and that if we want a better world, a better household you name it better organizations, that somebody and this is where it may feel unfair to us somebody is going to have to break the cycle. Somebody is going to have to grow up, somebody is going to have to forbear, somebody is going to have to turn the other cheek and forgive, or we just get locked into these reactive cycles that ultimately, nothing good happens.
Melissa:Yeah, it's like the ping pong match, you know here and they're off. They're off to the races, and so what does breaking the cycle then require, or what does that look like to you, bishop?
Bishop Wright:Well, I mean again, here's Jesus breaking the cycle because he doesn't harbor, he doesn't give safe harbor to vengeance, I mean. So I think breaking cycles means saying yes to some things and saying no to some things. You know, quite practically it is, and I think you know that quote, I read to you it is elongating, very practically, elongating the space between our response to triggers or perceived injuries or rejections or whatever the case may be. I think, you know, we are looking now out to Los Angeles and we're seeing, you know, the streets full of protesters and we're seeing, you know, the streets full of protesters. We're seeing, you know, some chaos, we're seeing some law enforcement officers' lives being put at jeopardy and at the same time, you know, we're seeing the response and one wonders if the response, by inviting National Guard and Marines, you know, is a proportional response. And so you know, you know, I would hope that we would be able to find a way to elongate responses, protecting our law enforcement officers, protecting property at the same time, but also bringing some sort of understanding. So I think saying yes is elongating the response. Saying yes is elongating the response, it is trying to account for lots of nuances, but I also think it's not having the ego needs that many of us have. You know, behind a lot of triggers is deep pain, and so what we're trying to do is react and the thing that is immediately triggering us is probably connected to a deep and historic wound or deep ego need to assert, to overcome, etc. So I guess you know that sounds like word salad, but I guess what we're talking about is a very complicated thing that has everything to do with maturity, right, and it is, and having you know this is why the Dalai Lama, to be sort of centered down to where I don't have the evil need to be over and against you. I don't have to run roughshod over you, I don't have to obliterate you Right To be, to be me. In fact, I can reject, you know, maybe even what I might perceive as my right to vengeance. I think that's what you have to do, and we know that that's hard, because these things get so full with emotion, right, we get flooded with emotion, and then we're off to the races and again we can talk about big things, los Angeles, we can talk about Gaza, we can talk about lots of things. But you know, you see this vividly at home and with spouses and with relatives that you know trigger us, and there have been historic hurts and etc. Etc.
Bishop Wright:So I think the other thing too is to find a space down the road to then come again and say something to someone. You know the Gottman Institute talks a lot about a soft entering into a legitimate disagreement, you know. So the story is incomplete. We know that Jesus just denied the disciples their vengeance and he decided not to participate in it. But that doesn't mean we just leave things hanging. There may be an opportunity down the road the story doesn't say so but for us down the road to reenter the wound, the wound making the offense softer I think that's also an indicator of maturity is is that, you know, week, three days, two days, whenever it is cooler, heads prevail.
Bishop Wright:We buy a cup of coffee and say you know, the other day was really, really hard for me. I was, in fact, I was really overwhelmed. I want you to know that I worked really hard not to react but just to listen so that I could give you my better response. And here's my better response. You know this is hard stuff, but I mean, I think what good is faith if it doesn't invite us into more capacity right and show us a way forward where things are really difficult for us. So what we want to do is we want to grow.
Bishop Wright:Maybe the disciples learned that day that. And Jesus goes on to say you know, this is really about the kingdom. So he puts kingdom on this. So kingdom is always with us, opportunity for kingdom is always with us. Kingdom is small sometimes. Kingdom isn't a yes, kingdom isn't a no, kingdom is forbearance. You know all these sort of things. So it's amazing that he holds these two ideas together. So these little practices that we can take up with each other actually release and reveal kingdom. And Jesus just was not going to be distracted that day. He sticks to the plan.
Melissa:You know, I took a Kingian nonviolence seminar way back when and I learned something interesting that when there's conflict, typically conflict escalates the closer one is in relationship to another. So the more people have in common, the greater the risk for harm and conflict and bad feelings. Which is kind of ironic, if you think about it, because we talk about our enemies being so far away. We don't often know them. But actually the harm one can do to a person they supposedly love or have a lot in common with is exponentially increased the closer ones are together. I don't know what to do about that, bishop. When it comes to vengeance, really what we're talking about is healing. Triggers are easily triggered because there's unprocessed damage or woundedness right, I think, at least.
Bishop Wright:No, I think that's right. You know, what's interesting is, that is you. You know, what I love about the Bible still is is that if you, if you click on an idea and then you decide to sort of you know, go deep in it, you know it, it always comes out on the side of love and freedom, right? So, however you enter into the story, it always ends up with God inviting us to take up practices, words, behaviors, non-behaviors that will lead us to freedom. And so one of the things that vengeance does is that it really makes you slave to the one who committed the offense, and so your response is actually dictated by the very person you say that you object to, that has offended you, etc. And so you know, the disciples are bopping along Jesus, those guys are doing things and then, all of a sudden, now they want to take this detour and do vengeance and consume, you know, consume a village, etc. Well, that was not part of the strategy, but because they decided to handle the offense in a particular way. Now they're off mission, right? And so you know, what Jesus in many ways does is to keep them free, right? So we're not defined by this rejection. The rejection happened. Yes, we know that we're not putting our head in the sand about it, but we have, I mean, think about it. It's real agency, it's real freedom. I have the freedom and the agency to decide how I will handle that rejection right Now. This is just not high-minded talk. I mean, you put this stuff in practice and it accrues to joy, right? So I can't be knocked off my mark.
Bishop Wright:And when you meet these kinds of people, I mean this is what's so wonderful about Atlanta and my time here is I met all these amazing civil rights leaders who you know. For them, it wasn't just about conversation and about emotional triggers. These people were beat over the heads, they were thrown in jail, they were abused, life threatened, et cetera, et cetera. And how did they stay centered is an extraordinary question. And to get to meet some of them and to speak to them and they just they believe that the stakes were so high. And so what they didn't want to do was not only respond violence for violence, but they didn't want to lose what they thought was their primary value, and that was to walk close to Jesus. And so for them, you know, you know, these folks who were doing violence and et cetera, et cetera to them, were really testing their resolve to stay centered on the kingdom, right? You know the old song no turning back, no turning back, right.
Bishop Wright:And so to me they bundled the best of this idea, which is that these things are tests. These things are, you know, in many ways for our ego needs, delicious invitations to distraction. And yet you and I wouldn't be here having the conversations that we're having in this country, and this country would be so much less, if they were not able really to forego a need for vengeance. I mean, just think about that, think about the genius of the non-violent movement. And this is my real hope now, even as our country is being sort of in the throes of a very difficult moment in Los Angeles.
Bishop Wright:I'm all for the protests and I'm all for making the point. That's part of our right as Americans. But to keep it clean, to keep it nonviolent I think you know Dr King would say is to take the moral high ground and it is to prove the better point. And yes, some people will say that rage and riot is the language of the unheard. I understand that. But at the same time, you know the movement, for it to yield the better fruits, has got to stay nonviolent and it's got to be above vengeance.
Melissa:Well, Bishop, thank you so much for your wisdom on vengeance. It's not mine to be had or yours, is it? Well, that's it, mine to be had or yours is it.
Bishop Wright:If we're truly calling Christ, that's it. And let me say this I know we're wrapping up, but let me just say this too, because you just named something that's critical here. So who does vengeance belong to Right? And so there's a freedom invitation too. So if I can just say well, vengeance belongs to God, we'll let God sort that out. Then I might end up just a little bit freer.
Melissa:Indeed Thanks be to God for that, bishop. Thank you and thank you, listeners, for tuning in 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.