Whatever

“Whatever” is usually the word you use when you’re done listening. In Philippians 4:1-9, Paul flips is the other way. Paul turns “whatever” into a wide-open invitation to grow your moral imagination and to pursue what is honorable, just, pure, pleasing, and commendable. The surprising twist is that those words are not a small box. They are guardrails for a bigger life with God and neighbor.

In this episode, Melissa and Bishop Wright have a conversation about a real tension many of us feel: church can drift into being an institution that shrinks people, which is why “spiritual not religious” resonates. If Jesus is not meant to be domesticated, what would it look like to “give him back to the world” through the way we live, lead, and serve? Listen in for the full conversation.

Read For Faith, the companion devotional.

Transcript

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Bigger, Not Smaller

Bishop Wright 0:00

Jesus went to his own people and said, Hey, this thing was supposed to make us bigger, not smaller. What church has got to be doing is always stretching itself. Jesus started a movement, not an organization, not a 501c3. It was meant uh to be a movement, not a museum. I think this is why it's so important uh for us as individuals to not make church our only spiritual resource.

Melissa 0:30

Welcome And The “Whatever” Devotion

Melissa 0:40

So you called this week's devotion whatever. Based on Philippians chapter 4, verses 1 through 9. You want to take it away?

Bishop Wright 1:10

Sure. When someone says whatever to us, usually we're being placated or worse, dismissed. Meant this way, whatever signals the shrinking of listening and understanding, but not with the apostle Paul. Whatever is his way to invite us to as much as possible with God and neighbor. Whatever is how he stirs our moral imagination, excellence, and engagement to new scope and scale. Whatever Paul says is honorable, just pure, pleasing, and commendable. Whatever is how Paul prompts us to think about the practical forms of friendship we can express towards God who has first befriended us.

Melissa 2:08

I love your spin on this, Bishop. So really, what's hitting you today other than what you just read?

Moral Imagination As A Faith Muscle

Bishop Wright 2:15

Well, yeah, well, you know, it just I mean like, you know, we talked about reverse was my last week's meditation. And it's just, you know, what's the old quote? You ought to read the Bible and uh and the New York Times or whatever the newspaper is simultaneously together. And, you know, I just think about the way in which we dismiss one another with whatever, as I said in a meditation, and it just limits us, shrinks us, makes things smaller. But Paul means something much more, bigger. Let your imagination run to its farthest edges and and and think about this wonderful list about what's honorable, commendable, just pure, and just sort of I think I think our faith life so often is limited by our imagination.

Melissa 3:02

Oh my gosh. Imagination was literally the word that was just coming to mind.

Bishop Wright 3:07

Yeah, and and I and I think um I think that uh that does real injury to to what our lives could look like, is that we think of God as small, and therefore we think of life with God as small. We think of religion as this thing that intends intends to make us small. Um I think that's what people mean when they say I'm spiritual, not religious. I think in many ways they're saying I don't want to be in this little box. Now the good news is neither does Jesus want us to be in a little box. And and the best read of our tradition is that it is inviting us on a pathway that's bigger than we can imagine, where risk and gift work so we can meet a trustworthy God. And so I like what Paul is doing here. He's just saying, whatever, man. In other words, let's go big, let's really think about this thing. And the only guardrails are what is just, what is pure, what is pleasing, right? And what is commendable. That's the guardrail. And then other than that, you know, let's make some stuff up, let's be generative, as long as we're going down this line, which builds and doesn't tear down.

Melissa 4:18

So you're striking a chord in me right now because you talked about the spiritual, not religious. And like kind of what you were getting to, sometimes I feel like people who have stepped out of the institutional church have a bigger imagination and are criticizing the lack or the smallness, the small imagination or lack thereof of the people who are so in the institution. So, what message would you have for people in the pews who are faithful and steadfast, who who maybe just need to exercise

Movement Not Museum Church

Melissa 4:55 Speaker 4:55

their imagination a bit more?

Bishop Wright 4:57

This is the perennial tension, right? I mean, it's it's as old as scripture and it's it's as new as the headlines. You know, as soon as the Hebrew folks who were enslaved are freed, uh they want to automatically make God and freedom smaller, right? They want to cut it up into bite-sized morsels. This this is just the perennial sort of tension that we live in as human beings. Living with God is a risk. It's big, it's audacious. Uh, and for us to sort of make it palatable, make it bite-sized, we chop it up in small ways. And when we do that, it becomes chronically small. You know, Jesus went to his own people, he went to his own religious tradition and said, Hey, you know, boys and girls, this thing was supposed to make us bigger, not smaller. And, you know, what's that old adage? You know, God has made us in God's image, and we have turned around and uh repeated the favor, or returned the favor rather. And so I I think what church has got to be doing is always stretching itself. Jesus started a movement, not an organization, not a 501c3. It was a movement. It was meant to be the beneficiary of tradition, but not a slave tradition. It was it was meant to be a movement, not a museum.

Personal Practices Beyond Sunday

Bishop Wright 6:20

And uh I think this is why it's so important for us as individuals to not make church our only spiritual resource. So I invite people to say, so what's your own personal devotional life look like? I mean, church is where we're supposed to go, to be together, uh, so that we can be strengthened one to the other. We can be affirmed in our walk, we can benefit from other people's walks, we can be remembered who we are and whose we are, and then we go back into our various quarters of life and live out deep spirituality. What I find about real life is that a church is not nearly enough on its own. And so we've got to have our own practices. Usually when I come, I'm talking to you in the morning. I've I've just spent an hour and a half or so on my morning walk. You know, I walk down by the Chattahoochee River here in Marietta, Georgia. I'm talking to God, I'm trying to listen to God. Scripture comes to mind, I'm trying to go deeper, I'm trying to ask not only about my profession and how might I share scripture, but also what's this say to me, the person, the person who has fears and wants and desires and falls short, et cetera. So I'm simply saying that we've got to be doing more for our own selves and you know, waiting till the storm hits in our life is not adequate storm preparation, right? So we've got to be having some abundant and abiding life with God. So Paul is saying he's setting up uh he's setting up resilience in the community by saying, whatever. He's trying to enable people to sort of think bigger, think beyond. And, you know, I really resonate with people who say, I tried church and found it too small. Sadly, that is a legitimate criticism in too many places. And we've got to be honest. But I don't take it as condemnation, I take it as counseling. And so I take it as encouragement. So for those of us who still feel that the church is something to commend, and I am one of those, I see its possibilities. I think that we've got to take that criticism seriously, and we've got to figure out how we can not dumb Jesus down, not domesticate Jesus, but give him back to the world because that's where he wants to be. The four walls are not the church, the people are the church. And so, ennobled by his message, we go out and are difference makers. I think that's what Paul is saying. Paul doesn't put bricks around this message, he's saying, whatever. In other words, he's saying, you know, do a jazz riff. You know, he's he's saying, you know, where's the innovation? You know, and uh and and I love that. You know, one of my favorite jazz musicians is John Coltrane. I've said this before, and I love what John Coltrane does with standards. Like uh, these are a few of my favorite things, which is that that wonderful, beautiful song we know from the sound of music. Doesn't get any more traditional than the sound of music. But in the hands of John Coltrane, this little ditty becomes an 11, 12-minute journey. He still coheres to the melody, but he takes it new places. And I think that's what Paul is calling us to do when he says, whatever.

Melissa 9:38

Listening For What God Is Doing

Melissa 9:39

Yeah. I feel like one thing Paul was really good at was listening to the Spirit and what God was already doing in the communities in which he was led.

Bishop Wright 10:07

I think that's the best way to do it is to understand that God is already the places that we're going. God doesn't need us to take God anywhere. God is already there. What God is hoping, I think, if scripture is correct, is God is hoping that we would join God in God's purpose already in those places. And so we we do more listening when we go, we do more question making when we go, and uh and then sort of equipped with our tradition. It it helps us to be able to parse and sniff out what spirit is already doing. That's the most exciting part about this thing. Bryan

Proximity, Coalitions, And “Whomever”

Bishop Wright 10:45

Stevenson, I was with Bryan Stevenson the other day, the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, an extraordinary human being, built and bred in the church in Virginia. And one of the questions that I asked him was is that, you know, you've made a career out of telling America hard truths. Uh, how have you built coalitions with people who agree with what you say, who don't agree with what you say? How do you do that? And it had everything to do with proximity, he said. It had to do with going to where people were, you know, places where people are, uh, fending off the temptation to be condescending or self-righteous, and realizing that everybody has something to teach, right? And everybody has something to learn. And I it was it was in a huge crowd, and I just you heard the whole crowd, a couple, a couple thousand people just saying, huh, all at the same time. And Jesus is proximity, he came among us, dwelt among us, Emanuel, God with us. So proximity is what releases this.

Melissa 11:59

Proximity, that's great. Because y'all, if you haven't seen just mercy, I highly commend it to you because I think that is Bryan Stevenson saying a big whatever. You know?

Bishop Wright 12:11

Yeah. And and he when you say whatever, it means also, I think, implied there is whomever. So in other words, I'm not limited to who I can partner with. Whomever can join in these righteous purposes. Whomever, you know, has something to offer or a perspective, let's account for that. I mean, it's it's it's radical, right? It's uh, I mean, if it was food, it would be paella or jambalaya, it would be all these rich ingredients that shouldn't go together, but that they go together, oh my God, it's a it's a it's a sort of a banquet for the taste buds. I mean, you just can't outthink God in this regard. I mean, who is like God's imagination to think that God can make something out of all these radical, diverse, uh, diverse perspectives and ways uh into thinking about things, but yet God finds a way to put it all in the slow cooker of time, in the best case scenario, and makes something more of it than we could make in our sort of over-reliance on homogeneity, right? We want one flavor. God is like, well, there's flavors, and you ought to see what I can do with these things.

Melissa 13:27

So our posture.

Humility That Helps Us See God

Melissa 13:29

So when someone says to us, the church, my God is bigger than yours, perhaps we're being invited to take the posture of imagining imagining the God that the person who is saying, My God is bigger, might be experiencing of God already, that we're not. Maybe our posture is to learn and to listen.

Bishop Wright 13:50

Yeah, I think so. I I try to run far away from those kind of you know, conversations where somebody's God is bigger than the other God. I I'm I'm still working on the fact that there's God. And that Gody I go deep in that, what I end up in is is a humility that puts me beside people. And so not over and against people. And every time I find that I get caught into my ego, I end up over and against people, and then you you run real quickly into the limitations of that. But when you go down deep in the fact that God is, you know, the creator of all that there is, and yet decided to squeeze God's self into a human suit and walk among us, I mean, it just blows the mind. And to think that because we said whatever in the dim in a dismissive way, we could not see the Son of God standing right in front of us. Right? And and so, oh, the blindness. But then Paul helps us. He says, whatever. He says, increase your ability to see the horizon, the vista, and you'll see God afresh.

Melissa 15:02

Amen. Bishop, thank you. Thank

Closing And How To Connect

Melissa 15:05

you for your reflection and listeners, thank you 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.