David Brisbin Podcast

Dave Brisbin 10.4.26 A woman told me she had remarried and was having trouble blending families. She had two small children. Her new husband had a huge black Labrador named Tucker. Tucker and the kids left no spot unspotted, filling the house while her husband was working or work-traveling leaving her to remember she was not a dog person, didn’t like dogs, especially this huge thing everywhere at once shedding and smelling…like a dog. When she couldn’t stand the smell and shedding another day, figured a bath should help. Only way she could think to manage it was to put Tucker in the shower, get in with him, start the water, and pour on the soap. Tucker loved it. Biting at the water, shaking it off, wiggling and leaning into her scrubs, everyone soaked. A few showers later, he was following her around the house, and a bond she never thought possible was revealed right under the surface of her discontent. Changed the way she approached everything. So… What if heaven isn’t the end of our journey, but the begi

Dave Brisbin 9.27.26 Do you have faith? How do you know? Because you believe you believe? What if there’s the slightest doubt? Is it still faith? As long as we imagine faith as mental agreement, we can run round these questions forever without ever really knowing. So Jesus’ brother James comes to the rescue, holding up Abraham as a hero of faith. Promised by God to be the father of many nations and innumerable descendants, Abraham is still childless at age 100 with his wife Sarah who is 90. The miraculous birth of their son Isaac is the proof to which he clings that God’s promise will be fulfilled. But he’s not our hero until he agrees to sacrifice his miraculous son of promise at God’s order. Christians have seen Isaac as foreshadowing Jesus, made to carry the firewood as Jesus carried the cross to the top of the same hill on which Jesus died. In what are we placing our faith? Is God really so monstrously cruel as to require the death of a son only to pull back at the last instant? The overarching mess

Dave Brisbin 9.20.26 In rhetoric—the art of persuasion—there are two basic ways to motivate someone to act. Protrepsis calls to another way of living or perceiving life, motivation to change. Paraenesis calls to continue a way of life already in motion, encouragement and advice to persevere. Biblical prophecy like that of Isaiah is protrepsis—calls to repent, change direction, avert the coming catastrophe. And when people don’t and are standing in the smoking crater of what once was everything they knew and believed, apocalyptic books like Daniel or Revelation are paraenesis—calls to remain steadfast, in faith that God remains present, all promises intact. Jesus and James share not only kinship, but their very Jewish teaching style as well. Even so, Jesus’ teaching is protrepsis, calling people to a relationship with God they could never imagine, to which their religion was no longer pointing. James, trying to hold the early movement together, taught through paraenesis, encouraging people to endure despit

Dave Brisbin 9.13.26 Years ago, a co-worker became a good friend—a man from India with very dark skin and big, white teeth. When he smiled it was exactly like snapping on a high-powered flashlight. And he was always smiling. I liked him immediately, and we’d go to lunch and meet after work hours as well. Just one fly in the ointment…he was always late. Not just a little. Sometimes an hour or more. I was developing an appropriate resentment, so I knew I had a choice to make…somehow grin and bear the tardiness or end the friendship. Neither was acceptable, so I found a third door. Without even telling him why, I’d always ask to meet at my apartment. That way, I just lived my life until he showed up, which was then always at the right time, often with homemade Tandoori chicken and the smile. He marched to a very different drummer and was always exactly himself, which is what I loved. I didn’t have vocabulary or concept for it then, but Chinese Daoists call it ziran, “self-so.” Means living or acting authenti

Dave Brisbin 9.6.26 I don’t usually do verse-by-verse scripture studies. Too easy to get lost in details, lose the forest for the trees. Too easy to be consumed with commentary and lose the application to everyday life. Without that application grounding scripture in human relationship and community, we lose relevant meaning. The exceptions are the Sermon on the Mount and the Book of James. Why? They’re all application. No coincidence that Matthew, containing the Sermon on the Mount, and James are the two most Jewish books of the NT and may have been originally written in Hebrew/Aramaic. Or that James was Jesus’ brother cut from the same Jewish cloth. Or that the Sermon on the Mount and James were used as catechisms for the early movement of Jesus followers. You won’t find high theology in the Sermon or James, only the building blocks of everyday life. James has been called the “Proverbs of the New Testament” and is filled with practical wisdom, aphorisms for living ethically in community along Jesus’ Way.

Dave Brisbin 8.30.26 Wait, Jesus had a brother? Scripture says he had four—James, Joses, Judas, Simon—and sisters too, unnamed and unnumbered. Not talked about much because Jesus with full siblings, DNA from both Mary and Joseph, blows up the doctrine of virgin birth that most Christianity accepts. If they were half-siblings, Mary having children after Jesus blows up the doctrine of Mary’s perpetual virginity that Catholic and Orthodox churches accept. But there’s a third door. With no word for cousin in Hebrew/Aramaic, they had to say son or daughter of my uncle. Cumbersome. So mostly they just said brother or sister. Jesus’ brothers could have been cousins, as Jesus’ aunt, Mary of Clopas, had at least two sons named James and Joses. Whew. However you see it, Jesus had a brother named James. We hear all about Peter and Paul as leaders of the early Jesus movement, but in the confusion following the crucifixion, there was only one man who had the reputation, trust, and kinship to hold the fledgling move

Dave Brisbin 8.23.26 Ever awaken at 3:30 in the morning? Doesn’t it always seem to be 3:30? Maybe coming out of a disorienting dream, disembodied in the dark with all it means to be you laid aside? It’s right there in that naked vulnerability that a lot of the work of Jesus’ Way is already done for you… Your clothes are in the closet. Your Rolex on the night stand. Maybe your teeth are in the bathroom. Car and tools in the garage, diplomas on the office wall. The people reflecting your roles seem remote, no substance in the dark. Who are you then? How do you relate to anything of significance? Later you get up, make coffee, feel better. Your reflection in the mirror, your clothes and rituals rebuild you in the light, help you forget questions circling in the dark. Jesus’ Way is the practice of waking at 3:30 AM and remaining quiet, disembodied, not running back to your reflection until all you’ve built around yourself becomes transparent enough to see right through to those central questions asked in the

Dave Brisbin 8.16.26 Are we human beings having a spiritual experience? Spiritual beings having a human experience? If you’ve been around the contemplative block, you know it’s never either/or, but both/and. Duality exists only in our minds, specifically, our left brains. Once immersed in momentary, right-brain experience, duality dissolves. Physical and spiritual can’t be separated as long as we’re breathing in these bodies. Many traditions consider spirit conscious energy. Einstein—E=MC2—considers energy and matter the same thing in different states. Whether spirit is really conscious energy is endlessly debatable, but the analogy helps us see that we can’t have spiritual experience apart from brains and bodies—the interpretation and sensation of any experience while human. For millennia, the Church has taught being more spiritual by being less physical, that the world is profane. But for ancient Jews who wrote our scripture, spiritual life was realized when fully immersed in physical life. Marriage, s

Dave Brisbin 8.9.26 You may be familiar with an elevator speech. Whatever you have to offer, if you can’t articulate who you are, what you do, why it matters in the time it takes to get to your floor in an elevator, you’ve lost the opportunity. Jesus’ Way is purely experiential, not cognitive, but we still need an elevator speech to concisely understand what it is and isn’t or we’ll be digging holes where there is no treasure. We each need our own personal speech…but generally, it’s not a path leading somewhere else. It’s how we follow the path we’re already on, growing awareness of the unseen Oneness of all things in two complementary ways: living as if oneness really exists while relinquishing everything that obscures it. Only way to see who we really are in relation to what really is. In 1996, a neuroanatomist had a stroke. Function by function, her left hemisphere went offline, leaving her entirely in her right mind. The left brain is the source of ego awareness, linear order, sense of separation and p

Dave Brisbin 8.2.26 We have always been taught that Jesus came to save us from our sins. Not true. Not sins plural as in all the harmful choices we make or actions we commit. God understands those, loves right through those. In John’s gospel, Jesus came to take away the sin of the world. Singular. Not choices or actions, but a state of being…separate. The universal sin of the world—the pervading illusion of separation, of ourselves as separate from, in competition with everyone and everything else—the state from which every harmful choice and action proceeds. The price of human self-awareness is to experience ourselves as separate beings, a sensation so physically pervasive, it overwhelms the unseen truth of ultimate connection. As infants, we swim in undifferentiated oneness until old enough to conceive of ourselves with distinct edges. Then the hurts and traumas of childhood pile up creating a narrative of unworthiness indoctrinating us to believe we’re not worthy of the connection we more and more diml

Dave Brisbin 7.26.26 Played high school football my first two years. Bookish kid trying to fit in, never got off the bench in league play. But I could learn that playbook. Knew it cover to cover better than the starters. Took some nerdy pride in that. Small and fast, they put me at tight end and during a training scrimmage, quarterback called an end around. I knew that play cold: two steps off the line, planted, spun around across the backfield, quarterback fading into view, ball suspended in my path, slapped against my chest. Clamped down and turned back toward the line. Perfectly executed. But in my mind, the play was over. No more lines on the page. Holding the ball with absolutely no idea what to do next. A big linebacker showed me. I had focused on what I could understand, but everything it means to be a football player starts where the playbook ends. The parts we can read and memorize are not why we go to football games. What we do when nothing is telling us what to do…that’s worth a ticket. In

Dave Brisbin 7.19.26 A contemporary theologian and semiotician—how meaning is communicated—saw that our youngest generations process information differently than older Westerners in the modern era. He called it EPIC: experiential, participatory, image-based, and communal. Pretty much the exact opposite of our modern method: propositional, representational, word-based, individualistic. We propose abstract concepts rather than experience a process; passively receive information rather than participate in an exchange; view the world through words as an individual rather than images within community. The hallmark of the modern West is to remain intellectually detached, observing life and attempting control from a safe distance. But the youngest among us jump right in, experiencing and participating in a communal world awash in image. Absorbing this decades ago, the light went on when I realized that ancient cultures, especially the Hebrews who wrote our scriptures, were EPIC too. Here we are, modern Westerners

Dave Brisbin 7.12.26 If God were sitting next to you right now and you could ask one question, what would it be? Puts a pretty fine point on it, yes? To stop the ever-running assembly line of questions forming in your mind and pick just one… For adults, the questions were predictable: Why do you allow suffering? Don’t all religions lead to you? How can I trust the bible? If you’re really there, why don’t you prove it? Children’s responses were predictably less heady: How are you doing? Are you happy? And… If God was sitting next to me, I’d just like to give him a hug. Gotta love kids. That last one really points in the right direction. Adults have to face the fact that the most important questions in life don’t have answers. Only the experience of asking. Life isn’t answered and resolved rationally. Only lived. We can keep asking questions, but using our minds to navigate a spiritual journey is like bringing a knife to a gunfight…the mind is not the vehicle for such a journey. Even so, there is one que

Dave Brisbin 7.5.26 Truth is messy. We like the beginning of things, especially big things like nations, to be neat and tidy events, so looking back, we compress them into just such neat narratives. Our histories and memories rely much more on poems we write about our heroes than actual happenings. True beginnings are most often a messy process that scatters and diffuses the points we want to remember. The points remain, just not wrapped in a bow. July 4th, 2026, we celebrated the 250th anniversary of what? Our nation’s birth? Beginning of revolution? Signing of the Declaration of Independence? None of those happened on July 4th, 1776. The war started a year before, and the Declaration wasn’t first signed until August 2nd with signatures dribbling in through early 1777. The colonies simply adopted Jefferson’s rough draft on the 4th of July. Truth is messy, but the point of the document remains… Jefferson speaks of political bands as existing only to serve the people—at their own consent—and when they n

Dave Brisbin 6.28.26 Eucharist—usually called communion—is the essential Christian sacrament, the centerpiece of Christian worship. When a sacrament persists for millennia as a defining ritual, it’s telling us something about how earliest followers understood their journey. It can also tell us what we’ve forgotten about ours. Eucharist means thanksgiving…because Jesus gave thanks over bread and wine at that last supper…because we should gratefully remember Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross, the means by which sins are forgiven, and we are saved. Jesus said that the bread was his body and wine a new covenant in his blood, but how we understand the word covenant has everything to do with how we understand communion. In the West, we’ve understood covenant as a legal contract obligating both parties as contracts do. If we keep the terms of the contract, God is obligated to accept us, save us. But through the lens of original sin, there is nothing we can do to make ourselves worthy, so contractually, Jesus must do

Dave Brisbin 6.21.26 At the extremes, physical reality is utterly different than the world we perceive each day. Unlike our solar system with distinct planets neatly orbiting the sun, inside an atom, an electron doesn’t orbit a nucleus, but has a form that can only be described as a cloud of probability. It doesn’t orbit. It surrounds the nucleus like a fog. Quantumly speaking, electrons are in superposition. In this state, subatomic particles don’t exist in any one place. There is only a certain probability of being here as opposed to there…until we interact with them, measure them. Then superposition collapses, and from our point of view, the particle is forced to “choose” a position. Before we interact, all positions and energy states are possible. Within the atom, the particle is everywhere and nowhere and yet always right herenow. Ancient Hebrews described God hovering over the moment of creation, a conscious interaction that collapsed the void into the positions of space, time, and matter—a version

Dave Brisbin 6.14.26 God is love. That’s not just a statement, it’s a principle. Attributes we experience as the infinite Source of everything go far beyond qualities we use to describe. They point at essence, a table of indivisible elements, commodities that comprise the whole. If God is love, then God is also everything else that supports the oneness that love is: restoration, reconciliation, salvation, forgiveness. God doesn’t perform them as verbs. God is them as nouns. Even grammar can’t keep up. If God is forgiveness, then God doesn’t forgive. Forgiveness is the essence of the field of God’s presence. Enter the field, enter forgiveness. There is no prerequisite for forgiveness. No contrition, confession, penance required. No precondition beyond what it takes any of us to enter the field. Entering the field, being fully present, means being fully aware, vulnerable, humble, willing to submit to something greater than self. Which happen to be the same qualities that forgive—free us from guilt or vi

Dave Brisbin 6.7.26 Man on his roof as flood waters rise. A boat paddles by—jump in, and we’ll save you. No, God will save me. Another boat—jump in, we’ll save you. No, God will save me. A helicopter hovers extending a rope ladder—climb up, and we’ll save you. No, God will save me. Flood comes up, and the man drowns. Face to face with God, he asks, why didn’t you save me? I sent two boats and a helicopter, what more did you want? How much time and angst do we spend asking for things we already possess? That are already here? We’ve been taught a zero-sum model of spirituality that enshrines scarcity over abundance. We’ve been taught a legal model of spiritual relationship that embeds a reward and punishment mindset. We’ve been taught an anthropomorphic God, operating out of human emotion with anger, resentment, retribution much more immediate than love and compassion. We’ve been taught to fear. Fear that God withholds until conditions are met. That contrition, confession, and penance are the legal means

Dave Brisbin 5.31.26 Sin is central to Western Christianity. From original sin—understood as a genetic state of depravity, a separation from God unbridgeable by human effort—to our own personal sins—understood as unlawful behavior—all we can do is wait to be saved by an outside power—understood as an event, a granting of approval triggered by ritual practice or mental assent to doctrinal beliefs. I know…putting it that way is a bit hyperbolic. But only a bit. Especially in contrast to Eastern Christianity, which understands salvation as a process of theosis—a life of becoming more and more God-like in awareness, intent, daily presence and practice. By default, we’re all legalists, believing we must earn everything we get. That’s the physical reality of life around us, and human authority always uses reward/punishment to control behavior through fear. By the third century, the church had codified Jesus’ message into more law, ironically missing the fact that Jesus constantly battled the religious legal sy

Dave Brisbin 5.24.26 When Jesus says, do not judge, for in the way that you judge, you will be judged, and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you, he is saying something immense. But we don’t get it. Squeezed through our default perspective, which is always legal, we see life through a performance-based, reward and punishment paradigm that peels off just one of the possible meanings of Jesus’ saying: that if we consciously judge/condemn others, we will be judged back. And through our legal lens, God is the one doing the retaliatory judging in some karma-like way. But the Aramaic language itself and Jesus as a Jewish mystic point to much more. Our minds are judging machines. That’s all they do. Compare, contrast, calculate odds for advantage and survival, dualistically judging each moment and everything in it as good or bad for our needs and agenda. Good and evil appear mutually exclusive and morally opposed against the standards we have absorbed since childhood. And those standards objec