David Brisbin Podcast

Dave Brisbin 11.3.19 If we really accept Jesus’ original challenge to “sell” everything we think we know and cling to for support and survival, what happens? What changes? The short answer is that we descend into a time of voluntary disorientation and disturbance sometimes bordering on panic as we realize our whole worldview wasn’t actually reality but just a set of beliefs, a filter on the world that we chose for ourselves or was chosen for us. And once we’ve looked behind the curtain, everything changes. But to be more specific, if we’re looking at the church and our faith, what changes and in which direction? In his book, a Quaker pastor describes ten new ways to look at Christian faith and church—ways that are possible to see and accept only after we’ve let go of our preconceptions and inherited beliefs. Can we find support for these new directions in the teachings of Jesus? And if we can, then these new ways of looking at church aren’t new at all. They are the reflection of Jesus’ original intent that we

Dave Brisbin 10.27.19 In speaking about the pain and disturbance of breaking out into larger spheres of awareness—being born again intellectually and spiritually—an ancient Chinese philosopher says, “you can’t speak of ocean to a wellfrog, the creature of a narrow sphere; you can’t speak of ice to a summer insect, the creature of a season.” To that I would add, “you can’t speak of perfect love to a human being, the creature of a broken heart.” Our broken hearts, as surely as the frog’s well or insect’s lifespan, wall us off from something so far from our imagined reality as to be inconceivable. How is it possible for us to break through the hurt, trauma, and need for defensive posture just long enough to glimpse the ocean of God’s love? The quick answer is faith—reeling off from the book of Hebrews that without faith it is impossible to please God. But that verse, so often used as a club over the head of the slightest admission of doubt or vulnerability, as if faith was the power we wield over uncertainty an

Dave Brisbin 10.20.19 Continuing on the previous week’s theme of Playing the Scriptures—finding the inspiration of scripture in the real time connection between inspired author, God, and inspired reader—what is our real relationship with scripture? The Quran, Islam’s sacred book, calls Jews and Christians “people of the book,” noting our special relationship and reverence for the text. But this focus on the text of scripture itself, the need to intellectually understand it as God’s revelation to humanity, has only brought two thousand years of division and persecution, resulting in tens of thousands of Christian denominations worldwide today. Is there another way to read scripture that heals divisions and brings us back shoulder to shoulder in shared meaning and purpose? Seems that is exactly what Paul is trying to do in his first letter to the Corinthians as he tries to heal the divisions among people focusing on different teachers with different interpretations, pledging allegiance to different factions am

Dave Brisbin 10.13.19 It is so interesting that bible scholars and commentators for two thousand years have agreed on very little that they read of God’s word and have violently disagreed often as not. And yet the mystics and contemplatives among us seem to unanimously agree on everything they know of God. Maybe it’s not so strange when you consider that scholars are reading words and mystics are experiencing presence, but do written words and unwritten experience necessarily lead to different results? Only when we get so immersed in the words that we lose sight of the experience they were originally meant to convey. Just as written music in notes and bar lines is not the music itself but a bridge between the sound in an inspired composer’s mind and the sound from the hands of an inspired performer, the words of written scripture are not God himself, but the bridge between the experience of an inspired relationship with God and the inspired experience of the reader. Both written music and scripture are meant

Dave Brisbin 10.6.19 Some twenty-five plus years ago, I walk into the office of a Franciscan priest, bible in hand, to debate a specific doctrinal issue, and before I can get more than a sentence out, he puts his big hand up in the universal stop sign and says: All I can tell you is what I’m convinced of. You go become convinced of what you’re convinced of. At the time, it seemed a supreme evasion, but as years went on, I realized it’s the only thing one person can say to another about the deep things that really matter and can only be proven to ourselves by ourselves. And now as a pastor these past seventeen years, how many times have I said the same to someone with bible in hand as an opening to a very different conversation? The genius of Jesus is to recognize that the truth that really sets us free can’t be transferred to our heads as second hand knowledge, but only applied directly to our hearts as first person experience. The Way of Jesus is an active partnership, a way of living with God, not a passive

Dave Brisbin 9.29.19 If you ask anyone what they really want out of life, you’ll get a variety of answers from health, wealth, relationship, family, love to meaningful work, purpose, a cause, making a difference to peace and serenity. But why do we want all those things? Because ultimately we believe they will make us happy. But happiness may not be the right word because it implies emotions that are ephemeral. Contentment. Solid, reliable, evergreen contentment. Ultimately, if we have that, we have it all. But we know the stories: people who have most or all items on those lists, still don’t have contentment. So what is contentment made of? Where does it come from? What will reliably make us content? Imitating Jesus, the Desert Fathers and Mothers of the third and fourth centuries left their cities, towns, and villages to live in the seclusion of the deserts of Egypt and Judea in search of the truth that would make them free enough to be content. Their stories give us the clues we need to understand that con

Dave Brisbin 9.22.19 Years ago, I drove all the way to Death Valley deep in the Mojave desert, arriving late at night so I could walk out into a dune field under a really dark sky to see the stars. I wasn’t disappointed. The vast canopy turned overhead with the band of the galaxy angling across, and from my dunetop perch, I felt close to the stars. But was I any closer there than here in the city where I can count the stars on a couple of hands, or during the day when no stars pierce the blue curtain at all? Truth is, the stars are just where they are all the time, whether we can see them or not. And more mind bendingly, there are stars beneath our feet as well. It’s just that the ball we’re standing on always obscures. God’s presence is like the stars—always there whether we see/feel it or not. To realize that God’s presence overhead can be obscured by the rising of our nearest star—our own consciousness, and God’s presence beneath our feet is hidden by our focus on the needs of our physical lives and our ve

Dave Brisbin 9.15.19 Our main mission at theeffect is to reintroduce Jesus to Western people. To meet Jesus again for the first time is to meet an ancient, Eastern Jesus who can speak again for himself, stripped of two thousand years of Western commentary and interpretation. And looking at Jesus through the eyes of those who followed first, hearing him from his own context and worldview, what is the essence, the foundation of his life and message? That’s what we really want to know, but to simply know is only an open doorway. Jesus’ real message is about what happens when we walk through and what it costs to walk through. To say that Jesus’ essential message is love is both true and misleading at the same time. The Father’s love that Jesus is trying to convey is so absolute and radical that it levels each and every one of us in the sameness of its indiscriminate covering. We strive our entire lives to be different, to be above, beyond, better, bigger, than others in order to be noticed, loved, and accepted. B

Dave Brisbin 9.8.19 One of my most indelible memories is freefalling from twelve thousand five hundred feet. All these years later, my skydive remains both a clear memory and a clear metaphor. To do an accelerated freefall— jump without a jumpmaster strapped to your back, meant eight hours of training on the ground. And all day long I felt the fear growing until it was at the base of my throat as I stood holding the edge of the open door of a plane looking down at over two miles of air. As long as I was holding the door, I had a choice to jump or not…and I also had fear. But as soon as I pushed off, after the initial shock, I settled down to the business of doing what I was trained to do. Once the choice of whether to jump was removed and a sequence of events started that would end at the ground one way or another, all that was left was to trust the people who had jumped before and survived, my training and the bedsheet on my back, and to simply enjoy the ride. The fear was gone. After my jump, I began to rea

Dave Brisbin 9.1.19 For past few weeks, we have been working through paradoxes, seeming contradictions—sticking points to being able to really trust our spiritual journeys. And nothing seems to stick us more than the difficulties, traumas, and sorrows of life. How are we supposed to understand them and their meaning in our lives? We’ve been programmed by church and culture to see them as evils in life, signs of God’s disapproval, chastisement, or correction—to be avoided or prayed away. But Jesus has a very different take that is illustrated well by Kahlil Gibran in The Prophet—that joy and sorrow are pulled from the same well, that joy is sorrow unmasked, and that the more that sorrow carves into our being, the more joy we can contain. What is Jesus saying when he tells us we’re blessed, fortunate, when we mourn—that our mourning is also the source of our comfort? There is a relationship between joy and sorrow that has nothing to do with the good and evil labels we typically attach. As we look deeper, we fin

Dave Brisbin 8.25.19 My wife suggests I speak about hope, and I’d been given some hope this week, but in a way that is a bit harder to express than I’d like. Had a dream of a conversation with an old friend who took his own life just over three years ago. It was a full role reversal, where I—who’d been pastor and counselor in our time together—was now student as he was counseling me. And I can’t remember anything he actually said, but it was the way he said it that was arresting: with a presence, a calm assurance, gravity, and confidence that he didn’t display in life. And all the emotion that I realized I hadn’t fully processed in three years welled up in me, and all I could croak out was, “I miss you so much.” And his wordless reply was the centerpiece of it all. Just a look that didn’t include sadness or regret or even sympathy. There was a knowing in his eyes that said he recognized my pain and my fears, but that he was part of a different reality now, an unbroken connection that I could see as well, righ

Dave Brisbin 8.18.19 It’s no secret that religious vocations and church attendance and membership continue to decline in the US and West in general. But even so, as religious affiliation and participation declines, more and more people, especially young people are describing themselves as spiritual and finding ways to express that spirituality. And the direction of the shift is nearly always in the same direction—toward a contemplative, even mystical spirituality. Considering three stories: a Carmelite order of nuns formally shifting back to ancient rites and rituals, a young Southern Baptist man who converted and became ordained into the priesthood of the Eastern Orthodox church, and a young Pentecostal man who moved to the Unitarian church and then on to discover the contemplative Christian tradition all tell this same tale of a need for a deeper, more rooted spirituality. It’s as if we in the modern West are feeling a collective need, the presence of a missing piece of ourselves, much like the phantom limb

Dave Brisbin 8.11.19 There is a persistent emphasis on submission and identity in Jesus’ teaching pointing to an obvious relationship between the two. Jesus is telling us that there is something that we can learn about identity from submission that we can’t learn from dominance—the constant focus and striving for dominance and power over others and our circumstances. And since Jesus always couches his teachings in the relational realities of daily life, especially the relationships within families, we can look at another basic reality of life for more clarity: eating and drinking…food. Food and the need to eat stands at the very center of life and culture. All our activities orbit the kitchen in our homes and meals in our relationships, but what can they teach us? In The Prophet, Khalil Gibran makes the statement that since we need to kill to eat, eating should be an act of worship and our tables an altar on which our food is sacrificed for what is purer and more innocent in mankind. What does it mean for our

Dave Brisbin 8.4.19 In trying to get his message across, Jesus doesn’t speak of abstract theological concepts but always couches his teachings in the relational realities of daily life. Starting with the basic relationships in each first century home—husband and wife, parents and children, master and servant—his implication is that if we can’t experience Kingdom there in those relationships, we won’t experience it anywhere else either. His emphasis on questioning the sense of identity these family roles give us, especially present in first century Jewish life, is the first step toward finding a deeper identity in unseen Father. Just as husband and wife need to maintain their own separate identities even as they join as one in marriage, parents need to respect and foster their children building identities separate from themselves. Jesus is showing us that taking our family roles as identities can both harm other members of our family and keep us from finding the freedom of true identity. To see roles as how we

Dave Brisbin 7.28.19 I love our Jude-Christian scriptures. I’ve been studying them for the past twenty-five years or so and trying to live by their precepts. But I didn’t always love them. In fact they have baffled me, confused, angered, annoyed, and outraged me for decades until I learned to read them in a way that seemed closest to the way in which they were written. That required reading through an ancient, Hebrew context. When we do that, sense, common sense, and a hold on common decency returns to a text that otherwise appears too alien to be of much spiritual service. To take one example, a contemporary Christian woman, who is also a feminist, can’t accept Paul and Peter’s instructions for a woman to submit to her husband. Submission has become a four letter word in our culture especially among women, minorities, and those who’ve been marginalized in our society. And when such passages link submission in marriage to submission in first century slavery, how can we possibly read such passages in a way tha

Dave Brisbin 7.21.19 A four day trip to the mountains with parents-in-law becomes contemplation by circumstance as everything slows and quiets down, adjusting to the pace and rhythm of our elders and the mountains. With everything we do and identify left down the mountain, without the noise, distraction, and activity that keeps us from considering the quieter, more interior parts of ourselves, what is left? Who are we then? What is the meaning of our lives here? The mountains remind that it has something to do with giving—the giving of ourselves to a moment and all who share that space. But giving is a loaded word in religious thought where it becomes a moral command to care for the poor or our church or the necessary mirroring of God’s nature that precedes a blessing back. But if giving is a command, then it’s just an obligation, and if it’s a prerequisite to a blessing, then it’s a transaction, and if there’s any amount designated, then it’s a tax. We need to look at the six aspects or traits of giving as J

Dave Brisbin 7.14.19 On the seventeenth anniversary of his ordination, Pastor Dave talks about the journey and what he’s learned about the meaning of following a spiritual path that only a certain amount of following can convey.

Dave Brisbin 7.7.19 In The Prophet by Khalil Gibran, marriage is first described as a life-long, even eternal union where two live life as one. But then the prophet goes on to say there should also be spaces in the togetherness, that the winds and seas should dance and move between, just as the pillars of the temple stand apart and the strings of a lute remain alone though they quiver with the same music. It can be an initial shock to read these thoughts through the lens of our ideal notions of romantic love, but only because the ideal is balanced with the practical realities of married life and human nature: the need for individual identity in real relationship. This balance of the ideal and the practical is becoming rare in our culture of opposing absolutes, which means there is less and less common sense going around. But Jesus is full of common sense, and when we read his teachings on marriage, divorce, remarriage and look beyond our literal, absolute, out of context interpretations, we find a balance of

Frank Billman 6.30.19 When Jesus is asked how many times an offending person should be forgiven, his famous answer seventy times seven can be a bit cryptic to us modern Westerners. Is it 490 times, and after that, we’re done? That’s a lot of times, of course, but in the case of lifelong friendships or marriages or family or even working relationships, we can go through that many times in a couple of years. In the symbolism of numbers in the ancient near east, Jesus’ expression means, essentially, forever and a day—an unlimited number. But how does that work? What does forgiveness really mean at its root and more importantly, how do we accomplish forgiveness, how do we know when it’s been accomplished, and who are we really forgiving?

Dave Brisbin 6.23.19 On the occasion of saying goodbye to our worship leader and friend of nearly five years as she moves out of state, I realize how much I seem to have been saying goodbye over the past two years. People have moved and died and simply fallen out of touch, and each loss takes its toll on my willingness to start again, imprint again, hurt again. It seems to never get easier, and yet what is love asking of us? In the prose poetry of the The Prophet, Khalil Gibran’s spiritual masterpiece, love is spoken of as a difficult path, a sometimes violent process of transformation that must be swallowed whole—the pain as well as the peace—or life will always be lived in seasonless shallows where we laugh, but not all our laughter and weep, but not all our tears. It’s a far cry from any of our cultural notions of love small enough to fit on a greeting card. It’s the image of an expansive, mature, open-eyed love that Jesus would recognize, because he describes it as well in his own paradoxical way. He and