David Brisbin Podcast

Dave Brisbin 7.16.23 Thirty years ago, three men, Catholic priests, gave me some of their time, became key figures, teachers in my life. I didn’t see it then—it takes time to see trajectories being established, the paths that remain. One of the three I only met once, but I still remember his name and the names on all the book covers he pointed out at the bookstore that afternoon. The other two I knew longer, a period of years. They counseled me and challenged me and then they were gone. I always thought we’d reconnect, but two of them died years ago, and we never did. When the student is ready, the teacher appears. They came into my life exactly when I was ready to receive them, gave me what they had become, and though they left again before I was ready, I still remember their names. The hardest part of being a pastor is watching people go. Letting those who have become friends go their way, sometimes never knowing if you really helped, never hearing the rest of the story. But like teachers and parents, fo

Dave Brisbin 7.9.23 One of the rallying cries of the Protestant Reformation five hundred years ago was “sola scriptura,” which means scripture alone reveals God’s word to humankind. For any Christian who holds the bible in such esteem, what they believe about the book is more predictive of their thought, behavior, and emotion than what they believe about God. If the book is the supreme authority revealing God’s nature and relationship with us, then how we interpret the printed word dictates how we hear God’s word. Unless… The Greek of the New Testament uses two different words we translate as word. The most common one is logos, which signifies the constancy of the written word: the underlying meaning, reason, intent behind it. The other, lesser known and less used, is rhema—the spoken word, a call, the action of uttering a thing said. It is always immediate, present, personal, and spoken now. Plato used rhema as the verb/action that drives the logos, noun/proposition, into being. Rhema is the living voice of

Dave Brisbin 7.2.23 The recent film Top Gun: Maverick, was hugely successful, with many fans saying, “they don’t make movies like this anymore.” Maverick feels like a throwback to Hollywood’s Golden Age, and it is. It’s depiction of clear heroes and villains, unapologetic respect for country, military, staunch individualism, are all marks of the Modern age that began around the year 1500 and is characterized by reason, science, capitalism, and the morality of individual and human rights. But since the end of WWII, we’ve been living in an increasingly Postmodern world that has questioned and deconstructed Modern values, accounting for most of the left-right culture wars we now face. For all the valid points Postmodernism makes, it’s fatal flaw is that we can’t live life as a negative. We can’t say there’s no meaning here and live that way indefinitely. Humans need meaning, and since the turn of the 21st century, a new movement has been gaining traction that some are calling Metamodern—meta: beyond, transcend—

Dave Brisbin 6.25.23 Heard of an elevator speech? You get on an elevator with someone of influence who wants to know what you do. Could you tell them before the doors open again? Thirty seconds to get across mission, vision, meaning, purpose, maybe even a bit of identity. Three or four sentences to be clear, concise, compelling. Obviously, this is a must for sales and marketing, but applies to anything we do with intention or passion. Including our spiritual practice…especially spiritual practice. If we can’t express the crux and intent of our spirituality in one sentence, in one word, it’s likely we’re not experiencing it on a daily basis. Jesus understood this. So did Br. Lawrence, a 17th century French monk who said that his spiritual life was all about presence, that the practice of the presence of God is the spiritual life itself. One word, one sentence…they ordered his life and experience. Jesus said that his Way to the Father was all about love, to seek first the Kingdom of God, and all else would be

Dave Brisbin 6.18.23 Father’s Day One of the greatest science fiction novels ever, Dune, finally made into a decent movie last year, takes us to a planet that is entirely desert. Sand dunes encircle the globe like an ocean punctuated by islands of scorched rock, the only refuge against the immense sandworms that swim the dunes like leviathan. In such a world, the culture, religion worldview, behavior, discipline of the native people—every detail of daily life, every ritual and concern—revolves around the scarcity of water, their lifesource. As both principle and metaphor, the world of Dune describes us humans on any world at any time. Whatever we experience or perceive as scarce becomes the center of our concern. We wrap our time, attention, effort, religion, culture, hopes, and dreams around it. Whether gold or oil, fame or power, youth, health, wealth, it becomes an object of worship and center of attention. But back on Dune, an outworlder tells a group of natives that where she was born, water fell from

Dave Brisbin 6.11.23 Can you state your spiritual journey, the whole of your search for meaning, in just one sentence? Br. Lawrence, a 17th century French monk, did just that: The presence of God is what the spiritual life is all about, and by practicing it, one becomes spiritual. Of course he was only channeling Jesus: Seek first the Kingdom, and all else is added. God is unity, oneness; kingdom is being one with God and all God has touched—being present to Presence. Both sentences are one: practice presence, get it all. Jesus loved one sentence, one-liners. Used them to describe what it meant to practice presence: unless we become little children we can’t enter kingdom; unless we exceed the righteousness of the law; unless we are born again, sell everything we own, lose our lives, deny ourselves, we can’t experience that pure connection. All these point at letting go of rational understanding in favor of something indefinable, uncontrollable—spirit experienced like wind, the meaning of spirituality itself

Dave Brisbin 6.4.23 It can be jarring, offensive to talk about Jesus having to learn and grow in wisdom…even more to think of him working through his own human obsessive-compulsive drives to a place of presence, balance, emotional regulation. Though we were taught, at least implicitly, a fully self-aware Jesus lying in the manger, the gospels tell a very different story. That Jesus was human in every way that we are, had to work through every development we all do. No shortcuts. When the Spirit drives Jesus into the wilderness, he was being called to a hero’s journey, the personal growth cycle always initiated by loss or insight stark enough to devastate our self-narrative, our view of the world as we know it. We don’t have to answer this call—most of us don’t the first dozen or so times. Some never do. To answer the call is to leave our old, too-small world and security behind to face a new world we know nothing of, full of tasks we don’t know how to complete. But if we persevere and complete the cycle, we

Dave Brisbin 5.28.23 Pentecost Jesus heals two blind men with spit, and there’s been endless speculation why Jesus would use such a strange way to heal. Passing a man born blind on the Sabbath, Jesus spits on the ground, kneads the dirt into mud, applies it to the man’s eyes, and tells him to go wash. Why the spit and dirt? To heal with a simple word, would not break the unwritten rules prohibiting work on the Sabbath as taught and enforced by the Pharisees. But kneading the saliva and dirt did. Jesus is going out of his way to put mud in the eye of these rules that had grown exponentially to such a burden on the people as to subvert the intent of the written Law. To imply that God was just about obedience to an inflexible system of ritual justification, obliterated the degreeless love that Jesus represented. Jesus heals the second blind man by spitting directly on his eyes. At first, the man can only see dimly, blurry people walking around like trees. Jesus lays hands on him again, and full sight is resto

Dave Brisbin 5.21.23 Last week someone asked how I would reimagine church. What would I change? We had just passed our 16th anniversary as a church—I said that’s exactly what we did sixteen years ago. We were a subversive lot back then, wanted to make a big statement about our differences. I was twenty years into study of Jesus from a Hebrew/Aramaic perspective and a personal contemplative journey. Our leadership group had formed around those principles, so we wanted our statement centered on those differences. We didn’t want to call ourselves Christian or church; those terms were loaded, descriptive of a different worldview. We wanted to de-emphasize theology in favor of personal experience in contemplative practice, using theology to limit our error rather than make absolute statements—embrace the uncertainty, paradox of this life. We wanted our gatherings (not services) to be EPIC—experiential, participatory, image-based, communal. We experimented. We started as a recovery church that also worshipped toge

Dave Brisbin 5.14.23 Patriarchal and paternal. Two words descending from the Latin word pater/father, but a patriarchal system is one that is male dominated and a paternal system is one where leadership—male or female—restricts the autonomy of people supposedly for their own good. Our country began shamefully patriarchal but not paternal—the states jealously guarded their freedoms. Today we’re much less patriarchal but more and more paternal, losing freedom in the name of the common good. Whether you feel this is appropriate is not so much the point on Mother’s Day as the role women are playing. The assumption has always been that if women were in charge of things, there’d be more balance, and the world wouldn’t be such a mess. But as women take more seats of power, is anything really changing, or does power make men and women look the same? Is matriarchy as toxic as patriarchy and equally paternal? As a model of balance, the perfect parent/government, we certainly should be able to point to God. But is G

Dave Brisbin 5.7.23 A man has been ill for thirty-eight years. Ill enough that he’s spent all those years lying by a public pool begging for a living and waiting for a healing. Jesus comes by and asks him if he wishes to be well. After thirty-eight years, that should be insulting. The biggest no-brainer of all time. And yet, the man can’t simply say yes, exclamation point. He complains there is no one to help him get into the pool when the healing waters stir. But that’s not what Jesus asked. What exactly did Jesus ask? In Aramaic, it would be something like tsaveh d’ethelem. Tsaveh is a form of tsevyana, the word we translate as will, but in the sense of desire, delight, pleasure, deepest purpose. Ethelem is complete wellness, wholeness, and health. Paul uses the word to denote sound doctrine, so we could say integrated—sound mind and body—just as shalom (peace) is really the greatest amount of connection, health, prosperity. Jesus’ question is all-encompassing: is your deepest purpose and desire to be whol

Dave Brisbin 4.30.23 It’s ironic that Jesus’ primary teaching, the one that defines his ministry and on which he spends nearly all his time, is the one we most misunderstand. Jesus is always talking about entering Kingdom, and of course we’re thinking about entering Heaven. Entering some Place. Or Space. Entering kingdom is a metaphor. A physical image for a spiritual realignment. There is no place or space to kingdom. We don’t enter it. We become it. Pointing at the children Jesus’ friends were shooing away, Jesus instructed to let them through, for such as these are kingdom. The littlest ones, whose egos have not yet formed, are kingdom—have not yet learned not to be kingdom so have no need to re-become it. Kingdom is a shift in identity. Or better, kingdom is the realization of our true identity, the recapturing of who we really are—were at the beginning and still are underneath. The children running at our feet are kingdom because they haven’t yet learned to believe they are not. But it won’t be long be

Vernon Porter 4.23.23 Vernon Porter takes the pulpit to give us a good look at God's love from another perspective. That we can't outrun God's goodness no matter what happens, however traumatic or how we feel about it. That God's love is always present, and because of the peculiar nature of perfect love, we are all God's favorite kid. Every single one of us.

Dave Brisbin 4.16.23 Met a prison chaplain who told me about needing to notify an inmate that his father had died, but when he called the inmate to his office, they were in count. Prisons count multiple times a day—inmates go to their cells and stand at their bunks until the count clears. Everything stops. No one moves. I realized we’d been in count for Lent, interiorly standing at our bunks, stopping distractions, counting out 40 days preparing for Easter. But by then, we were already in count again. Jews begin counting days from the second day of Passover through seven weeks of seven, 49 days, with the fiftieth day marking the Feast of Weeks. These two festivals mark first the physical liberation of the people from Egypt and then their spiritual liberation as they received the Law, establishing a new relationship with God. A necessary gap, a period of adjustment lies between the two liberations—a gradual graduation from the comforting but limiting reliance on physical connection to the limitless expanse o

Dave Brisbin 4.9.23 What is the meaning of the Resurrection? Christians are all over the map, fighting and debating not so much that Jesus is risen and still lives, but how and for what purpose. Ultimately, such questions are a matter of faith, but where can we look for guidance? Scripture, of course. The gospels show us where to look, what’s important to see. While we focus on the supernatural miracle, fighting over what can never be proven historically, the gospels focus on the effect the Resurrection had on Jesus’ first followers—not the Resurrection event itself. This is a huge distinction. The Resurrection happens offstage, and the story picks up afterward, following the tiny, unspectacular reactions of a few of Jesus’ closest friends. It tells us not to look at the miracle so much as how the miracle affects our own lives. The meaningful question isn’t whether or how we believe in the miracle, but what difference it makes that we believe. What can the reactions of Jesus’ friends teach us about that diff

Dave Brisbin 4.2.23 Most of counseling is listening. Listening to stories that give you a snapshot of a person’s life at the moment, backstory, symptoms they are suffering, and some of the stressors causing the symptoms. But only some. The stressors we can self-identify are the ones we can see outside of ourselves—circumstances, events, relationships that are creating pressure or pain. When a person says they have no idea why they are feeling the way they do or their feelings are far too intense for the stressors they are experiencing, there are stressors inside themselves where they can’t be seen. These inside, “endogenous” stressors lie in the unconscious as core beliefs about ourselves and life, programs for happiness and survival put in place unconsciously as necessary reactions to outside, “exogenous” stressors experienced from earliest childhood. These core beliefs define our reality for us in ways we’re not aware. They force us to live in a world that no longer exists with fears no longer real, now cr

Dave Brisbin 3.26.23 Had an intense conversation with a child specialist at the hospital grieving her friend, a nurse on the floor who died that morning. Cancer. She was reeling from her friend’s death, and we talked through her feelings and regrets—the sadness, numbness, disbelief, inability to imagine that she’d never see her again. The regret that she didn’t reach out more, even though she knew the nurse would only minimize everything, refuse any help. Caught between should-haves and respecting an intense need for privacy in her friend. Then almost incidentally, she said losing her friend had intensified her fear of death. That she’s always been afraid of death, but today was off the charts. She said it almost casually, the way we’d say we don’t like broccoli or baseball. A simple, known fact of her life that she’d come to accept. My ears went into overdrive. I asked why she feared death so intensely, but she couldn’t tell me, just has as long as she could remember. Was it a fear of hell or judgment in a

Dave Brisbin 3.19.23 This is the third in a series of Sunday sessions of conversations. After seven Sundays working on a Red Letter Study—the direct sayings and teachings of Jesus from a first century Hebrew/Aramaic perspective—questions, concerns, and resistances were surfacing from people in our community. It seemed a good moment to stop presenting new material and take some time to consolidate and clarify the material we’ve been processing these past two months, so this Sunday, we held a third live question and answer session in place of a message/teaching to see what was on people’s minds. This is not a “bible answer man” scenario carrying the implication that there is one “right” way to interpret the Bible and one “right” Christian doctrine and understanding of that doctrine that makes everyone and everything else wrong. This is meant to be a real conversation about confusing spiritual and doctrinal issues that impact us on a daily basis, trying to clarify the reconstruction of Jesus’ Aramaic meaning b

Dave Brisbin 3.12.23 This is the second in what will be three Sunday sessions of conversations. After seven Sundays working on a Red Letter Study—the direct sayings and teachings of Jesus from a first century Hebrew/Aramaic perspective—questions, concerns, and resistances were surfacing from people in our community. It seemed a good moment to stop presenting new material and take some time to consolidate and clarify the material we’ve been processing these past two months, so this Sunday, we held a second live question and answer session in place of a message/teaching to see what was on people’s minds. Right off the bat, this is not a “bible answer man” scenario carrying the implication that there is one “right” way to interpret the Bible and one “right” Christian doctrine and understanding of that doctrine that makes everyone and everything else wrong. This is meant to be a real conversation about confusing spiritual and doctrinal issues that impact us on a daily basis, to at least clarify the reconstructi

Dave Brisbin 3.5.23 After seven Sundays working on a Red Letter Study—the direct sayings and teachings of Jesus from a first century Hebrew/Aramaic perspective—questions, concerns, and resistances were surfacing from people in our community. It seemed a good moment to stop presenting new material and take some time to consolidate and clarify the material we’ve been processing these past two months, so this Sunday, we held a live question and answer session in place of a message/teaching to see what was on people’s minds. Right off the bat, this is not a “bible answer man” scenario carrying the implication that there is one “right” way to interpret the Bible and one “right” Christian doctrine and understanding of that doctrine that makes everyone and everything else wrong. This is meant to be a real conversation about confusing spiritual and doctrinal issues that impact us on a daily basis, to at least clarify the reconstruction of Jesus’ Aramaic meaning being discussed at theeffect, and to remove as many ob