David Brisbin Podcast

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

Dave Brisbin 6.16.19 Father’s Day: It’s impossible to overestimate the influence our fathers have had on our view of life and ultimately of God. Fathers tend to be less present to small children than mothers, more the disciplinarian who expects acceptable performance for approval. Even given all the variations in families and fluid parenting roles today, we still learn primarily from our fathers the way the world works in terms of the judging of performance and consequences of non-approval. And in a patriarchal culture, our institutions and especially our churches reinforce the traditional role of the father, and as we transfer that lesson learned to our Father in heaven, trust becomes very difficult. But Jesus is painting a very different picture of his and our Father. When we look at his stories and teachings, when we look at the Aramaic words he used in the first lines of the Lord’s Prayer, when we consider how he lived his own relationships, we see an exuberant extravagance, an overwhelming abundance alw

Dave Brisbin 6.9.19 We’ve been looking at love from God’s point of view: what is this love, what does it look like, how can we begin to grasp its infinite scope? But maybe what’s more important is beginning with the assumption of its reality and then asking what it means for us to be the beloved? To look at God’s love from our point of view. What does a person beloved of God look like? Fortunately, we have an example that jumps off the pages of scripture because his name actually means beloved—dead giveaway that we should be paying attention. David, the boy who became the king who united all the tribes of Israel is described as a “man after God’s own heart,” chosen to be king and God’s beloved. But a quick review of everything we know of David’s life and actions from the books of Samuel show us a man who looks anything but beloved. Capable of the greatest courage, loyalty, faithfulness, and exuberance, he is also capable of the greatest cruelty, selfishness, arrogance, and disregard for life. Which is the bel

Dave Brisbin 6.2.19 I sometimes get asked why I don’t talk more about the Spirit, and that question always surprises or at least reminds me of differing perspectives. Of course I understand why it comes up—the Spirit is central to any reading of the New Testament as that which draws us to God, informs and empowers us to a fullness in spiritual awareness. This week, I was asked when I would talk about the Trinity, so I thought I’d put the two together in the context of love and see what happened. It took the church 300 years after the crucifixion to decide how the Father and Jesus were related, and another fifty plus to add Holy Spirit to a trinity of persons in one God. But alongside those heady debates was a set of three eastern bishops who understood this threeness of God experienced as Father, Son, and Spirit in creation, reconciliation, and sanctification as inseparable from the constant movement, the alternating flow of giving and receiving between lover and beloved. They saw the three persons of the god

Dave Brisbin 5.26.19 Medieval maps of the known world would often depict dragons in the water beyond where anyone had gone. Uncharted waters held both promise and unknown dangers, and some maps actually printed the words here be dragons to really hit the nail on the head. Those willing to sail beyond what was familiar were the ones who charted the maps in the first place and continued to push against the dragons until the entire globe was charted. You see, everything it means to be an explorer begins where the map ends. It’s the same with the spiritual life. The same Book that tells us God’s love is the centerpiece of our existence also tells us such a love is too great for us to understand. But we need to understand something so central, don’t we? So Jesus addresses the dilemma with every teaching and story, consciously breaking down our attachment to what is familiar by calling us out beyond our maps of law, ethics, religion, justice, obligation, tradition, and even family and obedience-- whatever we grasp

Dave Brisbin 5.19.19 If you were asked to name Jesus’ main purpose in his ministry, could you do it? There will be many answers of course, but we don’t have to speculate. Jesus told us flat out in Luke 4 that his purpose was to preach the Kingdom of God to all the cities. So if the Kingdom of God is Jesus’ purpose, have we gotten the message? Do we know what the Kingdom is? Just as it was misunderstood by Jesus’ first followers, we misunderstand too, which is why Jesus goes to such lengths to tell us that the Kingdom is not a place but a quality of life to be lived, not future but now, not out there somewhere, but within and all around us, and one thing more that we tend to miss. When we look at Jesus’ life we see him in every possible emotional state, both positive and negative. He often retreated from his work in order to reconnect with his Father, which tells us that the quality of life that is the Kingdom of God is something that is chosen, returned to each moment rather than a steady state entered just

Dave Brisbin 5.12.19 Mother’s Day: Two scenes from a movie try to capture what the day to day relationship was between Jesus and his mother. They are touching scenes, one heartbreaking, but both underscore the power of a mother’s love that is the closest we will come to the love of our Father in this life. If mother’s love is closest to the Father’s love and the Father’s love is arguably the most important thing we can learn in our spiritual formation, then why do we refer to God as Father? Where’s mother? Looking at how the Hebrews understood their God as coded into their very language, we find that though God is referred to in the masculine, he is often portrayed as feminine by the prophets. The Hebrew words for spirit and kingdom are both feminine—and wisdom, a main attribute of God, is personified as female in Proverbs. How can God be both mother and father at same time? A perfect balance, perfect marriage? Just as we know the earth is round, but experience it as flat every day, we could say the earth is

Dave Brisbin 5.5.19 A friend calls me to the hospital bed of her dying husband, and there in the room with her and him and his entire family, watching and being part of the dynamic and grief, I am hyper aware of the precious nature of all our relationships. And a line from a Carl Sagan returns: that in all our searching, the only thing that makes the emptiness bearable is each other. When I first heard that, I didn’t agree on theological grounds, but twenty years later, I’ve become convinced. It has occurred to me that if God really is the unseen unity at the heart of all the diversity and separate form and function we see every day, then there really is only one relationship around which all our other relationships in life revolve. And all our relationships in life are really just different ways of looking at the only relationship that really exists. But does Jesus agree? Is he in different words saying the same thing and how does that change our everyday experience? Looking at the words of Jesus, James, and

Dave Brisbin 4.28.19 On Palm Sunday, looking at how the various groups of people around Jesus couldn’t see him as he was, but only through the filter of their own agendas and desires and so didn’t recognize the hour of their visitation—and then on Easter, looking at how the closest friends of Jesus didn’t recognize him at all after his resurrection—there’s a whole lot of unrecognition going around. So who is this Jesus we’re trying to follow and emulate? What do we really know and how close is what we think we know to who he really is? The New Testament doesn’t give a lot of detail, but when we dig into the language and context and the way the authors wrote their texts, a picture emerges, but it’s one that will challenge the view of Jesus that has come down to us traditionally. Can we really understand Jesus as lighthearted and playful, bold but vulnerable, and always completely integrated? When we look at Jesus through an Aramaic lens, how humor worked in the ancient world, the details that were put in and