David Brisbin Podcast

Dave Brisbin | 2.18.18 On the first Sunday of Lent, how do we learn about this 40 day journey to Easter from the tradition of liturgy? Each day of Holy Week, from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday has passages from the Gospels embedded that can help us prepare for the new life of Easter if we’re paying attention. Looking at the passage traditionally read on Palm Sunday, as Jesus is entering Jerusalem before the crucifixion, he tells those who are trying to silence the cheering crowd that even if these were silent, the rocks would cry out. What can we learn from singing rocks? That all creation is an unceasing expression of truth? That if we can learn to become still and silent inside, that we will be able to hear the music playing through each moment? Paul calls this sort of interior attitude unceasing prayer, and at 1Thessalonians 5, gives us not one, but three directives that if understood properly and practiced consistently, will transform the quality of our most basic relationships and take us a long way towar

Dave Brisbin | 2.11.18 Lent is upon us. Already. Again. What do we really know about Lent? For those of us who grew up in liturgical churches, what we learned may have had little to do with the traditions that established Lent, and what we remember now, may even subvert those ancient intentions. What does the word Lent mean? Why 40 days and how was Lent initially used in early church life? What traditions like Pancake Day, Mardi Gras, and Ash Wednesday have sprung up around it and what is their significance? But most importantly, how can we understand and even reimagine Lent to take us on a 40 day journey to the new life of Easter? If Lent became a time of fasting and deprivation as penance for sin, can we use Jesus’ 40 days in the wilderness as model to begin to see Lent as deprivation for the purpose of clearing away all that distracts from the Presence that will bring new life on Easter? Because just as Jesus’ first followers continued to look for the living among the dead, we need to practice new ways of

Dave Brisbin | 2.4.18 Once we begin to get a new notion of the Father’s love, we are immediately assailed with all the reasons why not, why it couldn’t be so, that something that seems to be this good, it just can’t possibly be. And so we need to protect the love—not the love itself; it needs no protecting as the first and most durable substance in the universe, but we do need to protect our convictions. Traumatic and challenging life events will chip away, difficult relationships, betrayals, abandonments, religious practice and doctrine, and even scripture itself make Father look like unconditional love at certain points and something else in others. How do we navigate all this? How do we read our scriptures in such a way that Father’s love remains in our hearts exactly as Jesus said it was? Taking sample passages from Paul’s letter to the Galatians and first letter to the Corinthians, we see how the Father’s love stands firm even in the face of passages that seem to directly refute it and can always remain

Dave Brisbin | 1.28.18 The Father’s love is so big, so pervasive that we still have more to talk about. How do we start to grasp something that by definition is ungraspable—as is anything that is infinite. In trying to understand anything, our minds immediately begin defining and categorizing, creating edges to distinguish that from this and give us something to hold on to. But this is not possible with the things of God that have no edge and no degree. Just as with the stars of the universe, which science tells us is finite, but has no edge—if there is no edge, there is no degree. The stars will look exactly the same in any direction: equal density and distribution. That’s the way it is with anything that can’t be measured. It always looks the same. The universe can’t be measured so it always looks the same wherever you are, which means wherever you are is exactly at the center of everything that is. God’s love has no edge and no degree, it can’t be measured and so always looks the same, which means that whe

Dave Brisbin | 1.21.18 Our co-founder, friend, and benefactor, Bob “Bubba” Beauchamp died January 16. It was a Tuesday morning when my phone rang at 7AM, and I saw Bubba’s son’s name and just knew things were going to be very different. Bubba was a larger than life character who filled rooms with presence and laughter--someone who never left you unchanged, always left you better than he found you. As we’ve been returning these past weeks to discover again the deepest principles of the faith community Bubba helped create, there is no more basic principle than the Father’s love and no one more suited to display it than our Bubba. Bubba found the connection. On the other side of the trauma and compulsions and resistance of his life, he found a love that consumed everything that had distracted him and left only the connection itself. For as long as knew him, he lived and loved that love, and showed us what it looked like in a beautifully imperfect package. All we can do now is be grateful for Bubba’s presence and

Dave Brisbin | 1.14.18 As we ease into our new space, seems a good time to revisit the foundational principles that define theeffect…go back to basics. This is never an irrelevant thing to do: the most fundamental principles in life are those that run so deep that we can only grasp them in stages. We need to revisit them over and over. And so it is with the most foundational of all the principles that Jesus gave us…the Father’s love: a love so consuming, pervasive, self-existing, even fierce, that GK Chesterton called the “furious love of God,” and Jesus called Abba. To really embrace such a love, one that has no degree, always looks the same lavished on any one of us, can’t be turned up, down, or away, that actually unbalances the scales of justice in favor of the beloved, is a love that will outrage and disturb us before it does anything in the direction of comfort. If God’s love hasn’t outraged us yet, we simply haven’t taken it seriously enough, haven’t waited to see how deep the rabbit hole goes. But on

On our first Sunday in our new space, we revisit the idea of consecrating our new space just as our old space was consecrated over nearly a decade of service. And not just in terms of a formal prayer or ritual or even of the formal worship on a Sunday morning, but through every authentic vulnerability between each of us and another in this place. To consecrate, to set aside this space for use in God’s kingdom is to enter again into real relationship either formed here or brought here—every tearful share and open conversation, every embrace and kindness. These are the moments and actions that consecrate our space. Jesus called it worshipping in spirit and in truth, and to really get inside the nuances of what he meant by that phrase will take us like a laser to the heart of the truth we seek.

On New Year’s Eve, on our last day in the space and facility that has been our home for over nine years, it is a day of endings. But then tomorrow is a day of beginnings… How do we process all that? People have often told us that just stepping into our room gives them a sense of spirit or presence or just connection and peace. Is that something we’re leaving behind? If this has been God’s house for us for nearly a decade, will our next space be God’s house as well? When we look at scripture, at Moses experiencing holy ground before the burning bush, then building the first tent of meeting--God’s first house among the Hebrews--we start getting clues to how God views his house. Beyond the fact that his first house was portable, the story of the filling of his presence moves unmistakably from the enclosure, the space, to the people themselves. And in Numbers 33, we see that the Hebrews always recorded their journeys from their starting places, as series of setting out, not destinations. And if we’re paying atten

We know so little of Jesus’ birth and childhood. Only two gospels give us any information at all. Luke gives us most of what we traditionally know of Jesus’ birth and childhood, and Matthew gives us the story of the Magi. Who were these Magi, these wise men from the east? What was the star they followed and what do their gifts signify? Why did Matthew feel this story, above all and any other stories of Jesus’ nativity and early years, was the one to include in his narrative? So many questions that we’ll never fully answer, but if we look at the Magi from a spiritual point of view and not just a historical one—bring the past right up into the present of our daily lives, it is shocking how relevant the Magi become. If we let them speak to us, if we put ourselves in their place, juxtaposed with the reality of our lives herenow, we find we can begin to see answers to the why and how of it all, even as we continue to speculate on the what.

As we prepare to move to a new facility at the end of the month, we take a moment to look back on our time at our facility of nine years and consider how we as humans attach such meaning and emotion to places and things. It’s a beautiful thing we do—makes us real. Taking time to grieve the loss of everything we’ve known, even as we prepare for the adventure of what is coming soon. And as we are also approaching Christmas as well as a move into the unknown, makes sense to consider Mary in Luke 1, given an incomprehensible message that she will be bearing a very special child that would change her life completely or possibly even end it. What was she thinking as she listened, what fears played across her mind and heart even as she humbly accepted a scenario she could never understand? And what lessons can we learn from a little girl, only 12 or 13 years old, that we can apply to ourselves, to the adventures that life will insert into our paths when we least expect them?

Dave Brisbin | 11.26.17 With Thanksgiving just passed, it may be good to stop for a minute and consider what this holiday may have to teach us at root. The older I get, the simpler things begin to look, and I’m beginning to realize that the things that remain complicated are of much less importance than the simple ones. As a master of simplicity, Jesus is always breaking things down to their simplest terms, and when it comes to kingdom, his central theme, it may all come down to just one word... The world is becoming angrier. Why? Unmet expectation, insecurity, envy, entitlement, victimization? Yes, all the above. And Jesus is always pointing in the same direction: overcoming expectation with awareness, insecurity with intimacy, envy with spiritual abundance, entitlement with vulnerability, and victimization with choice and action. And each one of these choices creates the same sensation, the same condition in life: gratitude. Gratitude is not a ticket in the door to kingdom. Gratitude is the experience of ki

Dave Brisbin | 11.19.17 The world and culture that produced our Scriptures is so different from ours that the very basis through which we understand the words we read in our translated texts—our worldview—has to be translated first in order to really understand the truth being conveyed. Try to imagine a world in which the workings of nature—from thunder and lightning to earthquakes and solar eclipses—are not scientifically understood, but ascribed directly to God. Imagine a complete dependence for survival on rains and weather, animals and crops, on family structure. An impossibly dark sky at night exploding with stars and the bright band of our galaxy as divine lightshow. Imagine living your life never seeing your own reflection, and the sense of self and identity that would entail. In a world like that, the most basic phrases relating to God and spirituality take on new meaning. Breath, wind, and spirit were all expressed by ancient Hebrews with the same word and so occupied the same space in their lives. T

Dave Brisbin | 11.12.17 It often helps to hear deep spiritual truths as expressed in faith traditions other than our own. We can become so familiar with our own traditional expressions that we don’t hear them anymore…they become enveloped in colloquial meaning and lose the ability to shock us into deeper awareness. And we do need to be shocked. Native Americans did not put their energy into buildings or infrastructure. They didn’t value the physical trappings of Western societies and lived nomadically within the systems nature provided. They saw life, meaning, and purpose from a vastly different perspective—one that Jesus was trying to convey as well. When Crowfoot, the great Blackfoot chief says, “What is life? It is a flash of a firefly in the night. It is a breath of a buffalo in the winter time. It is as the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset,” when Waheenee of the Hidatsa tribe writes, “Often in summer I rise at daybreak and steal out to the corn fields, and as I hoe

Dave Brisbin | 11.5.17 Maria Montessori said that play is the work of the child. She recognized that the playful activities of childhood influence the pattern of the connection between nerve cells in the brain, the development of motor skills, language, socialization, personal awareness, creativity, emotional wellness, problem solving. And if play is the work of the child, then toys are the tools. And yet, the child knows nothing of this. The child just plays, and all this development happens in the background as by-product. John Lennon wrote in a song that life is what happens while you’re making other plans. As adults, we often dismiss the play of the child as meaningless childhood expression, missing the deeper significance. In the same way, we miss the deeper significance of life because we take our work and tools literally and not as the play and toys they really are. Our work and tools have no real intrinsic meaning. Everything we build with our hands and tools will be lost in time. But what comes as by

Dave Brisbin | 11.2.17 Speaking to a divorce recovery workshop on the topic of new directions in life, how to make sense of the pain and loss? How to deal with the completely changed landscape of life and relationships? A new world in which to navigate and chart new directions? If we can understand the shape of the emotional/spiritual journey we’re on, like looking at the overall shape of the route on a map, we will have much more confidence we’re headed in the right direction as we twist and turn street by street on the ground. The shapes of ancient rites of passage and the timeless hero’s journey trace the shape of the journey in which we find ourselves and with that as guide, begin to show us meaning and purpose in the pain and loss—and at the same time, guiding principles for choosing the new directions that new landscapes demand.

Dave Brisbin | 10.29.17 A nationally-known pastor writes of a sea change earlier in his life when he realized that he was no longer on a path he recognized or thought would lead where he really wanted to go. He wrote that he believed that we have a far too narrow view of repentance, that it meant “to think,” and he had much to rethink and repent. But if we really look at the etymology of the word repentance through five different languages, ancient and modern, we find that repentance is vastly broader than simply feeling regret or rethinking. French, Latin, and Greek all stand between us and the original Hebrew that forms a major theme in Jesus’ teaching. The first words Jesus speaks in Mark is, “The waiting is over. The kingdom is here. Repent and believe the good news.” But when we look at repentance fully, we find not just a word, a single meaning, but an active process, another threeness that takes us from the sorrow of a path not taken to the renewing of mind that overcomes the fear of choosing altogethe

Dave Brisbin | 10.22.17 Looking at the record of increasing human awareness of the intimacy of God’s spirit recorded in scripture: from a wild, fearful presence on a mountaintop, to the shepherd-like pillars of cloud and fire leading the people of Israel, to the cloud standing outside the tent speaking to Moses, to that presence settling on and filling the tent and eventually the temple, to filling Jesus at his baptism, to the apostles at Pentecost…what of us? How do we move from the awareness of Spirit standing outside our tent to resting on and filling us as well? How do we receive the Holy Spirit? What does that even mean? And how do we know if we have that filling? There are clues all over scripture to guide us, but only if we really pay attention to the context, to the backstory, to the larger experience of the people that show us what it really means to ask and invite the Holy Spirit into our lives. Much more than a verbal asking, a spoken prayer—and much more than the speaking of tongues, the awareness

Dave Brisbin | 10.15.17 At the end of John’s Last Supper account, Peter asks Jesus in the Latin version, “Quo vadis, domine?” Where are you going, Lord? Isn’t that the question we’ve all been asking since the very beginning and are still asking now? We’re still asking because a question this large, that encompasses all of life and all it means to be human, is not answered in a conversation. It’s not answered verbally at all, but in the actual following after…once we have discerned a general direction. And what is that direction? If we are willing to look at scripture in a different way, from Genesis to Revelation, the direction the Lord is going becomes apparent. Looking at the Hebrew description of Presence, sometimes called shekinah glory—where and when it descends and where and when it is removed—we begin to see that it’s not the Presence that is changing, but our perception of where to look. If we can entertain the notion that the Hebrew and Christian scriptures together contain the record of the evolutio

Dave Brisbin | 10.8.17 Ever notice how it seems to take longer to get somewhere you’ve never been than to get back again? Why is that? Watching every turn, wondering if you missed one, if there’ll be a street sign, how much longer…? I always like to look at a map of the whole route before letting the GPS lady lead me around by the nose. There is a certain amount of anxiety involved in going somewhere for the first time that is relieved once we have some idea of the overall shape of the journey. And what’s true for external journeys is certainly true for interior ones as well. We are always looking for signs and prophecies, plans and God’s will to help us see the way before we actually travel the way. But what Jesus is constantly telling us is that we won’t get the kind of sign we’re looking for if what we’re looking for is certainty. All we get is the “sign of Jonah,” the general shape of the Way that descends into the belly of the beast before it ever leads anywhere else. Jesus is saying that life is shaped

Dave Brisbin | 10.1.17 Meister Eckhart said that the spiritual life is much more about subtraction than addition, but what does that mean? Many spiritual teachers have spoken about the fact that life is divided into halves, but what is the distinction? Putting the two together, the first half of life is about building the physical platform for survival, happiness, meaning, purpose, identity—it’s about acquisition both physically and emotionally…about addition. The second half is about undoing all that, about the subtraction of layer after layer of manufactured identity and the illusion of certainty. It’s about coming full circle back to the garden where we play with Presence in the cool of the evening and become vulnerably secure in trust. But what does a second half of life journey cost and look like? How do we know we’re in it? Here, Paul comes to the rescue with a beautiful moment of vulnerability and self-disclosure at Romans 7. In a passage that has traditionally been hard to understand, in this context,