theeffect Podcasts

Dave Brisbin 10.29.23

The Israel-Palestine war is kicking up a lot of questions. How did we get here? Why for four or five generations has there been an active volcano in Israel/Palestine that can erupt at any moment? Israelis, Palestinians, and the three Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—all claim the land. Whose land is it? Who is the occupier? Can we make any sense by looking at history?

Jews have continuously occupied what is now Israel/Palestine for at least 3,000 years. Arabs have occupied the same land for the last 1,400, side by side with Jews. For most of that time, the land was taken and controlled by a parade of foreign occupiers: Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Crusaders, Turks, and finally the British. There has never been a formal Palestinian state and no Jewish state since 63 BCE. Rome renamed their province of Judea, Syria Palestina, about 135 CE after the second Jewish-Roman war that finally purged most Jews from the land. The name stuck.

But 100 years ago, at the end of WWI, Britain took control of the area and supported a declaration calling for a Jewish national home in Palestine, opening the door to Jewish migration and creating tension and conflict with the Arab population. Twenty years and another world war later, Britain withdrew its control of Palestine in 1948, and the newly-formed UN approved a partition of Palestine between Arabs and Jews. Arabs rejected it; Israel declared independence; Arabs attacked; Israel defended and won most of the land partitioned to Palestinians, then purged those Arabs from their homes. The stage was set for the constant conflict of the past 75 years.

Both Jews and Arabs have ancient claims to the land. But land is always occupied by the winner of the last fight, and Jews and Arabs have taken and retaken this land over millennia. Whose land is it now and what can we do from the sidelines? We can start by admitting that history is not decisive, that all people have a right to a place to stand, and that we can’t afford to reflexively take sides and fall into the same patterns of hatred that lead to atrocities we abhor.

Dave Brisbin 10.22.23

In the last line of Matthew 5, Jesus says, therefore be perfect as God in heaven is perfect. Wow. Hearing that for the first time, would it spur you to work harder? Try to hit imagined thresholds? Or feel completely defeated? Shake your head and walk away? Most of us know we’re not perfect, that the human condition doesn’t allow, so exactly what is he asking?

Since Jesus said, “therefore,” we need to go back and see what that’s there for... Therefore connects back to the entire chapter as the how of this perfection, but especially to the immediate passage in which Jesus tells us to love our enemies. How are we supposed to love what we hate and what hates us? The original language helps. Enemy is not just a malicious adversary, but one who is not of our tribe, someone we don’t know, understand, trust, like.

We’re to love our enemies as we love our neighbors—those close to us in proximity and relationship—and love our neighbors as ourselves, which still doesn’t imply affection, but at least basic human decency. Still, that word love trips us up. Even showing basic decency to those we consider indecent is too much. But there are two words for love that Jesus uses in Aramaic. When he says love your neighbor, he uses rehem, which is a love full of affection and devotion that flows as if from a deep wellspring. And when he says love your enemy, he uses ahab, which literally means to kindle a fire: gather dry, dead twigs and ruffage, carefully spark and blow and guard until a warming fire burns.

Loving our enemies is a process of becoming someone who experiences growing a love never thought possible with someone always thought unlovable. Such an impossibility comes as a perfect moment, a connection beyond those we normally experience that changes our view of love and life. Jesus is saying that even in our imperfection, we can feel our love, our decency, falling like sun and rain on those who deserve it or not, for whom we feel affection or not…just as perfectly as God’s. It’s a momentary union of imperfection and perfection, an experience of perfect love that can grow into a character that defines.

Dave Brisbin 10.15.23

It is absolutely, positively, unreservedly impossible to overestimate the impact of culture on language. Language is a child of culture and can only breathe in the culture that birthed it. When translated to another language, we’ve taken a fish out of water, trying to understand as it flops on the ground. If we want to know a fish, we have to get into the water. If true for modern languages, how much more for ancient ones, where not only culture, but history, science, and technology also affect meaning?

Cultures exist to bind people together, ensure survival by making group experience meaningful and cohesive. So first task of culture is to control behavior—make sure the behavior of individuals is not harmful to the group. We see that as a function of law, because modern Western society is based on what anthropologists call a guilt/innocence culture: order is maintained by creating and reinforcing feelings of guilt and expectation of punishment.

But the ancient world, and much of the East to this day is based on honor and shame, not guilt and innocence: order is maintained through indoctrination of shame—loss of honor—and the threat of ostracism. Such cultures are collective: individuals exist to serve the group and bring either honor or shame to everyone in it. When shamed, the restoration of honor often through revenge, not punishment under law, restores balance. An honor/shame culture produced our Judeo/Christian scriptures and the impact of those texts can only be understood when we get into that water.

When Jesus tells us to turn the other cheek if struck on the right, until we know this meant a backhand slap, a shaming insult that would require vengeance to restore honor, we can’t know what he was asking in terms of voluntary humility for the sake of relationship. And when he says to go a second mile after Roman officials commandeered you for the first, until we see the shame in oppression, we can’t know how everything Jesus is teaching about the assurance and fearless vulnerability of God’s love is never found in the first mile. Only a second mile, beyond honor and obligation, can show us that.

Dave Brisbin 10.8.23

How hard is it for you to say no? From telemarketers to employers, people on the street with signs to friends and family, there’s a psychological spectrum of difficulty. No one likes to give anyone the bad news of no, but if the difficulty is so great that it’s near-impossible, then we’ve shifted from concern for another to a form of codependency, concern for what another thinks of us. We’re all codependent to certain degrees, but when we can no longer simply say yes and no, there’s a problem.

In a recent group discussion, women said they thought it was harder for them to say no than men—that women are more relationally focused and taught to please others in a way men are not. But everyone had varying levels of difficulty: the introverts said the answer is always no, no matter how many times they say yes; one man said you should always say no first, because it’s much easier to change your mind later to yes; a woman said that her no was always softened, accompanied by an alternative; while another spoke of the virtues of “maybe.”

Jesus said that yes or no are sufficient answers, you don’t need oaths or appeals to higher authority. In the context of formal contracts and proceedings, he spoke to a tradition that allowed people to legally break their promises depending on what authority they based their oath. God’s name was always binding, but lesser authorities were not. Jesus is saying we don’t need any higher authority than our own word to bind our promises once we have come to care about others as much as ourselves. Who is the person making the promise?

For an honest person, no oath is necessary—for a dishonest person, no oath is enough.

What does it take to be the person Jesus suggests? To simply say yes or no…why, only later if needed…takes someone who’s experienced an inner assurance of belonging and acceptance. Someone strong enough to say yes and carry it out; non-codependent enough to say no without loss of identity.

When we say yes to one thing, we say no to another. Yes and no, define us and the course of our lives. Jesus is showing us the freedom to choose with something other than fear.

Dave Brisbin 10.1.23

One of the most misinterpreted and misused passages in the Bible affects a foundational part of our personal lives. Jesus appears to tell us in Matthew that adultery is the only legitimate ground for divorce and anyone who remarries after divorce for any other reason commits adultery. In Mark and Luke Jesus seems to remove the exception: all remarriage after divorce is adultery. I’ve seen pastors send women back to abusive husbands, toxic marriages held together at all costs, divorced people leave the church in order to live their lives.

Is it legal to drink under the age of twenty-one?

We mentally add alcohol or the question is nonsense. We leave it out of the question because the context is clear. Same happens biblically, but we don’t know the context. Everyone in first century Israel knew there were five legal grounds for divorce, and adultery was not one of them. Proven adultery was punishable by death, not divorce. The matter of indecency Jesus cites that we have translated as adultery, meant bringing shame to the family, while the other four dealt with neglect, abuse, and infertility—common-sense responses to the realities of marriage in their culture.

Jesus was asked: is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any matter? “Any matter” created a narrow legal question. One school of Pharisees maintained the “matter of indecency” as a single ground for divorce; another school broke it in two: indecency and “any matter,” which meant a husband who wanted another woman, could divorce his wife for any or no reason at all. When pressed to choose between the two, Jesus maintained a matter of indecency as one ground—a husband had to show just cause, and if he divorced for “any matter” in order to marry another, it was the same as adultery. Common decency. Common sense.

God’s purpose is always to bring together, make separate things one, peace out of chaos. This is the purpose of marriage as well. But if a marriage is chaotic, abusive, toxic, divorce may be the only way to create greater oneness later.

God knows this…that sometimes it has to get darker before the dawn. Jesus did too. How about us?

Dave Brisbin 9.24.23

Co-facilitating a debrief for a medical team that was emotionally stressed by a case in which a baby died after drowning in his bathtub. And if that wasn’t traumatic enough, the mother was charged for leaving her baby alone in the tub while under the influence of drugs. As the staff is caring for the baby, the police are in the hospital room arresting the mother, cuffing her, taking her into custody. The medical staff know the baby will not make it and confront the police, asking that the mother be allowed to stay as long as her baby is alive. The police relent, but stand guard in the room and won’t uncuff the mother. She backs against the bed…trying to touch her baby.

It’s a classic clash of cultures between law enforcement and medical care. It’s not that the medical staff doesn’t know or care what the mother did; they are horrified. But where law enforcement sees the mother as offender and the room as a crime scene, the medical staff sees the offender as a mother and the room as a place of care. More broadly, it’s a clash between justice and mercy, macro and micro where neither side is wrong nor fully right in each other’s contexts. This mother must face the law and what justice demands, but as one nurse said, in that moment we needed to let her grieve over her baby.

The medical team was in moral distress. Being constrained from doing what they believed was ethical at the bedside, they were outraged at the action of law enforcement, who were also constrained by the law, whatever they may have been feeling. But if we can understand the necessary shift between macro law and micro compassion, the need for both, we can more easily understand the actions of those working in a different context. In Matthew 5, Jesus shifts us from macro law to micro compassion over and over, showing us how we can live well between the two, fulfilling both.

Even as we accept macro constraints, we can still choose the character of our micro life—compassion, connection, respect. How we live under the law is always our choice. Jesus is giving us back the awareness of our own power to choose. No one can take that from us.

Dave Brisbin 9.17.23

Years ago, first time visiting an inmate at men’s central jail, I was surprised by the attitudes of the other visitors. There wasn’t the melancholy or tears I was expecting, but a lightness, almost celebratory atmosphere. Young women made up and dressed up, parents, grandparents laughing and talking. Big Hispanic man loudly encouraging and praying, two women beside me speed talking, effortlessly gliding between English and Spanish. Family and friends doing what family and friends do. Was a forty-five-minute wait at my assigned window; time to take it all in.

Swinging around on my bolted-down metal stool, a young woman at the opposite bank of windows is talking on the handset to a young man on the other side of the glass. Orange jumpsuit. I see her from an angle, leaned forward and intent—free hand in the air, tone of voice, smile—she could have been sitting across white tablecloth and candlelight. She saw no orange jumpsuit, no offense, only the man she loved. I thought of the prodigal…in an orange jumpsuit…and I realized that she and the father of the prodigal were orange colorblind. Saw no offenses or punishments, only the beloved.

Is that fair? What about the offense, the victims? What about justice? Isn’t God just?

We humans live between heaven and earth. Between mercy and justice, between micro, one-on-one relationships where mercy and compassion are the highest good, and the macro groups to which we belong, where justice and law must prevail. To miss the fact that love must look like justice in our groups and compassion for each individual within those groups is to miss learning how to love in the ever-shifting context of our between-ness.

God is justice in the macro, when viewed where three or more are gathered. But when God views us—it is always micro, as if we are the only person living between heaven and earth. God is orange colorblind too. Sees through our faults like x-ray vision or a young woman at central jail. While we are still beholden to macro laws and the punishments they assign, between God and us, there are only and will only ever be white tablecloths and candlelight.

Dave Brisbin 9.10.23

The purpose of a fish trap is to catch a fish. Once the fish is caught, the trap is forgotten.

The purpose of a rabbit snare is to catch a rabbit. Once the rabbit is caught, the snare is forgotten.

The purpose of words is to convey ideas. Once the ideas are grasped, the words are forgotten.

Show me a person who has forgotten words. That’s the one I want to talk to.

Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu, wrote this three hundred years before Jesus, but it speaks to a timeless part of human nature. We are always getting means and ends confused. Missing the forest for the trees—missing the intent of a process by getting lost in its details, letting those details become an end in themselves, more important than the purpose for which they were put in place. This phenomenon of putting carts before horses is probably most clearly seen in religious practice.

An old joke: Why don’t Baptists allow premarital sex? Because it leads to dancing…

When it comes to law, religious or civil, we have often followed the practice of prohibiting behavior that may lead to larger offenses. But what happens when prohibiting the gateway behavior becomes more important than the unlawful behavior itself? Or when the code of the law itself becomes more important than the community it was meant to protect?

This is what both Chuang Tzu and Jesus are confronting. The religious laws of the Hebrew bible existed to preserve the life of the community and promote the awareness of God’s presence…not as a test of righteousness. The Hebrew word we translate as law really means instruction or guidance, which means that the rules are not goodness in themselves; they can only point us in that direction—a means of personal formation, of assuming the values of the law’s intent. Expressed in scripture as writing the law on our hearts, law is only needed until we learn to love, then the law can disappear.

We have learned to follow rules as the proof of our goodness and acceptance, but…

The purpose of the law is to catch God’s goodness. Once goodness is caught, the law can be forgotten. Show me a person who has forgotten law. That’s the one I want to obey.

There’s a great story, apparently from Mexico, in which an old mule falls into the farmer’s dry well. Poor animal is braying down there miserably, but the farmer can’t think of a way to get it out. And the mule is old and he’d been meaning to fill in that dry well, so he decides to put the mule out of its misery, bury it, and fill in the well all at once. First shovels full hit the mule, and it’s panic-braying, but after a few more, it goes silent. Farmer looks down to see that with every shovel full of dirt that hits its back, the mule shakes it off and steps up. Shakes it off and steps up, until he simply steps up over the edge of the well itself and trots off.

This story is usually used to illustrate how we can face adversity by shaking if off and stepping up. Nail hit on head. But when Jesus says the effect of our taking on God’s attributes as we grow spiritually is to become light in the world, we’re left thinking of straight rays of visible light as opposed to darkness, the absence of light. Or we may be thinking of light and dark as symbols for good versus evil—ever opposed. But ancient Hebrews understood light, nuhra, as straight lines of order, harmony, clarity function—and darkness, heshuka, as curved energies of mystery, obscurity, chaos, unfunction…not dysfunction, because darkness is not bad, just not directly usable, as we’d like.

At the bottom of our wells, in the chaotic uncertainty that life always delivers, we want straight, clear lines beamed down to pull us up into the light. But that’s not how enlightenment works. Straight rays can’t bend and reach around the curved space of heshuka. Rational thinking, can’t reach around the paradox that spirit represents.

Enlightenment is really endarkenment.

It’s not a direct beaming down of straight rays of understanding that lights our darkness, but an indirect layering up of experience that lifts us into the light. The intense experiences of love and suffering that life shovels onto our backs, if we shake them off and step up, keep vulnerably showing up to life, enlighten by slowly removing what obscures. It’s the only way.

Dave Brisbin 8.27.23

Talking to a man going through a devastating life transition. Now in his sixties, he’d always been a man who could make things happen through sheer intellect and effort: built businesses from the ground up and rose to top leadership in church and ministry. He derived his identity primarily from those two focuses—from ironclad beliefs that were both anchor and compass.

But a series of disillusioning events at the church drove a deconstruction of his faith and beliefs that cast him adrift, a down-spiral that included alcohol and a bad fall that incapacitated him long enough to lose his business and nearly his family as well. Four years later, he’s saying he wishes he could go back to the days when life made sense, that he’s not contributing anymore, doesn’t feel value to life. Thinks maybe he should move to a larger city where he’d have opportunities to volunteer, maybe write a book, start a new business.

I so resonate with this man.

I know that true identity never comes from temporary accomplishment and recognition, but from a silent place within that no one will ever see or applaud. That experiencing this deeper identity infuses meaning from inside out, rather than trying to extract it, vampire-like, from another source. And yet I still feel the pull to do something others will see as significant, leave a legacy that will outlive, a mark on the world like carving into a tree that I was here.

I know that in two generations, no one will remember me. Two generations. That’s it. Even if I leave a book or legacy, my products may be remembered, but not me. If I can’t find value right now, typing these words careless of whether anyone reads them, I won’t find it anywhere else. When Jesus says we’re blessed when we’re poor in spirit, he’s saying just that: to have an attitude of poverty even if we’re rich, admit complete dependence, realize we don’t exist individually but only in connection with each other, is the only meaning that is permanent. We’re blessed—whole and complete—the moment we can stop striving to be different to be remembered, laying back into the grateful anonymity of oneness with all that is.