theeffect Podcasts

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 invisibly breathing by.

I read an article by a long term care chaplain who over the years has sat with over five hundred people at the end of their lives. And what she learned was that “there are many instances when meaning has no truth or value or place in reality.” That a rational expression of meaning “breaks down precisely at the juncture of crisis and death.” That to simply listen, to “sit with the reality of the unknown…has plunged me into depths I cannot always fathom…caused me to see beyond words and action. There is, in truth, no separateness, for all is one, deeply and profoundly one, interdependent and grounded in oneness.”

Rational meaning breaks down, as all physical systems do, at the point of transcendence, just when we imagine we need it most. At the extremes of life, the junctures of crisis and death when meaning is most intense, it becomes inexpressible, invisible. We can assign words in retrospect, but at the moment we experience spiritual meaning, words are a distraction at best, an insult if spoken. All we can do is be present. Wordlessly present. Do that, get it all.

We can fit that in one sentence.

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 return where we started with interior gifts for those willing to receive.

Jesus answers his call and puts down the three symbolic “temptations” of our human need to be relevant, powerful, and spectacular, our drives for security and survival, power and control, affection and esteem. He finds his meaning and purpose in his identity with his Father who he can now call Abba out of intimate familiarity. He is so transformed by this journey, that his hometown neighbors who watched him grow up are astonished. Isn’t this the carpenter’s son? But one hero’s gift is the next person’s call to their own journey, a challenge to their own narrative. For those not yet ready, not only unwelcome, but a threat to oppose. Violently.

Jesus’ hero-gift, gospel, declaration of hope to the brokenhearted, is the truth that we are all as loved, free, forgiven as we want to be. Right now. Today. But today is terrifying for those unready to leave their nets at the shore. Today demands decision, challenges the security of our narrative. Jesus learned that the waiting is over, everything we need is already here. Just need to answer the call to make it so.

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 restored. In Jewish culture, to spit in a person’s face was an ultimate insult, complete rejection—yet only after this insult and a second laying of hands is the man fully healed. This story is followed by another in which Jesus tells his followers that he will be rejected, humiliated, killed, then will rise again. That if they intend to follow him, they will also have to take up their crosses and lose their lives before they find them. The two stories are meant to be understood together.

Jesus was spat upon, had to descend, lose everything it meant to be himself before rising to new life. We all must endure the same loss before rising to the Pentecost moment when we finally see clearly that we’re healed. Jesus’ followers saw him only dimly, clinging to their beliefs about law and justice restored when Jesus and they would rise to power. But Jesus is showing that obedience as a form of control is not enough. Only in the humiliating loss of all sense of personal power can we clearly see the truth of a love that obliterates law.

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 together, working with addicts and alcoholics, trying to stand the model of community church on its head. We saw ourselves chasing the effect of God’s love on our daily lives rather than a theological cause, answering both the necessary steps of early recovery and Jesus’ Aramaic Way. We saw everyone as recovering from something.

Honestly, we’ve stayed true to those principles, but the reality of a generation of community life has changed us. The losses we’ve sustained, the deaths, overdoses, disagreements, rejections—but also the miracles, healings, recovery, friendships.

What were we saying yes to sixteen years ago when we reimagined?

We said yes to having everything we thought we knew about ourselves, life, reimagined church and our ability to build it, challenged, dissolved. Loss of certainty, broken hearts, shattered faith. But as we kept showing up, what grew back after the wildfires was recovery. Miracles we never saw coming. We said yes to life unredacted, unadorned, unclothed. Would I say yes all over again? In a heartbeat.

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 God just another patriarchy? In scripture, God is referred to as male by name and pronoun, but how is “he” portrayed? Ruach, malkutha, shekinah, hockhmah—spirit, kingdom, presence, wisdom—are all feminine Hebrew nouns, so in spirit, presence, wisdom, God is “she,” and kingdom is queendom. God is consistently depicted as a mother birthing, caressing, and suckling her children. Jesus calls God abba, a child’s word conveying an intimacy first experienced as emma/mother, and he leads every personal encounter with a mother’s acceptance before the teaching of father.

Making our government and churches more equitable means more than the number of seats occupied by men and women. The Hebrew mind couldn’t conceive of God apart from a perfect balance of father and mother—masculine and feminine, justice and mercy, knowledge and wisdom, logic and intuition, performance and acceptance, accomplishment and intimacy. Until we meet Mother God ourselves, we’ll never know Father God. Until we who occupy seats of power become more perfect parents, our institutions will remain toxic and paternal, whether patriarchal, matriarchal, or anywhere in between.

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 whole, integrated, living in shalom, in kingdom?

These ancients viewed illness not as a medical problem, but the tragedy of being taken out of the flow of day-to-day life, to lose social standing and interaction with family, friends, neighbors, commerce. To be healed was to be restored to community, everything that gives meaning to life. Jesus knows this man is sick, not just physically, but spiritually, emotionally, relationally. When he can’t simply say yes to wholeness, we all know he is steeped in a victim mentality that keeps him from the relationships that are healing and forgiveness, restoration to all that life offers.

Jesus heals the man anyway, but he doesn’t even ask his name or look for him afterwards to thank or follow. The deeper sickness remains. Jesus finds him later and tells him now that he’s well, don’t sin anymore so nothing worse happens. Jesus isn’t promising more disease as punishment, but making a central point. Sin isn’t unlawfulness to be punished…sin is disconnection itself. The man is physically healed, but more importantly has been given a chance for new relationship. Will he take it? Will we?

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 before their minds take hold, telling them they must think about who they are, to hold that thought and defend it as they work to make it so. Whatever we think we are nothing without, lost without, is what we identify with. But anything we can lose is not who we are, and everything we think, will eventually be lost.

The freedom of the truth Jesus offers is that who we really are can never be lost. Ever. Not even in death. Any identity imagined as separate from any other identity, God’s identity, is illusion, so to strip the illusion is to see that we and the Father are one: true identity. Jesus’ Way is relinquishing everything that can be relinquished until only that which can’t be relinquished remains. The point of any spiritual journey is to arrive at the ground of this irreducible presence, an identity that can’t be lost, but costs us everything to which we cling.

The first responders to a message like this are those who are already close to the ground. We call them humble. Jesus calls them children, for such as they are kingdom.

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 of pure spirit.

Christian tradition overlays on this structure. Begins counting seven weeks of seven on Easter Sunday, and after counting to 49, the fiftieth day is Pentecost—the day that Jesus’ first followers were freed from the mental certainty of their physical relationship with Jesus to the full realization of their relationship with unseen God. Just as Jesus told Nicodemus that we all must be born of both water and spirit in order to see the Kingdom of God, the two births are separated by a gap, a period of adjusting to a new, non-physical, non-rational relationship with a God who like the wind, can’t be pinned down.

This is where we are now. In count between Easter and Pentecost.

The way to Pentecost begins at Calvary, the death of our physical certainty and reliance on rational thought. As we move through our grief over that loss, we begin to recognize that God didn’t die with our certainty, but still lives in the details of our daily lives in ways we hadn’t considered. And with that awareness, we’re in count to our Pentecost moment, the second liberation and birth, our embrace of pure spirit in physical life.

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 difference?

Not one of Jesus’ followers recognizes him post-Resurrection. They interact with him, sometimes for hours, as if with a stranger until an intimate and familiar gesture breaks the spell. We humans only know a person after experiencing intimate details over time, and Jesus’ friends had to re-experience that intimacy to prove his identity, a process of becoming ready to see a Jesus both intimately familiar and yet wildly changed. Same with us. The meaning of Resurrection is not out there in history or theological doctrines, but within us, in the most intimate details of our lives and relationships.

When the women come to the empty tomb to anoint Jesus’ body, they are asked why they seek the living among the dead. Again scripture is telling us where to look. Set beliefs are snapshots—static, motionless, dead—no longer among the living. If we keep the meaning of Resurrection in our thoughts alone, Jesus is not there. Like ruha—spirit, breath, wind—Jesus is always in motion, our motion. Among the living…that’s us, the living. We find the risen Lord in each face and embrace, every moment of our lives. Or not at all.