theeffect Podcasts

Dave Brisbin 3.15.20

There’s an elephant in the room, and there’s no sense not addressing it. The COVID-19 outbreak is unprecedented in the way it is changing our way of life, and there’s a sense that things may never be the same, just as they never were after 9/11. With schools, churches, conventions, restaurants, sporting events, all public venues shutting down, with supermarket shelves empty and people fighting over bathroom tissue, we all want to know how long this will last and how bad will it get? The truth is, no one knows—and that is what is most frightening. In a great article titled the Psychology of Uncertainty, psychologists show us how our brains will do almost anything to avoid uncertainty. Uncertainty can’t be fought, planned for, or outrun. It is the real spirit killer. How can we live through uncertain times like these with our spirits and humanity intact? The short answer is faith, but not as a platitude. Our need for certainty and control has distorted our understanding of what faith originally meant. As Dickens wrote, this is the best of times and the worst of times…and the times are showing us that life is made of uncertainty and bringing out the best and worst in each of us. We can’t outrun uncertainty, but real faith will let us live well in the midst of it all.

Dave Brisbin 3.8.20

If we are to be persuaded to try to make this Lent a transforming process, the creation of a new habitual way of living in greater presence, it’s important for us to have realistic expectation of the result. Most of us would say that we expect peace in some form, and by that we mean we want any and all hurting to stop, an absence of the pain and longing that characterize so many of our lives. But Jesus never promised this. He said that he gives us his peace in one passage, then says that he didn’t come to bring peace, but the sword in another. It’s not until we translate his sayings back into Aramaic that his meaning comes clear. When I was just starting my spiritual formation decades ago, a mentoring pastor said he saw in me a “divine dissatisfaction,” a spiritual unrest and longing for something I couldn’t quite define. When we look at the clues left us in scripture, it becomes more and more apparent that this divine dissatisfaction is there for a reason, and we should pray it never leaves us.

Dave Brisbin 3.1.20

I often say that I’m a teacher, not preacher, by which I mean that a preacher’s main purpose is to persuade, and a teacher’s is to encourage students to engage. Both impart information, but the agenda is different. That said, there are things I do want to persuade my listeners: to be intimately part of a faith community and to passionately engage their own spiritual journeys. How this is done is entirely up to them, but this Lent I have been trying to persuade everyone to use this time to try to establish a new habitual way of making themselves more present to whoever and whatever occupies their moments—and therefore to God in the moment. How is it that we are persuaded to do anything? A marketer says we are persuadable when someone encourages our dreams, justifies our failures, allays our fears, confirms our suspicions, and helps throw rocks at our enemies. When you think of it, these five are all included in the promises of Gospel, if in a slightly altered form than probably first intended. But by whatever method of persuasion, if we can commit to creating one personal sacrament—a simple concrete action signifying an inner transforming intent—and performing it every day of this Lent: if we were to commit to making just one person smile each day, we may be amazed at what can change.

Dave Brisbin 2.23.20

Lent begins Wednesday as it has every year since the seventh century. 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 affirmative action, as positive subtraction, sensory 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 listening and seeing that will allow us to look for new life, rebirth, where it really lives.

Frank Billman 2.16.20

The way Jesus teaches, through parables, stories, and questions in response to questions, makes clear that a primary intent is to challenge the belief system of the student, to help him or her deconstruct the worldview that is now limiting their ability to see a radically different truth. We all see the world based on several filters or lenses of our personal belief system, and identifying and deconstructing them is essential to spiritual growth because most of them operate on the subconscious level and appear to us as reality itself or the voice of God. Three categories of lenses of belief are: 1)Genetic predispositions--personality type, Myers Briggs, Enneagram; 2) Childhood upbringing, parents, teachers, church; 3) Woundings and successes. There are other filters but these have a huge impact and are a good place to start. If we can began to see what is shading our accepted truth, we can take action to negate or remove the filter entirely and begin the journey Jesus is traveling.

Dave Brisbin 2.9.20

It’s natural for people to focus on law and rules because the world runs on law and rules with the threat of punishment enforcing obedience. It makes the world go round and trains run on time. And the church, as an institution, has largely run on the same premise, which then makes God guilty by association of also looking for obedience to his “law” as the means by which we are accepted and approved. But Jesus and the Hebrew prophets before him are showing us a God running on compassion and mercy instead of justice, and if we’re going to actually follow Jesus’ Way, we need to make sure we understand that mere obedience can never bring us into Kingdom as Jesus defined it. A story in the book of 1 Samuel about David and man called Naval help illustrate the notion that we can still be wicked, even with the permission of the law, that is, lawful and unloving at the same time. God is interesting in lovingkindness, with lawfulness only an external guide to that internal state of connection with each other and himself. As we look at sayings from Jesus, Paul, and John, we see that mere obedience under the fear of punishment shows a missing confidence in connection with God that eliminates fear of punishment and allows us to simply love with a fearless vulnerability that looks like unrestricted obedience.

Dave Brisbin 2.2.20

Continuing a series of exploring difficult subjects, those that tend to really set off emotional triggers and divisive arguments, we have dug into the concepts of salvation, eternal life, Satan and spiritual warfare…and now the question comes about whether God’s judgment on us is predestined or if we really do have free will. Wow, no easy questions here. Just as with salvation by works or grace, there is an immediate apparent contradiction in scripture. Paul seems to directly say that God, from the beginning of time, has already picked the winners and losers—those going to heaven or hell. And Calvinist reformers 1500 years later, based on those passages and the writings of Augustine a thousand years earlier, created a belief system centered on the predestination of God’s elect. Of course, the controversy raged then and still does now, but it doesn’t take much digging to find passages that state absolutely that God draws and desire all people, not just some, to come to himself, and he wishes for none to go astray, some by Paul himself. Once we look more deeply at Paul’s apparent predestination statements in context of the larger passages and Paul’s main missionary objective to bring Gentile followers of Jesus equally into what started as a Jewish movement, a new understanding of predestination emerges. What is predetermined is not a forced outcome by God, but God’s deepest desire and intention that each one of us realizes that we are all equally a part of the family. What is predetermined is God’s choice about us. Left undetermined is our choice about God.

Dave Brisbin 1.26.20

Decades ago, I thought it was important to challenge a Franciscan priest who said he believed that Satan was really a metaphor for our own inclination to evil. He waved me off saying that all he could do was tell me what he was convinced of; that I needed to go become convinced of what I’m convinced of. Now, decades later I am challenged for my beliefs on Satan and evil, and though there is no definitive proof from the scriptures I used then to “prove” my points, I do have a different responsibility than did the priest to at least talk a bit about them. So, is Satan “real” as we typically understand him: a sentient being dedicated to opposing God’s will and effecting our destruction? When we dig into the Hebrew scriptures from within a Hebrew context, we’re in for a shock. The scriptures present at least four different ways “ha satan,” the adversary, can be viewed, and the passages we have used to nail down our popular image of Satan aren’t even referring to such a being in the first place. The Jews who wrote our scripture believed that nothing could oppose God, which carves out a very different understanding of ha satan’s role, and they also believed in a necessary balance between each human’s inclination to evil and good. It’s in that delicate balance between our own inclinations that we can find a view of ha satan that is healthy and helpful in taking us always toward the good that is our God.

Dave Brisbin 1.19.20

One of the drawbacks of the Sunday morning sermon is also its strength: uninterrupted speech. Good for developing and delivering a message, but not for conversation. And conversation, the give and take, question and answer is where ideas can really be conveyed and absorbed. And with a topic as large as salvation that was tackled last week, this Sunday is more about the conversation. Recapping the main lines of thought on salvation from last week’s “Becoming Saved” message, it seemed good to add a bit more thread. It’s hard for Westerners to get their minds around the Hebrew concept of salvation since it’s not grounded in afterlife, but here and now—as is all Jewish spirituality. It may help to understand that salvation and eternal life were equivalent terms to ancient Jews, but only if we know how eternal life was understood. Using Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus based around the famous verse, John 3:16, we get a glimpse from the Aramaic rendering of how eternal life is not life that continues indefinitely into eternity, but is life that is eternally alive, new, fresh, constantly reborn, as always, right here and now. Taking that definition and connecting it to salvation understood as spiritual liberation herenow, and then to Paul’s salvation statements in Romans, Ephesians, and Philippians, a new view of something so central to our faith begins to materialize. Let the conversation begin…

Dave Brisbin 1.12.20

A friend takes me to task saying that he could see that what I write and teach would make someone want to be “saved,” but that he couldn’t see where I was actually telling anyone how to attain salvation. Based on our understanding of salvation in Western Christian tradition and Paul’s line from Romans 10: if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your hear that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved, I completely understand why he would say that. But what if the Jews who wrote our scriptures, including Paul, understood salvation differently? And what about Paul then writing in Ephesians that there are no works by which we are saved but only by grace through faith and then further in Philippians that we must work out our salvation with fear and trembling? What can three statements seemingly in direct contradiction with each other and an altered view of what it means to be saved by God tell us about attaining that salvation? Digging in, we find that Jesus and Paul are speaking with one voice asking us to spin our assumptions a hundred and eighty degrees and see salvation from another point of view: that salvation is less about attaining and more about regaining—remembering who we are in God’s heart. And that if we’re always looking for salvation out there somewhere, it will forever remain just beyond our reach.