theeffect Podcasts

Dave Brisbin 3.31.19

Fourth Sunday of Lent: Each liturgical day of Holy Week from Palm Sunday to Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday has a name and scripture passages designated that tell the story of the final week of Jesus’ earthly life. But each day and its passages also tell another story when we look beneath the literal meaning. They show us the internal experience of the Way of Jesus…the path he takes all the way to the cross. Focusing on Holy Tuesday and Spy Wednesday that tell of the wise and foolish bridesmaids and about Judas and Mary, we find stories about balance. Jesus tells us that the parable of the bridesmaids is about watchfulness and readiness, and the context of the Jewish wedding tradition balances the anticipation of new life to come with the immersion in the life that is now. Judas, whether conspiring to have Jesus arrested or sparring with Mary over whether the perfume she pours over Jesus should have been sold for the poor, is wholly focused on macro political and social issues. Mary is only focused on her relationship with Jesus—intimate and vulnerable. Jesus is quick to point out the disconnect, and we are left to see how the balance between anticipation of new life to come and presence to daily details, the balance between the big issues over which we have no control and the intimacy of our closest relationships is part of this week of keys to Kingdom life.

Dave Brisbin 3.24.19

Third Sunday of Lent: Flipping channels, ran across the movie Chariots of Fire. Hadn’t seen it in decades and got immediately pulled in. Story of two runners preparing for the 1924 Olympics—a British Jew and Scottish Christian who couldn’t be more different. As the Brit is using running as a weapon against the prejudice he’s endured as a Jew, the Scotsman simply “feels God’s pleasure” when he runs. And his whole life as both athlete and Christian missionary to China reflects his ability to do two things: to see through the surface task—whether running or teaching—to the deeper, spiritual task beneath, and to radically accept life as it presents in any moment. Whether the pressure of an Olympic event or the advance of the Japanese army into China, he remains himself, wholly committed to the welfare of either competitors or students. How did he manage to get to this kind of balance? In his early twenties, no less? And more importantly, how can we? When we read from sources as diverse as Nehemiah, Ecclesiastes, Jesus at Matthew 6, and dialectical behavior therapy skills, we see patterns forming that give us clues to the how of this balance between work for change and radical acceptance, between the task at hand and finding the evergreen task within the task. And by leaning in right there we can begin to live the difference between identifying with our work, using our tasks as weapons of self-worth and simply feeling God’s pleasure as we run.

Dave Brisbin 3.17.19

Second Sunday of Lent: Trying to sit quietly in balcony chair and warm sunlight but shadows keep flitting across my closed eyes. Every time I look, nothing there, until finally I catch a smallish butterfly streaking by. Then another. And another, until I realize there’s a dense column all driving overhead in the same direction. Later I learn of the one billion butterflies migrating north to Oregon and beyond…because the rains this winter in the interior deserts dropped annual rainfall levels in single weekends, and dormant seeds and bulbs under the desert floor bloomed into carpets of flowers that caterpillars loved and survived into a billion butterflies going north. We notice a billion butterflies, but how often do we notice just one? Lent is about becoming people who don’t wait, like dormant, buried seeds for spectacular rains to bring a billion butterflies into our awareness, but actively search out the water and growth that allows us to see each and every butterfly that crosses our path. Jesus speaks of the cry of all creation showing us the truth, Paul gives us a three-part roadmap to the kind of awareness that really sees and celebrates whatever creation is right in front of us, right now. Whether a billion or just one, no longer waiting for a spectacular desert bloom, we make the desert bloom anytime any time we choose.

Dave Brisbin 3.10.19

On the first Sunday of Lent, we stop to consider what Lent has meant since the middle of the second century to millions of Christians from ancient to medieval to modern times. What is its place in the liturgical calendar and how did it and the other seasons of the church along with their cultural practices bind the people together in common experience? A common experience we no longer possess in our culture. But understanding Lent by understanding the model from which it came, Jesus’ 40 days in the wilderness, we begin to see that regardless of what the church taught and practiced, Lent was not about suffering or deprivation as some sort of sacrifice for God’s favor. Nor was it about penance for past sin. Looking at the model of Jesus, we see a voluntary sense-deprivation, a quieting and removal of all distraction and whatever fuels the ego-self that obscures real identity and meaning. Jesus didn’t go into the wilderness to suffer, he went to be purged of everything that hid the truth from his eyes, but he accepted suffering as part of the process. This Lent, this 40 day preparation for the new life of Easter, can establish a structure for our own journey toward our real selves, if we let it. Will we? Let it?

Dave Brisbin 3.3.19

The shape of our life journey moves initially from the simplicity of childhood to the complexity of adulthood. But if it stops there, we’ve missed the point of it all. To push further, to let go of the complexity and dive back down into the simplicity of our essential spirituality brings us into real meaning and purpose. To illustrate from John’s Gospel, the story of Jesus’ first miracle, changing water to wine at Cana, can be read very simply as just that, Jesus’ first miracle that established him as more than a man, teacher, and sage—someone in whom his first followers placed their faith. But delving deeper into the imagery, the symbolic use of numbers, the historical context and relationships implied from an ancient Hebrew point of view adds complex layers of meaning and begins to show us much more of what John and his community understood about Jesus near the end of the first century. But to stop there in all that complexity, no matter how interesting and enlightening, is still to miss the essential message of Jesus’ work. To break through and find the simple and intimate connection with the story is what moves us from head to heart, from a two thousand year old narrative to the choices we will make in our next breath.

Dave Brisbin | 2.24.19

Talking about the mental gymnastics involved in moving from dualistic thinking to unitive thinking, once again, it’s not about become wholly one or the other, but a realization of the need for the balance of middle ground. Ultimately all our brains do—our left brains at least—is to differentiate: compare and contrast, find the edges of things to define and distinguish them from the background and the next thing, to place them in categories, divide light from dark, past from future, us from them. Without this ability, we don’t survive. All the tasks along our journey of life are dependent on the ability to think dualistically, and we need to take the tasks of life seriously. If we don’t, we’ll never find our purpose, meaning, and identity as humans. But at the same time, if we take the tasks of life too seriously, if we never stop differentiating and judging, if we become defined and identified with our tasks and accomplishments, then we never find meaning, purpose, identity either. We’re on this hero’s journey of life not to find and acquire our purpose, but to reach the point of release of all that we think the journey is about, and in that clearing realize the purpose, meaning, and identity that had always been ours from before we began. From Abraham to Moses to Solomon, to Jesus to Dorothy Gale in Oz to each of us, the journey is the same in shape and infinitely different in detail. A hero is not the one who completes the journey, but the one whom the journey completes.

Frank Billman | 2.17.19

In talking about contemplative spirituality, the term dualism or dualistic thinking comes up quite a bit. What does that exactly mean? And more importantly, if the goal in contemplative life is to lose our natural dualistic tendencies, to become more unitive in our consciousness, what does that look like in everyday life? What are the mental gymnastics that need to be embraced before we could ever put such non-dualistic experience into play? Pastor Frank explores this with real world examples and some of the intellectual paradoxes that need to be faced in order to pursue the kind of spirituality that Jesus, in an ancient Hebrew context, found so natural.

Dave Brisbin | 2.10.19

When I was in pastoral training, a pastor told me that no one should preach the parables until they’ve been in ministry for 30 years. Now I violated that right away, but approaching 20 years in ministry, I do see what he was driving at. There is a perspective that comes just from sheer years of having seen the panorama, the parade of years go by that creates a different way of looking at life—and parables need to be looked at the way we look at life--not text. For two thousand years, scholars and clergy have debated the meaning of Jesus’ parables, breaking them down into the smallest bits, trying to crack the code. But some parables absolutely resist such fine grained interpretation. As in the difficult parables of the unjust steward and judge, Jesus seems to be violating everything we know of our morality and ethics as well as his own. But parables aren’t meant to be understood through the lens of what we already think we know, they are meant to explode what we already think we know. They are meant to slap us in the face and wake us up or at least confuse us enough to stop trying to force familiar lines of thinking into radical new concepts. If we let go of trying to resolve each word and detail to make the parable fit our understanding, if we step back as from the vantage of 30 years’ experience and see the overall contours of the story, where it’s pointing, how it makes us feel--with just enough Aramaic context, we can begin to see where Jesus is pointing us. And if we’re willing to follow that new direction both mentally and relationally, we’ll find new ways of seeing and hearing that may begin with a parable, but will extend to every detail of our lives.

Dave Brisbin | 2.3.19

Situated on the liturgical calendar between Christmas and Easter, between Jesus’ birth and death, is a perfect time to look at Jesus’ life—to look at balancing what he lived and how he loved with the more theologically significant events of his birth, death, and resurrection. It’s a perfect time to consider how living as he lived would give theological significance to our own birth and death. But our western church roots go deep, and making that balancing shift can be difficult unless as Jesus says: we grow new ears to hear. Using parables to break through what we think we already know and how we already hear, Jesus gives us the story of the Sower, which is really more about the Four Soils. But as he speaks of seed falling on the beaten path, rocks, and thorns as well as on good soil, church ears have heard him speaking of four different types of people who break down to two basic groups: believers and non-believers, those who accept Jesus theologically and those who don’t, us and them. Digging deep into the Aramaic underpinnings of Jesus’ saying, we find layers of meaning that put us in the center of the story: that ultimately each one of us is all four soils all at once. That we all have the blind spots, the hard baked stubborn spots, and the unhealed hurting spots that keep us from fully embracing a new truth, even as our good soil embraces others. If we willing to give little ground, Jesus is showing us how to prepare our soil and grow new ears that will grow good crops.

Dave Brisbin | 1.27.19

Nearing the end of the liturgical season of Christmas that spans 40 days from Christmas Day until the feast of the Presentation on February 2, we are now living between Christmas and Easter, between Jesus’ birth and death. People have commented on the fact that a tombstone lists dates of birth and death with only a mere dash signifying the entirety of a person’s life. But Jesus didn’t even get a dash; he only got a comma. In the earliest creed of the church, the Apostle’s creed, Jesus’ birth and death are listed in a series of beliefs only separated by commas. Everything that Jesus lived and breathed and taught and loved is not mentioned in a list of events the church understood as theologically significant. But how can we understand the theological significance of an event in Jesus’ life without knowing the life of which those events are a part—the context for any event in his life? Early in its history, the church shifted from a focus on Jesus’ life and Way of living it, to a focus on his death as instrument of salvation and promise of resurrection. But Jesus’ life informs his death, and if we’re to be authentic followers of Jesus, we must find the balance between the two—learning to trace the shape of his life before we consider the significance of his death, or our own. Here, now, between Christmas and Easter, we’re living in his comma, the perfect time to consider our dash.