theeffect Podcasts

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 wherever you are, whenever you are, you are always and forever right in the center of it all. If we could begin to grasp that…

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 example, and try to follow on, clumsily at first until we start to fill those big shoes.

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 the other side of that outrage is the abundant life of kingdom—and only on the other side of our outrage, the death of legal relationships, is a unity that changes everything.

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 attention, we come to understand that God’s house is within us, among us, in our midst--and in every setting out, we simply bring God’s House with us…if we so choose.

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 kingdom itself. Gratitude is what kingdom feels like—its default position. When we’ve taken the journey, it’s how we know we’ve arrived.

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. To understand this central place of spirit in motion and breath is to begin to understand biblical spirituality. Here, with no analog in Western culture, perhaps the Hawaiian concept of aloha and island spirituality can come to our rescue and help us translate our own texts.

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 the corn I sing to it, as we did when I was young,” they are speaking of the meaning of life encapsulated in the immersion in a singular act in a specific moment. All life and meaning coming to a single point of awareness. Jesus would call this Kingdom, and if we can’t learn to sing to the corn again, we won’t really know what he means.