Dave Brisbin 8.30.26

Wait, Jesus had a brother?

Scripture says he had four—James, Joses, Judas, Simon—and sisters too, unnamed and unnumbered. Not talked about much because Jesus with full siblings, DNA from both Mary and Joseph, blows up the doctrine of virgin birth that most Christianity accepts. If they were half-siblings, Mary having children after Jesus blows up the doctrine of Mary’s perpetual virginity that Catholic and Orthodox churches accept.

But there’s a third door. With no word for cousin in Hebrew/Aramaic, they had to say son or daughter of my uncle. Cumbersome. So mostly they just said brother or sister. Jesus’ brothers could have been cousins, as Jesus’ aunt, Mary of Clopas, had at least two sons named James and Joses. Whew.

However you see it, Jesus had a brother named James.

We hear all about Peter and Paul as leaders of the early Jesus movement, but in the confusion following the crucifixion, there was only one man who had the reputation, trust, and kinship to hold the fledgling movement together: Ya’akov ha-Tsaddiq, James the Just, Jesus’ brother.

James was above reproach, a lifelong Nazirite—formally dedicated to God. He didn’t follow Jesus during his ministry, but joined the movement after the crucifixion, and the people elected him nasi, overseer, a position he held for thirty years. Jewish authorities illegally stoned him in 62 CE, and the people were so outraged, it accelerated the unrest that led to the war with Rome four years later. James maintained the spiritual and social purity of the movement from the crucifixion to the war that ended the Jewish state and temple religion…time needed for the church to take root.

James’ book in the bible was used as a catechism, laying out in very Jewish fashion the concrete way of life that honored Jesus’ teaching in a Jewish frame. His writing is foundational, starting with accepting life as it is, enduring hardships that teach and mature, understanding faith and faithful life in community. James is a window on how Jesus was understood by those who knew him best, grew up with him.

We need to bring Jesus’ brother out of the shadows and let him speak.

Dave Brisbin 8.23.26

Ever awaken at 3:30 in the morning? Doesn’t it always seem to be 3:30? Maybe coming out of a disorienting dream, disembodied in the dark with all it means to be you laid aside? It’s right there in that naked vulnerability that a lot of the work of Jesus’ Way is already done for you…

Your clothes are in the closet. Your Rolex on the night stand. Maybe your teeth are in the bathroom. Car and tools in the garage, diplomas on the office wall. The people reflecting your roles seem remote, no substance in the dark. Who are you then? How do you relate to anything of significance? Later you get up, make coffee, feel better. Your reflection in the mirror, your clothes and rituals rebuild you in the light, help you forget questions circling in the dark.

Jesus’ Way is the practice of waking at 3:30 AM and remaining quiet, disembodied, not running back to your reflection until all you’ve built around yourself becomes transparent enough to see right through to those central questions asked in the dark. But Jesus knew how we can also lose our Way down the rabbit hole of abstract questions, lose our connection to daily life.

Like fish in water, the Way can’t exist anywhere but daily life, can’t be practiced anywhere but the physicality of our relationships. It’s the action of becoming aware enough to experience our original connection to significance—everything immediately present in our moments. Jesus calls this experience Kingdom, the state of being so connected as to identify with. Which is why he doesn’t get lost in abstract theology, but tells us to lose ourselves in intimate relationship. Without an effect on relationship, there is no Kingdom. No identification. Kingdom is the effect.

We naturally want to think more, try to understand, but the Way is showing us how to act in a way that mimics the 3:30 moment, bringing our stripped down, disembodied awareness into the light of daily experience. Practical action that attenuates left brain ego dominance and amplifies right brain experience without judgment. Concrete steps we can take that slowly show us, not tell us, who we are and how we relate to significance.

Dave Brisbin 8.16.26

Are we human beings having a spiritual experience?

Spiritual beings having a human experience?

If you’ve been around the contemplative block, you know it’s never either/or, but both/and. Duality exists only in our minds, specifically, our left brains. Once immersed in momentary, right-brain experience, duality dissolves. Physical and spiritual can’t be separated as long as we’re breathing in these bodies.

Many traditions consider spirit conscious energy. Einstein—E=MC2—considers energy and matter the same thing in different states. Whether spirit is really conscious energy is endlessly debatable, but the analogy helps us see that we can’t have spiritual experience apart from brains and bodies—the interpretation and sensation of any experience while human.

For millennia, the Church has taught being more spiritual by being less physical, that the world is profane. But for ancient Jews who wrote our scripture, spiritual life was realized when fully immersed in physical life. Marriage, sex, food, children, labor…dig deep, get dirty, love it, learn from it. All sacred. Walling off our humanity as a mark of spiritual progress is a spiritual by-pass of the highest order, by-passing the very life from which we learn what mature spirituality means.

Jesus’ Way is living life as a sacrament—outward expression of inward transformation. Any ritual means nothing until a human heart consecrates it with conscious presence. Physical life is equally meaningless until consecrated by presence, and our presence can’t be placed anywhere but the moment we occupy. Spiritual presence, physical moment. Inseparable.

Clare of Assisi wrote to allow our entire being transformed into the image of the Godhead itself. Meaningless until she defines it: so that we may feel what friends feel. If you’ve ever had a friend as close as your own heartbeat, you know Godhead. What could be more physical?

We don’t approach God directly. We approach God through immersion in the momentary details of our lives. We don’t love God directly. We love God by loving each other. We don’t know God directly. We know God when we feel what friends feel.

Dave Brisbin 8.9.26

You may be familiar with an elevator speech. Whatever you have to offer, if you can’t articulate who you are, what you do, why it matters in the time it takes to get to your floor in an elevator, you’ve lost the opportunity.

Jesus’ Way is purely experiential, not cognitive, but we still need an elevator speech to concisely understand what it is and isn’t or we’ll be digging holes where there is no treasure. We each need our own personal speech…but generally, it’s not a path leading somewhere else. It’s how we follow the path we’re already on, growing awareness of the unseen Oneness of all things in two complementary ways: living as if oneness really exists while relinquishing everything that obscures it. Only way to see who we really are in relation to what really is.

In 1996, a neuroanatomist had a stroke. Function by function, her left hemisphere went offline, leaving her entirely in her right mind. The left brain is the source of ego awareness, linear order, sense of separation and physical boundaries, deep ties to the past for threat assessment. The right brain is all about the present moment, flow, sense of oneness, experience without judgment, identification with everything. She watched with clinical fascination as her left brain faded, each area stopping function, her fear and horror muted by the overwhelming peace and oneness she felt as never before.

Took eight years to bring her left brain back online, to bring her two hemispheres into balance, to choose which left brain parts she wanted back and which only obscured the world as one. Took a stroke, the loss of her left brain to force awareness of her right, contemplative mind. She wrote she wished there were a safe way to induce this awareness in people.

Well, there is…

Jesus’ Way is a dive into the right mind by living as if all life is one, experiencing loving the enemy while relinquishing the dominance of the left mind, selling off everything that obscures us as one with.

Want a really short elevator speech on Jesus’ Way?

It’s a way of having a spiritual stroke.

You’d have a lotta ‘splainin’ to do, but at least you’d have their attention.

Dave Brisbin 8.2.26

We have always been taught that Jesus came to save us from our sins.

Not true. Not sins plural as in all the harmful choices we make or actions we commit. God understands those, loves right through those. In John’s gospel, Jesus came to take away the sin of the world. Singular. Not choices or actions, but a state of being…separate. The universal sin of the world—the pervading illusion of separation, of ourselves as separate from, in competition with everyone and everything else—the state from which every harmful choice and action proceeds.

The price of human self-awareness is to experience ourselves as separate beings, a sensation so physically pervasive, it overwhelms the unseen truth of ultimate connection. As infants, we swim in undifferentiated oneness until old enough to conceive of ourselves with distinct edges. Then the hurts and traumas of childhood pile up creating a narrative of unworthiness indoctrinating us to believe we’re not worthy of the connection we more and more dimly remember.

Between Mark 1 and 2, Jesus heals a leper, forgives a paralytic, and calls a tax collector to community back to back to back. Which means we’re supposed to see these encounters as connected. All three are outcasts. They know it, have accepted the narrative of unworthiness laid upon them. But Jesus touches the leper before healing, forgives the paralytic before restitution, calls the tax collector before repentance. He declares his connection with them even as their narratives stare in disbelief.

This was Jesus’ plan all along. Not to save us from sins, but to touch, forgive, call with the warmth of a smile that erased all doubt of connection. Only when we have felt completely unworthy and yet completely accepted at the same time, can we see shame for what it is—a narrative, a fear of disconnection that keeps us disconnected. Shame is the only thing standing between us and the Good News that our original connection remains, waiting patiently beneath old stories of original sin.

It’s the long way home, but Jesus came to save us from the separation that is sin.

But to do that he first had to save us from shame.

Dave Brisbin 7.26.26

Played high school football my first two years. Bookish kid trying to fit in, never got off the bench in league play. But I could learn that playbook. Knew it cover to cover better than the starters. Took some nerdy pride in that.

Small and fast, they put me at tight end and during a training scrimmage, quarterback called an end around. I knew that play cold: two steps off the line, planted, spun around across the backfield, quarterback fading into view, ball suspended in my path, slapped against my chest. Clamped down and turned back toward the line. Perfectly executed. But in my mind, the play was over. No more lines on the page. Holding the ball with absolutely no idea what to do next.

A big linebacker showed me.

I had focused on what I could understand, but everything it means to be a football player starts where the playbook ends. The parts we can read and memorize are not why we go to football games. What we do when nothing is telling us what to do…that’s worth a ticket.

In real life, though, excitement turns to panic when we can’t see the path ahead. It’s an honest mistake. We see the path snaking behind, choices and events like stones in a lawn, and we imagine the future laid out in front of us as well… destiny, fate, God ordained…if we could just get a glimpse. But wise man say the path is made by walking on it. Life is not a worn path in the woods, stretching out behind and before. It’s an adventure, a masted ship at sea. You see the wake behind, ahead only trackless ocean. A cloud of possible futures, constantly shifting with each choice/event.

We look to religion, its scripture, laws, beliefs, rituals—playbook and promise. If we follow the book, we’ll be safe. Saved. It may actually seem to work for awhile, until we suddenly find ourselves holding the ball with no idea what to do next.

Religion puts the play in motion. Jesus shows us how to exceed the playbook and run downfield with the ball. Life begins where the playbook ends. Why we buy the ticket. The way ahead is trackless ocean, a field of linebackers. Frightening. We could get in trouble. But that’s how you know it’s an adventure.

Dave Brisbin 7.19.26

A contemporary theologian and semiotician—how meaning is communicated—saw that our youngest generations process information differently than older Westerners in the modern era. He called it EPIC: experiential, participatory, image-based, and communal. Pretty much the exact opposite of our modern method: propositional, representational, word-based, individualistic.

We propose abstract concepts rather than experience a process; passively receive information rather than participate in an exchange; view the world through words as an individual rather than images within community. The hallmark of the modern West is to remain intellectually detached, observing life and attempting control from a safe distance. But the youngest among us jump right in, experiencing and participating in a communal world awash in image.

Absorbing this decades ago, the light went on when I realized that ancient cultures, especially the Hebrews who wrote our scriptures, were EPIC too. Here we are, modern Westerners, reading ancient EPIC texts in a diametrically opposed, non-EPIC way. Explains a lot.

Jesus called himself the Way. Not as propositional truth to use as a litmus test for orthodoxy, but as the invitation to participate and experience relational truth that could promise liberation no other way. Jesus’ earliest followers called themselves Followers of the Way. Not followers of Jesus in a representational, passive attempt to ride his coattails, but in the discipline of living lovingly in community. The Way, urha in Aramaic, means not just the path, but the light that reveals the path and opens possibility. When we view Jesus’ sayings of way, truth, life; ask, seek, knock; the five lines of the Lord’s prayer through an EPIC lens, they become sequences in a process of participatory experience, not words agreed upon for personal salvation.

We want to see the path that leads us to God. But when Jesus says the only Way to God is through him-as-Way, he is EPICly saying an unseen God can only be found on an unseen path…experienced in participation with each step, conveyed through image, and realized in identity with community.

Dave Brisbin 7.12.26

If God were sitting next to you right now and you could ask one question, what would it be?

Puts a pretty fine point on it, yes? To stop the ever-running assembly line of questions forming in your mind and pick just one… For adults, the questions were predictable: Why do you allow suffering? Don’t all religions lead to you? How can I trust the bible? If you’re really there, why don’t you prove it? Children’s responses were predictably less heady: How are you doing? Are you happy? And…

If God was sitting next to me, I’d just like to give him a hug.

Gotta love kids. That last one really points in the right direction. Adults have to face the fact that the most important questions in life don’t have answers. Only the experience of asking. Life isn’t answered and resolved rationally. Only lived. We can keep asking questions, but using our minds to navigate a spiritual journey is like bringing a knife to a gunfight…the mind is not the vehicle for such a journey.

Even so, there is one question Jesus is asked that rises above the rest. What must I do to obtain eternal life? Two thousand years ago, yesterday, today, isn’t that the question? Is what we see around us all there is to life or is there more? All other questions are just variants of this one, but Jesus doesn’t answer except to say, if you’ve done all you can do to be certain and want to fill that place that is still lacking, then sell all you think you know and come give me a hug.

We think of eternal life as a long time, life going on forever, an eternal future granted by God in exchange for believing the right things. But all of time is just one moment, eternally. And in Aramaic, eternal life is not life that goes on eternally, but life that is eternally alive—new, fresh, fulfilling, complete, abundant. Not then. Now. Not there. Here.

Life only becomes eternal the moment we become present to the life that is now.

We are not saved by the mind. By thinking, our minds separate us from this moment, from eternal life. To obtain that life is to stop thinking and start hugging. The hugging, embracing now as just enough is the eternal aliveness we seek.

Dave Brisbin 7.5.26

Truth is messy.

We like the beginning of things, especially big things like nations, to be neat and tidy events, so looking back, we compress them into just such neat narratives. Our histories and memories rely much more on poems we write about our heroes than actual happenings. True beginnings are most often a messy process that scatters and diffuses the points we want to remember. The points remain, just not wrapped in a bow.

July 4th, 2026, we celebrated the 250th anniversary of what? Our nation’s birth? Beginning of revolution? Signing of the Declaration of Independence? None of those happened on July 4th, 1776. The war started a year before, and the Declaration wasn’t first signed until August 2nd with signatures dribbling in through early 1777.

The colonies simply adopted Jefferson’s rough draft on the 4th of July.

Truth is messy, but the point of the document remains…

Jefferson speaks of political bands as existing only to serve the people—at their own consent—and when they no longer do, can and should be abolished. That all mankind are created equal with unalienable rights—rights that cannot be estranged. But that humans will suffer injustices infringing those rights as long as they are sufferable, knowing the path of revolution will make things much worse before ever better.

Jewish scripture often depicts Israel as one person, God’s son, moving through the shape of his journey to freedom. Those ancients believed “as above, so below,” that the movement of stars and nations mirrored our movement as individuals. What relational bands are keeping us in place? Do they serve all parties? Are they helping to secure our unalienable rights to love that can’t be estranged? Or are we suffering what is sufferable until our fears bottom out?

Jesus is a micro revolutionary calling us to fight an interior revolution for spiritual liberation. Jefferson mirrors that call with a Declaration stated as boldly as it gets. All in. Nothing left on the table.

The moment our longing for freedom exceeds the fear of claiming our right to unalienable love, we can be as bold as that. As messy. All in. Our 4th of July.

Dave Brisbin 6.28.26

Eucharist—usually called communion—is the essential Christian sacrament, the centerpiece of Christian worship. When a sacrament persists for millennia as a defining ritual, it’s telling us something about how earliest followers understood their journey. It can also tell us what we’ve forgotten about ours.

Eucharist means thanksgiving…because Jesus gave thanks over bread and wine at that last supper…because we should gratefully remember Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross, the means by which sins are forgiven, and we are saved. Jesus said that the bread was his body and wine a new covenant in his blood, but how we understand the word covenant has everything to do with how we understand communion.

In the West, we’ve understood covenant as a legal contract obligating both parties as contracts do. If we keep the terms of the contract, God is obligated to accept us, save us. But through the lens of original sin, there is nothing we can do to make ourselves worthy, so contractually, Jesus must do the heavy lifting. By believing in him theologically and not breaking the law, we are covered by his blood, but our side of the contract remains passive and vicarious. Salvation without transformation.

In Hebrews 9, the same word Jesus used for covenant is described as a last will and testament, its primary meaning. Jesus is the mediator, we would say devisor, of a will that leaves his estate to his heirs. Such a testament only comes into effect with the death of the devisor, not while he lives. Jesus said it was to our advantage that he go--only then could we receive our inheritance. The new covenant is not a contract as was the old one. It is a handoff of the estate of Kingdom. We are heirs to all Jesus had, not passive legal obligation, the opportunity to actively engage the experience, the awakening of Pentecost, full authority to live and love as Jesus did.

The earliest followers of Jesus called communion anamnesis, which means unforgetting. We would say remembrance. Unforgetting is better. To realize that Jesus willed Kingdom to us, that his Way of life has always been ours, is to unforget who we really are.