True North with Dave Brisbin

Dave Brisbin 5.3.20

The best part of being a pastor is being trusted enough to be invited into people’s lives. To see and be a part of their vulnerabilities and fears as well as joys and celebrations. And during this lockdown, many people I’m talking to have multiple losses and difficult circumstances layered over the quarantine crisis. And each one, whether a death, illness, unemployment, homelessness, a hospitalization, represents a loss of the relationships and routines, the way of life that we call our world and our lives. That experience of being thrust into a doorway between the world we knew and whatever world is coming next is sometimes called liminal space from the Latin word for threshold or limit. To be in the doorway is uncertain, full of unknowns, and is experienced with enough fear and disturbance that we will try to flop back down to one world or another and reset normal as quickly as we can. But Jesus spent his entire public life in the doorways of liminal space. He understood that the purpose of our lives—to see with the Father’s eyes and live accordingly—can only happen in the doorways between the things we think we already know. That only in the doorways are we free enough from our illusions of control and security that we can see past all the distinctions and judgments we create to the unseen connection that is the real truth of things. To accept the disturbance of the doorways, to remain in that breathless state of between-ness is the first step toward the compassion, understanding, and love that always comes from seeing with the Father’s eyes.

Dave Brisbin 4.26.20

Everything in the New Testament is geared toward creating in us a fundamental shift in perspective. To experience the process of learning to see life through the Father’s eyes. To see life in all its complexity, diversity, contradiction, even absurdity of pain and joy from the viewpoint of the one thing it all comes from, is sustained by, and ultimately is. When we can begin to see life from this point of connection, everything changes, and we can finally begin to see the ground-shaking significance of Jesus’ prayer from the cross asking our Father to forgive those who were torturing him because they didn’t know what they were doing. He’s speaking to the human condition as seen through the Father’s eyes. That driven by our fears, we literally don’t know what harm we do and pain we create as we simply struggle to survive. But if we’re willing to follow the shape of Jesus’ Way: to face, accept, and own our own fears and vulnerabilities, we can finally begin to see how they shape our behavior and from there see how the fears of others shape theirs, identify with them and take those first steps toward forgiveness. Because they never meant to hurt us personally; they just didn’t know what they were doing.

Dave Brisbin 4.19.20

As I talk to more and more people being worn down by quarantine lockdown to where some are in real distress, the point is hammered home that our faith, spirituality, and the message we convey must be relevant and useful enough to meet people at their point of need. If the gospel as we understand it isn’t relevant, if it remains abstract—however beautiful as a concept—what good is it? Some recent surveys are showing that domestic violence calls are up 35% in the past few weeks. Chinks are appearing in everyone’s armor, but where there was dysfunction to begin with, there is real distress now. In a Sunday message, we can’t address all the specific issues needed to help specific families and individuals. There are principles we can look at to help us maintain balance and poise in our homes whether living with others or alone, but to talk about principles with people in pain runs the risk of trivializing their circumstances—speaking platitudes to those in need. As true as the principles Jesus gave us for living in relationship may be, they are also unhelpful…unless there is one person in the household who is able to put them in practice in real time in their home. How is that done? There are two ways to look at, each with its own learning curve, but for the person ready to follow the curves and become someone who can really listen, understand the fears driving behavior, empathize, compromise, comfort, and encourage—there is hope for balance within his or her home. Instead of waiting for relief, are you ready to be the person who brings it?

Dave Brisbin 4.12.20

Easter Sunday: On Easter, in the midst of a pandemic lockdown, we celebrate Easter virtually via streaming with our community watching a live stream from their homes, setting their own communion tables to fully participate remotely together. Though missing each other’s company, in the following days, it was wonderful to hear how individuals and families created their own sacred space and found connection in spite of isolation. This Easter we try to step inside the minds and emotions of Jesus’ closest friends and followers as they live through the traumatic and mind bending events of Good Friday through Easter Sunday. What were they feeling and trying to understand? And why did none of them recognize the risen Jesus when they meet him again for the first time, and what it was that opened their eyes to finally recognize him when they did? There are no random details in the gospels. Every word and detail is carefully chosen to be preserved because it has something important to teach us. Why do we still look for the living among the dead? To focus beyond the literal stories to the spiritual truths to which they point tells us about our own expectations and beliefs that limit our ability to see new life when it meets us on the road to where we think we are going.

Dave Brisbin 4.5.20

Palm Sunday: On the first day of Holy Week—the week before Easter Sunday that recounts the events of the last week of Jesus’ life and circumstances of his death—the church celebrates Palm Sunday, named for the palm branches waved and laid before Jesus as he entered Jerusalem for the last time. The church has dubbed it the triumphal entry, but Jesus himself considered it a tragedy. Why? In Luke’s gospel, he weeps over the city and predicts its destruction because the people still didn’t know the things that make for peace, that they missed the hour of their visitation. And it’s in the tragedy of the people’s missed opportunity that we find the true significance of Palm Sunday—how it shows us the first step toward Jesus’ truth and only Way to the Father. The people cheering Jesus into the city saw only what they wanted to see, what their fear would allow them to see, as they imagined Jesus as their savior—the fixer of all their problems. And the silent onlookers, invested in the status quo, saw Jesus as a threat to their power base and all they held dear. Jesus was neither fixer nor threat, but something radically different that still requires each one of us to break through the fears and agenda of our egoic selves to see the opportunity for transformation that is riding into our lives at every moment.

Dave Brisbin 3.29.20

Fascinating thing about human nature is that we will do almost anything to avoid uncertainty and find meaning in the events and circumstances around us. And the bigger the event or circumstance, the bigger the cause needs to be to give the event the meaning we crave. But events, circumstances, and object don’t have meaning in themselves—they’re inanimate objects. If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it, does it mean anything at all? It’s we who must bring meaning to the events and circumstances we experience. When we stop asking why something is happening, what it means in itself and start asking how it is teaching us and growing us, then meaning becomes clear…not in the event or circumstance but in ourselves. The first few verses of the book of James could have been written to us right now in the middle of this pandemic. James is trying to get his own people, faced with the persecution and societal meltdown of mid first century Israel, to completely reframe the questions they were asking so they could begin to see the meaning for themselves in the hardship. Because once that meaning comes clear, we can endure anything—knowing it is the very thing that will take us where we really want to go.

Dave Brisbin 3.22.20

On the first Sunday of COVI-19 lockdown, streaming to those in self-isolation, the surreal quality of living the reality of a pandemic outbreak is amplified. In just a week of lockdown, many of us are already strongly feeling the effects of disconnection from each other and the regular routines of life that once connected us. How can we best help each other in times like these—or any times? As always, Jesus gives us the principles: establish authentic connection first, see others and their needs as they really are, respond with action that because it is grounded in connection is always relevant, always feels like love. Connection always takes precedence over program—connection is the only program that matters. Those who are really making a difference during this crisis are those continuing to extend themselves to others, letting their actions flow from really knowing who they are flowing to. The uncertainty of a time like this raises a thousand questions, and maddeningly, the questions we’re asking out of our fear have no answers. But if we just continue to connect in any way we still can: finding the beauty in each moment, cheering a friend, hanging on to humor, helping those who need us, retaining our basic humanity, we find other answers that are much more powerful and make those other questions fade like the stars at sunrise. Living the fear kills connection. Living the connection keeps the fear at bay. Doesn’t kill it, but allows us to live fully in its presence.

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.