True North with Dave Brisbin

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.

Dave Brisbin 1.5.20

Why are new year’s resolutions so hard to achieve? They are so hard that fewer and fewer of us actually try to make them anymore—especially those over fifty-five year of age. I suppose the older we get, the more we realize the difficulty, which lies in the fact that what we want most, resolve to do most, is not the result of a mere intellectual decision, a stated intention that we make once at the head of a new year. The things most valuable to us are always the result of repeated, ongoing action, discipline, and dedication until the change “takes.” Whether a reputation, character, stopping smoking, or losing weight, a marriage: if we’re not saying “I do” everyday, we’re ultimately saying “I don’t.” This is the same reason it’s so hard to follow Jesus. Because what we consider salvation is not an intellectual decision or stated intention either. Jesus specifically calls himself the “way,” the clear implication that following him is not an event but a process of showing up every day to a radically different way of living and perceiving life and love. His entire ministry and teaching is essentially the emphatic insistence that without a daily willingness to show up as a newcomer with beginner’s mind, like a child, we will never be able to apprehend the transformation of kingdom. In the parable of the Sower—really the parable of the Four Soils—Jesus takes us yet again through the process of following his Way. But unless understood from an Aramaic point of view, we’ll miss the lesson once again, understanding the four soils as and “us vs. them” distinction between believers and unbelievers rather than the internal process of preparing all the soil within ourselves and treat our own salvation as the ongoing resolution it really is.

Dave Brisbin 12.29.19

Anticipating a new year and new decade, how best to prepare and direct ourselves? How best to find the hope, peace, and assurance we need to remain undeterred and undistracted amid the noise and chaos of another year? Coming from an unexpected direction, I get a phone call from a licensed clinical psychologist, a PhD who had a near death experience that was so profound that he had to write about it, asking if I would be willing to read his manuscript. His story stood out among other such experiences I’ve read in its sincere attempt at objectively describing what is inherently a radically subjective and ultimately inexpressible experience—an experience of pure presence, of God’s presence—yet completely devoid of religious imagery. And most interestingly, his description matched in some cases almost word for word the experiences of the mystics and contemplatives who have written for millennia. Whether external circumstances like illness or accident bring us to the point where ego is completely stripped, or whether we live our contemplative practice to point we can voluntarily go to the same place, there is a common experience of the peace and assurance that all is well when we get beneath our conscious thought stream that is constantly telling us otherwise and maintaining the illusion of aloneness. That is the hope and blessed assurance we need to approach this new year, the conviction of knowing that ultimately everything is always and will always be well.

theeffect 12.22.19

theeffect’s Christmas service as a seamless presentation of music and story combines the scripture passages of Jesus’ nativity with original and curated writing, all centering on the incredible story of the Christmas Truce of 1914 between the trenches of the Western Front of World War One in Belgium and northern France. A spontaneous ceasefire in which muddy, exhausted soldiers were able to see themselves in the muddy, exhausted soldiers sometimes only fifty yards away across No Man’s Land. And though wearing different uniforms, these soldiers found the same humanity, hopes, and dreams that Christmas promised nineteen hundred years before and still promises today.

Dave Brisbin 12.15.19

Has the Star of Bethlehem ever fascinated you? The Star that led the Magi to Jesus…what was it really? A miraculous star that appeared and behaved like no other star ever did or could? Or a natural, but perfectly or supernaturally timed astronomical event like a comet, supernova, conjunction of planets or some other anomaly as many scholars have suggested? But even such events, if natural, could never behave as Matthew describes the Star behaving: going before the Magi, unseen by Herod and his advisors, and then stopping and standing over the place of Jesus’ birth. Is there any possible astronomical event that could account for all Matthew’s details? In our continued look at the account of Jesus’ birth in Matthew and Luke, we look at the Star like a forensic detective sifting through the clues left in the gospel to see what may actually have happened. And surprisingly, if we’re willing to look in a direction that is often forbidden in modern, Western Christianity, we find there is one that does. If we’re willing to widen our view of scripture, there is an astronomical event that fits the date of Jesus’ birth, not as we celebrate it, but when it historically must happened, and accounts for all the other seemingly miraculous details Matthew relates—but only if we look through astrological eyes. Astrology in the bible? Not as we understand that term today, but yes, absolutely. Or course we can’t know for sure that this is our Star, but it’s a beautiful thing whenever our scripture and historical fact line up and point us in the same direction.

Dave Brisbin 12.08.19

There’s a word little known in Western Christianity that was a foundation of Hebrew spirituality, appearing throughout both Old and New Testaments. Anawim, plural for anawv in Hebrew, literally means to “bow down” but by extension means lowly, poor, oppressed, or marginalized. But more than that, it refers to people who have accepted this position in life, see themselves as vulnerable and dependent, and are grateful for all provision—realizing that ultimately they must rely on God rather than themselves for sustenance. The humility, submission, and grateful vulnerability of the anawim were understood as the ideal attitude toward life and God, and that it was primarily an interior attitude of heart that was easier to attain if physically poor as well, but available to even the wealthiest. The anawim are held up as the inheritors of God’s kingdom from the Psalms to the Beatitudes, and all the great figures of faith in scripture are anawim at heart regardless of their station in life. Mary and Joseph are most especially anawim, and at Christmas, we recognize that Jesus is born anawim as well. It is the full message of Christmas that Jesus “emptied” himself to be born as an infant no one would recognize as exceptional except those who were also anawim. The shepherds were anawim inside and out—the genius of the Magi is that they were deeply anawim despite their wealth, knowledge, and power. The full message of Christmas is that our God is anawim, treasures those attributes, and that we’ll never recognize him as he is until we become anawim as well.