message archive

Audio recordings of messages from Sunday and some Tuesday Recovery Gatherings are archived here for downloading or streaming. You can browse current year messages below from most recent to oldest, or select a category for specific years or one of our “boxed sets,” message series on specific topics.

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Sun and Rain

Dave Brisbin 10.22.23
In the last line of Matthew 5, Jesus says, therefore be perfect as God in heaven is perfect. Wow. Hearing that for the first time, would it spur you to work harder? Try to hit imagined thresholds? Or feel completely defeated? Shake your head and walk away? Most of us know we’re not perfect, that the human condition doesn’t allow, so exactly what is he asking?

Since Jesus said, “therefore,” we need to go back and see what that’s there for… Therefore connects back to the entire chapter as the how of this perfection, but especially to the immediate passage in which Jesus tells us to love our enemies. How are we supposed to love what we hate and what hates us? The original language helps. Enemy is not just a malicious adversary, but one who is not of our tribe, someone we don’t know, understand, trust, like.

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We’re to love our enemies as we love our neighbors—those close to us in proximity and relationship—and love our neighbors as ourselves, which still doesn’t imply affection, but at least basic human decency. Still, that word love trips us up. Even showing basic decency to those we consider indecent is too much. But there are two words for love that Jesus uses in Aramaic. When he says love your neighbor, he uses rehem, which is a love full of affection and devotion that flows as if from a deep wellspring. And when he says love your enemy, he uses ahab, which literally means to kindle a fire: gather dry, dead twigs and ruffage, carefully spark and blow and guard until a warming fire burns.

Loving our enemies is a process of becoming someone who experiences growing a love never thought possible with someone always thought unlovable. Such an impossibility comes as a perfect moment, a connection beyond those we normally experience that changes our view of love and life. Jesus is saying that even in our imperfection, we can feel our love, our decency, falling like sun and rain on those who deserve it or not, for whom we feel affection or not…just as perfectly as God’s. It’s a momentary union of imperfection and perfection, an experience of perfect love that can grow into a character that defines.

 

Second Mile

Dave Brisbin 10.15.23
It is absolutely, positively, unreservedly impossible to overestimate the impact of culture on language. Language is a child of culture and can only breathe in the culture that birthed it. When translated to another language, we’ve taken a fish out of water, trying to understand as it flops on the ground. If we want to know a fish, we have to get into the water. If true for modern languages, how much more for ancient ones, where not only culture, but history, science, and technology also affect meaning?

Cultures exist to bind people together, ensure survival by making group experience meaningful and cohesive. So first task of culture is to control behavior—make sure the behavior of individuals is not harmful to the group. We see that as a function of law, because modern Western society is based on what anthropologists call a guilt/innocence culture: order is maintained by creating and reinforcing feelings of guilt and expectation of punishment.

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But the ancient world, and much of the East to this day is based on honor and shame, not guilt and innocence: order is maintained through indoctrination of shame—loss of honor—and the threat of ostracism. Such cultures are collective: individuals exist to serve the group and bring either honor or shame to everyone in it. When shamed, the restoration of honor often through revenge, not punishment under law, restores balance. An honor/shame culture produced our Judeo/Christian scriptures and the impact of those texts can only be understood when we get into that water.

When Jesus tells us to turn the other cheek if struck on the right, until we know this meant a backhand slap, a shaming insult that would require vengeance to restore honor, we can’t know what he was asking in terms of voluntary humility for the sake of relationship. And when he says to go a second mile after Roman officials commandeered you for the first, until we see the shame in oppression, we can’t know how everything Jesus is teaching about the assurance and fearless vulnerability of God’s love is never found in the first mile. Only a second mile, beyond honor and obligation, can show us that.

 

Yes and No

Dave Brisbin 10.8.23
How hard is it for you to say no? From telemarketers to employers, people on the street with signs to friends and family, there’s a psychological spectrum of difficulty. No one likes to give anyone the bad news of no, but if the difficulty is so great that it’s near-impossible, then we’ve shifted from concern for another to a form of codependency, concern for what another thinks of us. We’re all codependent to certain degrees, but when we can no longer simply say yes and no, there’s a problem.

In a recent group discussion, women said they thought it was harder for them to say no than men—that women are more relationally focused and taught to please others in a way men are not. But everyone had varying levels of difficulty: the introverts said the answer is always no, no matter how many times they say yes; one man said you should always say no first, because it’s much easier to change your mind later to yes; a woman said that her no was always softened, accompanied by an alternative; while another spoke of the virtues of “maybe.”

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Jesus said that yes or no are sufficient answers, you don’t need oaths or appeals to higher authority. In the context of formal contracts and proceedings, he spoke to a tradition that allowed people to legally break their promises depending on what authority they based their oath. God’s name was always binding, but lesser authorities were not. Jesus is saying we don’t need any higher authority than our own word to bind our promises once we have come to care about others as much as ourselves. Who is the person making the promise?

For an honest person, no oath is necessary—for a dishonest person, no oath is enough.

What does it take to be the person Jesus suggests? To simply say yes or no…why, only later if needed…takes someone who’s experienced an inner assurance of belonging and acceptance. Someone strong enough to say yes and carry it out; non-codependent enough to say no without loss of identity.

When we say yes to one thing, we say no to another. Yes and no, define us and the course of our lives. Jesus is showing us the freedom to choose with something other than fear.

 

Darker Before Dawn

Dave Brisbin 10.1.23
One of the most misinterpreted and misused passages in the Bible affects a foundational part of our personal lives. Jesus appears to tell us in Matthew that adultery is the only legitimate ground for divorce and anyone who remarries after divorce for any other reason commits adultery. In Mark and Luke Jesus seems to remove the exception: all remarriage after divorce is adultery. I’ve seen pastors send women back to abusive husbands, toxic marriages held together at all costs, divorced people leave the church in order to live their lives.

Is it legal to drink under the age of twenty-one?

We mentally add alcohol or the question is nonsense. We leave it out of the question because the context is clear. Same happens biblically, but we don’t know the context. Everyone in first century Israel knew there were five legal grounds for divorce, and adultery was not one of them. Proven adultery was punishable by death, not divorce. The matter of indecency Jesus cites that we have translated as adultery, meant bringing shame to the family, while the other four dealt with neglect, abuse, and infertility—common-sense responses to the realities of marriage in their culture.

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Jesus was asked: is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any matter? “Any matter” created a narrow legal question. One school of Pharisees maintained the “matter of indecency” as a single ground for divorce; another school broke it in two: indecency and “any matter,” which meant a husband who wanted another woman, could divorce his wife for any or no reason at all. When pressed to choose between the two, Jesus maintained a matter of indecency as one ground—a husband had to show just cause, and if he divorced for “any matter” in order to marry another, it was the same as adultery. Common decency. Common sense.

God’s purpose is always to bring together, make separate things one, peace out of chaos. This is the purpose of marriage as well. But if a marriage is chaotic, abusive, toxic, divorce may be the only way to create greater oneness later.

God knows this…that sometimes it has to get darker before the dawn. Jesus did too. How about us?

 

Perfectly Imperfect

Dave Brisbin 1.1.23
First apartment Marian and I rented was near a nature reserve, and a colony of turkey vultures roosted in the tops of the eucalyptus all around us. Most people complained about the mess on the sidewalks, but I loved them. Waiting every morning for the sun to heat the updrafts that would take them aloft, like business people waiting for the train, they went to the office every day, all day, back home with the lowering sun. Day after day, seasons, weekends, holidays made no difference. No sense of time or the arbitrary lines we draw to mark our calendars.

On New Year’s Day, we celebrate an arbitrary line. A line drawn differently in different cultures at different times in history. In the West, we think of time as a series of line segments, but the new year we celebrate is really a circle. The universe is made of circles. Circles within circles. Stars, planets, orbits, rotations, all scribing the circles we call days, months, years, seasons. The earth has no more sense of time than a turkey vulture, but we do, and in the language of Jesus, when a circle is completed as on New Year’s Day, it is g’mar, perfected. 2022 is now a perfect year. Complete. Fulfilled.

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Hard to imagine any of us calling 2022 a perfect year because we think of perfection as without fault or blemish. No year is without blemish, but they all come full circle. None of us are without fault, but we can come full circle too. James says it best at the top of his letter: “Let endurance have its perfect result, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing.” When Jesus says, “Be ye perfect” and his brother James says,” be perfect and complete,” they are urging the perfection of homecoming after a difficult journey.

Perfection is not about working a process to a perfect result, but about the effect that process has on us…even if the result is imperfect. Outcome is irrelevant to the perfection of Jesus and James. We are perfected when we come full circle, home to our eucalyptus, having learned to be more fully present and aware, to more perfectly embrace whatever and whomever shares our homecoming. No matter how imperfect.

 

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