theeffect

hebrew jesus

It’s easy for us to forget that the message of Jesus and the entire Bible come from an intensely Hebrew context and worldview. Jesus was a Jew teaching Jews, and bringing the words of scripture back to their original Hebrew language and setting, understanding what the first Jewish hearers of those words would have understood, is the closest we can come to their original intent.

The Whole in the Part

Dave Brisbin 5.19.24

So easy to lose the forest in the trees. Especially with scripture. We dig deep into the weeds of each verse, pull it apart, imagine meaning that may not have anything to do with the larger passage or chapter, let alone the whole book.

A famous writer says unless you can describe the whole of your book in one sentence, you won’t write convincingly. You’ll meander, each part not contributing to the whole. The bible is actually sixty-six books, an anthology. Even harder to pull back enough to see a single line capturing its meaning—each verse revealing more of the whole. I’ve heard said that the bible is a love letter from God. A bit overly simplistic and sentimental for me, but on the right track. Maybe this: the bible traces the nature, development, and realization of our relationship with God. And if God is love, and love is identification with the beloved, then what we’re realizing is the oneness at the core of all our relationships.

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The gospels are all about this oneness. Jesus is one with the Father and the Way to the Father. He calls his Way kingdom, the quality of a life lived in full presence and connection…oneness. Everything he teaches relates back to kingdom and kingdom to the oneness at the heart of relationship. He tells us not to worry—focusing on the future destroys presence. He tells us not to judge—objectifying others destroys connection.

When he tells us not to give what is holy to dogs or pearls of wisdom teaching to pigs because they will trample it or turn and tear us to pieces, it sounds condescending and has been used to exclude those not of our “faith.” But is that an interpretation consistent with the whole of Matthew’s gospel, with Jesus, the whole book? If we know the whole, we can reverse engineer the part, fine tune our interpretation of any part by never losing sight of the whole.

Jesus is one with the whole, never excludes, accepts everyone where they are, never judging where they should be. Takes the time presence requires to first establish connection before healing or instruction. If we seek kingdom first—presence and connection—the whole will always be in the part.

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Transparent World

Dave Brisbin 4.21.24

When Thomas Merton gave a final address to his monastic community before retiring to a hermitage in 1965, he was famous worldwide for his spiritual writings. His speech was recorded on audio tape, and I ran across a short clip in which he was talking about the fact that we are living in a world that is absolutely transparent, that God is always shining through. God is in everything and everyone, every event, and it’s impossible to be without God. Ever.

We don’t see this fact because we make the world opaque by becoming attached to, preoccupied with things we regard as individual objects—analyzing them as if unwrapping packages, layers of opaque paper, all while missing the larger transparent world. We get to bottom of the pile of paper, only to find nothing there; we were only unwrapping our own thoughts about something, not the thing itself. It’s not until we loosen our grip and lose ourselves in the experience of something that we can stop thinking of it as a thing in isolation and see it as part of the whole of creation, and all of creation, God, shining through its transparency.

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Our attachments keep us from seeing the whole in all the parts. Constantly taking thought keeps our world opaque and hides the truth…no coincidence that taking thought is the literal meaning of the word translated as worry in a series of Jesus’ sayings. He tells us not to take thought, to worry about our lives, what we will eat, drink, or wear. He points to birds who work constantly but don’t store in barns, staying rooted in the present moment without taking thought.

To worry is to live in fear. Fear creates the obsessive need to acquire. In telling us that if we want life that is eternally alive we need to sell everything we own, Jesus is telling us we need to sever our attachments to individual objects in order to see the whole transparent world at once. No matter how essential a thing may seem, if we’re unwrapping it, the world is opaque. An ancient elder said that he sold the book—his treasured bible—that told him to sell everything and give to the poor.

When we can do that, God can shine through our transparent world.

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Jesus Saves

Dave Brisbin 3.24.24
Western Christianity has largely failed us in its primary responsibility: to preserve Jesus and his teaching and help us engage. Focused on law and punishment to the point of legalism; ritual to the point of superstition; scarcity to the point of passive petition; outcome to the point of dismissed herenow, an authentic Jesus and his message have been left behind.

One little passage sums it up. “The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eye is clear, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness.” Lest we take the English too literally, in Aramaic, eye/aina means a person’s entire way of seeing, their worldview. Clear/p’shitta is clear in the sense of simple and sincere. Light/nuhrah is illumination, intelligence, order. Bad/bisha means unripe, immature, not fully formed. And darkness/heshuka is chaos, disharmony.

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Jesus’ whole ministry was to show us how we can sincerely allow the order and clarity of ultimate reality penetrate the chaos of the immature thought-worlds we have created for ourselves out of fearful survival needs. And in following this only Way, to see the Good News of our reality—that we are already as loved and approved as we want to be. When Jesus rolls into Jerusalem on his last week before the crucifixion, his followers, the people, the Jewish and Roman authorities only see him through the filter of their own wants and needs. For those at the margins, he is savior. For those invested in the status quo, a threat to their powerbases.

Is Jesus a savior or a threat? We reflexively say savior, have grown comfortable with that image, but if we don’t also see Jesus as a threat, we will miss how he saves. The next day, Jesus overturns the money tables in the temple. If there is anything in our thought-worlds we have built up and rely on, if we let him anywhere near, Jesus will overturn it that our eye may be clear. It’s up to us to be outraged or intrigued. This is how Jesus saves—by showing us how to clear our eye. But until we accept his threat, he can’t save us.

Jesus is our savior and our threat. But not necessarily in that order.

When Down is Up

Dave Brisbin 3.10.24
The reality we believe is the reality we endure.

We don’t see reality as it is. We see reality as we are. Our minds are a necessary tool for survival, but keyed to survival, they are fear-based, making our thoughts overwhelmingly negative as they literally create the world in which we live. As long as we’re thinking, we’re enduring a world we believe we must control to survive. We’ll need our minds as long as we’re drawing breath, but our mistake is to take them literally. To believe our thoughts are true is to live in the anxiety of our own personal hell.

Jesus is acutely aware of the grip our minds have over us, that our minds can’t tell the difference between the thoughts it generates and sensory input coming from the outside. Always trying to engineer breaks in our stream of thought to allow something really real to break in, he never answers a question except with another question, a story or parable. He knows an “answer,” received as part of the mind’s drive to control the fear of uncertainty, is the problem. The solution is to take our thoughts by surprise so we can step away, become free of their self-created, fear-based world.

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Sometimes Jesus doesn’t use words at all. When he washes his followers’ feet, he is breaking into their fear-world in the most intense way possible. As his followers jockey for positions of power in Jesus’ kingdom as they think it will be, Jesus shows them, through the most humiliating and disgusting act of service in ancient Jewish culture, the meaning of true power. The highest position is the lowest, because only in service, in laying down our lives for another, is the reality of love ever expressed.

Jesus is a footwasher.

He says that he and the Father are one, which makes our Father a footwasher too. We have placed God high over our thought-worlds in positions of power and control. But if we really want to find our God, we have to look down, not up—not in the clouds, but in the standing height of a child, the kneeling height of a servant.

Can you honestly accept and respect a God who washes your feet? And if not, what will it take to break into your thought-world?

 

Training Wheels

Dave Brisbin 2.11.24
What churches and religion inevitably forget—as does every human group—is that their laws, doctrine, and practice are not ends, truth in themselves, but pointers, guides to non-rational truth that must be personally experienced, never bestowed.

Thomas Huxley said that new ideas begin as heresy, advance to orthodoxy, and end in superstition. Belief systems practiced for a length of time follow this curve, and Christian thought is no exception. The practices that Jesus taught and his followers called the Way, heretical to most, were understood as a way of life that prepared individuals to experience the paradoxical truth of God’s love. But as the movement matured and institutionalized, life practice became ritualized, and the theological ideas that had grown around them were legalized into orthodoxy. Eventually, law and ritual were believed to have supernatural power, ends in themselves rather than pointers to spiritual experience.

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The original Hebrew meaning of law—torah—was instruction, guidance, like training wheels on a bike. But that in no way diminishes its importance. Jesus said he was not abolishing the law, but fulfilling it—that even the smallest letter and stroke would remain until heaven and earth pass away, which in Aramaic means to cross a boundary. We need the guidance, restriction, and discipline of law and ritual until the oneness of heaven merges with the individuality of life on earth in our own hearts. When heaven and earth merge in us, we no longer need law and ritual as training wheels, but will live them from the inside out as expressions of the love we have experienced along the Way.

Jesus is teaching us that law is not fulfilled in obedience or righteousness in ritual practice. Legal compliance and ritual observance mean nothing in themselves, but everything when they have become the deepest purpose of a transformed heart. To believe otherwise is to miss the Way entirely, remain focused on conformance rather than transformance…as if training wheels are permanent, the highest expression of riding a bike, and not a limitation—the outward badge of an inward inability to fly.

 

Radical Forgiveness

Dave Brisbin 2.4.24
Some things are too big to grasp all at once. Like those Nazca lines in Peru…geoglyphs laid down on a windless plateau around the time of Christ—so big you can only see them from the air. Other things are too big to grasp within the limits of rational thought. You need greater perspective to see, not altitude, but a step outside conscious thought to the wordless awareness of pure presence. You still can’t grasp the thing intellectually, but you can experience its reality.

God’s radical, degreeless, indiscriminate love is just such a thing. This is why Jesus doesn’t give us a theology. More things to think about. We can understand the words that describe perfect love, but not its reality from words alone. So Jesus gives us a Way of living, the only way to experience the reality of a love so alien that it can’t be rationally understood. Alien. I hope that word is uncomfortable. Only if we are experiencing something uncomfortably unfamiliar at first, or even frightening or amoral according to our sense of justice, are we even in the neighborhood of God’s radical love.

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Nowhere is this paradox more apparent than with the concept of forgiveness. Forgiveness is greatly misunderstood. We equate forgiveness with condoning the past, making restitution, even reconciliation, but it has nothing to do with any of these. Neither does it have anything to do with the person who hurt us…we can forgive the dead. In Aramaic, forgiveness descends from the same root word as freedom. To those who wrote the gospels, to be forgiven is to be set free from any victimization or unbalance that has occurred, to be restored to our original state.

This is a completely interior process that only we can do for ourselves. No one, not even God can do it for us. God doesn’t forgive; God is forgiveness as much as God is love. God can’t withhold his own nature; it self exists. All we will ever get from God is love and forgiveness, but we will never know this reality until we live the Way, until we love and forgive those who haven’t earned it. Then we’ll know how real it is, how it had to first be given to us before we could ever give it away.

 

Teach Us to Pray

Dave Brisbin 1.28.24
Familiarity breeds contempt usually means that the more we know people, the more we can lose respect and judge more harshly. If contempt seems too strong a word, at least the more familiar things become, the more they blend into the wallpaper until we don’t even see them anymore. And when those things are religious scripture and doctrine, we may be so saturated that we believe we know things we have never considered on our own: accepted as children or under group pressure, such teachings became familiar before ever teaching us how to live spiritual lives in a physical world.

And what is more familiar than the Lord’s Prayer? Even those not steeped in Christian tradition are familiar with it. We learned it as kids, recited it—but what is this wallpaper saying? Is there anything to learn beyond mere recitation? We know the words: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, as in heaven, so on earth…

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But when Jesus’ friends asked him to teach them to pray, he would have said something like, abwoon d’bwashmaya, nethqadash shmakh, teytey malkuthakh, nehwey sebyanach, akanna d’bwashmaya aph b’arha. Transliteration alone gives a sense of the unfamiliar otherness of a teaching from as far out of modern Western experience as humanly possible. But beyond mere translation, when we put these Aramaic words back in their ancient Eastern context, we discover this “prayer” is actually a blueprint for living a spiritually aware life.

The five lines of the prayer form the steps of a process that starts with becoming unfamiliar again with everything we think we know. Clearing an interior space allows us to see the reality of the sacred in the ordinary details of life and begin to match our values to God’s, only knowable when our sense of separate self is lost in present action. Released from that sense of separateness, the victimhood of the past, we realize a new connection, always herenow.

If we can become unfamiliar again, see these words again for the first time, we can stop reciting them and start living the path they describe. Or better, recite them as a reminder to really live.

 

Following the Star

Dave Brisbin 12.17.23
We think we know Christmas. Bed-sheeted children reenact the details every year, so it’s shocking to go back to the gospels and see how little is there and how much is merely tradition. All we know about Jesus’ birth from Luke is that he was wrapped in cloths and laid in a manger because there was no room in the inn. All we get from Matthew is the story of Herod and the magi, wise men from the east following a star.

Reading closely, there weren’t three wise men, and they weren’t kings. With some word study, there was no inn—the word refers to the living space of a first century Judean home. And historically, Jesus couldn’t have been born December 25th—Judean shepherds did not keep their flocks out at night during cold winter months—or in year 1 CE, since Herod died in 4 BCE. Most likely date was either in spring or summer between 7 and 5 BCE.

And what about that star?

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Matthew tells us magi saw the star in the east, that it went before them, guiding them west, then stood over the place of Jesus’ birth. No star could do this. Are we looking for a miraculous star with non-physical properties? Scholars have offered comets, supernovas, planetary conjunctions as explanation, but none of these fit Matthew’s details, and there’s no astronomical evidence either. But in the ancient world, astronomy and astrology were one and the same, and amazingly, there is astrological evidence for the magi’s star. From April 17 to December 19, 6 BCE, Jupiter obeyed all Matthew’s details in its apparent motion, astrologically speaking…making Jesus’ birthday April 17, 6 BCE.

Is this true? Can’t know. Important? Only in considering the magi. Probably descendants of Jewish exiles searching the stars across centuries, longing for signs of their promised king. The devotion and discipline, willingness to risk life and reputation following a star only they could see, humility to surrender their treasures to an impoverished child. What is the temperature of our desire? Hot enough to persevere? To search the stars, risk following the star we find, surrender preconceptions blinding us to the truth our star reveals? That’s important.

Preparing to See

Dave Brisbin 12.10.23
What do we really know about the birth of Jesus? There’s so little information in the gospels, just a few scant paragraphs in Matthew and Luke. Only Luke gives us details of the birth itself and the shepherds’ vision and visit, while Matthew tells of the Magi after Jesus’ birth. All we’re told of Jesus’ birth is that he was wrapped in cloths and placed in a manger because there was no room in the inn. That’s it.

Early Christians didn’t consider Jesus’ birth very important compared to his death and resurrection; it would be over 800 years before Christmas was widely celebrated in the church. Probably why the gospels didn’t record much, but the details that survive are important because they emphasize an absolutely ordinary and unremarkable first century birth. The relatives or friends with whom Joseph and Mary stayed in Bethlehem didn’t even make room for them in the living space of their home—the word inn is a mistranslation here—they had to stay in the part of the house reserved for the animals.

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Ordinary? Unremarkable? You’re thinking the shepherds and Magi saw something pretty spectacular, right? Yes, but why are they the only ones recorded as having a significant experience with this birth? Why didn’t the people in the same house as Mary and Joseph see anything special? Why didn’t king Herod or his court see the star? Jesus was born as any poor Galilean: washed, rubbed with salt, tightly wrapped in spare strips of cloth, but also laid in a livestock feeding trough because no room was made for him in the house.

We say seeing is believing, but some things must be believed to be seen. The deep truth the gospels are telling about this birth is that only those who were prepared to see beyond their expectations could see the significance of what was right before their eyes. True then, true now. Our God is an unassuming God. Humble, vulnerable, unremarkable to those set on power and wealth. Only when we become humble and vulnerable enough, begin to reflect and value what God values, will we see that God really is Immanuel—with us, right here and now, perfect love in human form. And always has been.

 

Give with the Wind

Dave Brisbin 12.3.23
Amid the holidays, ‘tis the season for giving. Expectation and requests bombard from every form of media and family and cultural traditions. Trying to come up with perfect gifts for family, friends, clients, prospects, bosses, those who matter in your life, those who can give back, those who can’t—how much feels like obligation and how much freely blows like wind into the shopping, decorating, cooking, planning?

Giving shouldn’t be complicated, but it can be…tied up with many conflicts of interest. Ancient Jews considered charitable giving one of three measures of a person’s righteousness, along with prayer and fasting. The rabbinic tradition, with its typically legal perspective, had defined giving to death with numbers and percentages, reduced it to rules and obligations. And with all that emphasis at stake, those following the rules naturally wanted everyone to know just how righteously giving they were.

Jesus lays his ax right at the root of these conflicts.

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In religious circles we often hear that we can’t out-give God or that our tithes and offerings will come back to us 100-fold. True as that may be spiritually, if that is our intent, then our giving has become mere investment. And as soon as we put a number or percentage on a gift, it’s just a tax. Jesus teaches us to give so that the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing—preserving the anonymity of the giver and the dignity of the receiver, removing the conflicts that make giving not a gift.

It’s a first step in chipping away at the God-complex we have about giving: the need to be in the superior, controlled position of the giver rather than the vulnerable dependence of the receiver. Until we have received, what do we have to give? Until we recognize that all we have of any lasting value is a free gift we could never give ourselves, how will we ever know the vulnerability and gratitude that animates all true giving? The difference between a gift and an investment or tax, is the fear of not knowing that we’re merely caretakers, constantly receiving, and all we can ever do is regift what has already been given. Freely and secretly.

 

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Everyone is recovering from something… Admitting this is the first step in spiritual life, because any unfinished business in our lives–trauma, unforgiveness, fear-based perceptions–fosters compulsive behavior and keeps us from connecting spiritually and emotionally.

Since we’re all recovering, we accept everyone right as they are—no expiration dates or deadlines. We don’t tell anyone what to believe or do. We present points of view that we hope will engage seekers in their own journey; help them unlearn limiting perceptions, beliefs, and compulsions; give opportunities to get involved in community, building the trust we all need to find real identity, meaning, and purpose. In other words, to engage the transforming Way of living life that Jesus called Kingdom…non-religiously understood from a first century Hebrew point of view.

 

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Embedded in the fun and laughter of each of our gatherings and events is the connection and accountability as well as the structure, discipline, and opportunity for service that authentic community is all about. We help create programs for physical support, emotional recovery, and spiritual formation that can meet any person’s needs. Such programs work at two levels: first to address a person’s physical and emotional stability—clinical, financial, relational, professional—anything that distracts from working on the second level: true spiritual formation centered around the contemplative way of life defined by an original Hebrew understanding of the message of Jesus.

Rather than telling people what to believe or think, we model and encourage engagement in a personal and communal spiritual journey that allows people to experience their own worthiness of connection and acceptance, to find the freedom from underlying fears that brings real meaning and purpose into focus.

 

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Seeing ourselves as a learning and recovery community that worships together, the focus isn’t on Sunday morning alone, but on every day of the week as we gather for worship, healing and support workshops, studies, 12 step meetings, counseling and mentoring sessions, referral services, and social events.

Our Sunday gathering starts at 10AM and includes worship with one of the best worship bands in the area. We also have online discussion and study groups on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings at 6:30P PST. See our interactive calendar and our Facebook page to stay in touch with what is happening each week. You can also sign up on our elist for email enews updates.

 

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