2019 Archives
Submission and Identity
Dave Brisbin 8.11.19
There is a persistent emphasis on submission and identity in Jesus’ teaching pointing to an obvious relationship between the two. Jesus is telling us that there is something that we can learn about identity from submission that we can’t learn from dominance—the constant focus and striving for dominance and power over others and our circumstances. And since Jesus always couches his teachings in the relational realities of daily life, especially the relationships within families, we can look at another basic reality of life for more clarity: eating and drinking…food. Food and the need to eat stands at the very center of life and culture. All our activities orbit the kitchen in our homes and meals in our relationships, but what can they teach us?
There is a persistent emphasis on submission and identity in Jesus’ teaching pointing to an obvious relationship between the two. Jesus is telling us that there is something that we can learn about identity from submission that we can’t learn from dominance—the constant focus and striving for dominance and power over others and our circumstances. And since Jesus always couches his teachings in the relational realities of daily life, especially the relationships within families, we can look at another basic reality of life for more clarity: eating and drinking…food. Food and the need to eat stands at the very center of life and culture. All our activities orbit the kitchen in our homes and meals in our relationships, but what can they teach us?
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In The Prophet, Khalil Gibran makes the statement that since we need to kill to eat, eating should be an act of worship and our tables an altar on which our food is sacrificed for what is purer and more innocent in mankind. What does it mean for our meals to become worship? What is worship really? And is there a more expanded meaning that Jesus calls worship in spirit and truth that can help us find another way to submit in life and point us more emphatically to our identity in Father?
Family Ties
Dave Brisbin 8.4.19
In trying to get his message across, Jesus doesn’t speak of abstract theological concepts but always couches his teachings in the relational realities of daily life. Starting with the basic relationships in each first century home—husband and wife, parents and children, master and servant—his implication is that if we can’t experience Kingdom there in those relationships, we won’t experience it anywhere else either. His emphasis on questioning the sense of identity these family roles give us, especially present in first century Jewish life, is the first step toward finding a deeper identity in unseen Father.
In trying to get his message across, Jesus doesn’t speak of abstract theological concepts but always couches his teachings in the relational realities of daily life. Starting with the basic relationships in each first century home—husband and wife, parents and children, master and servant—his implication is that if we can’t experience Kingdom there in those relationships, we won’t experience it anywhere else either. His emphasis on questioning the sense of identity these family roles give us, especially present in first century Jewish life, is the first step toward finding a deeper identity in unseen Father.
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Just as husband and wife need to maintain their own separate identities even as they join as one in marriage, parents need to respect and foster their children building identities separate from themselves. Jesus is showing us that taking our family roles as identities can both harm other members of our family and keep us from finding the freedom of true identity. To see roles as how we play out our spiritual identity in physical life, to allow ourselves to submit to each other within those roles, builds the humble servant leadership and vulnerability that is both Kingdom and our deepest identity—oneness with Father.
The S Word
Dave Brisbin 7.28.19
I love our Jude-Christian scriptures. I’ve been studying them for the past twenty-five years or so and trying to live by their precepts. But I didn’t always love them. In fact they have baffled me, confused, angered, annoyed, and outraged me for decades until I learned to read them in a way that seemed closest to the way in which they were written. That required reading through an ancient, Hebrew context. When we do that, sense, common sense, and a hold on common decency returns to a text that otherwise appears too alien to be of much spiritual service. To take one example, a contemporary Christian woman, who is also a feminist, can’t accept Paul and Peter’s instructions for a woman to submit to her husband.
I love our Jude-Christian scriptures. I’ve been studying them for the past twenty-five years or so and trying to live by their precepts. But I didn’t always love them. In fact they have baffled me, confused, angered, annoyed, and outraged me for decades until I learned to read them in a way that seemed closest to the way in which they were written. That required reading through an ancient, Hebrew context. When we do that, sense, common sense, and a hold on common decency returns to a text that otherwise appears too alien to be of much spiritual service. To take one example, a contemporary Christian woman, who is also a feminist, can’t accept Paul and Peter’s instructions for a woman to submit to her husband.
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Submission has become a four letter word in our culture especially among women, minorities, and those who’ve been marginalized in our society. And when such passages link submission in marriage to submission in first century slavery, how can we possibly read such passages in a way that retains the credibility of the books I say I love? It’s all about the context.
Gift of Meaning
Dave Brisbin 7.21.19
A four day trip to the mountains with parents-in-law becomes contemplation by circumstance as everything slows and quiets down, adjusting to the pace and rhythm of our elders and the mountains. With everything we do and identify left down the mountain, without the noise, distraction, and activity that keeps us from considering the quieter, more interior parts of ourselves, what is left? Who are we then? What is the meaning of our lives here? The mountains remind that it has something to do with giving—the giving of ourselves to a moment and all who share that space.
A four day trip to the mountains with parents-in-law becomes contemplation by circumstance as everything slows and quiets down, adjusting to the pace and rhythm of our elders and the mountains. With everything we do and identify left down the mountain, without the noise, distraction, and activity that keeps us from considering the quieter, more interior parts of ourselves, what is left? Who are we then? What is the meaning of our lives here? The mountains remind that it has something to do with giving—the giving of ourselves to a moment and all who share that space.
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But giving is a loaded word in religious thought where it becomes a moral command to care for the poor or our church or the necessary mirroring of God’s nature that precedes a blessing back. But if giving is a command, then it’s just an obligation, and if it’s a prerequisite to a blessing, then it’s a transaction, and if there’s any amount designated, then it’s a tax. We need to look at the six aspects or traits of giving as Jesus taught and are illustrated in Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet to see how giving and a sense of meaning in the mountains are related.
practical ideals
Dave Brisbin 7.7.19
In The Prophet by Khalil Gibran, marriage is first described as a life-long, even eternal union where two live life as one. But then the prophet goes on to say there should also be spaces in the togetherness, that the winds and seas should dance and move between, just as the pillars of the temple stand apart and the strings of a lute remain alone though they quiver with the same music. It can be an initial shock to read these thoughts through the lens of our ideal notions of romantic love, but only because the ideal is balanced with the practical realities of married life and human nature: the need for individual identity in real relationship.
In The Prophet by Khalil Gibran, marriage is first described as a life-long, even eternal union where two live life as one. But then the prophet goes on to say there should also be spaces in the togetherness, that the winds and seas should dance and move between, just as the pillars of the temple stand apart and the strings of a lute remain alone though they quiver with the same music. It can be an initial shock to read these thoughts through the lens of our ideal notions of romantic love, but only because the ideal is balanced with the practical realities of married life and human nature: the need for individual identity in real relationship.
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This balance of the ideal and the practical is becoming rare in our culture of opposing absolutes, which means there is less and less common sense going around. But Jesus is full of common sense, and when we read his teachings on marriage, divorce, remarriage and look beyond our literal, absolute, out of context interpretations, we find a balance of the ideal and practical that is breathtaking—and liberating. An implicit permission to bring common sense back into our faith and live in harmony with everyday life.
70X7
Frank Billman 6.30.19
When Jesus is asked how many times an offending person should be forgiven, his famous answer seventy times seven can be a bit cryptic to us modern Westerners. Is it 490 times, and after that, we’re done? That’s a lot of times, of course, but in the case of lifelong friendships or marriages or family or even working relationships, we can go through that many times in a couple of years. In the symbolism of numbers in the ancient near east, Jesus’ expression means, essentially, forever and a day—an unlimited number. But how does that work? What does forgiveness really mean at its root and more importantly, how do we accomplish forgiveness, how do we know when it’s been accomplished, and who are we really forgiving?
When Jesus is asked how many times an offending person should be forgiven, his famous answer seventy times seven can be a bit cryptic to us modern Westerners. Is it 490 times, and after that, we’re done? That’s a lot of times, of course, but in the case of lifelong friendships or marriages or family or even working relationships, we can go through that many times in a couple of years. In the symbolism of numbers in the ancient near east, Jesus’ expression means, essentially, forever and a day—an unlimited number. But how does that work? What does forgiveness really mean at its root and more importantly, how do we accomplish forgiveness, how do we know when it’s been accomplished, and who are we really forgiving?
Another Goodbye
Dave Brisbin 6.23.19
On the occasion of saying goodbye to our worship leader and friend of nearly five years as she moves out of state, I realize how much I seem to have been saying goodbye over the past two years. People have moved and died and simply fallen out of touch, and each loss takes its toll on my willingness to start again, imprint again, hurt again. It seems to never get easier, and yet what is love asking of us? In the prose poetry of the The Prophet, Khalil Gibran’s spiritual masterpiece, love is spoken of as a difficult path, a sometimes violent process of transformation that must be swallowed whole—the pain as well as the peace—or life will always be lived in seasonless shallows where we laugh, but not all our laughter and weep, but not all our tears. It’s a far cry from any of our cultural notions of love small enough to fit on a greeting card.
On the occasion of saying goodbye to our worship leader and friend of nearly five years as she moves out of state, I realize how much I seem to have been saying goodbye over the past two years. People have moved and died and simply fallen out of touch, and each loss takes its toll on my willingness to start again, imprint again, hurt again. It seems to never get easier, and yet what is love asking of us? In the prose poetry of the The Prophet, Khalil Gibran’s spiritual masterpiece, love is spoken of as a difficult path, a sometimes violent process of transformation that must be swallowed whole—the pain as well as the peace—or life will always be lived in seasonless shallows where we laugh, but not all our laughter and weep, but not all our tears. It’s a far cry from any of our cultural notions of love small enough to fit on a greeting card.
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It’s the image of an expansive, mature, open-eyed love that Jesus would recognize, because he describes it as well in his own paradoxical way. He and the poets are telling us that love always means saying goodbye to loved ones—the more loved ones the more goodbyes. And to live in love is to remain willing to be graciously and fearlessly vulnerable, willing to be hurt again, to say goodbye again and again until the day someone is finally saying goodbye to us.
Water from the Sky
Dave Brisbin 6.16.19
Father’s Day: It’s impossible to overestimate the influence our fathers have had on our view of life and ultimately of God. Fathers tend to be less present to small children than mothers, more the disciplinarian who expects acceptable performance for approval. Even given all the variations in families and fluid parenting roles today, we still learn primarily from our fathers the way the world works in terms of the judging of performance and consequences of non-approval. And in a patriarchal culture, our institutions and especially our churches reinforce the traditional role of the father, and as we transfer that lesson learned to our Father in heaven, trust becomes very difficult. But Jesus is painting a very different picture of his and our Father.
Father’s Day: It’s impossible to overestimate the influence our fathers have had on our view of life and ultimately of God. Fathers tend to be less present to small children than mothers, more the disciplinarian who expects acceptable performance for approval. Even given all the variations in families and fluid parenting roles today, we still learn primarily from our fathers the way the world works in terms of the judging of performance and consequences of non-approval. And in a patriarchal culture, our institutions and especially our churches reinforce the traditional role of the father, and as we transfer that lesson learned to our Father in heaven, trust becomes very difficult. But Jesus is painting a very different picture of his and our Father.
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When we look at his stories and teachings, when we look at the Aramaic words he used in the first lines of the Lord’s Prayer, when we consider how he lived his own relationships, we see an exuberant extravagance, an overwhelming abundance always flowing from Father that can’t be stopped or slowed in any way. Just as a desert dweller living in a culture built around the scarcity of water can’t conceive of living where water falls from the sky, Jesus is trying to show us that the scarcity of love and acceptance on which our lives are built can change in an instant once we experience a love that literally falls from the sky.
Being the Beloved
Dave Brisbin 6.9.19
We’ve been looking at love from God’s point of view: what is this love, what does it look like, how can we begin to grasp its infinite scope? But maybe what’s more important is beginning with the assumption of its reality and then asking what it means for us to be the beloved? To look at God’s love from our point of view. What does a person beloved of God look like? Fortunately, we have an example that jumps off the pages of scripture because his name actually means beloved—dead giveaway that we should be paying attention. David, the boy who became the king who united all the tribes of Israel is described as a “man after God’s own heart,” chosen to be king and God’s beloved. But a quick review of everything we know of David’s life and actions from the books of Samuel show us a man who looks anything but beloved. Capable of the greatest courage, loyalty, faithfulness, and exuberance, he is also capable of the greatest cruelty, selfishness, arrogance, and disregard for life. Which is the beloved part?
We’ve been looking at love from God’s point of view: what is this love, what does it look like, how can we begin to grasp its infinite scope? But maybe what’s more important is beginning with the assumption of its reality and then asking what it means for us to be the beloved? To look at God’s love from our point of view. What does a person beloved of God look like? Fortunately, we have an example that jumps off the pages of scripture because his name actually means beloved—dead giveaway that we should be paying attention. David, the boy who became the king who united all the tribes of Israel is described as a “man after God’s own heart,” chosen to be king and God’s beloved. But a quick review of everything we know of David’s life and actions from the books of Samuel show us a man who looks anything but beloved. Capable of the greatest courage, loyalty, faithfulness, and exuberance, he is also capable of the greatest cruelty, selfishness, arrogance, and disregard for life. Which is the beloved part?
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Why was he chosen for belovedness? What does his story tell us about ours? It tells us that David wasn’t God’s beloved because he deserved it or earned it, but only because he believed it to be true so deeply that he never stopped coming back to God. No matter how far he strayed, he trusted that God was just a breath away, his own breath breathing his return to God’s presence. David represents the extremes of human behavior in a beloved package. And though our behavior may be much less extreme, the package is no less beloved.
Trinity: Love of Three
Dave Brisbin 6.2.19
I sometimes get asked why I don’t talk more about the Spirit, and that question always surprises or at least reminds me of differing perspectives. Of course I understand why it comes up—the Spirit is central to any reading of the New Testament as that which draws us to God, informs and empowers us to a fullness in spiritual awareness. This week, I was asked when I would talk about the Trinity, so I thought I’d put the two together in the context of love and see what happened. It took the church 300 years after the crucifixion to decide how the Father and Jesus were related, and another fifty plus to add Holy Spirit to a trinity of persons in one God. But alongside those heady debates was a set of three eastern bishops who understood this threeness of God experienced as Father, Son, and Spirit in creation, reconciliation, and sanctification as inseparable from the constant movement, the alternating flow of giving and receiving between lover and beloved.
I sometimes get asked why I don’t talk more about the Spirit, and that question always surprises or at least reminds me of differing perspectives. Of course I understand why it comes up—the Spirit is central to any reading of the New Testament as that which draws us to God, informs and empowers us to a fullness in spiritual awareness. This week, I was asked when I would talk about the Trinity, so I thought I’d put the two together in the context of love and see what happened. It took the church 300 years after the crucifixion to decide how the Father and Jesus were related, and another fifty plus to add Holy Spirit to a trinity of persons in one God. But alongside those heady debates was a set of three eastern bishops who understood this threeness of God experienced as Father, Son, and Spirit in creation, reconciliation, and sanctification as inseparable from the constant movement, the alternating flow of giving and receiving between lover and beloved.
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They saw the three persons of the godhead as in perichoresis—a Greek word that literally means circle dance—the blur of motion that is the definition of the dance, the way the motion of breath and wind is the definition of ruha, Aramaic for spirit. The blur of motion is God, and a mention of any one person of God always includes every person in the blur because it’s the motion that defines the relationship. It’s when we enter the motion blur ourselves like kids jumping on a spinning merry go round to join their friends that the blur of faces resolves to individuals as we add ours to circle of the dance.
