2020 Archives

Leading the Way

Dave Brisbin 7.19.20
I was asked to talk about leadership last week, and I took a deep breath before responding because I realized what a loaded topic it was and how the request itself was coming from a profound disappointment in our current political leadership. I think I said I’d think about it, but the more I did, the more it seemed like it needed to be discussed. What makes a great leader? When I really considered it, analyzed the leaders I admire most, laid their qualities against the leadership exemplified by Jesus, I shouldn’t have been surprised that the qualities that make a great leader are the same that make a great person. When you think on it, we’re all leaders in one way or another, but no matter how small or large the scope of our leadership, the principles remain the same.

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What was it about our greatest presidents, like Washington and Lincoln, leaders like MLK, Gandhi, and Churchill that is common and points to great ability to lead. It’s easy to criticize the leadership we see or don’t see around us, especially now when our leaders appear oblivious or outmatched by the issues we face. But as with everything else that matters, the search for great leadership starts within us—that’s Jesus 101. In our search for great leaders, we need to look for those qualities within ourselves first, because though we may not find them on the national or world stage, it’s only if we can’t find them within that we are truly lost.
 

Uncarved Wood

Dave Brisbin 7.12.20
A friend makes the comment that being a Christian is really hard. I ask why. He says it’s hard to meet moral and ethical standards, understand theological and doctrinal concepts, and live the precepts of the church. Well, he doesn’t put it that way, but more or less what he means. He also says it’s hard to put up with the bias he sees in our media and culture and encounters in his own life. Is it hard to be a Christian, or more on point, to be a follower of Jesus? We’ve made our faith so complex in legal and theological terms: created rules upon rules and dense theological arguments trying to describe spiritual realities that cannot be described in words. We’ve tied our faith to the politics and levers of power in each age and generation to better impose and legislate our worldview on others, earning their enmity and prejudice against us. This all makes Christianity hard to be. But does any of this have anything to do with Jesus and his teaching?

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Jesus couldn’t be clearer: loving God and loving each other—two ways of looking at the same thing—are the twin commandments that contain all the rest. And loving each other in the manner Jesus loves us is the only way we will be known as his followers. Not complicated. While the hardest thing we will ever do is empty ourselves of everything we think we know and hold on to for support, once we do, the kind of love Jesus is modeling follows as night follows day. The Chinese symbol for simplicity literally means “uncarved wood,” the natural state of something before we work it into complexity. If we can’t find the simplicity on the far side of our own complexity, our faith will remain hard, and the freedom Jesus promises, elusive.
 

Each Other

Dave Brisbin 7.5.20
My wife tells me we need to talk about hope on Sunday. It’s been so heavy lately, so much to process, so much disturbance, where do we look for hope? That’s the key isn’t it? To continue to find hope, to continue to trust that all will be well in any circumstance. I hear radio hosts glibly throwing around words like endurance, resilience, caring, mindfulness, but it feels true and insulting at the same time. Platitudes. Where can we find a way to hope that still acknowledges the reality of whatever pain we feel?

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I’ve been fascinated by the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto during WWII since the moment I first read their story. Walled off in a section of the city, over nine to a room on average, fed only 184 calories a day, with no medical services and brutal treatment from Nazi guards, they found a way to survive so successfully that eventually they had to be deported to death camps as the final solution. They smuggled food and other supplies, maintained underground hospitals, soup kitchens, orphanages, libraries, synagogues, school, even a symphony orchestra. Not all, but enough of them found the hope to continue that can inspire us today to do what they did: to creatively restore what was lost, to find beauty in the rubble, and especially to find spiritual connection—solidly, concretely, in each other. Where are we to find the hope we seek in our difficulties? We can say in God, of course, but right here and now, we are God’s gift of himself to us in each other. If we can’t find God in each other, we won’t find him anywhere else…or the hope we need to continue.
 

Breaking Through

Dave Brisbin 6.28.20
The current unrest over race relations has opened and even forced the opportunity for honest discussion about race and persistent inequality in our country. Unfortunately amid the demonstrations and destruction, the extreme voices are the ones heard the loudest, and emotions and rhetoric are high. Is it possible in this climate to actually talk to one another, to learn things we don’t know about each other’s culture and experience that is different from our own? And can we, will we use this present crisis as a head start down the path of self exploration to identify our own biases, hidden or otherwise, that keep us from being fully present to others regardless of race, creed, or political positions?

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We can allow this crisis to further our growth or we can try to wriggle off the hot seat and retreat to familiar patterns. In a fascinating story from the Gospels, Jesus appears to perpetuate the biased and racist attitudes of the Jews of his day, by essentially calling a Gentile woman a “dog,” the common slur Jews used for those they considered ethnically and legally unclean. What is Jesus doing here? What is he trying to teach us about sticking with the difficult and uncomfortable conversations until we can break through and begin to see the content of character and faith in people beneath the condition of their container or the color of their skin?
 

Our Father in Heaven

Frank Billman 6.21.20
On this Father’s Day we explore the nature and attributes of our heavenly father. Before we look at the scripture it is important to consider what may block us from truly seeing him and understanding his true nature. We can have roadblocks like our early church experience. Or perhaps our earthly father left an impression on us that colors our view of God’s nature. It’s even possible that our understanding of how the world works—our worldview—can impede our understanding of God. These need to be recognized and healed as we begin our journey to truly understanding our heavenly father. Perhaps the most compelling scripture comes from the Old Testament – Micah 6:6-8. In this passage Micah is reminding the Hebrew people that God is not nearly as interested in their sacrifices on the altar as He is in their changed heart and behavior toward others.

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Micah ends these verses with the simple message of: act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God. Quite an amazing contrast to everything the Hebrews had been taught since childhood. Our journey is often the same. We have to unlearn some “truths” that we learned on our path to adulthood in order to really grasp the nature of God. Concepts like grace, unconditional love, and forgiveness are difficult to grasp and internalize unless and until we remove the baggage that we carry from years of earthly training and experience. And so, we start the journey!
 

End of Times

Dave Brisbin 6.14.20
I’m often asked about end times and the apocalyptic passages and books of the bible that support popular end times scenarios. But especially now, there is an increase of questioning as the events of the last few months appear to mirror much end times imagery. A recent survey showed 56% of a group of pastors believing that we are in end times, but what can scripture itself show us about what we can and can’t know about end times? And what is prophetic and apocalyptic literature anyway? And since it’s so easy to get lost in the weeds of esoteric details that are highly contested and controversial within Christianity, are there main themes and guiding principles we can extract that can guide us to a personal response to life in this world?

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Starting with the famous Olivet Discourse, the “little apocalypse” of the gospels, Jesus first sets the context of his remarks, then makes three big statements that can serve to frame all apocalyptic literature. But as we look beyond that passage to Revelation, Daniel, 1Thessalonians, 1Corinthians, and various gospel passages, we see a consistent imagery that lines up with the primary metaphor ancient Jews used to describe life here between heaven and earth: the extended Jewish wedding ceremony. Understanding the function of prophetic and apocalyptic literature as well as Israel as the bride of Yayweh and the church as the bride of Christ, allows us to sidestep competing interpretive views and the fear they engender while giving us guiding principles for living our faith through turbulent times.
 

An Appointed Time

Dave Brisbin 6.7.20
We’re sailing through a perfect storm of pandemic and protest driven issues that are raising deep questions and the need for reexamination of ourselves and our society. Can our scriptures help us at a time like this? I’m asked how we’re supposed to understand Romans 13 where Paul tells us to obey our state authorities no matter what—they are ordained by God. He tells us to pay our taxes and bills and respect our leaders—no matter what. In other letters, he tells us if we’re married, stay married, if we’re single, stay single, if we’re a slave, stay a slave, if we’re a woman, submit to your husband and don’t speak or teach in church. Paul seems completely committed to the status quo, no fight for social justice here. What are we to make of all this and how can it help us in this present crisis? It all comes down to how we are conditioned to read the scriptures. Paul will never make sense to us until we realize that he wasn’t writing to us. We’re reading someone else’s mail.

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Paul was writing to groups of people trying to live through their own present crises, and if the circumstances of their crises weren’t the same as ours, then specific details of Paul’s answer may or may not apply. An answer can only be true within the context of the question, even if the principles it invokes are evergreen. The first step is giving ourselves permission to read scripture in a different way. The second step is to determine as best we can the prescriptive principles that always apply and will guide us anywhere and anywhen through our own perfect storm.
 

Fifty Days

Dave Brisbin 5.31.20
Pentecost Sunday: Though it’s the feast of Pentecost today, the week of protests and riots are the elephant in the room that demands some attention and discussion. But is there a link between our response to the strife and opposition around us and the deepest message of Pentecost? Or better, would our engagement in Pentecost temper our response to the opposition we face? Between the extremes of the most destructive forces around us, there are still voices in our country calling us back to connection and sanity. Those voices crying in the wilderness are the ones giving us hope that we really will pull back from the brink, just as Martin Luther King’s voice did for previous generations. Reading his words of deep conviction and determination for his people that he spoke while still maintaining the balance and perspective to “learn and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition,” is the message we need to hear again today. And it is the message of Pentecost as well.

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Peter, a tribal and shortsighted figure who violently struck and injured those who opposed Jesus, on Pentecost became a man who could speak to all the nations in their own tongue so they could understand and respond. Pentecost is the infilling of an infinitely expansive Spirit. When we are ready, the tongues of fire and the wind constantly blowing through are lives will become real enough to fill us with the ability to love and learn from the opposition as much as we do our own tribes.
 

High Places

Dave Brisbin 5.24.20
Thomas Merton wrote that the bible is, without question, one of the most unsatisfying books ever written until the reader comes to terms with it in a very special way. If you’ve never been unsatisfied by the bible, if you’ve never been perplexed, affronted, offended, even outraged by it, then it’s possible you’ve never seriously considered it. What are we to make of God ordering Abraham to sacrifice his son, or Moses being punished with death before entering the promised land, for one infraction in forty years? Or Jesus saying it was for his followers benefit that he was leaving them? Reading the bare words, it’s hard to find satisfaction in such stories. But considering Hezekiah’s first actions as one of the few righteous kings in Judah’s history: tearing down the high places of worship and long standing religious traditions that had led the people astray, the spiritual principles running through all these stories and the main themes of scripture begin coming to the surface.

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The special way of reading scripture that will satisfy us, even thirty centuries later, lies in seeing the bible as a spiritual book whose physical details always serve a spiritual purpose, and in realizing that the bible will not do our spiritual work for us. It won’t give us the absolute answers to life’s questions we crave, but will give us the compass, tools, and hope we need to find the trust that will take us home.
 

Fear Itself

Dave Brisbin 5.17.20
As the outbreak crisis continues, fear is ramping up in us either directly or through its son and daughter emotions of anxiety, stress, anger, and depression, among others. It’s becoming painfully clear that our fear is now creating new problems and exacerbating others, which brought a quote to mind from another era: the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Franklin Roosevelt said that in his first inaugural address in 1933—another era, but as history always shows, one much like our own. It was the fear of the people that had begun driving the Depression deeper, and he was offering the hope of new solution and direction as a bridge to repairing broken trust. Fear is not an evil; it is the means by which we survive the clear and present dangers in our lives. But we need to determine that those dangers are clear and present and whether our fear levels are justified or becoming part of the problem. We can manage fear and use it to focus and motivate ourselves as long as we have hope and trust in the way forward. And ultimately, that means hope and trust in God and the unseen reality of life.

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Where is our FDR to show us the conviction and confidence we may have lost somewhere along the way? The great mystics and contemplatives, those who have had near death experiences, Jesus and Paul in the gospels and epistles all tell us the same thing. When life’s losses or we intentionally clear out, even momentarily, the thoughts and habitual thought patterns that carry our fear, we can again see what was always there, the ultimate truth of things: that all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.
 

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