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2021 Archives

That is the Question

Dave Brisbin 4.25.21

I’ve been getting a lot of questions about death lately. Things seem to come in cycles, and this apparently is that cycle. In the past week, I was asked about death from an eighteen-year-old girl and a sixty-eight year old man, so it’s on all our minds. What happens at death? What happens after death? What does the bible say about death? But between all the questions, what is it we really want to know? The central, mother of all questions? We want to know whether we continue as ourselves beyond death…right? Will we be known and know others as we are now. Eric Clapton famously sang: would you know my name, would it be the same, if I saw you in heaven? All the rest is commentary. We want to know if we’ll recognize each other, historical figures, ourselves, or will we, as Buddhists suggest, return as a drop to the ocean—our consciousness absorbed back into the great universal, collective consciousness?

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Why do we fear death? It’s a question of identity of course. Everything we think we know about ourselves, who we are, our sense of ourselves as individuals at all, is contained in our conscious minds. Our egoic minds. And it’s not just the body that ends at death, but those minds as well. Who are we if everything we know about ourselves is taken with our mind? Of course we can never know for sure in a way that will satisfy our minds’ craving for certainty. Scripture doesn’t tell us, once we’ve adjusted for cultural and idiomatic sayings, but there are fascinating clues. Especially telling is an encounter Jesus has with a group of Sadducees, a powerful first century Jewish sect that didn’t believe in afterlife at all. Jesus’ answer to their mocking verbal test gives us possibly the best look behind the curtain we’ll get. Ultimately it is up to each of us to become convinced of what we’re convinced of. But to become convinced of a view of death that allows us to live life fully and abundantly, even as death become clear and present, requires more than just mental agreement with the beliefs of another. Jesus’ Way of living honors life’s paradox not by questioning our death, but by questioning our identity. Once we have experienced that who we are is not anything that can be taken from us, that our identity runs as deep as the Father’s love, we realize we are what cannot be taken. And with that knowing, we can face any question.
 

Rain Falls

Dave Brisbin 4.18.21
Have you always worked for a guaranteed, monthly or hourly salary or have you worked freelance or project-to-project or owned your own business? If you’ve done both at various times, you know how different the experiences are. Working for a salary makes life much more manageable, predictable and smoother than always wondering where the next job or customer is coming from, storing reserves when business is good to cover when it’s not. But the predictability of a salary is also a cap, a limitation on how far or how fast you can progress, and for all the unpredictability, freelancers experience a different rhythm of vulnerability and gratitude that keeps them closer to earth and edge.

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When the Hebrews were freed from the slavery of Egypt, they were also taken from a land that had a massive river system that annually flooded the plains with rich silt that fertilized soil and could be harnessed and directed for irrigation, creating a salary of sorts, a thriving agriculture. The Hebrews became desert nomads, living a freelance life, gathering food as they could from day to day, and even when they occupied their new land, it had no natural source of water that could support agriculture. They only had the rains. And though the rains of Israel are cyclic: early and late rains falling in Autumn and Spring, they couldn’t be controlled. They fell from the sky of their own volition, and could only be experienced, never managed. This is exactly the model God intended for his people—cycles of vulnerability and gratitude amid the uncertainties of life. As we approach Pentecost, the celebration of spiritual liberation from our limiting fears, does that mean that life is suddenly experienced with a new certainty and predictability that salaried life implies? When we read the scriptures carefully, we realize for all their newfound boldness, Jesus’ first followers had no more clarity or certainty than they had before. But what they had gained was trust. Trust that amid the uncertainty of life, the rains would still fall at their appointed time, and if they did the hard work of preparing soil and seed, when the rains came, the cycle of vulnerability to gratitude would be complete. This is true spiritual liberation—trust in the midst what can’t be controlled.
 

Counting to 49

Dave Brisbin 4.11.21

We’ve made a big deal about counting to 40 during Lent—forty being the biblically symbolic number of preparation into rebirth, preparing for the new life Easter represents. Lent ended last Sunday with Easter, but even then we were already a week into another count, this time to 49. Jews, ancient and modern, begin counting each day from the second day of Passover through seven weeks of seven, 49 days, with the fiftieth day marking another major festival, the Feast of Weeks. These two festivals, Passover and Weeks mark first the physical liberation of the people from the slavery of Egypt and then the spiritual liberation of the people as they were given the Law that established a new government, culture, and relationship with God. There is a necessary gap, a period of adjustment that occurs between the two liberations—a gradual graduation from the comforting but limiting reliance on physical connection to limitless expanse of pure spirit.

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The New Testament overlays on this structure, and after counting to 49, the following day, the fiftieth day, is Pentecost, the day that Jesus’ first followers were freed from the comfort and mental certainty of their physical relationship with Jesus to the full realization of the power of their relationship with unseen God. Just as Jesus told Nicodemus, that we all must be born of both flesh and spirit in order to see the Kingdom of God, the two births, the two liberations are separated by a gap, a period of adjusting to a new, non-physical, non-rational relationship with a God who can’t be named. Jesus says it’s like the wind, which we can’t see or know where it’s coming from or going to, but its effects change everything about everything. In the church, we begin counting our seven weeks of seven on Easter Sunday, and seven being the number of spiritual perfection, seven times seven is that spiritual perfection squared. It’s another time of preparation for our graduation from the comfort and seeming certainty of our physical logic and rational thought to the limitless freedom of a direct relationship with the unseen wind of Pentecost, the spirit of our unseen God.
 

Among the Living

Dave Brisbin 4.4.21
Easter Sunday. What is the most important single thought to take away from this Easter? After all the Easters you’ve lived through, what single concept will bring you closer to the new life and fresh wind of Easter? We typically focus on the supernatural miracle of the resurrection, of course, but notice that the gospels don’t. They focus on the effect of the resurrection on Jesus’ closest friends. The gospel stories pick up after the resurrection has occurred offstage and follow Jesus’ friends through each of their experiences of resurrection, but not the resurrection itself. The gospels are telling us where to look with their own gaze, telling us what is important to see. And what they show us is that none of Jesus’ closest friends recognize him when they first see him again. They watched him die. They buried him. And regardless of their time with him or what he taught, they fully expected him to stay buried and stay dead. They, as we, see what we expect to see until something breaks the spell of our self-imposed limitations.

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For us, the resurrection is a huge supernatural occurrence as well as a huge theological truth. But in the gospels, it’s nothing huge or supernatural that breaks that spell and brings the truth of resurrection home to Jesus’ friends. Just the opposite. It’s the smallest, most intimate gestures and interactions—the tone of voice calling Mary’s name, the breaking of bread at the Emmaus table—small details seen and heard a thousand times break through to prove identity in the only way possible. In intimacy. We only really know someone when we’ve experienced them in the most intimate details, and Jesus’ friends had to re-experience that intimacy with him to prove his identity to themselves. It is the same with us. As long as resurrection remains huge and transcendent, it will remain distant, a thought in our heads. But the moment we begin to see the risen Lord in the most intimate details of every day life, we will realize, as Jesus’ friends slowly did, that life is motion, and we will never find our God among the dead, motionless thoughts in our heads. Only among the living. That’s us, the living. We will find our risen, living God in each face and embrace or not at all.
 

Savior or Threat

Dave Brisbin 3.28.21
Palm Sunday. When Jesus rides into Jerusalem that first Palm Sunday, he brings with him a trail of clues to answer the question everyone is asking: Who is this Jesus of Nazareth? His public life’s work, his teaching, even the colt of a donkey he rides are answering this question for anyone who’s really paying attention, yet no one is seeing who really rides that little burro. We all see only what our fears—expressed as wants and needs—allow us to see. And what the people and followers of Jesus see is a savior who will deliver them from oppression and anonymity. But what the authorities see—both Jewish and Roman—is a threat to their power bases in which they are so invested. As with every time Jesus rides into our lives, he presents a paradox: is he a savior or a threat? If we’re afraid of change, relying on whatever status quo we’ve invested, then Jesus is a threat to our power base. But if we’re afraid things will not change, if we’re oppressed or marginalized, then Jesus is savior come to fix our problems.

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Now we would immediate say that Jesus is our savior, but allowing paradox to do its work in us, is for us to allow the paradox to stand long enough to do its work. Can we resist the knee-jerk reaction to choose one side or the other, make one side right and the other wrong long enough to see the deeper truth beyond the seeming contradiction? If we say Jesus is our savior, not a threat, we will miss how Jesus saves and from what, because the truth of this paradox is that Jesus can’t be our savior until he’s first a threat…a threat to all our powerbases: everything we hold dear, take pride in, use to advantage. Until everything we’ve piled up in our lives out of fear is cleared out, we can’t even see what we need to be saved from. Jesus is not riding into our lives to save us from oppression or save us from our problems. He’s here to save us from the fear that keeps that oppression and those problems in place, and until we let Jesus threaten all we’ve built out of fear, he can’t save us from the fear itself. The truth will make us free from fear, but only if it first threatens everything made of fear on which we rely. Jesus is my savior and my threat…but not necessarily in that order.
 

The Four Esses

Dave Brisbin 3.21.21
Fifth Sunday of Lent. With Lent winding down, we remember that we have been approaching this Lent not as a negative time of giving things up as penitence for sin as much as the positive, affirmative action of introducing the elements that would clear out our distractions, purify our intent, and mirror Jesus’ time in the fortyness of his desert wilderness. What did Jesus positively have in the desert? Nothing material, but the desert provided all he needed spiritually—the four esses: silence, solitude, simplicity, and stillness. Isn’t it interesting that the absolutely essential elements of spiritual formation, of human meaning, purpose, and identity, are also the most endangered species in our modern, urban life? Think on it: our lives naturally produce the exact opposite of the four esses: noise, community, complexity, motion. Now it’s not that the things our lives produce are bad—they are beautiful and essential as well—but left unbalanced, they delude us into thinking they are all we are, and we forget our deeper selves.

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Even in Jesus’ day, he needed to leave his small village with its noise, community, complexity, and constant motion to find the environmental qualities that would force his focus inward toward his Father. And when the desert’s four esses had become his own, he strode out of the wilderness carrying those four elements wherever he went like an astronaut in a pressure suit. These qualities, these four esses were both the impetus toward and result of Jesus’ encounter with his Father, why he could say with authority that he and the Father were one, and why everyone who encountered him was struck by the depth of his presence and the simple truth in his teaching. If we want to follow Jesus to the oneness he occupies with Father, we will need to be willing to place into our lives this silence (turning off extraneous noise and devices), solitude (alone with God time), simplicity (keeping just enough), and stillness (interior balance in a busy life). God’s address is always right on the corner of silence, solitude, simplicity, and stillness. If we want to knock on his door, we need to go there first.
 

Sacred Surprise

Dave Brisbin 3.14.21
Fourth Sunday of Lent. A woman tells me that covid issues have divided her family to the point she feels her once close family is now like roommates passing in the halls. She was devastated and wondering how it could have happened? Good question. How have the medical and political issues surrounding the pandemic been powerful enough to divide us all the way down to families and marriages? Last few weeks, we’ve been talking about paradox as the means to deeper truth, and here’s a case in point: what paradox is more central to human experience than life and death? How do we live life well always knowing we’re going to die? Characteristically, we’ve been doing it by simply not thinking about death…our society has dealt with the paradox by choosing sides—life, youth, materialism—quickly removing dead and dying to hospitals, morgues, nursing and funeral homes, extending life at all costs, pretending we’re not part of the circle of life. Recent science has even shown that our brains physically reject connections of death as pertaining to ourselves: don’t fire electrically, don’t register the surprise/shock of that reality.

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As individuals and societies, we treat paradox as simple contradictions to resolve, choosing a side, so never finding the deeper truth that always presents as surprise. A surprise is the greatest gift life can give us, shocking us into new, more real reality. Why has covid divided us? Created roommates where there used to be family? Because it has stripped off our avoidance of death, made us face our own mortality as well as that of others. And that has made us afraid, and fear divides. But Jesus shows us in parables and sayings related to the Hebrew wedding tradition that death is the surprise that makes life alive—eternal. That holding life and death, the now and not yet in equal embrace reveals the priceless fragility of life even as we anticipate the ultimate surprise that death represents. And if we’ll respect the central paradox of the gospels, we’ll see that resurrection is the surprise that takes the sting, the fear out of death. No longer fearful, we find the truth that makes us free to live life well, even as and only when lit by the surprise of death.
 

Eye of the Needle

Dave Brisbin 3.7.21
Third Sunday of Lent. Tyranny of the Finite…love that term. Means that as finite creatures, we can’t be everywhere at once, and don’t have enough time to be everywhere eventually. Means we have to choose—and choice means stress, anxiety…after all, saying yes to one thing is saying no to something else, and we could make the wrong choice. In fact, stress and anxiety are how we know we have a choice to make. Make the choice, commit to the choice, stress relieved. This fact of life has taught us to view life as binary, dualistic, sets of opposing elements about which we must choose, if only to relieve the stress. But even as we do, if we want the deeper truth life is meant to teach, then working through the continual paradoxes life presents becomes much more important than the choices themselves. The process is the goal, not the outcome, and we can meet God equally on any chosen path. If we so choose.

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How do we work through the paradoxes life presents? Fortunately, Jesus tells us. When a young man comes to him, suspended between the horns of the dilemma that his wealth, power, and piety have not relieved the anxiety of his sense of meaninglessness, Jesus tells him, there’s one thing you lack: sell all you have and follow me. When the man realizes he’s not ready for that, Jesus remarks it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of the needle than a rich person enter the kingdom. This wonderful image can mean many things, but what it ultimately means is that if we’re willing to let go of all we think we possess, the freedom of truth will not be denied. But only if. The eye of the needle is too small to let anyone with baggage pass through. When we become continually ready to shed our skins, living in a constant state of childlike, beginner’s mind, we are then ready to follow Jesus through the eye of the needle to the radical freedom that only those who are unencumbered and unattached to their worldview will be able to embrace.
 

Wrestling with Paradox

Dave Brisbin 2.28.21
Second Sunday of Lent. Why do Jesus and Paul teach the way they do? Why do they both tell us that the Way to new and abundant life is by focusing on what is invisible, conquering by yielding, resting under a yoke, becoming free by becoming a slave, reigning by serving, being great by being small, becoming wise by being a fool, triumphing through defeat, living by dying, being strong by being weak? Maddening for people focused on the security and control implied in single, accurate, even formulaic answers. But a true encounter with God, a momentary view of life through God’s eyes, is necessarily at odds with the view from a human vantage. God always presents as a paradox between what we think is true and what is now possibly really true. As long as we’re breathing, we will need our human point of view, and until we’re ready to wrestle with how God’s reality fits into human lives, paradox will simply present as a contradiction. And unlike paradox, contradiction needs to be resolved.

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A contradiction is a set of opposing elements of which only one can be “true.” A paradox is a set of opposing elements designed to lead to a deeper insight, a truth that doesn’t resolve the paradox, but makes resolution moot. A paradox is not meant to be resolved; it’s meant to be wrestled. Twenty years after a transcendent encounter with God—the vision of a ladder between heaven and earth—Jacob is still only half-baked, halfway through the fortyness of his journey. But when he wrestles all night with the spirit of God, he is wounded, but through the wounding of his own self-sufficiency, God changes his name from Jacob, the schemer, to Israel, the one who has wrestled with God. A good teacher like Jesus or Paul knows that any encounter with God can only be authentically expressed as a paradox, left unresolved, because any single answer is just a picking of sides in a contradiction. A full stop to further truth. A good teacher knows that the process itself is the goal, that the wrestling, not a resolution, is the Way through the fortyness of any paradox we face: especially the fortyness of Lent leading to the central Christian paradox of how Jesus has died, yet lives.
 

Still Small Voice

Dave Brisbin 2.21.21
On the first Sunday of Lent, after having been through how many Lents? How many Easters? We’re pretty sure we know what Easter is all about. Just ask us, and we’ll rattle off all our theological truths about the resurrection. But when you bring the certainty of your beliefs to Jesus, you’re in for a shock. What would Jesus say? Probably to sell everything you have and come and see how the big Easter you hold in your mind is blocking a life-sized Easter that can actually fit into your daily moments. Every follower of Jesus, every hero of faith in scripture who received a spectacular revelation, a mountaintop experience with God, was immediately plunged into a forty-ness, a wilderness period represented by the number forty that was a time of consolidation and assimilation, of bringing the hugeness of the experience down into the DNA of daily life. It’s the inevitable process in which the great doubt sets back in, but through the action of faith, the great truth distills down for use in real life, if it’s to be used at all.

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From Noah and Moses to Jesus, Peter, and Paul, the shape of the journey is the same. And in the story of Elijah, we see the full shape of his journey from the spectacular miracles on Mount Carmel to the humble silence of a cave on Mount Horeb. And what stood between those two mountains? Forty days in the wilderness… Forty days or years is not literal here; it’s the long-as-it-takes time to grow the “shepherd consciousness” of Moses, the humble anawim spirit that can recognize God in the smallest of things. When Moses is still and small enough, he can see God in a burning bush, and when Elijah is still and small enough he hears his God in the kol d’mamah daqqah, Hebrew for the still small voice or better, the silent sound, sheer silence of God that draws Elijah out of the cave of his wilderness. Lent is the church’s ceremonial re-enactment of the wilderness that precedes the new life of Easter, an opportunity to grow deeper into our own still, small selves and an Easter we’ve not yet imagined.
 

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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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