2023 Archives

Crazy World

Dave Brisbin 12.31.23
Another new year that’s promising to be as crazy as they get. After the past three years, that’s saying something, but a contentious election on top of escalating world events make it a contender. Anticipating this, we wonder why things can’t just settle. We look for resolution to contentions and contradictions, but when does life ever resolve?

There’s something deep in us that knows that life only and ever resolves in death. That like ignoring a spoiler alert that makes a movie uninteresting and unwatchable, to know the end, the resolution of life would make it pointless and unlivable. The mystery, the crazy contradictions, the missing pieces keep us guessing, interested and alive…and afraid. There’s the rub. Our fear keeps us obsessing and grasping for the very certainty that would drain the life out of our lives if we could ever actually achieve it.

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So what’s a human to do? Forever caught between the horns of a paradox—between intolerance of uncertainty and a world specifically designed to make certainty impossible. We’ve known this at the quantum level for nearly a century, but what we know rationally and need emotionally are another paradox we can’t resolve. A forty-year-old song captures it: Crazy world, full of crazy contradictions like a child. Just when I believe your heart’s getting warmer, you’re cold and you’re cruel, and I like a fool try to cope, try to hang on to hope. Oh, how I love this crazy world.

Jesus said he came to teach us to live abundantly. How do we do that in a crazy world, a crazy new year full of contradictions? The world is built on the uncertainty of its smallest particles. To believe that the world is not as it should be is to live in scarcity. Waiting for the world to meet our expectations before life feels safe enough to live is a train that never comes. If we can’t accept the world as it is, the work we do for change will carry the obsession of scarcity.

Abundant life begins the moment we realize that we love this crazy world and its unresolvable contradictions. That it is as it must be, and even as we work for change, we wouldn’t have it any other way.

 

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.

 

Moments Like These

Dave Brisbin 11.26.23
My good friend these past eight years, a committed member of our faith community, Bob Lang, died last week. I was at his house the night before with his wife and daughter and again the next day after he had passed. Staying connected to him and his family during his illness, I was very glad that last night to have been able to say in his ear all I wanted him to know, hoping he could hear and understand. He leaves a big hole in my breakfast schedule, the conversations we’d have, and accepting that he’s no longer callable will take some time.

Moments like these call so much into question, maybe everything that matters to us as fragile humans. What is Bob doing now? Who is he with? Anyone at all? Does he know the answers to all the questions I have, that every human has ever had since we started this whole thing? Most of us are well steeped in religious and cultural doctrine, but moments like these have the power to strip all that away, undistract us, question everything we think we know and lay bare the reality of what we can’t.

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Truth is, there’s no certainty about the unseen parts of life. By definition, they are unprovable. Unseen, we can say they don’t exist, or we can let what we do see convince us of something more. Fear makes us crave certainty, but certainty is only mind deep; conviction goes all the way to the bone. We choose our convictions out of the experience of our lives—not as a certainty, but as the basis of how we live. Now. Not then.

All we have is now. All Bob has is now. I’m convinced it’s the same now, shared, at different frequencies.

Moments like these have convinced me that choosing to live based on love is to feel love’s eternal quality. That we come from love and return to it, that we as part of love are never lost, just change form. Like energy and matter, we remain constant while constantly changing. I’m convinced that Bob is not lost, just unseen to me. We often say that the dead are still present and alive in our hearts, but I’m becoming convinced that our hearts, tuned to the frequency of presence, can make us aware of unseen life in our one, shared now…moments like these.

The Path to Grateful

Dave Brisbin 11.19.23
Important government official comes to a renowned Zen master and says, “Teach me the ways of Zen. Open my mind to enlightenment.” It’s more command than request. The master smiles, saying, “Let’s discuss it over tea.” When the tea is ready, he pours for his guest, and pours until the cup begins to overflow, creeping across the table until it runs off onto the man’s robes. He jumps up, “Stop! Can’t you see the cup is full?” The master smiles again, “You are like this cup. So full, nothing can be added. Come back when your cup is empty. Come back with an empty mind.”

As modern, Western people, our cups are now so full, overflowing with digital data, that a study has shown our attention spans have dropped from twelve seconds in 2000 before the mobile revolution to eight seconds today. Considering that goldfish have demonstrated attention spans of nine seconds, we have fallen below goldfish in our ability to hold the moment, to simply be present to what is rather than what projects on our screens and our minds.

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Why does this matter and what does it have to do with gratitude? Gratitude is more than mere thankfulness. It begins there, but journeys on to a life altering attitude and way of living connected to gifts we could never give ourselves. Gratitude is dependent upon presence, the ability to get all our preconceptions out of the way, clear our minds of distracting thoughts by immersing in what is right before us.

We can’t create gratitude, seek it directly or count blessings into it. Gratitude is what happens when we let go of the complexity in our minds in favor of the simplicity of an instant. It’s an umbrella term that covers all the positive emotions and excludes the rest. You can’t be grateful and anything negative at the same time. It’s a physical, mental, emotional impossibility. Maybe gratitude isn’t a thing itself, but the absence of anything that distracts from the ongoing gift—what it feels like to let the moment we’re in be enough for us, realize that anything added or taken away would only diminish.

Gratitude is what we call what we feel when we empty our cup and graduate from goldfish.

 

Fearing Not

Dave Brisbin 11.12.23
You can understand much of human behavior by remembering that we are fragile little creatures living under a death sentence trying to survive and somehow thrive. Fear makes us crave certainty and control, which don’t exist in life but drive our thoughts and behavior in predictable directions, including our religious obsession with prophecy and end times speculation. All enthusiastically doomed to frustration.

So how do we do it? Survive and thrive under such conditions? Since human experience never changes, we can look to the ancients, not for what we can know with certainty, but for how we can live in uncertainty without fear. Throughout the Judeo-Christian scriptures, there is one overarching metaphor for life lived here between heaven and earth—the Hebrew wedding tradition…from the bride’s point of view. Seems strange at first, but consider that a Hebrew girl was betrothed to a man she may have never met in a ceremony called the kiddushin. Her groom would then leave her to build the chadar, their apartment at his father’s house where they would consummate and live out their marriage. He could be gone a year or more, returning without notice, surprising the bride to carry her home for the nissu’in, the wedding ceremony.

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Imagine the bride living between kiddushin and nissu’in…excited anticipation of her new life deepening the awareness that she must leave everything she’s ever known and loved, all while knowing that at any moment everything could change. All human history and life are lived in the uncertainty between betrothal and consummation, promise and fulfillment, birth and death. The bride is living the paradox of balancing now and not yet—anticipating the excitement of new life, working toward change without ever losing immersion in the moment and relationships now.

Immersion now, even as we anticipate not yet, teaches us that all moments are equally sacred. That all moments, now and not yet, are the same moment once entered, and the uncertainty we fear resolves only and always now in the connection we make and maintain—the only certainty we’ll ever experience with the power to cast out fear.

 

What Love Requires

Dave Brisbin 11.5.23
I’ve continued to receive questions about the war in Israel and related issues, and one of them was very specific and raised an ethical nightmare of conflicting moral imperatives. Got me thinking of the competing ethical systems I learned in school: categorical imperatives—universal laws and duties that are self-contained and always morally right without regard to consequences vs utilitarianism—actions that are morally right when they produce the greatest good for the greatest number of people vs virtue ethics—the what would Jesus do question of looking to an ideal virtue agent to show us right action.

Each one has its pros and cons, and we probably need all three to regulate the excesses of the others, but what would Jesus do presents an interesting question for those of us trying to follow his teaching. First off, we can’t apply what would Jesus do to macro situations—Jesus was always teaching in the context of micro relationships and individual hearts. But a friend told me his reaction to the macro war was so personally devastating that he “googled Gandhi” to find, an eye for an eye will leave the whole world blind, and Jesus in the gospels, do not treat evil with evil, but rather with love. My friend’s clear use of virtue ethics helped him reframe, return home from macro confusion and despair.

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Jesus is much more situational than categorical in his ethics. Since he can’t ask what Jesus would do, in asking what the Father would do, he focuses on what love requires in any situation rather than what is categorically right. But to know what love requires, itself requires pure presence—awareness to really see the situation as it is, all who share it as they are.

When Jesus gets the devastating news that his dear friend Lazarus is dying, he stays two more days where he is, teaching and healing. Did love require delay to create the greatest good for greatest number or was he just lost in presence? When he arrives, he knows love requires a deep conversation with Martha, but with Mary, he simply weeps. What love requires can cut through volumes of ethical philosophy, but only if we’re fully present first.

 

A Promised Land

Dave Brisbin 10.29.23
The Israel-Palestine war is kicking up a lot of questions. How did we get here? Why for four or five generations has there been an active volcano in Israel/Palestine that can erupt at any moment? Israelis, Palestinians, and the three Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—all claim the land. Whose land is it? Who is the occupier? Can we make any sense by looking at history?

Jews have continuously occupied what is now Israel/Palestine for at least 3,000 years. Arabs have occupied the same land for the last 1,400, side by side with Jews. For most of that time, the land was taken and controlled by a parade of foreign occupiers: Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Crusaders, Turks, and finally the British. There has never been a formal Palestinian state and no Jewish state since 63 BCE. Rome renamed their province of Judea, Syria Palestina, about 135 CE after the second Jewish-Roman war that finally purged most Jews from the land. The name stuck.

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But 100 years ago, at the end of WWI, Britain took control of the area and supported a declaration calling for a Jewish national home in Palestine, opening the door to Jewish migration and creating tension and conflict with the Arab population. Twenty years and another world war later, Britain withdrew its control of Palestine in 1948, and the newly-formed UN approved a partition of Palestine between Arabs and Jews. Arabs rejected it; Israel declared independence; Arabs attacked; Israel defended and won most of the land partitioned to Palestinians, then purged those Arabs from their homes. The stage was set for the constant conflict of the past 75 years.

Both Jews and Arabs have ancient claims to the land. But land is always occupied by the winner of the last fight, and Jews and Arabs have taken and retaken this land over millennia. Whose land is it now and what can we do from the sidelines? We can start by admitting that history is not decisive, that all people have a right to a place to stand, and that we can’t afford to reflexively take sides and fall into the same patterns of hatred that lead to atrocities we abhor.

 

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.

 

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