2023 Archives
Second Mile
Dave Brisbin 10.15.23
It is absolutely, positively, unreservedly impossible to overestimate the impact of culture on language. Language is a child of culture and can only breathe in the culture that birthed it. When translated to another language, we’ve taken a fish out of water, trying to understand as it flops on the ground. If we want to know a fish, we have to get into the water. If true for modern languages, how much more for ancient ones, where not only culture, but history, science, and technology also affect meaning?
Cultures exist to bind people together, ensure survival by making group experience meaningful and cohesive. So first task of culture is to control behavior—make sure the behavior of individuals is not harmful to the group. We see that as a function of law, because modern Western society is based on what anthropologists call a guilt/innocence culture: order is maintained by creating and reinforcing feelings of guilt and expectation of punishment.
read more
When Jesus tells us to turn the other cheek if struck on the right, until we know this meant a backhand slap, a shaming insult that would require vengeance to restore honor, we can’t know what he was asking in terms of voluntary humility for the sake of relationship. And when he says to go a second mile after Roman officials commandeered you for the first, until we see the shame in oppression, we can’t know how everything Jesus is teaching about the assurance and fearless vulnerability of God’s love is never found in the first mile. Only a second mile, beyond honor and obligation, can show us that.
Yes and No
Dave Brisbin 10.8.23
How hard is it for you to say no? From telemarketers to employers, people on the street with signs to friends and family, there’s a psychological spectrum of difficulty. No one likes to give anyone the bad news of no, but if the difficulty is so great that it’s near-impossible, then we’ve shifted from concern for another to a form of codependency, concern for what another thinks of us. We’re all codependent to certain degrees, but when we can no longer simply say yes and no, there’s a problem.
In a recent group discussion, women said they thought it was harder for them to say no than men—that women are more relationally focused and taught to please others in a way men are not. But everyone had varying levels of difficulty: the introverts said the answer is always no, no matter how many times they say yes; one man said you should always say no first, because it’s much easier to change your mind later to yes; a woman said that her no was always softened, accompanied by an alternative; while another spoke of the virtues of “maybe.”
read more
For an honest person, no oath is necessary—for a dishonest person, no oath is enough.
What does it take to be the person Jesus suggests? To simply say yes or no…why, only later if needed…takes someone who’s experienced an inner assurance of belonging and acceptance. Someone strong enough to say yes and carry it out; non-codependent enough to say no without loss of identity.
When we say yes to one thing, we say no to another. Yes and no, define us and the course of our lives. Jesus is showing us the freedom to choose with something other than fear.
Darker Before Dawn
Dave Brisbin 10.1.23
One of the most misinterpreted and misused passages in the Bible affects a foundational part of our personal lives. Jesus appears to tell us in Matthew that adultery is the only legitimate ground for divorce and anyone who remarries after divorce for any other reason commits adultery. In Mark and Luke Jesus seems to remove the exception: all remarriage after divorce is adultery. I’ve seen pastors send women back to abusive husbands, toxic marriages held together at all costs, divorced people leave the church in order to live their lives.
Is it legal to drink under the age of twenty-one?
We mentally add alcohol or the question is nonsense. We leave it out of the question because the context is clear. Same happens biblically, but we don’t know the context. Everyone in first century Israel knew there were five legal grounds for divorce, and adultery was not one of them. Proven adultery was punishable by death, not divorce. The matter of indecency Jesus cites that we have translated as adultery, meant bringing shame to the family, while the other four dealt with neglect, abuse, and infertility—common-sense responses to the realities of marriage in their culture.
read more
God’s purpose is always to bring together, make separate things one, peace out of chaos. This is the purpose of marriage as well. But if a marriage is chaotic, abusive, toxic, divorce may be the only way to create greater oneness later.
God knows this…that sometimes it has to get darker before the dawn. Jesus did too. How about us?
Power to Choose
Dave Brisbin 9.24.23
Co-facilitating a debrief for a medical team that was emotionally stressed by a case in which a baby died after drowning in his bathtub. And if that wasn’t traumatic enough, the mother was charged for leaving her baby alone in the tub while under the influence of drugs. As the staff is caring for the baby, the police are in the hospital room arresting the mother, cuffing her, taking her into custody. The medical staff know the baby will not make it and confront the police, asking that the mother be allowed to stay as long as her baby is alive. The police relent, but stand guard in the room and won’t uncuff the mother. She backs against the bed…trying to touch her baby.
It’s a classic clash of cultures between law enforcement and medical care. It’s not that the medical staff doesn’t know or care what the mother did; they are horrified. But where law enforcement sees the mother as offender and the room as a crime scene, the medical staff sees the offender as a mother and the room as a place of care. More broadly, it’s a clash between justice and mercy, macro and micro where neither side is wrong nor fully right in each other’s contexts. This mother must face the law and what justice demands, but as one nurse said, in that moment we needed to let her grieve over her baby.
read more
Even as we accept macro constraints, we can still choose the character of our micro life—compassion, connection, respect. How we live under the law is always our choice. Jesus is giving us back the awareness of our own power to choose. No one can take that from us.
Mercy and Justice
Dave Brisbin 9.17.23
Years ago, first time visiting an inmate at men’s central jail, I was surprised by the attitudes of the other visitors. There wasn’t the melancholy or tears I was expecting, but a lightness, almost celebratory atmosphere. Young women made up and dressed up, parents, grandparents laughing and talking. Big Hispanic man loudly encouraging and praying, two women beside me speed talking, effortlessly gliding between English and Spanish. Family and friends doing what family and friends do. Was a forty-five-minute wait at my assigned window; time to take it all in.
Swinging around on my bolted-down metal stool, a young woman at the opposite bank of windows is talking on the handset to a young man on the other side of the glass. Orange jumpsuit. I see her from an angle, leaned forward and intent—free hand in the air, tone of voice, smile—she could have been sitting across white tablecloth and candlelight. She saw no orange jumpsuit, no offense, only the man she loved. I thought of the prodigal…in an orange jumpsuit…and I realized that she and the father of the prodigal were orange colorblind. Saw no offenses or punishments, only the beloved.
Is that fair? What about the offense, the victims? What about justice? Isn’t God just?
read more
God is justice in the macro, when viewed where three or more are gathered. But when God views us—it is always micro, as if we are the only person living between heaven and earth. God is orange colorblind too. Sees through our faults like x-ray vision or a young woman at central jail. While we are still beholden to macro laws and the punishments they assign, between God and us, there are only and will only ever be white tablecloths and candlelight.
Love is the Law
Dave Brisbin 9.10.23
The purpose of a fish trap is to catch a fish. Once the fish is caught, the trap is forgotten.
The purpose of a rabbit snare is to catch a rabbit. Once the rabbit is caught, the snare is forgotten.
The purpose of words is to convey ideas. Once the ideas are grasped, the words are forgotten.
Show me a person who has forgotten words. That’s the one I want to talk to.
Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu, wrote this three hundred years before Jesus, but it speaks to a timeless part of human nature. We are always getting means and ends confused. Missing the forest for the trees—missing the intent of a process by getting lost in its details, letting those details become an end in themselves, more important than the purpose for which they were put in place. This phenomenon of putting carts before horses is probably most clearly seen in religious practice.
An old joke: Why don’t Baptists allow premarital sex? Because it leads to dancing…
read more
This is what both Chuang Tzu and Jesus are confronting. The religious laws of the Hebrew bible existed to preserve the life of the community and promote the awareness of God’s presence…not as a test of righteousness. The Hebrew word we translate as law really means instruction or guidance, which means that the rules are not goodness in themselves; they can only point us in that direction—a means of personal formation, of assuming the values of the law’s intent. Expressed in scripture as writing the law on our hearts, law is only needed until we learn to love, then the law can disappear.
We have learned to follow rules as the proof of our goodness and acceptance, but… The purpose of the law is to catch God’s goodness. Once goodness is caught, the law can be forgotten. Show me a person who has forgotten law. That’s the one I want to obey.
Salt and Light
There’s a great story, apparently from Mexico, in which an old mule falls into the farmer’s dry well. Poor animal is braying down there miserably, but the farmer can’t think of a way to get it out. And the mule is old and he’d been meaning to fill in that dry well, so he decides to put the mule out of its misery, bury it, and fill in the well all at once. First shovels full hit the mule, and it’s panic-braying, but after a few more, it goes silent. Farmer looks down to see that with every shovel full of dirt that hits its back, the mule shakes it off and steps up. Shakes it off and steps up, until he simply steps up over the edge of the well itself and trots off.
This story is usually used to illustrate how we can face adversity by shaking if off and stepping up. Nail hit on head. But when Jesus says the effect of our taking on God’s attributes as we grow spiritually is to become light in the world, we’re left thinking of straight rays of visible light as opposed to darkness, the absence of light. Or we may be thinking of light and dark as symbols for good versus evil—ever opposed. But ancient Hebrews understood light, nuhra, as straight lines of order, harmony, clarity function—and darkness, heshuka, as curved energies of mystery, obscurity, chaos, unfunction…not dysfunction, because darkness is not bad, just not directly usable, as we’d like.
read more
Enlightenment is really endarkenment.
It’s not a direct beaming down of straight rays of understanding that lights our darkness, but an indirect layering up of experience that lifts us into the light. The intense experiences of love and suffering that life shovels onto our backs, if we shake them off and step up, keep vulnerably showing up to life, enlighten by slowly removing what obscures. It’s the only way.
Poor and Blessed
Dave Brisbin 8.27.23
Talking to a man going through a devastating life transition. Now in his sixties, he’d always been a man who could make things happen through sheer intellect and effort: built businesses from the ground up and rose to top leadership in church and ministry. He derived his identity primarily from those two focuses—from ironclad beliefs that were both anchor and compass.
But a series of disillusioning events at the church drove a deconstruction of his faith and beliefs that cast him adrift, a down-spiral that included alcohol and a bad fall that incapacitated him long enough to lose his business and nearly his family as well. Four years later, he’s saying he wishes he could go back to the days when life made sense, that he’s not contributing anymore, doesn’t feel value to life. Thinks maybe he should move to a larger city where he’d have opportunities to volunteer, maybe write a book, start a new business.
I so resonate with this man.
read more
I know that in two generations, no one will remember me. Two generations. That’s it. Even if I leave a book or legacy, my products may be remembered, but not me. If I can’t find value right now, typing these words careless of whether anyone reads them, I won’t find it anywhere else. When Jesus says we’re blessed when we’re poor in spirit, he’s saying just that: to have an attitude of poverty even if we’re rich, admit complete dependence, realize we don’t exist individually but only in connection with each other, is the only meaning that is permanent. We’re blessed—whole and complete—the moment we can stop striving to be different to be remembered, laying back into the grateful anonymity of oneness with all that is.
Ocean and River
Dave Brisbin 8.20.23
How do you know you’re in love? Can you explain it, define it? Control it? Oh sure, you can talk about effects on your heartrate and attitude…but define, much less control? You just know. The train leaves the station, and you’re on it. Great movie exchange between atheist and theist: atheist says she will only accept what she can prove scientifically. Theist thinks for a beat, then asks, do you love your father? Yes. Prove it.
Jesus gets this. Said such spiritual processes are like the wind. You can’t see it, only hear and see its effects. Can’t know where it’s going or coming from. Powerful, invisible, mysterious. In his usual enigmatic way as poet, Jesus is saying that love and spirit operate outside of logic and rationality. We can’t define or control anything without thinking about it, and if we’re thinking about it, we’re not in it.
read more
This is basic human nature, and why Jesus’ main objective is to shock us out of our minds. Look at his words again. He’s a poet, so you won’t see it directly, but an ancient Chinese philosopher framed it perfectly, telling of a river, full of its power during a flood, emptying into the ocean and there facing the shock of its own insignificance, dependence on greater waters. Life will deliver such shocks naturally, but our minds resist the conclusion. Jesus is teaching an intentional Way, eliciting experiences that will shock us into a benevolent mental breakdown.
Outside the Box
Dave Brisbin 8.13.23
Ever heard of the nine dots puzzle? Nine dots arranged in a square, three equal rows of three, like tic tac toe. Challenge is to connect all dots using only four straight lines and without lifting pen off paper or retracing any lines. After snapping a couple of pencils and throwing up your hands, you find the solution looks like an arrowhead with its head on a corner and wings extending beyond the box of dots. We naturally assume the solution must be contained inside the box. There is no solution inside the box.
Puzzle imitating life.
We naturally assume every challenge we face must be solved inside the box—the scope of our life experience—because we can’t conceive of anything outside our box. You cannot speak of ocean to a well-frog, the creature of a narrower sphere, the philosopher said. As with the frog, the sneakiest part is: we don’t even know we have a box. It’s just life. Our lives. The laws of society, religion, physics, the dynamics of our family of origin, our traumas and training…all we know and have decided to believe, forms the walls of our box.
read more
Jesus leaves nothing on the table in a single-minded drive to break us out of the prison of our box. Boxes limit and contain. That’s their functional beauty. But the love and life Jesus is living can’t be contained and remain themselves. Only when we’re willing to get out of control, out of our minds, will the first glimpse of vast ocean come into view. Outside the box.
