theeffect

2023 Archives

Saying Yes

Dave Brisbin 5.21.23
Last week someone asked how I would reimagine church. What would I change? We had just passed our 16th anniversary as a church—I said that’s exactly what we did sixteen years ago. We were a subversive lot back then, wanted to make a big statement about our differences. I was twenty years into study of Jesus from a Hebrew/Aramaic perspective and a personal contemplative journey. Our leadership group had formed around those principles, so we wanted our statement centered on those differences.

We didn’t want to call ourselves Christian or church; those terms were loaded, descriptive of a different worldview. We wanted to de-emphasize theology in favor of personal experience in contemplative practice, using theology to limit our error rather than make absolute statements—embrace the uncertainty, paradox of this life. We wanted our gatherings (not services) to be EPIC—experiential, participatory, image-based, communal. We experimented. We started as a recovery church that also worshipped together, working with addicts and alcoholics, trying to stand the model of community church on its head. We saw ourselves chasing the effect of God’s love on our daily lives rather than a theological cause, answering both the necessary steps of early recovery and Jesus’ Aramaic Way. We saw everyone as recovering from something.

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Honestly, we’ve stayed true to those principles, but the reality of a generation of community life has changed us. The losses we’ve sustained, the deaths, overdoses, disagreements, rejections—but also the miracles, healings, recovery, friendships.

What were we saying yes to sixteen years ago when we reimagined?

We said yes to having everything we thought we knew about ourselves, life, reimagined church and our ability to build it, challenged, dissolved. Loss of certainty, broken hearts, shattered faith. But as we kept showing up, what grew back after the wildfires was recovery. Miracles we never saw coming. We said yes to life unredacted, unadorned, unclothed. Would I say yes all over again? In a heartbeat.

 

Perfect Parent

Dave Brisbin 5.14.23
Patriarchal and paternal. Two words descending from the Latin word pater/father, but a patriarchal system is one that is male dominated and a paternal system is one where leadership—male or female—restricts the autonomy of people supposedly for their own good. Our country began shamefully patriarchal but not paternal—the states jealously guarded their freedoms. Today we’re much less patriarchal but more and more paternal, losing freedom in the name of the common good.

Whether you feel this is appropriate is not so much the point on Mother’s Day as the role women are playing. The assumption has always been that if women were in charge of things, there’d be more balance, and the world wouldn’t be such a mess. But as women take more seats of power, is anything really changing, or does power make men and women look the same? Is matriarchy as toxic as patriarchy and equally paternal?

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As a model of balance, the perfect parent/government, we certainly should be able to point to God. But is God just another patriarchy? In scripture, God is referred to as male by name and pronoun, but how is “he” portrayed? Ruach, malkutha, shekinah, hockhmah—spirit, kingdom, presence, wisdom—are all feminine Hebrew nouns, so in spirit, presence, wisdom, God is “she,” and kingdom is queendom. God is consistently depicted as a mother birthing, caressing, and suckling her children. Jesus calls God abba, a child’s word conveying an intimacy first experienced as emma/mother, and he leads every personal encounter with a mother’s acceptance before the teaching of father.

Making our government and churches more equitable means more than the number of seats occupied by men and women. The Hebrew mind couldn’t conceive of God apart from a perfect balance of father and mother—masculine and feminine, justice and mercy, knowledge and wisdom, logic and intuition, performance and acceptance, accomplishment and intimacy. Until we meet Mother God ourselves, we’ll never know Father God. Until we who occupy seats of power become more perfect parents, our institutions will remain toxic and paternal, whether patriarchal, matriarchal, or anywhere in between.

 

Tale of Two Healings

Dave Brisbin 5.7.23
A man has been ill for thirty-eight years. Ill enough that he’s spent all those years lying by a public pool begging for a living and waiting for a healing. Jesus comes by and asks him if he wishes to be well. After thirty-eight years, that should be insulting. The biggest no-brainer of all time. And yet, the man can’t simply say yes, exclamation point. He complains there is no one to help him get into the pool when the healing waters stir. But that’s not what Jesus asked.

What exactly did Jesus ask? In Aramaic, it would be something like tsaveh d’ethelem. Tsaveh is a form of tsevyana, the word we translate as will, but in the sense of desire, delight, pleasure, deepest purpose. Ethelem is complete wellness, wholeness, and health. Paul uses the word to denote sound doctrine, so we could say integrated—sound mind and body—just as shalom (peace) is really the greatest amount of connection, health, prosperity. Jesus’ question is all-encompassing: is your deepest purpose and desire to be whole, integrated, living in shalom, in kingdom?

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These ancients viewed illness not as a medical problem, but the tragedy of being taken out of the flow of day-to-day life, to lose social standing and interaction with family, friends, neighbors, commerce. To be healed was to be restored to community, everything that gives meaning to life. Jesus knows this man is sick, not just physically, but spiritually, emotionally, relationally. When he can’t simply say yes to wholeness, we all know he is steeped in a victim mentality that keeps him from the relationships that are healing and forgiveness, restoration to all that life offers.

Jesus heals the man anyway, but he doesn’t even ask his name or look for him afterwards to thank or follow. The deeper sickness remains. Jesus finds him later and tells him now that he’s well, don’t sin anymore so nothing worse happens. Jesus isn’t promising more disease as punishment, but making a central point. Sin isn’t unlawfulness to be punished…sin is disconnection itself. The man is physically healed, but more importantly has been given a chance for new relationship. Will he take it? Will we?

 

First Responders

Dave Brisbin 4.30.23
It’s ironic that Jesus’ primary teaching, the one that defines his ministry and on which he spends nearly all his time, is the one we most misunderstand. Jesus is always talking about entering Kingdom, and of course we’re thinking about entering Heaven. Entering some Place. Or Space.

Entering kingdom is a metaphor. A physical image for a spiritual realignment. There is no place or space to kingdom. We don’t enter it. We become it. Pointing at the children Jesus’ friends were shooing away, Jesus instructed to let them through, for such as these are kingdom. The littlest ones, whose egos have not yet formed, are kingdom—have not yet learned not to be kingdom so have no need to re-become it.

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Kingdom is a shift in identity. Or better, kingdom is the realization of our true identity, the recapturing of who we really are—were at the beginning and still are underneath. The children running at our feet are kingdom because they haven’t yet learned to believe they are not. But it won’t be long before their minds take hold, telling them they must think about who they are, to hold that thought and defend it as they work to make it so. Whatever we think we are nothing without, lost without, is what we identify with. But anything we can lose is not who we are, and everything we think, will eventually be lost.

The freedom of the truth Jesus offers is that who we really are can never be lost. Ever. Not even in death. Any identity imagined as separate from any other identity, God’s identity, is illusion, so to strip the illusion is to see that we and the Father are one: true identity. Jesus’ Way is relinquishing everything that can be relinquished until only that which can’t be relinquished remains. The point of any spiritual journey is to arrive at the ground of this irreducible presence, an identity that can’t be lost, but costs us everything to which we cling.

The first responders to a message like this are those who are already close to the ground. We call them humble. Jesus calls them children, for such as they are kingdom.

 

God’s Favorite Kid

Vernon Porter 4.23.23

Vernon Porter takes the pulpit to give us a good look at God’s love from another perspective. That we can’t outrun God’s goodness no matter what happens, however traumatic or how we feel about it. That God’s love is always present, and because of the peculiar nature of perfect love, we are all God’s favorite kid. Every single one of us.

In Count

Dave Brisbin 4.16.23
Met a prison chaplain who told me about needing to notify an inmate that his father had died, but when he called the inmate to his office, they were in count. Prisons count multiple times a day—inmates go to their cells and stand at their bunks until the count clears. Everything stops. No one moves. I realized we’d been in count for Lent, interiorly standing at our bunks, stopping distractions, counting out 40 days preparing for Easter. But by then, we were already in count again.

Jews begin counting days from the second day of Passover through seven weeks of seven, 49 days, with the fiftieth day marking the Feast of Weeks. These two festivals mark first the physical liberation of the people from Egypt and then their spiritual liberation as they received the Law, establishing a new relationship with God. A necessary gap, a period of adjustment lies between the two liberations—a gradual graduation from the comforting but limiting reliance on physical connection to the limitless expanse of pure spirit.

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Christian tradition overlays on this structure. Begins counting seven weeks of seven on Easter Sunday, and after counting to 49, the fiftieth day is Pentecost—the day that Jesus’ first followers were freed from the mental certainty of their physical relationship with Jesus to the full realization of their relationship with unseen God. Just as Jesus told Nicodemus that we all must be born of both water and spirit in order to see the Kingdom of God, the two births are separated by a gap, a period of adjusting to a new, non-physical, non-rational relationship with a God who like the wind, can’t be pinned down.

This is where we are now. In count between Easter and Pentecost.

The way to Pentecost begins at Calvary, the death of our physical certainty and reliance on rational thought. As we move through our grief over that loss, we begin to recognize that God didn’t die with our certainty, but still lives in the details of our daily lives in ways we hadn’t considered. And with that awareness, we’re in count to our Pentecost moment, the second liberation and birth, our embrace of pure spirit in physical life.

 

Among the Living

Dave Brisbin 4.9.23
What is the meaning of the Resurrection? Christians are all over the map, fighting and debating not so much that Jesus is risen and still lives, but how and for what purpose. Ultimately, such questions are a matter of faith, but where can we look for guidance? Scripture, of course. The gospels show us where to look, what’s important to see. While we focus on the supernatural miracle, fighting over what can never be proven historically, the gospels focus on the effect the Resurrection had on Jesus’ first followers—not the Resurrection event itself.

This is a huge distinction. The Resurrection happens offstage, and the story picks up afterward, following the tiny, unspectacular reactions of a few of Jesus’ closest friends. It tells us not to look at the miracle so much as how the miracle affects our own lives. The meaningful question isn’t whether or how we believe in the miracle, but what difference it makes that we believe. What can the reactions of Jesus’ friends teach us about that difference?

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Not one of Jesus’ followers recognizes him post-Resurrection. They interact with him, sometimes for hours, as if with a stranger until an intimate and familiar gesture breaks the spell. We humans only know a person after experiencing intimate details over time, and Jesus’ friends had to re-experience that intimacy to prove his identity, a process of becoming ready to see a Jesus both intimately familiar and yet wildly changed. Same with us. The meaning of Resurrection is not out there in history or theological doctrines, but within us, in the most intimate details of our lives and relationships.

When the women come to the empty tomb to anoint Jesus’ body, they are asked why they seek the living among the dead. Again scripture is telling us where to look. Set beliefs are snapshots—static, motionless, dead—no longer among the living. If we keep the meaning of Resurrection in our thoughts alone, Jesus is not there. Like ruha—spirit, breath, wind—Jesus is always in motion, our motion. Among the living…that’s us, the living. We find the risen Lord in each face and embrace, every moment of our lives. Or not at all.

 

The Eyes Have It

Dave Brisbin 4.2.23
Most of counseling is listening. Listening to stories that give you a snapshot of a person’s life at the moment, backstory, symptoms they are suffering, and some of the stressors causing the symptoms. But only some. The stressors we can self-identify are the ones we can see outside of ourselves—circumstances, events, relationships that are creating pressure or pain. When a person says they have no idea why they are feeling the way they do or their feelings are far too intense for the stressors they are experiencing, there are stressors inside themselves where they can’t be seen.

These inside, “endogenous” stressors lie in the unconscious as core beliefs about ourselves and life, programs for happiness and survival put in place unconsciously as necessary reactions to outside, “exogenous” stressors experienced from earliest childhood. These core beliefs define our reality for us in ways we’re not aware. They force us to live in a world that no longer exists with fears no longer real, now creating or exaggerating fears that create obsessive thought and compulsive behavior patterns that create disruption in relationships that create more external stressors. We can only see the world our unconscious defines for us, not free to live our moments as they really are.

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We say Jesus saves, but we imagine he saves exogenously—fixing outside stressors and circumstances, paving the way for heaven. But looking closely at his teaching, Jesus saves endogenously—showing us how to clear our way of seeing, clear out limiting beliefs that block us from seeing that heaven is already here, as close as our ability to be present. He said that the eye is the lamp of the body and when our eye is clear, our body is full of light. But when our eye is bad, we are full of darkness. Translated back to Aramaic, eye/aina is much more than eyesight—it is the way we see: our beliefs and attitudes, our entire worldview…all that endogenous programming.

Following Jesus’ Way of truth clears up the way we see life by stripping down our deepest, earliest beliefs. The ones that block our view of the truth that makes us free.

 

Conversations 4

Dave Brisbin 3.26.23
Had an intense conversation with a child specialist at the hospital grieving her friend, a nurse on the floor who died that morning. Cancer. She was reeling from her friend’s death, and we talked through her feelings and regrets—the sadness, numbness, disbelief, inability to imagine that she’d never see her again. The regret that she didn’t reach out more, even though she knew the nurse would only minimize everything, refuse any help. Caught between should-haves and respecting an intense need for privacy in her friend.

Then almost incidentally, she said losing her friend had intensified her fear of death. That she’s always been afraid of death, but today was off the charts. She said it almost casually, the way we’d say we don’t like broccoli or baseball. A simple, known fact of her life that she’d come to accept. My ears went into overdrive. I asked why she feared death so intensely, but she couldn’t tell me, just has as long as she could remember. Was it a fear of hell or judgment in a religious sense? No, more just the thought of not being here anymore. Being anywhere. She was vaguely Christian, believed in God, but was no longer sure there was anything after this. Not being. With her family, here, in life.

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She hadn’t heard of contemplative prayer. I told her it was a stepping away from all thoughts, words, feelings, everything you imagine you are, to experience a deeper self that still remains. At peak moments in her life—the birth of her sons, a first kiss, a sunset—she had experienced moments so intense they blew out her thoughts like a candle. We never feel more alive than at such moments, more fulfilled, connected, loved.

To step out of our minds is to step into the reality of love.

Why do we assume death is any different? Irony is, we live for the moments we step out of our minds, yet fear the moment we step completely out of ourselves. But if we’re present enough, life and prayer can teach us there is connection that can’t be contained in our minds, but is always waiting for the moment we step out of ourselves. Our minds can’t know what that will be like. Our deepest selves know already.

 

Conversations 3

Dave Brisbin 3.19.23
This is the third in a series of Sunday sessions of conversations. After seven Sundays working on a Red Letter Study—the direct sayings and teachings of Jesus from a first century Hebrew/Aramaic perspective—questions, concerns, and resistances were surfacing from people in our community. It seemed a good moment to stop presenting new material and take some time to consolidate and clarify the material we’ve been processing these past two months, so this Sunday, we held a third live question and answer session in place of a message/teaching to see what was on people’s minds.

This is not a “bible answer man” scenario carrying the implication that there is one “right” way to interpret the Bible and one “right” Christian doctrine and understanding of that doctrine that makes everyone and everything else wrong. This is meant to be a real conversation about confusing spiritual and doctrinal issues that impact us on a daily basis, trying to clarify the reconstruction of Jesus’ Aramaic meaning being discussed at theeffect, and to remove as many obstacles as possible to each person’s ability to engage their own journey to transformative truth.

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When it comes to spiritual matters, all we can ever do is tell each other what we are convinced of and the reasons and justifications for those convictions. With no objective certainty in spiritual matters, the process of searching for truth itself brings increasing personal conviction that metastasizes as trust. Trust without certainty is a good definition of faith, because conviction-become-trust is what allows us to risk action in the presence of doubt. And sharing our journeys and convictions helps us confront uncertainty and move past it.

That’s the point of having these Conversations, and the questions and comments this Sunday went far beyond the Red Letter material to issues that stand right at the heart of the Christian tradition. We still may have more to discuss, so we will finish up next Sunday, and see how much deeper we can dig.

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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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Embedded in the fun and laughter of each of our gatherings and events is the connection and accountability as well as the structure, discipline, and opportunity for service that authentic community is all about. We help create programs for physical support, emotional recovery, and spiritual formation that can meet any person’s needs. Such programs work at two levels: first to address a person’s physical and emotional stability—clinical, financial, relational, professional—anything that distracts from working on the second level: true spiritual formation centered around the contemplative way of life defined by an original Hebrew understanding of the message of Jesus.

Rather than telling people what to believe or think, we model and encourage engagement in a personal and communal spiritual journey that allows people to experience their own worthiness of connection and acceptance, to find the freedom from underlying fears that brings real meaning and purpose into focus.

 

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Seeing ourselves as a learning and recovery community that worships together, the focus isn’t on Sunday morning alone, but on every day of the week as we gather for worship, healing and support workshops, studies, 12 step meetings, counseling and mentoring sessions, referral services, and social events.

Our Sunday gathering starts at 10AM and includes worship with one of the best worship bands in the area. We also have online discussion and study groups on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings at 6:30P PST. See our interactive calendar and our Facebook page to stay in touch with what is happening each week. You can also sign up on our elist for email enews updates.

 

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