Deconstructing Scripture
The ancient sacred writings of of the Hebrews and early Jewish followers of Jesus do not immediately convey their original meaning to Western readers–ancient or modern. By the fourth century, church doctrine and law was being formulated on a Western and more literal understanding of the text, and as time has passed, it has become only harder for us to understand Jesus’ original message. These podcasts break down–deconstruct–the literal meaning of our English translations to put them back into their original context, language, and worldview–essential to understanding what the writers were originally trying to communicate.
Doing the Word
Dave Brisbin 10.4.26
A woman told me she had remarried and was having trouble blending families. She had two small children. Her new husband had a huge black Labrador named Tucker. Tucker and the kids left no spot unspotted, filling the house while her husband was working or work-traveling leaving her to remember she was not a dog person, didn’t like dogs, especially this huge thing everywhere at once shedding and smelling…like a dog.
When she couldn’t stand the smell and shedding another day, figured a bath should help. Only way she could think to manage it was to put Tucker in the shower, get in with him, start the water, and pour on the soap. Tucker loved it. Biting at the water, shaking it off, wiggling and leaning into her scrubs, everyone soaked. A few showers later, he was following her around the house, and a bond she never thought possible was revealed right under the surface of her discontent. Changed the way she approached everything. So…
What if heaven isn’t the end of our journey, but the beginning?
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Jesus says it’s not out there somewhere hiding, but within. No more waiting; it’s right here in this field—if we just sell all that obscures and buy the field. James says if we start acting as if this good news is true, we find that it is. Faith—acting as if—moves us from mere belief to trust.
If heaven isn’t the end of our journey, but the beginning, if we were born non-rationally aware of the inseparable oneness of everything and then forgot in the rough play of growing up, then all of life is really just a remembering. Letting go of everything we learned in the forgetting.
We started with heaven. It has never left us. We left it. Acting as if this is true, getting in the shower with the smelly dog is the first step to living heaven first, revealing a bond we never thought possible right under the surface of our fears.
Doing the Word
Dave Brisbin 9.27.26
Do you have faith? How do you know? Because you believe you believe? What if there’s the slightest doubt? Is it still faith? As long as we imagine faith as mental agreement, we can run round these questions forever without ever really knowing.
So Jesus’ brother James comes to the rescue, holding up Abraham as a hero of faith.
Promised by God to be the father of many nations and innumerable descendants, Abraham is still childless at age 100 with his wife Sarah who is 90. The miraculous birth of their son Isaac is the proof to which he clings that God’s promise will be fulfilled. But he’s not our hero until he agrees to sacrifice his miraculous son of promise at God’s order. Christians have seen Isaac as foreshadowing Jesus, made to carry the firewood as Jesus carried the cross to the top of the same hill on which Jesus died.
In what are we placing our faith? Is God really so monstrously cruel as to require the death of a son only to pull back at the last instant?
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God didn’t require human sacrifice. Abraham’s idol happened to be his son, and the idol had to die for Abraham’s belief in God to grow into an ultimate risk-filled action, a relinquishment that realized his faith in unshakable trust. Trust that required no visible support.
For James, faith without such works is dead. Hearing the Word means nothing until we become doers of the Word. Not in fearful obedience, in trust.
Beyond Judgment
Dave Brisbin 9.20.26
In rhetoric—the art of persuasion—there are two basic ways to motivate someone to act. Protrepsis calls to another way of living or perceiving life, motivation to change. Paraenesis calls to continue a way of life already in motion, encouragement and advice to persevere.
Biblical prophecy like that of Isaiah is protrepsis—calls to repent, change direction, avert the coming catastrophe. And when people don’t and are standing in the smoking crater of what once was everything they knew and believed, apocalyptic books like Daniel or Revelation are paraenesis—calls to remain steadfast, in faith that God remains present, all promises intact.
Jesus and James share not only kinship, but their very Jewish teaching style as well. Even so, Jesus’ teaching is protrepsis, calling people to a relationship with God they could never imagine, to which their religion was no longer pointing. James, trying to hold the early movement together, taught through paraenesis, encouraging people to endure despite the difficulties they faced.
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James tells us to speak and act as if we are to be judged by the law of liberty… The only “law” that liberates is a love that never separates. To live that love is to know we are judged only by standards we set for ourselves, chosen or instilled.
Jesus and James work together: calling us to experience a perfect connection beyond our standards of judgment, then to keep choosing that connection in every relationship.
Persistent Presence
Dave Brisbin 9.13.26
Years ago, a co-worker became a good friend—a man from India with very dark skin and big, white teeth. When he smiled it was exactly like snapping on a high-powered flashlight. And he was always smiling. I liked him immediately, and we’d go to lunch and meet after work hours as well. Just one fly in the ointment…he was always late. Not just a little. Sometimes an hour or more.
I was developing an appropriate resentment, so I knew I had a choice to make…somehow grin and bear the tardiness or end the friendship. Neither was acceptable, so I found a third door. Without even telling him why, I’d always ask to meet at my apartment. That way, I just lived my life until he showed up, which was then always at the right time, often with homemade Tandoori chicken and the smile. He marched to a very different drummer and was always exactly himself, which is what I loved.
I didn’t have vocabulary or concept for it then, but Chinese Daoists call it ziran, “self-so.” Means living or acting authentically, without constraint or ulterior motives, just as we naturally are and exist to be. My friend flowed to a different sense of time and lived accordingly. I could accept that and flow with, or not. But I couldn’t change him even if I’d wanted.
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James tells us to count it all joy when difficulties come, because enduring them through gritted teeth is not the endurance James is talking about, that produces wisdom, maturity. When we let life be self-so, the universe no longer persecutes but teaches, life will still hurt, but is no longer difficult…
Having learned that through each difficulty a smiling presence persists, we can enjoy our friends whenever they arrive.
Alphabet of Life
Dave Brisbin 9.6.26
I don’t usually do verse-by-verse scripture studies. Too easy to get lost in details, lose the forest for the trees. Too easy to be consumed with commentary and lose the application to everyday life. Without that application grounding scripture in human relationship and community, we lose relevant meaning. The exceptions are the Sermon on the Mount and the Book of James. Why? They’re all application.
No coincidence that Matthew, containing the Sermon on the Mount, and James are the two most Jewish books of the NT and may have been originally written in Hebrew/Aramaic. Or that James was Jesus’ brother cut from the same Jewish cloth. Or that the Sermon on the Mount and James were used as catechisms for the early movement of Jesus followers. You won’t find high theology in the Sermon or James, only the building blocks of everyday life. James has been called the “Proverbs of the New Testament” and is filled with practical wisdom, aphorisms for living ethically in community along Jesus’ Way.
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The Sermon gives us the permission and means of stripping away the limitations that hold us in the hell of separation, and James, the ABCs of bringing that transformation back into everyday life in community. Greatly misunderstood in the West, James must be viewed with Jewish eyes. When we do, just as liquid takes the shape of any container into which it’s poured, we can distinguish the content of the message frozen in its Jewish container, and warmed to room temp, pour it fresh into the containers of our own lives. Same message, new shape.
Jesus’ Brother
Dave Brisbin 8.30.26
Wait, Jesus had a brother?
Scripture says he had four—James, Joses, Judas, Simon—and sisters too, unnamed and unnumbered. Not talked about much because Jesus with full siblings, DNA from both Mary and Joseph, blows up the doctrine of virgin birth that most Christianity accepts. If they were half-siblings, Mary having children after Jesus blows up the doctrine of Mary’s perpetual virginity that Catholic and Orthodox churches accept.
But there’s a third door. With no word for cousin in Hebrew/Aramaic, they had to say son or daughter of my uncle. Cumbersome. So mostly they just said brother or sister. Jesus’ brothers could have been cousins, as Jesus’ aunt, Mary of Clopas, had at least two sons named James and Joses. Whew.
However you see it, Jesus had a brother named James.
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James was above reproach, a lifelong Nazirite—formally dedicated to God. He didn’t follow Jesus during his ministry, but joined the movement after the crucifixion, and the people elected him nasi, overseer, a position he held for thirty years. Jewish authorities illegally stoned him in 62 CE, and the people were so outraged, it accelerated the unrest that led to the war with Rome four years later. James maintained the spiritual and social purity of the movement from the crucifixion to the war that ended the Jewish state and temple religion…time needed for the church to take root.
James’ book in the bible was used as a catechism, laying out in very Jewish fashion the concrete way of life that honored Jesus’ teaching in a Jewish frame. His writing is foundational, starting with accepting life as it is, enduring hardships that teach and mature, understanding faith and faithful life in community. James is a window on how Jesus was understood by those who knew him best, grew up with him.
We need to bring Jesus’ brother out of the shadows and let him speak.
The Workings of the Way
Dave Brisbin 8.23.26
Ever awaken at 3:30 in the morning? Doesn’t it always seem to be 3:30? Maybe coming out of a disorienting dream, disembodied in the dark with all it means to be you laid aside? It’s right there in that naked vulnerability that a lot of the work of Jesus’ Way is already done for you…
Your clothes are in the closet. Your Rolex on the night stand. Maybe your teeth are in the bathroom. Car and tools in the garage, diplomas on the office wall. The people reflecting your roles seem remote, no substance in the dark. Who are you then? How do you relate to anything of significance? Later you get up, make coffee, feel better. Your reflection in the mirror, your clothes and rituals rebuild you in the light, help you forget questions circling in the dark.
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Like fish in water, the Way can’t exist anywhere but daily life, can’t be practiced anywhere but the physicality of our relationships. It’s the action of becoming aware enough to experience our original connection to significance—everything immediately present in our moments. Jesus calls this experience Kingdom, the state of being so connected as to identify with. Which is why he doesn’t get lost in abstract theology, but tells us to lose ourselves in intimate relationship. Without an effect on relationship, there is no Kingdom. No identification. Kingdom is the effect.
We naturally want to think more, try to understand, but the Way is showing us how to act in a way that mimics the 3:30 moment, bringing our stripped down, disembodied awareness into the light of daily experience. Practical action that attenuates left brain ego dominance and amplifies right brain experience without judgment. Concrete steps we can take that slowly show us, not tell us, who we are and how we relate to significance.
Smilepoint
Dave Brisbin 8.2.26
We have always been taught that Jesus came to save us from our sins.
Not true. Not sins plural as in all the harmful choices we make or actions we commit. God understands those, loves right through those. In John’s gospel, Jesus came to take away the sin of the world. Singular. Not choices or actions, but a state of being…separate. The universal sin of the world—the pervading illusion of separation, of ourselves as separate from, in competition with everyone and everything else—the state from which every harmful choice and action proceeds.
The price of human self-awareness is to experience ourselves as separate beings, a sensation so physically pervasive, it overwhelms the unseen truth of ultimate connection. As infants, we swim in undifferentiated oneness until old enough to conceive of ourselves with distinct edges. Then the hurts and traumas of childhood pile up creating a narrative of unworthiness indoctrinating us to believe we’re not worthy of the connection we more and more dimly remember.
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This was Jesus’ plan all along. Not to save us from sins, but to touch, forgive, call with the warmth of a smile that erased all doubt of connection. Only when we have felt completely unworthy and yet completely accepted at the same time, can we see shame for what it is—a narrative, a fear of disconnection that keeps us disconnected. Shame is the only thing standing between us and the Good News that our original connection remains, waiting patiently beneath old stories of original sin.
It’s the long way home, but Jesus came to save us from the separation that is sin. But to do that he first had to save us from shame.
Trackless Passage
Dave Brisbin 7.26.26
Played high school football my first two years. Bookish kid trying to fit in, never got off the bench in league play. But I could learn that playbook. Knew it cover to cover better than the starters. Took some nerdy pride in that.
Small and fast, they put me at tight end and during a training scrimmage, quarterback called an end around. I knew that play cold: two steps off the line, planted, spun around across the backfield, quarterback fading into view, ball suspended in my path, slapped against my chest. Clamped down and turned back toward the line. Perfectly executed. But in my mind, the play was over. No more lines on the page. Holding the ball with absolutely no idea what to do next.
A big linebacker showed me.
I had focused on what I could understand, but everything it means to be a football player starts where the playbook ends. The parts we can read and memorize are not why we go to football games. What we do when nothing is telling us what to do…that’s worth a ticket.
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We look to religion, its scripture, laws, beliefs, rituals—playbook and promise. If we follow the book, we’ll be safe. Saved. It may actually seem to work for awhile, until we suddenly find ourselves holding the ball with no idea what to do next.
Religion puts the play in motion. Jesus shows us how to exceed the playbook and run downfield with the ball. Life begins where the playbook ends. Why we buy the ticket. The way ahead is trackless ocean, a field of linebackers. Frightening. We could get in trouble. But that’s how you know it’s an adventure.
Unseen Path
Dave Brisbin 7.19.26
A contemporary theologian and semiotician—how meaning is communicated—saw that our youngest generations process information differently than older Westerners in the modern era. He called it EPIC: experiential, participatory, image-based, and communal. Pretty much the exact opposite of our modern method: propositional, representational, word-based, individualistic.
We propose abstract concepts rather than experience a process; passively receive information rather than participate in an exchange; view the world through words as an individual rather than images within community. The hallmark of the modern West is to remain intellectually detached, observing life and attempting control from a safe distance. But the youngest among us jump right in, experiencing and participating in a communal world awash in image.
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Jesus called himself the Way. Not as propositional truth to use as a litmus test for orthodoxy, but as the invitation to participate and experience relational truth that could promise liberation no other way. Jesus’ earliest followers called themselves Followers of the Way. Not followers of Jesus in a representational, passive attempt to ride his coattails, but in the discipline of living lovingly in community. The Way, urha in Aramaic, means not just the path, but the light that reveals the path and opens possibility. When we view Jesus’ sayings of way, truth, life; ask, seek, knock; the five lines of the Lord’s prayer through an EPIC lens, they become sequences in a process of participatory experience, not words agreed upon for personal salvation.
We want to see the path that leads us to God. But when Jesus says the only Way to God is through him-as-Way, he is EPICly saying an unseen God can only be found on an unseen path…experienced in participation with each step, conveyed through image, and realized in identity with community.
