message archive
Audio recordings of messages from Sunday and some Tuesday Recovery Gatherings are archived here for downloading or streaming. You can browse current year messages below from most recent to oldest, or select a category for specific years or one of our “boxed sets,” message series on specific topics.
Doing without Measuring
Dave Brisbin 6.5.22
Anything that can’t be measured always looks the same. Think on that for a second. All our minds really do is measure. Compare, contrast, create differences and distinctions. Without something to measure against, the measureless thing always looks the same: far out at sea—featureless water in all directions, cloudless sky, starfield. Always look the same.
God’s love has no degree. Can’t be measured by anything that can. Always looks the same to whomever is looking regardless of accomplishment. Knowing God’s nature and love is knowing that we can’t impress God with our accomplishments, can’t earn a place or a higher place, that each of us is God’s favorite and most beloved human because we’re here breathing and for no other reason. In a field of degreeless love, every point is mathematically dead center, and any other position is meaningless. Doesn’t exist.
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What we do along Jesus’ way—releasing, submitting, surrendering, trusting—is work that no one will ever see, congratulate, reward. It won’t matter. Once we stop measuring, the only reason to do anything is because it is our deepest purpose and pleasure to do so. When we can’t not do what God’s does all day long and twice on Sunday, we will at last know God and know what can’t be measured is why we’re here.
Ecclesiastes Moments
Dave Brisbin 5.29.22
In 1205, Francesco Bernardone, Francis of Assisi to us, had another worldview shattering moment. After a series of shattering events including being held prisoner of war and becoming deathly ill led him to renounce his father’s wealth and reconfirm his faith, he was praying in the crumbling chapel called San Damiano. In a vision, the painting of Jesus on the wooden panel cross spoke, telling him to rebuild God’s house, church, because it was falling into ruin.
Young Francis took the words as literally as most of us would have and began repairing the broken structure of San Damiano. He missed the metaphor that seems obvious now, but some moments are so shattering to our view of the world and our place in it, that they seem to require an immediate response. Francis did what was available and knowable, but after a few more such shattering moments, it wasn’t what he did, but who he became—in poverty, humility, humor, and connection to all living things—that reminded those in a wealthy and powerful church who Jesus was and what they were supposed to be reflecting.
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An Ecclesiastes moment is a world and ego shattering epiphany that whittles us down past obsession with accomplishment and control to the liberation of pure presence. Most likely, we’ll need a series of them to break through, because until we see all meaning contained in just one continuous moment, we are not free enough to live it abundantly.
Becoming Convinced
Dave Brisbin 5.15.22
After twenty-nine weeks studying the Sermon on the Mount, can we say in one sentence what this masterpiece is all about? If not, we’ll be lost in detail and miss its intent. Speaking strictly for myself, the Sermon is a radical exercise in deconstruction: a ruthless and unapologetic tearing down, upside downing, of the world we think we know: life and love, ethics and spirituality. Once we see Jesus working to break us through the limitations of our own minds—the thought and behavior patterns that keep us from the experience of full connection herenow—we have engaged the process he calls the Way.
When Jesus tells us that even if we do miraculous things in his name, we still may not know each other, have no intimate experience that makes us one in kingdom—he is trying to break our obsession with accomplishment, ultimately the accomplishment of certainty. In the fear that makes up the working of our conscious minds, certainty is the greatest prize. But certainty is a unicorn; it doesn’t exist in this life. Knowing God doesn’t mean being certain theologically, legally, doctrinally, or any other way. It means spending enough time out of our conscious minds to become convinced.
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Jesus’ Sermon pulls back the curtain of manufactured certainty and forces us into the disturbance of realizing we just don’t know, can’t know the ultimate workings of life and God. But in the process of questioning everything we think we know, accepting uncertainty, we come to rely on a power greater than ourselves that convinces us we’re not alone.
Our Mother
Dave Brisbin 5.8.22
A woman who grew up in a painfully patriarchal Christian sect, told me she was uninterested in attending a Mother’s Day church service that simply gave roses to moms. She’s been trying to understand her place as a woman in a faith that seems to be all about men…subjugating women. Starting with God as Father.
We know all about our Father. Why is there no mention of our Mother in scripture? Scholars have speculated that ancient Hebrews prohibited all rituals of the polytheistic nature religions encircling them to keep Israel focused on this life and their one God. Hebrews were forbidden to communicate with the dead, embalm, mummify, or even touch a corpse. They prohibited the worship of any physical image of God including nature as goddess—mother earth. But if these intentions and their own patriarchal culture kept explicit mention of our Mother out of scripture, the essential balance of father and mother in God is as clear as we’re willing to see.
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God is a perfect God only when justice and mercy, knowledge and wisdom, discipline and relationship, male and female, mother and father are equally honored and present. Without God’s matriarchy balancing us, anything we do, male or female, becomes just another patriarchy. Only our Mother guards our Father from the subjugation of others.
Lord, Lord
Dave Brisbin 5.1.22
It’s amazing how differently we hear things depending on our emotional and intellectual investments. Sometimes when counseling couples, I actually see words changing meaning in the air between one partner’s lips and the other’s ears. It’s all about what we’re prepared to understand. We hear what we’re prepared to hear. It’s the same with scripture.
At the end of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says that not everyone who calls out, “Lord, Lord, we’ve prophesied and done miracles in your name,” will enter the kingdom of heaven. And to put a really fine point on it, he finishes with: “I never knew you: depart from me, you who practice lawlessness.” Focused on afterlife as reward, and accomplishment and performance as the prerequisite for God’s favor, we immediately hear Jesus talking about our day of judgment with God—heaven or hell. But final and permanent damnation based on a principle we may have not even understood? That would violate everything Jesus lives out and says about the nature of God’s love, acceptance, forgiveness. Whatever this saying means, it’s not that.
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This saying isn’t about the afterlife and final judgment of God at all. Jesus’ kingdom is always here and now, and we are crying Lord, Lord, each and every day we desire to experience the fulfillment Jesus calls kingdom. Depart from me you who practice lawlessness is a direct quote from Psalm 6, but there, David tells us that those confronted with their dysfunction turn from their lawlessness, literally repent. Jesus isn’t judging here. He’s confronting. Trying to help us change direction and repent our way back into the intimacy of kingdom.
Wolves and Sheep
Dave Brisbin 4.24.22
Jesus gave us just one Way to experience the oneness of the Father, which when followed looks like presence, emotional regulation, and vulnerability. But this Way remains elusive because it’s nothing less than the complete deconstruction of our egoic consciousness—everything we think we are and have—in favor of a truth we can only see when everything false is removed. Very hard to do, and Jesus says few go by the narrow road to new life, rebirth.
Our churches haven’t been teaching this Way; it’s a tough sell. We don’t want to hear about a path that doesn’t ascend straight to prosperity or salvation, that curves down into the depths of ourselves, painfully purging until we can see where we really need to go. Everything in us wants a kinder, gentler way, a miracle cure or a savior we can passively accept. But without the healing that only a dive into our deepest fears can bring, we will always be looking for something or someone to do for us what we can only do for ourselves: become vulnerable enough to experience the love that casts out fear.
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Until we submit to the realities of Jesus’ Way, we will never see that we were born “saved,” that is, loved and accepted as perfectly as we can ever be. Jesus’ Way is the way of remembering who we are and have always been…beloved. Remembering our belovedness means letting go of everything that says otherwise, and until we do, no shepherd, no matter how good can lead us past the wolves.
Among the Living
Dave Brisbin 4.17.22
It has always struck me that the gospels tell us nothing about the resurrection of Jesus. The central event around which Christianity orbits is left entirely offstage. The gospels pick up the story after the resurrection has occurred and focus not on the event itself, but the effect it has on Jesus’ friends. The gospels are telling us, with their own gaze, where to look, what is important to see.
What we see is that none of Jesus’ closest friends recognize him when they first see him again. They watched him die. They buried him. Regardless of what he taught, they fully expected him to stay buried and stay dead. The gospels are showing us that the miracle of resurrection in our lives is not an external event, but a process of recognizing the miraculous. That we all see what we expect to see until something breaks the spell of rational limitation.
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We only know someone when we’ve experienced them in intimate detail, and Jesus’ friends had to re-experience that intimacy with him to prove his identity to themselves. Same with us. As long as resurrection remains huge and transcendent, it remains distant, a thought in our heads. But the moment we begin to see the risen Lord in the most intimate details of everyday life, we realize, as Jesus’ friends slowly did, that we can’t seek the living among the dead. Life is motion; set belief is static. We will never find our God among motionless thoughts in our heads. Only among the living.
That’s us, the living, the moving ones. When we’re ready, we will find our risen, living God in each face we encounter and embrace or not at all.
My Savior and My Threat
Dave Brisbin 4.10.22
Our fears define us, make us see everything through the pain of our unmet wants and needs—or the compulsive need to hold on to what we think we already have. If we’re afraid of change, it’s because we’re invested in our status quo and see change as a threat to our powerbase. If we’re afraid of no change, we feel marginalized and oppressed, victims looking for a savior to fix our problems.
Einstein said we can’t solve problems using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them. Seems obvious, but each of us is stuck trying to use conscious and unconscious tools created by our fears to fix problems also created by fear. This is really the point of Palm Sunday: when Jesus rides into Jerusalem, the people see him as either savior or threat based on their fears. But Jesus is neither and both, a true paradox, and he weeps that his people couldn’t remain in the tension of his paradox long enough to recognize what he was really bringing: the invitation to a way of seeing past their fears.
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Jesus is not riding into our lives to save us from oppression or fix 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 fear itself. The truth Jesus brings can and will make us free—by threatening everything made of fear on which we rely.
Jesus is my savior and my threat…but not necessarily in that order.
The Way to the Gate
Dave Brisbin 4.3.22
When we were kids, my sister did a paint-by-numbers of Da Vinci’s Last Supper. You remember those…a canvas board with a printed outline of an image, jigsaw-puzzled into numbered patches to correspond with paint colors. She worked day by day, filling in the patches with the right colors, and when she was done, if you stood about a block away, the colors fused into a whole in your eyes the way digital sound fuses in your ears.
Contrast her experience filling in the patches with Da Vinci’s after a lifetime of preparation, an image in mind, planning composition and technique, grinding pigments, mixing colors, experiencing the flow of bringing something radically new into the world. The two are as far as night from day, east from west. In Jesus’ day, the Pharisees had created a paint-by-numbers spirituality and righteousness. All legalists do. They imagine that our most profound experiences in life can be digitized, reduced to numbers that if followed in the right sequence will create a product, an outcome: righteousness, justification, salvation.
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Jesus is brutally clear that there is only one way to the flow of God’s spirit, and that Way is hard—requires stripping away everything we cling to out of fear that blocks the flow. When he says the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to life and few find it, he’s not saying that most people are going to hell. He is saying there are no shortcuts, and few will take the time and disturbance to realize that both gate and way are a person and not a product, and never what we expect to find.
Falling to Heaven
Dave Brisbin 3.27.22
Ever think about why you’re here? On this planet? Breathing? Maybe you have no idea, or maybe you have answers that will most likely have to do with accomplishment—things we do that give us a sense of meaning and purpose. But if Jesus and Brene Brown are right, we’re here to connect, to be at one with each other. All the rest is commentary.
Could it be that simple? Could human purpose have nothing to do with accomplishment, only how and whether we relate? Hard to process. We want to do something concrete, purposely control outcomes. But what would accomplishments mean in isolation, with no connection to share? Accomplishments are only meaningful in the context of connection. They end at our head stones, yet we chase them as ends in themselves. Truthfully, what we accomplish is important, but only as a meaning/purpose delivery device—a means for delivering connection.
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Jesus and the ancients knew that climbing can’t acquire what can only be gifted; it moves us in the wrong direction. When you’ve fallen in love, did you have to work at it? Accomplish it? Complete the task by climbing into position? There’s a reason we speak of falling in love. It’s involuntary. We can work to avoid it, but we can’t make it happen. We can’t climb to heaven, ultimate purpose, either. We fall to heaven by letting go of everything that would break our fall. Until we let go and fall hard, we never realize why we’re here, never experience the connection that is heaven.
