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.
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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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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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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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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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.
Perfectly Imperfect
Dave Brisbin 1.1.23
First apartment Marian and I rented was near a nature reserve, and a colony of turkey vultures roosted in the tops of the eucalyptus all around us. Most people complained about the mess on the sidewalks, but I loved them. Waiting every morning for the sun to heat the updrafts that would take them aloft, like business people waiting for the train, they went to the office every day, all day, back home with the lowering sun. Day after day, seasons, weekends, holidays made no difference. No sense of time or the arbitrary lines we draw to mark our calendars.
On New Year’s Day, we celebrate an arbitrary line. A line drawn differently in different cultures at different times in history. In the West, we think of time as a series of line segments, but the new year we celebrate is really a circle. The universe is made of circles. Circles within circles. Stars, planets, orbits, rotations, all scribing the circles we call days, months, years, seasons. The earth has no more sense of time than a turkey vulture, but we do, and in the language of Jesus, when a circle is completed as on New Year’s Day, it is g’mar, perfected. 2022 is now a perfect year. Complete. Fulfilled.
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Perfection is not about working a process to a perfect result, but about the effect that process has on us…even if the result is imperfect. Outcome is irrelevant to the perfection of Jesus and James. We are perfected when we come full circle, home to our eucalyptus, having learned to be more fully present and aware, to more perfectly embrace whatever and whomever shares our homecoming. No matter how imperfect.
