2021

Dave Brisbin 3.7.21
Third Sunday of Lent. Tyranny of the Finite…love that term. Means that as finite creatures, we can’t be everywhere at once, and don’t have enough time to be everywhere eventually. Means we have to choose—and choice means stress, anxiety…after all, saying yes to one thing is saying no to something else, and we could make the wrong choice. In fact, stress and anxiety are how we know we have a choice to make. Make the choice, commit to the choice, stress relieved. This fact of life has taught us to view life as binary, dualistic, sets of opposing elements about which we must choose, if only to relieve the stress. But even as we do, if we want the deeper truth life is meant to teach, then working through the continual paradoxes life presents becomes much more important than the choices themselves. The process is the goal, not the outcome, and we can meet God equally on any chosen path. If we so choose.

How do we work through the paradoxes life presents? Fortunately, Jesus tells us. When a young man comes to him, suspended between the horns of the dilemma that his wealth, power, and piety have not relieved the anxiety of his sense of meaninglessness, Jesus tells him, there’s one thing you lack: sell all you have and follow me. When the man realizes he’s not ready for that, Jesus remarks it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of the needle than a rich person enter the kingdom. This wonderful image can mean many things, but what it ultimately means is that if we’re willing to let go of all we think we possess, the freedom of truth will not be denied. But only if. The eye of the needle is too small to let anyone with baggage pass through. When we become continually ready to shed our skins, living in a constant state of childlike, beginner’s mind, we are then ready to follow Jesus through the eye of the needle to the radical freedom that only those who are unencumbered and unattached to their worldview will be able to embrace.

Eye Of The Needle

Dave Brisbin 3.14.21
Fourth Sunday of Lent.  A woman tells me that covid issues have divided her family to the point she feels her once close family is now like roommates passing in the halls. She was devastated and wondering how it could have happened? Good question. How have the medical and political issues surrounding the pandemic been powerful enough to divide us all the way down to families and marriages? Last few weeks, we’ve been talking about paradox as the means to deeper truth, and here’s a case in point: what paradox is more central to human experience than life and death? How do we live life well always knowing we’re going to die? Characteristically, we’ve been doing it by simply not thinking about death…our society has dealt with the paradox by choosing sides—life, youth, materialism—quickly removing dead and dying to hospitals, morgues, nursing and funeral homes, extending life at all costs, pretending we’re not part of the circle of life. Recent science has even shown that our brains physically reject connections of death as pertaining to ourselves: don’t fire electrically, don’t register the surprise/shock of that reality.

As individuals and societies, we treat paradox as simple contradictions to resolve, choosing a side, so never finding the deeper truth that always presents as surprise. A surprise is the greatest gift life can give us, shocking us into new, more real reality. Why has covid divided us? Created roommates where there used to be family? Because it has stripped off our avoidance of death, made us face our own mortality as well as that of others. And that has made us afraid, and fear divides. But Jesus shows us in parables and sayings related to the Hebrew wedding tradition that death is the surprise that makes life alive—eternal. That holding life and death, the now and not yet in equal embrace reveals the priceless fragility of life even as we anticipate the ultimate surprise that death represents. And if we’ll respect the central paradox of the gospels, we’ll see that resurrection is the surprise that takes the sting, the fear out of death. No longer fearful, we find the truth that makes us free to live life well, even as and only when lit by the surprise of death.

Sacred Surprise

Dave Brisbin 3.28.21
Palm Sunday. When Jesus rides into Jerusalem that first Palm Sunday, he brings with him a trail of clues to answer the question everyone is asking: Who is this Jesus of Nazareth? His public life’s work, his teaching, even the colt of a donkey he rides are answering this question for anyone who’s really paying attention, yet no one is seeing who really rides that little burro. We all see only what our fears—expressed as wants and needs—allow us to see. And what the people and followers of Jesus see is a savior who will deliver them from oppression and anonymity. But what the authorities see—both Jewish and Roman—is a threat to their power bases in which they are so invested. As with every time Jesus rides into our lives, he presents a paradox: is he a savior or a threat? If we’re afraid of change, relying on whatever status quo we’ve invested, then Jesus is a threat to our power base. But if we’re afraid things will not change, if we’re oppressed or marginalized, then Jesus is savior come to fix our problems.

Now we would immediate say that Jesus is our savior, but allowing paradox to do its work in us, is for us to allow the paradox to stand long enough to do its work. Can we resist the knee-jerk reaction to choose one side or the other, make one side right and the other wrong long enough to see the deeper truth beyond the seeming contradiction? If we say Jesus is our savior, not a threat, we will miss how Jesus saves and from what, because the truth of this paradox is that Jesus can’t be our savior until he’s first a threat…a threat to all our powerbases: everything we hold dear, take pride in, use to advantage. Until everything we’ve piled up in our lives out of fear is cleared out, we can’t even see what we need to be saved from. Jesus is not riding into our lives to save us from oppression or save us from 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 the fear itself. The truth will make us free from fear, but only if it first threatens everything made of fear on which we rely. Jesus is my savior and my threat…but not necessarily in that order.

Savior Or Threat

Dave Brisbin 4.4.21
Easter Sunday. What is the most important single thought to take away from this Easter? After all the Easters you’ve lived through, what single concept will bring you closer to the new life and fresh wind of Easter? We typically focus on the supernatural miracle of the resurrection, of course, but notice that the gospels don’t. They focus on the effect of the resurrection on Jesus’ closest friends. The gospel stories pick up after the resurrection has occurred offstage and follow Jesus’ friends through each of their experiences of resurrection, but not the resurrection itself. The gospels are telling us where to look with their own gaze, telling us what is important to see. And what they show us is that none of Jesus’ closest friends recognize him when they first see him again. They watched him die. They buried him. And regardless of their time with him or what he taught, they fully expected him to stay buried and stay dead. They, as we, see what we expect to see until something breaks the spell of our self-imposed limitations.

For us, the resurrection is a huge supernatural occurrence as well as a huge theological truth. But in the gospels, it’s nothing huge or supernatural that breaks that spell and brings the truth of resurrection home to Jesus’ friends. Just the opposite. It’s the smallest, most intimate gestures and interactions—the tone of voice calling Mary’s name, the breaking of bread at the Emmaus table—small details seen and heard a thousand times break through to prove identity in the only way possible. In intimacy. We only really know someone when we’ve experienced them in the most intimate details, and Jesus’ friends had to re-experience that intimacy with him to prove his identity to themselves. It is the same with us. As long as resurrection remains huge and transcendent, it will remain distant, a thought in our heads. But the moment we begin to see the risen Lord in the most intimate details of every day life, we will realize, as Jesus’ friends slowly did, that life is motion, and we will never find our God among the dead, motionless thoughts in our heads. Only among the living. That’s us, the living. We will find our risen, living God in each face and embrace or not at all.

Among The Living

Dave Brisbin 4.11.21
We’ve made a big deal about counting to 40 during Lent—forty being the biblically symbolic number of preparation into rebirth, preparing for the new life Easter represents. Lent ended last Sunday with Easter, but even then we were already a week into another count, this time to 49. Jews, ancient and modern, begin counting each day from the second day of Passover through seven weeks of seven, 49 days, with the fiftieth day marking another major festival, the Feast of Weeks. These two festivals, Passover and Weeks mark first the physical liberation of the people from the slavery of Egypt and then the spiritual liberation of the people as they were given the Law that established a new government, culture, and relationship with God. There is a necessary gap, a period of adjustment that occurs between the two liberations—a gradual graduation from the comforting but limiting reliance on physical connection to limitless expanse of pure spirit.

The New Testament overlays on this structure, and after counting to 49, the following day, the fiftieth day, is Pentecost, the day that Jesus’ first followers were freed from the comfort and mental certainty of their physical relationship with Jesus to the full realization of the power of their relationship with unseen God. Just as Jesus told Nicodemus, that we all must be born of both flesh and spirit in order to see the Kingdom of God, the two births, the two liberations are separated by a gap, a period of adjusting to a new, non-physical, non-rational relationship with a God who can’t be named. Jesus says it’s like the wind, which we can’t see or know where it’s coming from or going to, but its effects change everything about everything. In the church, we begin counting our seven weeks of seven on Easter Sunday, and seven being the number of spiritual perfection, seven times seven is that spiritual perfection squared. It’s another time of preparation for our graduation from the comfort and seeming certainty of our physical logic and rational thought to the limitless freedom of a direct relationship with the unseen wind of Pentecost, the spirit of our unseen God.

Counting To 49

Dave Brisbin 4.18.21
Have you always worked for a guaranteed, monthly or hourly salary or have you worked freelance or project-to-project or owned your own business? If you’ve done both at various times, you know how different the experiences are. Working for a salary makes life much more manageable, predictable and smoother than always wondering where the next job or customer is coming from, storing reserves when business is good to cover when it’s not. But the predictability of a salary is also a cap, a limitation on how far or how fast you can progress, and for all the unpredictability, freelancers experience a different rhythm of vulnerability and gratitude that keeps them closer to earth and edge.

When the Hebrews were freed from the slavery of Egypt, they were also taken from a land that had a massive river system that annually flooded the plains with rich silt that fertilized soil and could be harnessed and directed for irrigation, creating a salary of sorts, a thriving agriculture. The Hebrews became desert nomads, living a freelance life, gathering food as they could from day to day, and even when they occupied their new land, it had no natural source of water that could support agriculture. They only had the rains. And though the rains of Israel are cyclic: early and late rains falling in Autumn and Spring, they couldn’t be controlled. They fell from the sky of their own volition, and could only be experienced, never managed. This is exactly the model God intended for his people—cycles of vulnerability and gratitude amid the uncertainties of life. As we approach Pentecost, the celebration of spiritual liberation from our limiting fears, does that mean that life is suddenly experienced with a new certainty and predictability that salaried life implies? When we read the scriptures carefully, we realize for all their newfound boldness, Jesus’ first followers had no more clarity or certainty than they had before. But what they had gained was trust. Trust that amid the uncertainty of life, the rains would still fall at their appointed time, and if they did the hard work of preparing soil and seed, when the rains came, the cycle of vulnerability to gratitude would be complete. This is true spiritual liberation—trust in the midst what can’t be controlled.

Rain Falls

Dave Brisbin 4.25.21
I’ve been getting a lot of questions about death lately. Things seem to come in cycles, and this apparently is that cycle. In the past week, I was asked about death from an eighteen-year-old girl and a sixty-eight year old man, so it’s on all our minds. What happens at death? What happens after death? What does the bible say about death? But between all the questions, what is it we really want to know? The central, mother of all questions? We want to know whether we continue as ourselves beyond death…right? Will we be known and know others as we are now. Eric Clapton famously sang: would you know my name, would it be the same, if I saw you in heaven? All the rest is commentary. We want to know if we’ll recognize each other, historical figures, ourselves, or will we, as Buddhists suggest, return as a drop to the ocean—our consciousness absorbed back into the great universal, collective consciousness?

Why do we fear death? It’s a question of identity of course. Everything we think we know about ourselves, who we are, our sense of ourselves as individuals at all, is contained in our conscious minds. Our egoic minds. And it’s not just the body that ends at death, but those minds as well. Who are we if everything we know about ourselves is taken with our mind? Of course we can never know for sure in a way that will satisfy our minds’ craving for certainty. Scripture doesn’t tell us, once we’ve adjusted for cultural and idiomatic sayings, but there are fascinating clues. Especially telling is an encounter Jesus has with a group of Sadducees, a powerful first century Jewish sect that didn’t believe in afterlife at all. Jesus’ answer to their mocking verbal test gives us possibly the best look behind the curtain we’ll get. Ultimately it is up to each of us to become convinced of what we’re convinced of. But to become convinced of a view of death that allows us to live life fully and abundantly, even as death become clear and present, requires more than just mental agreement with the beliefs of another. Jesus’ Way of living honors life’s paradox not by questioning our death, but by questioning our identity. Once we have experienced that who we are is not anything that can be taken from us, that our identity runs as deep as the Father’s love, we realize we are what cannot be taken. And with that knowing, we can face any question.

That Is The Question

Dave Brisbin 5.2.21
What kills our ability to trust our lives to the action of unseen spirit? Our fears, of course. We fear death because of the ultimate unknown it represents: whether anything we imagine ourselves to be continues. We fear God’s judgment and hell because we’ve been taught to look at God legally and hell literally. But that is not what Scripture teaches. Corrected by context, Scripture presents a heavenly God, connected, always unbalancing the scales of justice in favor of the beloved—the living definition of grace. And of the five words in the bible that have been translated as hell in English, none of them mean the hell we imagine—a word borrowed from medieval Germanic tribes and a concept borrowed largely from Dante’s fourteenth century poem, Inferno. The closest the bible comes to our notion of hell, the Aramaic word gehenna, like Catholic purgatory, is a temporary place for the wicked dead where the fires are more for purification than punishment. When purified, even the wicked move on.

Does this mean there is no hell? Of course not. But it does mean that if God is not a legal God, then hell is not what we think it is. Hell is not so much a thing as the absence of a thing—the way cold is absence of heat and dark is absence of light, hell is absence of…heaven. We’ll never have a healthy understanding of hell until we understand heaven. Scripturally, heaven and God are the same: to know the consummate oneness and connection of God is to know/enter heaven, right here and right now. The oneness of heaven is the reality of our universe, but our conscious minds create the illusion of separation; our minds create hell and keep us there as long as we identify with our minds more than each other. But once we’re fully involved in life, we stop fearing death, and once we’re fully involved in heaven, we stop living in hell. We have learned to imagine heaven as a place of ideal circumstances. But what if it’s not? What if heaven is the learned ability to see our circumstances as ideal? Connected. Unified. Anywhere. Anywhen. What if, at the end of all our searching, we find that heaven is portable? We don’t go there, we carry it with us wherever we go.

A Portable Heaven

Dave Brisbin 5.9.21
Mother’s Day. A few years ago I was asked: I know God loves me, but how do I know he likes me? Made me smile immediately, as it cut right to the heart of things. 

Love can means so many things to us, but like is pretty specific—implies affection, genuine delight, pleasure, desire to be with, playful attention, fun. God’s love may hold the fabric of the universe together, but God’s like is what makes us feel loved. Knowing we are liked is one of our most basic needs and is usually what we experience first from our mothers. If we’re not sure God likes us, it’s because we’ve never experienced him as mother, maybe never admitted the possibility of such a thing as Mother God to ourselves or each other. Yet scripture teaches just that. Though God is referred to as Father, there is a perfect balance between ideal masculine and feminine qualities conveyed throughout both Old and New Testaments. 

Hochkmah, God’s wisdom, is personified as female in the book of Proverbs, and the Hebrew words for spirit and kingdom, ruach and malkutha, are both feminine, meaning we could literally refer to God’s spirit as “she” and kingdom as queendom. God is often portrayed in feminine terms as in Hosea where God takes his people in his arms, picks them up and holds them to his cheek, draws them with affection, feeds them and cares for them. In the gospels, Jesus always leads with touch, connection, affection before teaching and instruction, showing us it’s only when we have experienced the touch of Mother God in our day to day lives that we can begin to understand the love of Father God at all. God is a perfect God only when both justice and mercy, knowledge and wisdom, discipline and relationship, male and female, mother and father are equally honored and present. The perfect parent is dad acting like mom and mom acting like dad…acceptance and change balanced in a love that contains liking as well.

The Perfect Parent

Dave Brisbin 5.16.21
Imagine living in a world where you didn’t understand the workings of nature…where thunder, lightning, earthquakes, eclipses were literally the voice, hands, and face of God? Where impossibly dark nights exploded with stars and the only entertainment were the chants, drums, and dance around community fires at night. Where you never saw your own reflection in a mirror and only knew the faces of those around you? How would you experience life and identity in such a world? Slow, earthy, magical, communal. This is the world from which our scripture comes and when Jesus describes people born of spirit as the wind blowing where it pleases, that we can hear the sound of it but don’t know where it’s coming from or going to, we understand the words, but not the radically different world that gives them deepest meaning. The ancient Hebrew world was amazingly parallel to indigenous cultures today, and we can crawl through a window to that world most easily by looking at those cultures still alive now.

In Hawai’ian, the word “ha” means breath, wind, and spirit all at the same time in just the way that Hebrew ruach and Aramaic ruha do. We can’t say them without making the sound of breath and wind, being connected to them. The Hawai’ian word “alo,” means in the presence of, so aloha means in the presence of breath, wind, spirit—a description of life. To the ancient Polynesians who first discovered the Hawai’ian islands on tiny koa canoes across thousands of miles of blue water, the incessant trade winds always blowing east to west were the breath of God that made life possible. We can’t understand Hebrew or Hawai’ian spirituality without understanding breath and wind and the culture that experienced life in breath. And if we don’t understand life in breath, how can we understand Jesus’ words? As we continue to prepare for our own Pentecost—a breakthrough to trust in unseen spirit experienced as a great wind rushing through the upper room of Jesus’ first followers—there are five principles of Hawai’ian spirituality that define their world, describe Jesus’ world, and can help us make sense of our own, help us learn to see the wind.

Seeing The Wind

Dave Brisbin 5.23.21
Jesus says that if we believe in him, we will do the works he did and greater works than those. Most commentators say that those works are Jesus’ miracles and the greater works are not in quality but quantity—that Jesus’ followers had more time to do more works for more people. But the bible is a spiritual book conveying spiritual truths and principles, and if we take it too literally, we can miss its primary points. Of all the works Jesus did, what did he primarily do? Ask us to do? He tells us over and over, but most clearly in his simple commandment to love each other as he loved us, that we would be known as his followers by our love. Love. Not doctrine or theology or any other litmus test we can imagine.

And to make sure we understand, Jesus shows us and tells us that it’s love of the enemy—in his language, someone of a different tribe, someone you don’t see as your own—that defines the love he’s talking about. Pentecost marks the entrance of Jesus’ closest friends into the freedom of spirit that allowed them to love tribelessly. Baptized in water, they were still thinking in physical and literal terms and living in fear. But at Pentecost, they are baptized again in fire, born again in spirit. What changed their limited, tribal thinking to encompass borderless spirit? The road to Pentecost begins at Calvary—the trauma of the loss of our exterior object of faith. For them, it was Jesus himself. For Abraham, it was Isaac. For the Hebrews, it was Moses. Jesus said it was to their advantage that he go so the spirit would come. An idiomatic way of saying that as long as we are focused on physical objects for our faith, we’ll never see our Helper. Jesus spent his life breaking through ethnic, social, and religious barriers to show us the extent of his love. After he is risen, he passes through walls as if they are not there. He occupies a borderless place between tribes from which he can love indiscriminately and see the oneness of spirit that connects us all. That is work we can do if we wish to follow.

Between Tribes

Dave Brisbin 1.3.21
Our little dog was attacked by an owl in our backyard a few nights ago—an owl, can you believe it? She came running back in screaming and bleeding and now won’t go back out into the yard. She now sees the backyard as a scary place, even if daytime with no owls in sight. Are we much different? Looking to a new year with hope for change, are we looking with eyes capable of seeing change? This last year of loss has been so profound, and the first week of the new year not much better, that we’ve been programmed into a fearful mindset, a way of seeing that won’t change with the calendar.

Jesus said, “The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eye is clear, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. And if the light that is in you is darkness, how great is the darkness.” It’s that last line that signals to us in English that Jesus is speaking metaphorically. But in Aramaic, Jesus’ native language with its layers of simultaneous meaning, the metaphorical meaning is also literal. He is telling us that until the eye, the view, opinion, mindset with which we look at life is clear, simple, sincere, straight, true—even the light we see, the order and balance in our moments, will appear dark—chaotic, disordered. Scary. With no owl in sight. To rise above the programming of the loss of a year or a lifetime takes an eye clear enough to always choose in the direction of connection with each other and everything in our moments. The change to a new year is a great milestone, but changing the eye of our mindset is what really makes the year new.

Direction Of Connection

Dave Brisbin 1.10.21
As our world seems to spin more and more out of control, becomes more and more precariously balanced, the word apocalyptic is being used more and more as well. We’re becoming obsessed. Movie, TV, and social media content seems to revolve more and more around apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic material, and all this cultural focus assumes that apocalypse means catastrophic destruction—world ending destruction. We get that meaning from its association with the book of Revelation, the last book of the New Testament. But the book of Revelation gets its name from the first Greek word of the book: apocalupsis…which means, wait for it…revelation. Better, unveiling or uncovering. The point of apocalyptic literature is not the catastrophe, but that in the midst of the destruction, God is still there, temporarily hidden by trauma and loss, but no less present and protective. 

The apocalypse is the uncovering, the unveiling of God’s continued presence, the conviction that his promises remain intact, though we can’t see how. It’s ironic that we have come to fear apocalyptic books, when they were originally meant to instill hope, but even with this original understanding in hand, are we still waiting for this apocalyptic unveiling to happen? If we are still waiting, we’re missing the point. Jesus’ Kingdom always carries the qualities of now and not yet—acceptance of and gratitude for each moment, even as we work diligently for change in the next. Jesus is saying that apocalypse, God’s unveiling, begins right now with our own decision to see or it doesn’t begin at all. If we’re really following Jesus, then we are creating little apocalypses every day, seeing God revealed in the most seemingly insignificant details. The truth Jesus is trying to convey is that if we can’t see God now, we won’t see God later…in this life or the next.

Little Apocalypse

Dave Brisbin 1.17.21
Ever looked up to realize you’ve driven miles past your exit with no idea how you got there? Who was doing the driving just then? Ever done or said something before you were even aware another choice was possible, cringing afterward? Paul bemoans the same thing at Romans 7 saying, the things he hates are the things he finds himself doing. Says he’s not in control, that the sin living in him is driving. Two thousand years later, neuroscientists believe there are three parts of our brain, but only one is conscious and not always driving. The first one, often called the lizard brain is responsible for our most primitive survival instincts and procedural memory—the things we do over and over, like driving cars. The second, the limbic system controls our emotions and specific memories. What is programmed into our lizard and limbic brains over the course of a lifetime doesn’t just change on a dime because our conscious brain, the neocortex, has an epiphany, a conversion, or even just a desire to change.

This is why Jesus’ first followers called themselves Followers of the Way—not followers of Jesus. They understood that what they thought they knew and believed only showed them the door, but could not take them to the transformation they sought. Jesus says this over and over, that only when we ourselves do what he has done, will we be made free. It’s not enough to believe Jesus with our minds, to understand theology or church doctrine. Those conscious activities don’t get down to the lizard brain where our compulsions and fears really live. Only the daily practice of Jesus’ Way of love and symbolic rituals that bring us back to connection can deprogram what we can’t touch with our conscious minds. The lizard brain doesn’t know the difference between a symbolic act and a real one, so if we create a rich, daily practice of real and symbolic action always in the direction of connection, we will find we’re gradually experiencing the transformation Jesus intends.

Lizards And The Way

Dave Brisbin 1.24.21
Friend of mine, increasingly frustrated that his actions and attitudes weren’t matching the conviction he believed he believed, had a sudden breakthrough one morning: that he was trying to create meaning out of life and something of himself through a sheer force of intellectual will. That he wasn’t taking God seriously—just showing up each morning and letting life teach. As a reminder, he took a Mason jar and labeled it “will/ego” and put on the top shelf of his pantry, so every morning when he goes to get his coffee, he can look up at the jar and say, “not today.” Beautiful little ritual containing a huge truth. Before we can answer abstract questions of meaning and identity, we first need to ask concrete questions of purpose. Why am I here? What is the goal of my life? Questions that define a direction, indicate next steps. 

This is exactly what Jesus teaches. He doesn’t give us expansive theology, philosophy, or doctrine—great abstract thoughts. He gives us purpose and direction because the big questions of life can’t be answered by sheer force of intellectual will and never all at once. Meaning as concept can only ever be extracted from purpose in action. Why are we here? To learn to live in connection and love. Jesus tells us if we continue in that purpose over time, lose our lives, our sense of self, in that purpose, we will experience a serial surrender of ego and will that will allow us to know the truth—that everything and everyone really are connected. And the conviction of that truth will make us free—the goal of our lives: freedom from the fear and compulsions that prevent us from living in love. Jesus knows, two thousand years before modern neuroscience could tell us why, that this process of serial surrender is the only Way to the Father, the source and embodiment of that freedom, our Good News.

Serial Surrender

Dave Brisbin 1.31.21
If Jesus were here today, would he be a Republican or a Democrat? Really? What I first thought had to be a rhetorical or facetious question was being asked in all sincerity. And the quick answer: that he would be neither or both, while possibly technically true, would be an evasion, ignoring the complexities and subtext of the question. Such a question deserves to be answered with the seriousness with which it is asked, because at a time when politics have been equated with morality, with opposing positions not simply wrong, but evil, we really want to know. If we revere Jesus, or just believe our opposition does, we’re going to want Jesus in our camp, and some of us are absolutely certain he already is. But if Jesus had any political beliefs, they are not recorded in the New Testament, which means they are not important, non-essential to his message. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t have any.

Jesus was a fiercely loyal Jew to the end. He said he was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel, yet he never refused compassion and assistance to anyone whether from his own camp or any other. He was the first to criticize his own people, then added insult to injury by praising their most hated enemies. Jesus had a side, but his identity was with his unseen Father first—and from that vantage, what he saw far transcended his politics. Over a thousand years before, Moses set up the Tent of Meeting a half mile outside the camp of the Israelites; if you wanted to meet God, you needed to go outside the camp. Just when we think we’ve got Jesus figured, domesticated, co-opted, he rocks us back on our heels. Always comforting but never comfortable, if you want to meet Jesus again for the first time, you will need to go outside your camp. If you’re asking whether Jesus is a Republican or Democrat to justify a position, prepare to be frustrated. His answer will not scratch your itch. And if you’re looking to Jesus in all sincerity as your north star, he will lead you—but prepare to be led well outside your camp, your party, and anything else in which you huddle for security.

The Politics Of Jesus

Dave Brisbin 2.7.21
A man calls to ask how he can know God’s love is real and not just a thought in his head that he made up or would like to believe. He’s asking the central question without which life remains very scary. I remember asking the same thing about prayer. Was I just talking to myself? How could I know if my prayer was real? By outcomes? By feelings? Maddeningly, Jesus doesn’t tell us. Always comforting but never comfortable, Jesus never gives us the intellectual certainty of a direct answer. He’s not being coy. He knows even if he gave us the “right” answer, it would still just be another thought in our heads. If we think it, we can unthink it and would never know if it was real. Eastern teachers, whether middle or far Eastern, know this about spiritual matters: that the answers we crave can’t be transferred. They must be personally experienced to have the conviction of reality.

Far Eastern teachers have used koans for millennia to show the inadequacy of rational thought. These paradoxical and unresolvable little stories or questions make no rational sense and are meant to muddle the mind and create the “great doubt” that can lead to sudden intuitive leaps. Jesus teaches in exactly the same way, and when you analyze the conversations preserved for us in the gospels, you see one overarching theme: motion. Even when just asked where he is going, Jesus says: come and see--move with me and you will know beyond mere understanding. God’s spirit is ruha in Aramaic and means breath, wind, spirit all at the same time. It’s all about motion; three things defined by motion, that don’t exist without motion. Jesus is telling us that God’s love is a moving target, and the only way we can know if it’s real and not just a thought in our heads, is to move with it. It will be in the motion of love through us to another that we will become convinced that God and God’s love is as real as real gets.

Moving Target

Dave Brisbin 2.14.21
Poor Thomas… As one of the twelve Apostles, the inner circle of Jesus’ first followers, he follows Jesus for years, exhibits his bravery and boldness in following where others feared to go, and according to tradition, carries the gospel as far as India before he was martyred there in 72 CE. Pretty good resume. And yet because of one mistake—saying he wouldn’t believe the report of a risen Jesus until he’d put his hands in the wounds—he’s gotten this bad rap and a demeaning nickname for two thousand years and counting. Extremely unfair, especially when you consider that every one of Jesus’ first followers also doubted his resurrection until they’d had a personal experience with him. Thomas was the only one honest enough, bold enough, to admit he needed a personal experience to bring it home. But further, did Thomas really make a mistake at all? 

Jesus teaches in such a way to first break down the assumptions and belief system of the questioner, because without first instilling the “great doubt” in a questioner’s mind, no further enlightenment can take place. Yet we in the West have been taught that doubt is bad, a sin, the opposite of faith. Nothing could be further from the truth. Faith is not thought; faith is action. And the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty, the mental illusion that stops any further action of faith. The doubt and uncertainty that are an essential part of human life are the motivators that make our faith possible. Faith only exists in the presence of doubt, is the ability to act in the presence of doubt. Doubt is part of the divine dissatisfaction that propels us not to certainty, but to the personal experience that convinces us of the truth that makes us free. This is the Way of Jesus, the Way he teaches us to experience truth, and the only Way to the Father… Thank you, Thomas.

Doubting Thomas

Dave Brisbin 2.21.21
On the first Sunday of Lent, after having been through how many Lents? How many Easters? We’re pretty sure we know what Easter is all about. Just ask us, and we’ll rattle off all our theological truths about the resurrection. But when you bring the certainty of your beliefs to Jesus, you’re in for a shock. What would Jesus say? Probably to sell everything you have and come and see how the big Easter you hold in your mind is blocking a life-sized Easter that can actually fit into your daily moments. Every follower of Jesus, every hero of faith in scripture who received a spectacular revelation, a mountaintop experience with God, was immediately plunged into a forty-ness, a wilderness period represented by the number forty that was a time of consolidation and assimilation, of bringing the hugeness of the experience down into the DNA of daily life. It's the inevitable process in which the great doubt sets back in, but through the action of faith, the great truth distills down for use in real life, if it’s to be used at all.

From Noah and Moses to Jesus, Peter, and Paul, the shape of the journey is the same. And in the story of Elijah, we see the full shape of his journey from the spectacular miracles on Mount Carmel to the humble silence of a cave on Mount Horeb. And what stood between those two mountains? Forty days in the wilderness... Forty days or years is not literal here; it’s the long-as-it-takes time to grow the “shepherd consciousness” of Moses, the humble anawim spirit that can recognize God in the smallest of things. When Moses is still and small enough, he can see God in a burning bush, and when Elijah is still and small enough he hears his God in the kol d’mamah daqqah, Hebrew for the still small voice or better, the silent sound, sheer silence of God that draws Elijah out of the cave of his wilderness. Lent is the church’s ceremonial re-enactment of the wilderness that precedes the new life of Easter, an opportunity to grow deeper into our own still, small selves and an Easter we’ve not yet imagined.

Still Small Voice

Dave Brisbin 2.28.21
Second Sunday of Lent. Why do Jesus and Paul teach the way they do? Why do they both tell us that the Way to new and abundant life is by focusing on what is invisible, conquering by yielding, resting under a yoke, becoming free by becoming a slave, reigning by serving, being great by being small, becoming wise by being a fool, triumphing through defeat, living by dying, being strong by being weak? Maddening for people focused on the security and control implied in single, accurate, even formulaic answers. But a true encounter with God, a momentary view of life through God’s eyes, is necessarily at odds with the view from a human vantage. God always presents as a paradox between what we think is true and what is now possibly really true. As long as we’re breathing, we will need our human point of view, and until we’re ready to wrestle with how God’s reality fits into human lives, paradox will simply present as a contradiction. And unlike paradox, contradiction needs to be resolved.

A contradiction is a set of opposing elements of which only one can be “true.” A paradox is a set of opposing elements designed to lead to a deeper insight, a truth that doesn’t resolve the paradox, but makes resolution moot. A paradox is not meant to be resolved; it’s meant to be wrestled. Twenty years after a transcendent encounter with God—the vision of a ladder between heaven and earth—Jacob is still only half-baked, halfway through the fortyness of his journey. But when he wrestles all night with the spirit of God, he is wounded, but through the wounding of his own self-sufficiency, God changes his name from Jacob, the schemer, to Israel, the one who has wrestled with God. A good teacher like Jesus or Paul knows that any encounter with God can only be authentically expressed as a paradox, left unresolved, because any single answer is just a picking of sides in a contradiction. A full stop to further truth. A good teacher knows that the process itself is the goal, that the wrestling, not a resolution, is the Way through the fortyness of any paradox we face: especially the fortyness of Lent leading to the central Christian paradox of how Jesus has died, yet lives.

Wrestling With Paradox

True North with Dave Brisbin is a podcast about the things that can bring you back to center, whether God, spirituality, community or family or all of them. Never esoteric or abstract for its own sake; always practical and full of common sense, we’re interested in exploring the effect of what we believe on our lives and questioning what we believe in light of the deep connection we’re meant to live. Dave Brisbin is an author, speaker, coach, and songwriter. He is the teaching pastor of theeffect, a faith community and recovery ministry in San Clemente, CA and executive director of Encompass Recovery, an addiction treatment center in San Juan Capistrano. For more on finding deeper spiritual expression free from limiting beliefs and behavior, go to davebrisbin.com.