True North with Dave Brisbin

Dave Brisbin 5.19.19 If you were asked to name Jesus’ main purpose in his ministry, could you do it? There will be many answers of course, but we don’t have to speculate. Jesus told us flat out in Luke 4 that his purpose was to preach the Kingdom of God to all the cities. So if the Kingdom of God is Jesus’ purpose, have we gotten the message? Do we know what the Kingdom is? Just as it was misunder...

Dave Brisbin 5.12.19 Mother’s Day: Two scenes from a movie try to capture what the day to day relationship was between Jesus and his mother. They are touching scenes, one heartbreaking, but both underscore the power of a mother’s love that is the closest we will come to the love of our Father in this life. If mother’s love is closest to the Father’s love and the Father’s love is arguably the most...

Dave Brisbin 5.5.19 A friend calls me to the hospital bed of her dying husband, and there in the room with her and him and his entire family, watching and being part of the dynamic and grief, I am hyper aware of the precious nature of all our relationships. And a line from a Carl Sagan returns: that in all our searching, the only thing that makes the emptiness bearable is each other. When I first...

Dave Brisbin 4.28.19 On Palm Sunday, looking at how the various groups of people around Jesus couldn’t see him as he was, but only through the filter of their own agendas and desires and so didn’t recognize the hour of their visitation—and then on Easter, looking at how the closest friends of Jesus didn’t recognize him at all after his resurrection—there’s a whole lot of unrecognition going around...

Dave Brisbin 4.21.19 Easter Sunday: One of the most striking details of the post-resurrection narratives in the Gospels is that none of Jesus’ closest followers recognize him when they first see him risen from the tomb. What is going on here? How could they not recognize Jesus? Is this a literal fact being preserved, a deeper spiritual meaning being evoked, both? The two figures confronting the wo...

Dave Brisbin 4.14.19 Sixth Sunday of Lent, Palm Sunday: Holy Week begins with Palm Sunday, Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem that Jesus ironically sees as a tragedy for his people. Why? Because they miss the hour of their visitation, keeping them on a path leading to destruction. But how so? They greet him at the city gates with palm branches and shouts that signify the return of a king… As w...

Dave Brisbin 4.7.19 Fifth Sunday of Lent: And so we come to Maundy Thursday as we work through the liturgical days of Holy Week. The traditional scripture passages associated with Maundy Thursday are all the events and preparations for the Last Supper, the agony in the Garden, and Jesus’ arrest. It’s a busy day as Jesus gives a new commandment to his friends at supper—to love each other as he has...

Dave Brisbin 3.31.19 Fourth Sunday of Lent: Each liturgical day of Holy Week from Palm Sunday to Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday has a name and scripture passages designated that tell the story of the final week of Jesus’ earthly life. But each day and its passages also tell another story when we look beneath the literal meaning. They show us the internal experience of the Way of Jesus…the path he...

Dave Brisbin 3.24.19 Third Sunday of Lent: Flipping channels, ran across the movie Chariots of Fire. Hadn’t seen it in decades and got immediately pulled in. Story of two runners preparing for the 1924 Olympics—a British Jew and Scottish Christian who couldn’t be more different. As the Brit is using running as a weapon against the prejudice he’s endured as a Jew, the Scotsman simply “feels God’s p...

Dave Brisbin 3.17.19 Second Sunday of Lent: Trying to sit quietly in balcony chair and warm sunlight but shadows keep flitting across my closed eyes. Every time I look, nothing there, until finally I catch a smallish butterfly streaking by. Then another. And another, until I realize there’s a dense column all driving overhead in the same direction. Later I learn of the one billion butterflies migr...

Dave Brisbin 3.10.19 On the first Sunday of Lent, we stop to consider what Lent has meant since the middle of the second century to millions of Christians from ancient to medieval to modern times. What is its place in the liturgical calendar and how did it and the other seasons of the church along with their cultural practices bind the people together in common experience? A common experience we n...

Dave Brisbin 3.3.19 The shape of our life journey moves initially from the simplicity of childhood to the complexity of adulthood. But if it stops there, we’ve missed the point of it all. To push further, to let go of the complexity and dive back down into the simplicity of our essential spirituality brings us into real meaning and purpose. To illustrate from John’s Gospel, the story of Jesus’ fir...

Dave Brisbin | 2.24.19 Talking about the mental gymnastics involved in moving from dualistic thinking to unitive thinking, once again, it’s not about become wholly one or the other, but a realization of the need for the balance of middle ground. Ultimately all our brains do—our left brains at least—is to differentiate: compare and contrast, find the edges of things to define and distinguish them f...

Dave Brisbin | 2.10.19 When I was in pastoral training, a pastor told me that no one should preach the parables until they’ve been in ministry for 30 years. Now I violated that right away, but approaching 20 years in ministry, I do see what he was driving at. There is a perspective that comes just from sheer years of having seen the panorama, the parade of years go by that creates a different way...

Dave Brisbin | 2.3.19 Situated on the liturgical calendar between Christmas and Easter, between Jesus’ birth and death, is a perfect time to look at Jesus’ life—to look at balancing what he lived and how he loved with the more theologically significant events of his birth, death, and resurrection. It’s a perfect time to consider how living as he lived would give theological significance to our own...

Dave Brisbin | 1.27.19 Nearing the end of the liturgical season of Christmas that spans 40 days from Christmas Day until the feast of the Presentation on February 2, we are now living between Christmas and Easter, between Jesus’ birth and death. People have commented on the fact that a tombstone lists dates of birth and death with only a mere dash signifying the entirety of a person’s life. But Je...

Dave Brisbin | 1.6.19 January 6th has lost its significance in our non-liturgical, Western churches. Known as the feast of the Epiphany since ancient times, it celebrates the appearance of God to Magi and the rest of the world and sits in the transition between the 12 days of Christmastide and the 28 days of Epiphanytide—the 40 days of the full Christmas season. It is a season full of other feast...

Dave Brisbin | 1.13.19 The passing of Shirley Boone, Pat Boone’s wife of 65 years has had a big impact on many of us. A close personal friend and staunch supporter and member of our community for the past five years, she will be hugely missed here and of course worldwide. But watching Pat moving through the final months of her life and through the week following her death has been a great lesson f...

Dave Brisbin | 12.30.18 The run up to Christmas was full of personal setbacks and a difficult week, but the Christmas service itself seemed to simply erase all that angst in one stroke as I allowed myself to immerse in the images, music, and sense of connection to the people in the room. We think of our spiritual journey as one solid path that we’re either on or off, and once on, should stay on if...

Dave Brisbin | 12.16.18 We all tend to look for anything where we expect it to be. Makes perfect sense. Works for car keys and laundry detergent, but not so much when you’re looking for truth. Truth has a way of showing up in the most unexpected places, and if you’re only willing to look where you already believe it to be, you’ll miss it every time. How in the world would anyone think to look for...

Dave Brisbin | 12.9.18 It’s hard enough to communicate spiritual experiences and truth when we’re honestly trying. But what about when we’re not? When consciously or unconsciously, we’re hiding behind spiritual platitudes and practices to justify our actions or inactions, to gain some advantage or outcome…? It can be tricky because it’s easy to convince ourselves that the language we speak and rel...

Dave Brisbin | 12.2.18 When we say to each other, just give it to the Lord, surrender your life to Jesus, or let go and let God... When we say, ask Jesus into your heart, pray about it, or you need to find God’s plan for your life…do we really know what we mean? And even if we do, does the person we’re speaking to have a chance at the same understanding? And even if they do, do they have any idea...

Dave Brisbin | 11.25.18 When it comes right down to it, the main effects of an authentic spiritual journey are gratitude and humility. From these two attributes flow every other attribute we may associate with our spiritual progress. Why? If humility is defined as an undistorted view of ourselves and our relationships with God and each other; if gratitude is defined as an undistorted view of the m...

Dave Brisbin | 11.18.18 Most of the questions we ask about religion and scripture and theology are really the same question over and over, because all of our questions and difficulties center on the one question of unconditional love and acceptance. In other words, we want to know if God is keeping a light on for us… But the answer we crave, the one that will really set our anxieties down, can’t b...

Dave Brisbin | 11.4.18 When Jesus speaks of Kingdom, he’s not speaking of a place or a territory. He’s talking about us, all of us living a particular quality of being that translates into a particular quality of life—a habit of being. Some sociologists call any habitual way of being a habitus. But Jesus’ habit of being has a quality defined by presence, connection, the ability to see both the see...