True North with Dave Brisbin

Dave Brisbin 7.16.23 Thirty years ago, three men, Catholic priests, gave me some of their time, became key figures, teachers in my life. I didn’t see it then—it takes time to see trajectories being established, the paths that remain. One of the three I only met once, but I still remember his name and the names on all the book covers he pointed out at the bookstore that afternoon. The other two I k...

Dave Brisbin 7.9.23 One of the rallying cries of the Protestant Reformation five hundred years ago was “sola scriptura,” which means scripture alone reveals God’s word to humankind. For any Christian who holds the bible in such esteem, what they believe about the book is more predictive of their thought, behavior, and emotion than what they believe about God. If the book is the supreme authority r...

Dave Brisbin 7.2.23 The recent film Top Gun: Maverick, was hugely successful, with many fans saying, “they don’t make movies like this anymore.” Maverick feels like a throwback to Hollywood’s Golden Age, and it is. It’s depiction of clear heroes and villains, unapologetic respect for country, military, staunch individualism, are all marks of the Modern age that began around the year 1500 and is ch...

Dave Brisbin 6.25.23 Heard of an elevator speech? You get on an elevator with someone of influence who wants to know what you do. Could you tell them before the doors open again? Thirty seconds to get across mission, vision, meaning, purpose, maybe even a bit of identity. Three or four sentences to be clear, concise, compelling. Obviously, this is a must for sales and marketing, but applies to any...

Dave Brisbin 6.18.23 Father’s Day One of the greatest science fiction novels ever, Dune, finally made into a decent movie last year, takes us to a planet that is entirely desert. Sand dunes encircle the globe like an ocean punctuated by islands of scorched rock, the only refuge against the immense sandworms that swim the dunes like leviathan. In such a world, the culture, religion worldview, behav...

Dave Brisbin 6.11.23 Can you state your spiritual journey, the whole of your search for meaning, in just one sentence? Br. Lawrence, a 17th century French monk, did just that: The presence of God is what the spiritual life is all about, and by practicing it, one becomes spiritual. Of course he was only channeling Jesus: Seek first the Kingdom, and all else is added. God is unity, oneness; kingdom...

Dave Brisbin 6.4.23 It can be jarring, offensive to talk about Jesus having to learn and grow in wisdom…even more to think of him working through his own human obsessive-compulsive drives to a place of presence, balance, emotional regulation. Though we were taught, at least implicitly, a fully self-aware Jesus lying in the manger, the gospels tell a very different story. That Jesus was human in ev...

Dave Brisbin 5.28.23 Pentecost Jesus heals two blind men with spit, and there’s been endless speculation why Jesus would use such a strange way to heal. Passing a man born blind on the Sabbath, Jesus spits on the ground, kneads the dirt into mud, applies it to the man’s eyes, and tells him to go wash. Why the spit and dirt? To heal with a simple word, would not break the unwritten rules prohibitin...

Dave Brisbin 5.21.23 Last week someone asked how I would reimagine church. What would I change? We had just passed our 16th anniversary as a church—I said that’s exactly what we did sixteen years ago. We were a subversive lot back then, wanted to make a big statement about our differences. I was twenty years into study of Jesus from a Hebrew/Aramaic perspective and a personal contemplative journey...

Dave Brisbin 5.14.23 Patriarchal and paternal. Two words descending from the Latin word pater/father, but a patriarchal system is one that is male dominated and a paternal system is one where leadership—male or female—restricts the autonomy of people supposedly for their own good. Our country began shamefully patriarchal but not paternal—the states jealously guarded their freedoms. Today we’re muc...

Dave Brisbin 5.7.23 A man has been ill for thirty-eight years. Ill enough that he’s spent all those years lying by a public pool begging for a living and waiting for a healing. Jesus comes by and asks him if he wishes to be well. After thirty-eight years, that should be insulting. The biggest no-brainer of all time. And yet, the man can’t simply say yes, exclamation point. He complains there is no...

Dave Brisbin 4.30.23 It’s ironic that Jesus’ primary teaching, the one that defines his ministry and on which he spends nearly all his time, is the one we most misunderstand. Jesus is always talking about entering Kingdom, and of course we’re thinking about entering Heaven. Entering some Place. Or Space. Entering kingdom is a metaphor. A physical image for a spiritual realignment. There is no plac...

Dave Brisbin 4.16.23 Met a prison chaplain who told me about needing to notify an inmate that his father had died, but when he called the inmate to his office, they were in count. Prisons count multiple times a day—inmates go to their cells and stand at their bunks until the count clears. Everything stops. No one moves. I realized we’d been in count for Lent, interiorly standing at our bunks, stop...

Dave Brisbin 4.9.23 What is the meaning of the Resurrection? Christians are all over the map, fighting and debating not so much that Jesus is risen and still lives, but how and for what purpose. Ultimately, such questions are a matter of faith, but where can we look for guidance? Scripture, of course. The gospels show us where to look, what’s important to see. While we focus on the supernatural mi...

Dave Brisbin 4.2.23 Most of counseling is listening. Listening to stories that give you a snapshot of a person’s life at the moment, backstory, symptoms they are suffering, and some of the stressors causing the symptoms. But only some. The stressors we can self-identify are the ones we can see outside of ourselves—circumstances, events, relationships that are creating pressure or pain. When a pers...

Dave Brisbin 3.26.23 Had an intense conversation with a child specialist at the hospital grieving her friend, a nurse on the floor who died that morning. Cancer. She was reeling from her friend’s death, and we talked through her feelings and regrets—the sadness, numbness, disbelief, inability to imagine that she’d never see her again. The regret that she didn’t reach out more, even though she knew...

Dave Brisbin 3.19.23 This is the third in a series of Sunday sessions of conversations. After seven Sundays working on a Red Letter Study—the direct sayings and teachings of Jesus from a first century Hebrew/Aramaic perspective—questions, concerns, and resistances were surfacing from people in our community. It seemed a good moment to stop presenting new material and take some time to consolidate...

Dave Brisbin 3.12.23 This is the second in what will be three Sunday sessions of conversations. After seven Sundays working on a Red Letter Study—the direct sayings and teachings of Jesus from a first century Hebrew/Aramaic perspective—questions, concerns, and resistances were surfacing from people in our community. It seemed a good moment to stop presenting new material and take some time to cons...

Dave Brisbin 3.5.23 After seven Sundays working on a Red Letter Study—the direct sayings and teachings of Jesus from a first century Hebrew/Aramaic perspective—questions, concerns, and resistances were surfacing from people in our community. It seemed a good moment to stop presenting new material and take some time to consolidate and clarify the material we’ve been processing these past two months...

Dave Brisbin 2.26.23 I’ve spent the past twenty-five years trying to understand, live, and teach the message of Jesus from an Eastern, Hebrew perspective. Unfortunately not always in that order—it’s still a work in progress that has created reactions ranging from relief to consternation to outright hostility, which has always amazed me considering the heart of the matter of Jesus’ message that I h...

Dave Brisbin 2.19.23 If you had a private audience with the Pope—or insert your most revered religious figure here—what would you say? Is there a question you always wanted to ask, felt their perspective would be unique? Now what if you had a private moment with Jesus? All his attention fixed on you alone. How would you use that time? What would you want to know? Could you boil it all down to one...

Dave Brisbin 2.12.23 Who says there’s no humor in the bible? When Jesus tells Nicodemus he must be born again to see Kingdom, picture the scene: Nicodemus, face in a knot, thinking out loud—how can an old man crawl back into his mother’s womb? I know it’s not LOL funny to our ears, but worth a smile. Jesus offers living water to a Samaritan woman at a well with her pitcher: Give me this water so I...

Dave Brisbin 2.5.23 For God so loved… First phrase of what may be the most famous verse in the bible. At least in Evangelical circles. Even the bottom of In-N-Out soda cups have John 3:16 printed on them. Why? For many Christians, this verse is the gospel in microcosm: For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believes in him will not perish, but have eternal life...

Dave Brisbin 1.29.23 Jesus will never give anyone a straight answer to a question. Even when simply asked where he’s staying, he replies: Come and see. He’s not trying to be difficult. He just knows that with an answer in our heads, we will stop looking. A map is not the territory, and no answer made of words is true enough to make us free. Truth with the power to make us free can only be experien...

Dave Brisbin 1.23.23 Think of the best teachers you’ve had in your life. Not just in classrooms. Friends, coaches, parents, bosses, leaders, anyone who showed up at the critical moment when you were ready to listen to a voice outside your own head. Didn’t they always seem to ask the perfect questions? Directing you where you didn’t even know you needed to go? This is the way of good teachers. Crea...