Ep. 291: A Multiverse of Scripture

*Below is an edited transcription of the audio conversation.

Daniel Markin:

Hey, this is Daniel Markin, and on today’s episode of indoubt, I’m excited to just share with you a chat that I had with Lee Brubacher. Lee is a worship pastor, worship director out in Ontario. He’s been doing this for 20 years. And so we’re talking about some of the verses of scripture that have been really impactful in meaning to him over the years. 20 years doing that is a long time, and so you’ll find this really interesting. Even hearing from the other side, what’s it like for a pastor, for a minister to be talking about scripture from his perspective as he leads the congregation. So I hope you find this helpful.

Daniel Markin:

Hey, welcome to indoubt. My name’s Daniel Markin, and today I’m joined by Lee Brubacher. Lee, how’re you doing today, man?

Lee Brubacher:

I’m doing well.

Daniel Markin:

It’s good to see you. Lee, why don’t you just briefly give a quick bio to our audience so they know who we’re listening to, and then we can jump in from there?

Lee Brubacher:

Yeah. Lee Brubacher. I’m chatting with you from Hamilton, Ontario. I’m the worship director at West Highland Church in Hamilton. I’ve been here actually just over 20 years and I’ve been part of worship ministry here ever since, leading the choir, and band, and orchestra, and tech teams, and drama, and all those things that worship people sometimes are involved in. And so just carrying on in ministry and loving the Lord as best I can and his people. So I got my wife of 25 years and three kids, the oldest of which is getting married in about six weeks.

Daniel Markin:

No way.

Lee Brubacher:

We got some interesting times in our house right now.

Daniel Markin:

So 20 years at the same church is an amazing thing. And I just wanted to honor you in that. We’ve never met until just before this, but when I hear someone’s been at a church for 20 years, 20 years in the same community, faithful ministry, that’s no small feat. And you get it. You get the ins and outs of ministry, and that community, and you know those people, and you’ve grown alongside them. I just think it’s really, really cool.

Lee Brubacher:

Yeah. Sometimes the odd new musician will come in and start checking us out, and they’ll approach me, as musicians always do, to get involved, which I love. I love doing that. I love interviewing people and auditioning. And so they will approach me with the idea that they want to join the band and they want to come in and just do their gig once a month or whatever. And I always say, “This is not about a band. This is not about a gig here. This is a church community. This is a family.” And so we’re all about, of course, serving the Lord with whoever he brings to us but it’s not just about a gig. This is serving the king of kings. It’s serving the kingdom, and it’s more long term than just a bounce in, bounce out. “Oh, next week, I’m at another church,” and another week, “Wow. I’m going to go check out this other place.” Well, there’s a place for itinerant musicians, but here, what you’re getting at here, it’s about investing in the family that’s connected here and that’s what I love to do.

Daniel Markin:

Yeah, absolutely, man. What instruments do you play and what was your musical training?

Lee Brubacher:

I went to Heritage College, which is in Cambridge, just an hour away from us here. And way back in the late 90s, finished a bachelor of Church Music, and my main instrument was trumpet at that time but along the way, I’ve also picked up piano and guitar, of course. About 20 years ago, I started playing guitar, and about when we moved here to this church, I started leading from it basically every Sunday. So my main instruments are piano and guitar for leading these days, and as many musicians, you pick up drums along the way too, and different things.

Daniel Markin:

I want to chat a little bit about this, but also there’s an article here that you wrote for Gospel Coalition Canada which is called Entering The Multiverse, and I want to talk to you a little bit about that because… First of all, talk to us about that title, but then I thought the content of this was a great way for our young adults, going forward, to have a sense of multiverse packed way in their own minds that they can keep going back to. But if you’d maybe just share a little bit about what this article is and then the impact that it’s had for you, I’d love to begin to interact with that a little bit.

Lee Brubacher:

So I assume you are a little bit of a geek like I am just in terms of science fiction.

Daniel Markin:

Oh, yeah.

Lee Brubacher:

I certainly am, and so…

Daniel Markin:

For me, it’s Star Wars.

Lee Brubacher:

Oh, that’s the highest, for sure. A couple years ago, I remember, maybe three years ago now, watching a number of episodes of The Flash with my kids, and all of a sudden this thing, multiverse, was a big deal in all these episodes. And I hadn’t heard of it before that. And of course ever since then, I’ve heard that term peeking out of various science fiction forms ever since. And so the other day I was just thinking about that concept and it just sparked a little bit of light bulb in my mind about verses, as far as scripture verses, and what are the multiverses, scripture-wise, in my background? And so I just talked a little bit in the article about the concept of multiple. The Flash, he runs so fast that he can dive into multiple universes overlaid on top of each other. And I don’t really believe that theologically, but the concept of walking this journey of faith with Bible in hand, and connecting to significant verses that mean something to you personally. So everybody always says, “What’s your favorite verse?” And I got to say, in fact, I told my church this about a week ago on a Sunday morning, I have a hard time answering that question because I often have a new favorite verse that crops up and it just means a lot to me in a certain period of time. For instance, Psalm 34 has become hugely influential for me recently, the entire Psalm. “I sought the Lord and he answered me. Taste and see that the Lord is good.” There’s some significant phrases in that Psalm that really impact me as a worship leader. You come to the table of communion, and you’re tasting, and you’re seeing that the Lord is good. That means something to me as a worship leader. And then, of course, you have Shane & Shane, and those guys that wrote a song based on Psalm 34, and Brooklyn Tabernacle picked up that and recorded their own version of it. And so those things fire my imagination in the scriptures, those artistic forms. But when I thought about my own life, I thought about what have been even more perhaps than those scriptures that come along just week by week, month by month, are there ones that have been meaningful to me for year at a time. And so that brought me back to a bit of a testimonial in this article, in my own walk of faith, my own journey of Christianity. And so me, myself, like so many others, I grew up in a Christian home. My parents, my dad is a pastor and was for most of my life. And I remember at the end of grade 10, my parents announced one day after being at a church in London, Ontario for nine years, that it was time to move on. They were feeling like their ministry there was coming to an end and they were feeling drawn to another location, another city, another church. And mid-high school, that’s a big deal. To pick up and move in the middle of your high school career, thinking about finding a whole bunch of new friends, and a new church community, a new neighborhood, and finding a new school. That’s not easy for any teenager. And so that in my life was a significant time of wrestling. I wrestled like Jacob did in the Old Testament with God. It felt like I was, for a whole week, really wrestling my will against God’s will for my life. And by that point in my life, I was a Christian. I knew it, but I’d never really had to struggle through anything yet. I didn’t have a dark knight of the soul, but that was for me. And I remember in that time, a verse bubbled up as I just committed myself to keep reading the word and praying, even though I was struggling and I wasn’t very happy. But Romans 8:28 bubbled up to the surface in that period of my life as a teenager. “And we know that God works together for good, those who follow him and those who are committed to him.” So, that was the verse that came to the surface as I was reading. It jumped out at the end of that chapter in Romans 8, and I had to just accept that as God’s truth. “God is working together something for good in me and my family, and either I believe it totally, or I don’t.” And in that time, God settled that in my heart. And so that became my first multiverse. It became the first verse that was significant to me, and that lasted at least 10 years.

Daniel Markin:

You just mentioned you always think about that verse, and I love that you are honest and you’re speaking to something that you actually see a lot in the Psalms, which is you can be frustrated and angry at life, even frustrated at God, and the way he’s orchestrating things. And as Christians, and feel free to jump in on this, we’re actually allowed to bring that to God. We’re actually allowed to vent that frustration to him. In fact, I think that’s the healthiest way to, to be like, “God, I’m actually angry at you. I’m mad. I know I shouldn’t be, but I am.” And that’s actually really healthy because I think if we don’t bring that to God, then we’re at risk of that turning into resentment and bitterness.

Lee Brubacher:

Yeah. The Psalmist says, “How long, oh Lord, will you forget me forever?” That’s a raw emotion and not many of us pray like that, do we? We really don’t.

Daniel Markin:

And I think that we, and rightly, we approach God, we approach the throne in a way you wouldn’t go and yell that to the king of kings. At the same time though, we have relationship with that king of kings, and so if you were like the king’s brother, you could yell that out to him about the frustration of how things are. And that’s the tight relationship that God wants with us, and so I think that’s huge. The second piece, it’s just funny that you mentioned Psalm 34. That’s a verse that literally yesterday has just been such a godsend to my wife and I. And so it’s just pretty cool, man. We just gave birth to twin girls, and so it’s been an amazing… They’re beautiful and they’re really doing well, but they were born at 33 weeks, which means we haven’t brought them home yet so they’re still in the NICU. They’ve been there for 40 plus days, and just to read those psalms and hear of the Lord’s steadfastness and love and refuge. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, but I’ve always viewed as an intellectual. It’s like, “Oh, go get degrees and understand God, and then you can know all these things about him and be able to help people.” But there’s something of like that relational comfort in scripture that’s absolutely amazing. It’s like, “You know what? I need this. I need the Lord in this. I need to hear this from him.” You’re a well studied man. I’d love to hear a little bit your relationship with scripture just on a heart level.

Lee Brubacher:

Well I’m not the greatest with excellent devotional practices, but I try and set some structure into my day that forces me to keep reading, keep studying and not get lazy with that. Because week after week, month after month, year after year in pastoral ministry, like I’ve been in, it’s pretty easy to see scripture, the Bible as a textbook. “I’m just using this.” Well, if you’re in school, it’s a textbook. If you’re in church life, it’s just a tool to plan a service. And you’re right, it has to be more than that, and so every week I’m just pulling out my app here. I’m hanging out with Nicky Gumbel who has a daily verse, daily scriptures from the Psalms, the New Testament and the Old Testament. It fires at me every single day. I can just read it right there. And so those are some of the things that I try and do to keep fresh and to keep honest before the Lord and not be getting lazy with staying in the word daily. I remember, maybe about three summers ago, sometimes in the summer I like to run and stay a bit fit and healthy. So while I was running consistently, almost every day, I also had scriptures in my pocket, literally a big wad of paper. Didn’t have a phone back then that I was using as a Bible. So I actually memorized the whole book of second Timothy as I was running through that whole summer. So every day I would take the next 10 verses and just memorize them as I’m running along the street, and had the paper and pull it out and rehearse the previous chapter. So it is just different ways. One of our other pastors calls that habit stacking. You ever heard that term before?

Daniel Markin:

No.

Lee Brubacher:

It’s a great term. Habit stacking means you take something that you’re doing every day, even brushing your teeth and you say, “While I brush my teeth at nighttime, I’m going to pray for my family every day.” But at that time, I was taking the habit of running and stacking a spiritual discipline of memorizing scripture with that. It’s a great way of connecting the spiritual disciplines with something that you do every day naturally.

Daniel Markin:

That’s smart.

Lee Brubacher:

Yeah.

Daniel Markin:

And so that verse also in Romans is just a beautiful, beautiful verse. “God working all things together for good.” And we don’t see that in the moment, but we see that often, later on. And we also have to just trust that. What was the next verse that you had on here?

Lee Brubacher:

So the next one was Psalm 100:2, and this came about after I was in ministry. It’s a beautiful verse. “Serve the Lord with gladness. Come before him with joyful songs.” And that word serve at the very beginning in the Hebrew can also be rendered worship. It’s the same word. Worship the Lord with gladness. So the Old Testament concept of service is really worship. It’s almost the same thing. And so what that means to me is that really is my personality and my calling. So personality wise, I’m understood, I’m seen, and people tell me this, as a little bit of a glass half full person, a positive person. I tend to smile a lot. I tend to see joy. And even as I’m leading worship on stage, I exude that visually, the joy. And so the concept of serving the Lord with gladness and joyful songs is my personality. It really is. That’s deep inside me, but there’s also my calling in that because I’m coming before him with songs and as a musician, that’s what I do. So that verse is really meaningful, and it was sort of that next long time period of my life, where I grabbed onto that verse and said, “This is what I’m about. This is how I’m wired, and it’s what I’m called to be. Serve the Lord with gladness come before him with joyful songs.” And so that became my second. It’s a good verse.

Daniel Markin:

Yeah. Have you ever had to, as you’ve been doing your ministry, really fight for that gladness because I know it’s easy for bitterness and resentment to fall in. Have there ever been moments where you’ve been serving the Lord with frustration?

Lee Brubacher:

I tell you what, as a worship pastor, I could substitute a number of different words in there, serve the Lord with tiredness, or serve the Lord with apathy or hopefully not, but serve the Lord with indifference. Sometimes that’s life. Sometimes it is not all roses and happy times. It’s definitely not happy clappy, as we would say in the music world. Definitely not. And that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying serving the Lord with gladness is a determination to do what’s right, not necessarily what you feel in the moment. Musicians have this temperament that’s often fairly emotional. It’s the artist temperament that we sometimes feel more deeply than others maybe. And I’m not a melancholic person, so this verse probably would be hard for me if I was a melancholic personality. I’m not. I’m by nature, a little more upbeat, but that’s not to mean that I always deeply feel the joyful songs that I’m trying to lead before the congregation. But I just know there’s other scriptures that tie into that. “Put on a garment of praise for a spirit of heaviness.” That was a determination in the Old Testament that you choose praise even when you don’t feel like it. And so I think that’s a good way to approach ministry. We can’t be fake. We can’t be unreal in front of our people because people can see that mask if you’re just going through the motions, and I never want to be like that. So Lord willing, hopefully when I’m leading up front, it’s not fake. It’s real. Some days are harder than others, and I push through it for the benefit of the people that are there, doing what’s right, not always what’s easy, or what I feel like every time.

Daniel Markin:

Yeah. As you’re saying that, it touches on something that I often think about and am reminded about. It’s just something my dad would often say, which is worship starts before you arrive on Sunday. And that idea of even if you’re having a crummy time you’re going there, and we often just view… I’m sure a common critique or common thing people will say, they’ll be like, “Oh, how was the worship? Oh, did you enjoy the worship to today? Oh, we really enjoyed your worship today.” And I think what they’re trying to say is, “Hey, we really enjoyed the music,” and that’s not exactly what you’re trying to do. It’s like, “I hope you enjoyed the music. I hope it was edifying to you. But the real question is how was your worship today?” Turning it back on them, and be like, “Did you show up with a heart, even if it’s broken, but a heart of worship?”

Lee Brubacher:

Yeah. We definitely hear more people approaching us after a Sunday, commenting on the sound volume or on song choice, than really connecting with the Lord met me today. Those are the comments we love to hear. Because that means so much more, doesn’t it?

Daniel Markin:

Yeah, exactly.

Lee Brubacher:

So a third verse that came along, which is more recent, actually just within the last month or two. For a while, I’ve been thinking it’s time for a new one. Psalm 100:2 has been meaningful, but that was 10 or more years of my life, so I just knew it was time for something that’s fresh, but still contains those aspects of who I am and what I’m called to do and to be. So one of our pastors recently referenced Hebrews 13 and this is the two-versed scripture that jumped off the page at me. It says, “Through Jesus, therefore…” This is verse 15 to 16. “Through Jesus, therefore let us continually offer to God a sacrifice of praise, the fruit of lips that openly profess his name.” So, that’s part one. Part two goes in a completely different direction. “And do not forget to do good and to share with others for with such sacrifices God is pleased.” So I’m in the midst of a doctorate program through Southern Seminary and I’ve done a lot of study on worship through the Old Testament and the New, and I know that the term sacrifice was hugely impactful in the Old Testament, much more than we consider it today. But to bring a sacrifice to the Lord was not only a requirement of the Old Testament people, it was their joy, it was their worship. And so Hebrews, as it often does, connects back to the Old Testament, and here we have two times that the word sacrifice is used in this little verse, and it just sparked imagination in me. “Let us continually offer to God a sacrifice of praise.” So thank the Lord through Christ we no longer offer a sacrifice of an animal. That’s done through Christ. He was the final and complete sacrifice. So we don’t need to bring animals anymore. We don’t need to bring grain offerings, and peace offerings and all those things. So what does Hebrews say? We bring a sacrifice of praise. So there’s still a sacrifice, and this is worship, the fruit of lips that openly profess his name. And so that is telling the gospel, that is singing about it. It’s what we do in vocalizing our faith. So that’s so much of what I do every day, every week. I am asking others to do the same to openly profess the name of Christ. That is a sacrifice of praise. I love that phrase that just speaks to me, but it doesn’t stop there, and this is why I included the next verse. It’s like the greatest commandment. Jesus said, “Love Lord God with all your heart and love your neighbor as yourself.” There’s the two-parter. And so here has the second part in it as well. Verse 16, “Do not forget to do good and to share with others.” Why? Because that also is a sacrifice by which God is pleased. So there’s two sacrifices here. There’s a sacrifice of what you say and the sacrifice of what you do with others. I got to admit here, I’m a task-oriented person. I’m much more a task-oriented than people-oriented. And so this verse was a challenge to me recently that I need to be about people and loving others, and a sacrifice that the Lord is pleased with is when I’m doing good and sharing with others. And that was a conviction for my heart recently.

Daniel Markin:

Yeah. It’s faith and works, and faith and works are worship. We believe it. We’re singing about it, but it’s like, “Go do something about it.” And that’s something that I think we always need a kick in the butt as Christians, is like, “Look, you believe this. Go prove it. Go show that you actually believe it by making a difference in your workplace, by making a difference in your community, in your schools.” That is something that we oftentimes, are missing. It’s something that’s always convicting to me, is if you truly believed it, the action should pour out. If you truly believe Jesus is Lord over creation, then live like that’s true. Go and live for the kingdom and try and build his kingdom by being the best plumber you can, by being the best musician you can, the best student, biologist, whatever. And so I think that’s a great for you to land there because it’s going to always keep you, “Ugh, I have to, I have to practice it.” It’s always going to be there. You can’t ignore it, right?

Lee Brubacher:

Well, as a music director, let me tell you, as a task oriented music director, I can easily get engrossed in how the platform looks on a Sunday. So I’m looking at all these messy mic cables and patch cables, and I want to clean them up and keep them tidy because that’s infused in my DNA as a task person.

Meanwhile, there’s people standing right here that want to talk to me and I’m distracted by the things around me rather than being distracted, in a good way, by the people that need to be loved and cared for. So I’m always confessing this to our people too, because they know it.

Daniel Markin:

Well, Lee, thank you man, for walking us through this and being part of this program today. And we’re coming the end of our time here, but I just wanted to give you the final word. As you’re looking forward as a worship leader, what is something you’re really excited about, about what the Lord’s doing?

Lee Brubacher:

Well, I tell you COVID is, I think, decreasing from our world. So in this time we are finally seeing some things opening up again. Just two or three weeks ago, our church was able to regather in double services, full out again. And now we’re no more masks anymore, so it’s a very new day around here. And I’m seeing some of the people we’ve been praying for for months and even the last two years who we’ve not seen at all, maybe they’ve been online, but we haven’t physically seen them, they’re starting to come back again, and they’re sending emails and phone calls saying, “We’re coming back. We want to reengage.” And so these are really good things that the Lord is doing to regather his church. It’s like we’re coming back from exile, almost. These are good days. We’re just seeing the regathering. We’re seeing so many people able to use their gifts who couldn’t the last couple years. They’re able to serve according to the spirit, and that’s what we want. And more than that, I think a lot of our outreach as a congregation has been really hampered by the limitations the last two years, where government kept saying, “This is what you can’t do. You can’t do this, you can’t do this.” Well somehow we’ve been trying to find a way to do things still, to reach out and to love people, and to share the gospel. And so, we’re seeing those things coming again and I’m looking forward to that in the coming days.

Daniel Markin:

It’s so good. And it’s just so good being with one another again and hearing all the voices. That’s been an amazing thing. Lee, thank you for being on the program. Thank you for joining us, and we look forward to chatting with you again.

Lee Brubacher:

You’re welcome. Thank you so much.

Daniel Markin:

Okay. Well thanks again, Lee, for being on the program. If you want to find any of Lee’s other work, you can go to the go Gospel Coalition Canada and look up Lee Brubacher on there. But thanks again for listening. Thank you for tuning in. Make sure to connect with us on social media. I look forward to hearing from you soon. Goodbye.