Lenten Readings from Me-Ville: Resurrection Sunday

"Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you."
--John 20:21

Lenten Readings from Me-Ville: Day 40

God didn’t come all the way from his kingdom to Me-Ville to get me simply to part ways with me; God wants me—and with me, you and really all of us—to be in his kingdom, which is where he is, which as the Lord’s prayer suggests, is on earth even as it is in heaven. . . . Jesus, let this Covenant prayer [from John Wesley] affirm, is above all our Covenant friend, delivering us from Me-Ville and leading us along the rough and rocky path to a sure destination at the throne of God.

O mighty God, the Lord Omnipotent, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,
You have now become my Covenant Friend.
And I, through your infinite grace, have become your covenant servant.
So be it.

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Copyright 2008 Cook Communications Ministries. Deliver Us From Me-Ville by Dave Zimmerman. Used with permission. May not be further reproduced. All rights reserved.

Lenten Readings from Me-Ville: Day 39

If we’re committed to the notion that God doesn’t save only each of us but all of us, and that God is pulling us into a community together, and if we’re further committed to the notion that God acts out of love for us and works through us to communicate that love to one another—then even the most difficult encounters, the most nerve-wracking news are framed in grace. When we enter into our relationships assured that God is pro-me and consequently pro-us, we can more confidently remember that not even we, ultimately, can be against us.

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Copyright 2008 Cook Communications Ministries. Deliver Us From Me-Ville by Dave Zimmerman. Used with permission. May not be further reproduced. All rights reserved.

Lenten Readings from Me-Ville: Day 38

Me-Ville is a place we will visit again and again and again over the course of our lives. It’s such an interesting place for such curious people as us, such a safe place for such insecure people as us. In Me-Ville we can safely and comfortably look out for number one, which every once in a while will sound like the most sensible thing in the world to do.

But the farther Jesus leads us from Me-Ville to the place he has prepared for us, the less sensible it is to go back, and the less fulfilling each visit will be.

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Copyright 2008 Cook Communications Ministries. Deliver Us From Me-Ville by Dave Zimmerman. Used with permission. May not be further reproduced. All rights reserved.

Lenten Readings from Me-Ville: Day 37

Moses called out to the Israelites from Mount Sinai to tell them that they were no longer slaves. . . . They were now a free people, under the sovereignty of an unequaled God. They needed to stop subsisting like slaves—driven by immediate circumstances, indulging themselves in little vices and petty disputes, hoarding whatever power and privilege they could scrape together, looking out for number one under the assumption that nobody else was going to—and start enjoying the privileges and embracing the responsibilities of life in the kingdom of God.

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Copyright 2008 Cook Communications Ministries. Deliver Us From Me-Ville by Dave Zimmerman. Used with permission. May not be further reproduced. All rights reserved.

Lenten Readings from Me-Ville: Day 36

The sprawl and the smog of Me-Ville effectively shrouds God’s sovereignty over his creation, and so we don’t start to pick up on it until we get outside the city limits. And the full disclosure of God’s reign is still off in the horizon. Between here and there—between now, when we live aware of God’s kingdom and learn to reconcile ourselves to it, and that day when we will find that we’ve been here all along, encircled by God’s grace, transformed by his goodness—by faith we walk, and walk, and walk.

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Copyright 2008 Cook Communications Ministries. Deliver Us From Me-Ville by Dave Zimmerman. Used with permission. May not be further reproduced. All rights reserved.

Lenten Readings from Me-Ville: Day 35

ESCAPE FROM SUPERBIA

Consider your existing relationships and think of who is most likely to hang with you even when you’re being unlikeable, even when you’re disclosing the darkest parts of yourself. What would it take to consecrate that relationship so that you can help one another interpret your stories, expose your self-delusions, recalibrate your universe so that Christ is still in the center?

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Copyright 2008 Cook Communications Ministries. Deliver Us From Me-Ville by Dave Zimmerman. Used with permission. May not be further reproduced. All rights reserved.

Lenten Readings from Me-Ville: Day of Rest

Rejoice greatly, O Daughter of Zion!
Shout, Daughter of Jerusalem!
See, your king comes to you,
righteous and having salvation,
gentle and riding on a donkey,
on a colt, the foal of a donkey.
I will take away the chariots from Ephraim
and the war-horses from Jerusalem,
and the battle bow will be broken.
He will proclaim peace to the nations.
His rule will extend from sea to sea
and from the River to the ends of the earth.
--Zechariah 9:9-10

Lenten Readings from Me-Ville: Day 34

The prophet Isaiah, the apostle Paul, the reformer Martin Luther, and countless other followers of Jesus down through the ages have hit that crisis point, questioning our ethical impulses, only to be reassured yet again that we are loved by God regardless of our patterns and quirks, that in Jesus Christ, God is pro-me—and in the words of Paul, “If God is for us, who can be against us?”

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Copyright 2008 Cook Communications Ministries. Deliver Us From Me-Ville by Dave Zimmerman. Used with permission. May not be further reproduced. All rights reserved.

Lenten Readings from Me-Ville: Day 33

[The apostle] John recognized the danger of invidious comparison, the threat to our spiritual well-being that comes when we shove Jesus out of the center in order to get a better look at our friends, relatives, and, above all, rivals—to size them up, to ascertain what they have that we don’t and what we have that they don’t. To thus shove Jesus from his rightful place in relation to us is to dis-integrate what God has brought together; the logical conclusion of this kind of dis-integration is a more deeply entrenched sense of superbia than we earlier escaped.

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Copyright 2008 Cook Communications Ministries. Deliver Us From Me-Ville by Dave Zimmerman. Used with permission. May not be further reproduced. All rights reserved.

Lenten Readings from Me-Ville: Day 32

We’re not ordered to create a community of God, we’re rather invited into one. As such, we’re not responsible to come up with a way of working together, although we are responsible to one another. . . .

We learn how this new community operates, not by trial and error, but by observation and emulation; we allow Jesus to stand between us, interpreting our behaviors and identifying our motivations for each other.

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Copyright 2008 Cook Communications Ministries. Deliver Us From Me-Ville by Dave Zimmerman. Used with permission. May not be further reproduced. All rights reserved.

Lenten Readings from Me-Ville: Day 31

The desire for security in the face of a sudden insecurity is overwhelming sometimes, causing us to disregard even the commands of God or the rule of common sense in order to grasp onto something concrete, something immediate, some surrogate for what we suddenly lack.

The church, carrying as it does the title “Body of Christ,” very logically provides that surrogacy for a lot of people . . . right?

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Copyright 2008 Cook Communications Ministries. Deliver Us From Me-Ville by Dave Zimmerman. Used with permission. May not be further reproduced. All rights reserved.

Lenten Readings from Me-Ville: Day 30

I, an individual, am chosen by God as part of a people, ordained by God as part of a royal priesthood, consecrated by God as part of a nation. This is a marked contrast to the kingdom we’ve left, where every home is some person’s castle, walled off from one another. In Me-Ville we could hardly be called a people, but outside its walls, en route to the kingdom of God, we find ourselves collected into the people of God.

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Copyright 2008 Cook Communications Ministries. Deliver Us From Me-Ville by Dave Zimmerman. Used with permission. May not be further reproduced. All rights reserved.

Lenten Readings from Me-Ville: Day 29

We realize soon enough upon our departure from Me-Ville that more than one set of footprints track through the sand; Jesus is not plucking us individually out of trouble but gathering together a people for himself, establishing a kingdom that will reign forever and teaching us how to inhabit that kingdom as a community of faith.

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Copyright 2008 Cook Communications Ministries. Deliver Us From Me-Ville by Dave Zimmerman. Used with permission. May not be further reproduced. All rights reserved.

Lenten Readings from Me-Ville: Day of Rest

How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God!
--1 John 3:1

Lenten Readings from Me-Ville: Day 28

ESCAPE FROM SUPERBIA

Before you leave for church—whether a worship service or a bake sale or a committee meeting or, if your church is a group of people who all live together, your living room—ask Jesus to stand between you and everybody else. Observe the event not as a generic visitor or as a semiconscious attendee or even as a worshiper in the throes of spiritual passion; observe the event through the eyes of Jesus, who died for this church but holds authority over it as its Lord.

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Copyright 2008 Cook Communications Ministries. Deliver Us From Me-Ville by Dave Zimmerman. Used with permission. May not be further reproduced. All rights reserved.

Lenten Readings from Me-Ville: Day 27

Religion is . . . a pretty tempting crutch when you’ve been untethered from the props of superbia. Outside observers of Christian faith—people whose primary residence is still in Me-Ville—are not surprisingly unconscious of the various institutions and practices that serve as crutches for them. But upon leaving Me-Ville you no longer have ready access to such props. Meanwhile, you’ve entered into a culture within the larger culture, and you’re tempted to use that culture in the way all manufactured cultures get used: to support the self, to prop up your ego, to indulge your self-regard.

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Copyright 2008 Cook Communications Ministries. Deliver Us From Me-Ville by Dave Zimmerman. Used with permission. May not be further reproduced. All rights reserved.

Lenten Readings from Me-Ville: Day 26

God knows that what we are at any given moment is only at best a foreshadowing of what we’re becoming. He knows that we’re always vulnerable to a sense of superbia that allows us to think that wherever we’ve come to rest our head at any given moment simply must be where we were meant forever to be. In those moments we need to be rescued from ourselves, delivered from our self-constructed prisons.

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Copyright 2008 Cook Communications Ministries. Deliver Us From Me-Ville by Dave Zimmerman. Used with permission. May not be further reproduced. All rights reserved.

Lenten Readings from Me-Ville: Day 25

Christianity is like everything else in that over time its scripts have been written and memorized without our even being conscious of it. We’re conscious instead of one another, and because we’ve inherited not only the scripts of our religion but also the scripts of our culture we look for ways of distinguishing ourselves from one another, of being “holier than thou” or “more relevant than thee”—whatever we’re more capable of pulling off.

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Copyright 2008 Cook Communications Ministries. Deliver Us From Me-Ville by Dave Zimmerman. Used with permission. May not be further reproduced. All rights reserved.

Lenten Readings from Me-Ville: Day 24

Taken at their most simple, the Beatitudes are a progression: a point of realization that leads us to relinquishment that turns us toward God and refashions our understanding of the world around us, to the point where the world around us is threatened by our simply being our new selves. These are not status-seeking disciplines so much as they are the outward impact of a very personal, intimate reckoning with God. God isn’t establishing us as some special category of super-Christian here; he’s simply leading us out of Me-Ville, and the world is alternately enticed and threatened simply by watching us go.

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Copyright 2008 Cook Communications Ministries. Deliver Us From Me-Ville by Dave Zimmerman. Used with permission. May not be further reproduced. All rights reserved.