Lenten Readings from Me-Ville: Day 20

ESCAPE FROM SUPERBIA

Pick a psalm, one that’s familiar but not too familiar, and pray your way through it. Pay attention to your spirit as you go: note which lines are particularly resonant with you, and which lines seem curiously irrelevant or downright troubling. I suggest beginning with Psalm 40. . . .

Read through the psalm, considering the possibility that by doing so you’re reading through someone else’s prayer journal. Consider the intimacy of the relationship between the psalmist and the God he writes to; reflect on a similar moment of intimacy between you and 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 19

In the psalms we find people lashing out against God, people praying for their own death, people calling down violence against children. In the psalms we find people bragging and whining and arguing and bargaining with God. We find all kinds of people being all kinds of people, and we find God in the center of their thoughts.

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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 18

Between the law and its fulfillment, between us and God, between us and each other, between our fear of God as Judge and our trust in God as Deliverer, even ultimately between who we think we are and who we were born to become—Jesus steps into that gulf because he is for us enough to bear the weight that we can’t bear ourselves. In so doing he displaces us to become the center of everything about us, which is his rightful place.

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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 17

While we’re comforted by the fact that the invisible God has become present to us—we’re assured that he’s there—we’re also subjected to his judgment. He looks at the things we’ve amassed for ourselves, the empire of relationships, achievements, and status we’ve built for ourselves, and asks us what good it all is. We feel ourselves judged by Jesus because we ourselves are learning to judge ourselves. It’s a re-creation of the initial act of creation—Jesus honors us by helping us to name what we observe, calling it good or, more often perhaps, not good.

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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

In your unfailing love you will lead
the people you have redeemed.
In your strength you will guide them
to your holy dwelling.
--Exodus 15:13

Lenten Readings from Me-Ville: Day 16

I can check Wikipedia to get a rough idea of when and how to change the oil in my car, and from there I can, according to the spirit of the times, “fake it till I make it.” But there are all kinds of life experiences and life choices for which a culture of self-sufficiency becomes not a privilege but a prison.

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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 15

Displacement isn’t a bad thing; it’s a necessary element of any journey. If we want to get anywhere we aren’t, we can count on being displaced. The key is to plan for it. We can do some planning on our own—we can google our destination and download driving directions; we can flip through our address book and figure out if anyone we know lives anywhere near where we’re going. But the best plan for displacement is to trust ourselves to a trustworthy guide.

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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 14

ESCAPE FROM SUPERBIA

Take a prayer drive through your community. What cultural messages do you observe as you go? In what ways are the billboards, stores, and status symbols of your community reinforcing the notion of entitlement? How do they promote self-absorption? What does your community need to be delivered from? What tables in your community would Jesus upend? What pharaohs would he confront with the message “Let my people go”? Which of these would your community have the most trouble leaving behind?

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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 13

Ultimately, when we strip away all the airs that we’ve put on, our true friends are those we are for and who are for us. When we understand that God is for us, when we realize that Jesus is pro-me, a knock at the door doesn’t lose the sting of potential judgment and likely change, but it does lose the sting of an attack from the unfamiliar. We lead through the rooms of our refuge not an awkward stranger but the lover of our souls, who was present when we were formed in secret. We learn from Jesus where our public persona doesn’t measure up with what he (and we) know to be true of ourselves. And he offers us a way into a life that is freer, truer.

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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 12

Jesus is fully God, but by his incarnation he is also fully human—the image of that effectively invisible God. He has become in flesh what we’ve read of God in the pages of the Bible: a friend of sinners, a deliverer from all kinds of evil, and a teacher thoroughly invested in our well-being. Jesus is in fact so pro-me that he in effect becomes me.

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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 11

In the movie Office Space, one of hundreds of anonymous workers is singled out as management material after being inadvertently hypnotized to not care about anyone or anything but his own sense of inner peace. The movie has proven successful because the concept is so familiar: When we figure out how to work the system, and all the people in it, we are rewarded with more substantial titles and more office space. A happy side effect of the turn inward is that the annals of power are reduced in our minds to an abstraction, some far-off other watching us only from a distance, which we consequently don’t have to deal with.

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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.