IVP - Strangely Dim

He's Got the Whole World Coming and Going

So much religion, I’ve come to realize, is just a bunch of going. Christians go to church, Jews go to synagogue, Muslims go to mosque. Witches go to covens, animists go to the woods. Particularly zealous people go even beyond that: Christians go on retreat, Muslims go to Mecca, Native Americans go on vision quests. Some groups are convinced they’re going to space.

God, in the Christian tradition, has his own comings and goings. God comes to the garden to visit with Adam and Eve (Genesis 3). God comes to the temple to sanctify it by his presence (1 Kings 8). In Jesus God comes to earth as a human being (John 1). God the Holy Spirit comes into our hearts and resides in us (Ephesians 2). And the Nicene Creed teaches that Jesus will come again to judge the living and the dead.

God’s also gone to some significant destinations: God went before the Israelites into the Promised Land (Exodus 13). Jesus went to the cross to suffer and die (John 19). For three days he went to preach good news to the spirits in prison—whatever that means (1 Peter 3). And as he told his followers, “I go to prepare a place for you” (John 14). The Nicene Creed teaches that he went to heaven, and is seated at the right hand of the father. And as he promised, he will come again.

What’s significant in God’s coming and going is that he comes and he goes for us. In a sense, at least from our perspective, we are at the center of God’s universe.

God wanted us, so he made us. He wanted to be with us, so he came to us. And when he came, we didn’t know him, and we told him to go to hell. And in rejecting our Creator we reject our own creation. It’s enough to send your head spinning.

But despite the trouble we throw at God and despite our tendency to run away from him, God has come and will come again. He has gone to great lengths to make and remake us, and he has gone even further to make a new home for us. In the meantime, he simply welcomes us and waits for us to welcome him in return. If we slow down we can see that it’s our coming and going—not God’s demands upon us—that’s been wearing us out.

So if we can’t get over our own urge to come and go, we can take up Jesus’ open invitation: “Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.”

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Wow. Preachy.

I'm now two weeks out from my book's delivery. My contractions are twenty minutes apart. In the meantime, a discussion guide is now posted online at ivpress.com. It's a big file (now in technicolor!) but gives you a good excuse to watch six superhero movies. Check it out and use it with your friends.

Ticked Off

By David A. Zimmerman

Part of my church’s ministry to the community these days is a program called Alpha. If it were a macro in Microsoft Word, it would look a little something like this:

For n = 1 to 15
1. Enjoy a meal together.
2. Sing together.
3. Watch a forty-five-minute video together.
4. Talk together.
Next
End

As weird as that may seem to you, it’s pretty standard stuff. Ask any programmer. The really weird thing about the program is that the speaker on the video is British. Now, I don’t hold it against anyone for being British, but they shore do talk funny. It’s cute, in a way, like watching public television on Sunday nights.

My line of work puts me in contact with lots of British books. For roughly the same amount of time that I’ve been going through Alpha, I’ve been busy translating two British books from English to English. As weird as that may seem to you, it’s pretty standard stuff. British grammar, for example, calls for single quotation marks around quoted material: ‘Four score and seven years ago’. It also calls for terminating punctuation (that’s “periods” for all you laypeople) to be placed outside quotation marks, as you can see in the same quoted material above. To translate the phrase from English into English, then, I would render it thus: “Eighty-seven years ago.”

Subtle, I know. It can take some time, but in general most English-to-English translation is relatively straightforward. Where it gets dicey is in the arena of idiom.

British people call the subway the ‘tube’. They call the bathroom the ‘wc’. They call a line a ‘queue’ or something like that. They say things like ‘quite right’ and ‘tally ho’ and ‘jolly well good’. None of these has a direct equivalent in English. It’s my job to decipher their meanings and make them meaningful to American readers.

I find myself applying this skill to my experience at Alpha. The most notorious example thus far comes when the speaker starts talking about lists. Several things on his lists have invariably been ‘ticked off’, which seems on the surface to be unlikely—unless, I suppose, his list included the job of ‘ticking off my American audience’, for example.

For Americans, intentionally ticking something or someone off is offensive, a willful act of malice. For a British speaker to go around ticking things off so cavalierly should lead us to count his message as not worth hearing.

But wait a minute: the context of his comment tells me that ‘ticking off’ may require translation from English to English. I sleuthed it out a bit and concluded that ‘ticking off’ is English for “checking off,” as in “I’m so excited to be checking this week’s Strangely Dim off my list—even though it is a bit hard to understand and for the most part meaningless.”

So there’s hope for us yet, we Americans and our British neighbors. As long as they don’t tick us off, everything will be jolly well good.

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Hello out there! E-mail me at dzimmerman@ivpress.com or post a comment here.

The covers for my book are now printed, just waiting to be glued in place. It's now only a matter of time . . .

Read more about me (because I know you're dying to) by clicking here.

Underdog World

By David A. Zimmerman

I always root for the underdog. If you’re likely to lose some contest, I’ll be waiting for you to win. When I’m feeling particularly daring or noble, I’ll set myself up as an underdog by taking the most challenging of a set of options or declining to use resources made available to me. Underdog was even one of my favorite cartoons when I was very young.

It may be because my namesake, the biblical David, was a willing underdog in the classic sense. David raised sheep—arguably the most defenseless and indefensible animal on the planet—and fought lions and wolves on their behalf with nothing but a sling and stone.

David took that same sling and stone set to a battle with a giant warrior, Goliath, who had given an entire nation the willies. And he did so not after Goliath jumped him in an alley but after being told to go home by his brothers and being offered the king’s armor for protection.

David later refused to fight back when the king abused and persecuted him, he refused to use his authority as king to squelch a rebellion by his son, he refused to use his power to destroy someone mocking him on a bad day. He even refused to drink the cup of water his underlings brought him because, in fetching him a drink, they had risked their lives for his sake.

Perhaps it’s self-absorption that makes me hold a special affection for underdogs—some vague sense of calling associated with my naming. When I was a kid, my uncle (a priest; I call him “my uncle the father”) had me reach into a bag and pull out the name of a biblical character, which he would then use to preach a sermon illustration. I pulled out my own name, and though in effect I was doing nothing for him but manipulating his congregation with my boyish cuteness, in that moment I felt a profound sense of identification with King David, and the more I learned about him, the more, subconsciously I think, I committed myself to the calling of the underdog.

Underdogs can appear foolish because they set themselves to tasks that are clearly beyond their capacity, or they refuse means readily at their disposal to take on such tasks. But on some secret level we’re all rooting for the underdog, aren’t we? The underdog who does the impossible proves that everything is possible, that there’s no limit to the hope available to us. The world’s troubles, the abiding presence of evil that can be tasted and seen, seem like insurmountable challenges that we might as well ignore or acquiesce to, but the underdogs among us are equal parts crazy enough and courageous enough to look such goliaths square in the face and knock them over.

Some say God made the world and left. Others say the world’s evil is proof that God is either evil or incompetent. But imagine that God made the world his Israel and sin his Goliath, and has refused the armor offered him by the world’s Sauls. Perhaps throughout creation God has stood on the battlefield with stone and sling in hand, taking on all comers no matter how big, proving that “it is not by sword or spear that the LORD saves, for the battle is the LORD’s.”

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I've now got a direct line to my book page: www.ivpress.com/zimmer-man. The book is less than a month away from being in print!

Look for a discussion guide based on the book and all my favorite superhero movies, coming soon to ivpress.com/zimmer-man and www.intervarsity.org.

E-mail me at dzimmerman@ivpress.com.

The Hizzouse of Usher

By David A. Zimmerman

Nothing gives me the willies quite like being an usher. My anxiety, I think, goes back to my youth; I ushed poorly at my uncle’s wedding, effectively ruining the pageantry of the event by marching my grandparents down the aisle after the bride had made her entrance. My aunt and uncle are still married, but I don’t think my ushing has had much to do with their marital success.

Nevertheless, the usher is, in more ways than one, the point of entry into a church service. In my case, being an usher is, if you will, ushering me into the next phase of my involvement with my local church.

My wife and I started visiting our new church regularly eight months ago, and went through what I think is a natural initial process—curiosity, excitement, commitment and disillusionment—before finding our footing as regular attenders. We went through a similar process as we became members. Now we’re ushers, and we’re experiencing our new church through yet another set of lenses.

Suddenly, the fact that we don’t have a key to the building presents a potential problem. Suddenly, we have to know where everything is. Suddenly we need to understand how the service progresses, who needs to touch what, and what’s happening before, between and after the Sunday schedule. We need to have a working idea of who’s new, who’s old, and who gets the money from the collection plate.

We were getting along fine as members without all this information—until we started to ush. Suddenly we find ourselves not just associated with our church; now we’re participating in the church’s week-to-week life.

There really are three ways of experiencing church, I think: visitor, member and participant. You have particular responsibilities no matter which you pick, of course. Visitors must endure curious glances and hyper-enthusiastic handshakes and a barrage of questions and bewilderment in the face of an unfamiliar church order. I remember my wife’s first experience of a Roman Catholic mass, which involved intuitive standing, sitting and kneeling, and a sermon about broccoli. No way around discomfort—it’s a natural reaction to something new.

A member has a different set of expectations to fulfill, though of the three ways to go, membership may well be the easiest. You have to surrender some amount of personal information—perhaps no more than your address and e-mail—and you can expect to get some mail asking you for money from time to time. But your membership can conceivably take you a long way toward church legitimacy without much exertion on your part.

But to participate—now that’s where things get dicey. To participate is to leave part of your life open, to link not just your identity but your schedule to a particular faith community. You don’t just consume, you produce. You no longer have the luxury of complaining about what you don’t like about how things are; you have to either come to peace with it or make it better. Your very sanity and the natural cohesion of your community depend on it.

Ushers were the first people we met at our church; the second were people participating in the music ministry, and there followed pastoral staff, elders, trustees, stewards, and any variety of other participants in the life of the church. They shook our hands enthusiastically, shot curious glances in our direction and chuckled as we fumbled our way through unfamiliar rituals in the Sunday service. Eight months later, we’re going and doing likewise. It seems like a pretty natural progression.

***

I'm still scared of posting comments online, but if you have something to say about all things usherish, e-mail me at dzimmerman@ivpress.com, and I'll post it manually.

Read interviews with me or various other IVP authors here.

To Comment or Not to Comment?

What follows is a conversation between me and an occasional reader of Strangely Dim. I post it because the e-mail I sent bounced right back to me (Alan, I'm not ignoring you!).

You'll see my rationale for not enabling comments (I've discussed it before; see my entry "Born to Blog"), but I have no excuse for staying completely out of touch. For future reference, if you'd like to e-mail me, you can reach me at dzimmerman@ivpress.com.

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David,

You don't know me, but I've been reading your online column for some time now. There's something about your writing style that, on its best days, strikes a chord in me. That's unusual.

At the same time I can't help but feel like you're missing one of the most powerful aspects of blogging: the dialogue with your readers. Is there a reason why you've chosen to broadcast rather than converse? What kinds of things do you think people might say in response to your writings? Would it make Strangely Dim better or worse? I suspect it would add a dynamic quality, but only you can answer that for certain.

Anyway, I was going to write you with the suggestion that you turn on post comments, but then I realized that not only are comments turned off, but you offer absolutely no way to contact you, anywhere on your site! I had to use my Ultra Secret Inside Sources (I could tell you, but... well, you know the rest) to get your email address.

I hope you find this helpful and not the least bit whiny,

Alan.

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Alan:

Thanks for the e-mail. You're right, of course, about posting comments; I
have a very selfish, very simple reason that I don't: the only people
commenting (apart from a very small handful) were selling mortgages,
online gambling or body enhancement. I should, however, and will put a
link to my e-mail starting asap. Thanks for the suggestion. I would love
to post comments, and maybe I'll try it again in a couple of months.

Anyway, thanks for the e-mail. It's nice to know I'm not the only one
reading my blog.

Dave