Mystery
Stories
Object:
Contents
A Story To Live By:"Mystery"
Sharing Visions: "How Can I Do This?" Kai McClinton
Good Stories: "Love Never Ends" John Sumwalt
Scrap Pile: "The Passion" John Sumwalt
A Story To Live By
Mystery
"For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face.
Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been
fully known." 1 Corinthians 13:12
Patti Davis, the youngest daughter of former President Ronald Reagan, has spent much of her life trying to understand her elusive and distant father. Dutch, the 1999 biography about her father by Edmund Morris, gave her some new insights and peace.
"Dutch is dedicated to Christine Reagan, a half sister I never knew I had. Long before I was born she lived only nine hours -- long enough to have a name and an effect on her parents' lives. Christine was folded into history and hidden away. Until now. It says so much about my father. He lost a child, and I think that loss was more than his heart could bear and so it did what hearts often do -- shut down. Somewhere in the ache and silence and the ashes of a cremated child, he made sure he would never hurt like that again. No wonder he retreated from his children. No wonder he offered bewilderment instead of the demonstrative love my brother and sister and I wished for. I still don't fully understand my father. After all those years of exhaustive research, even Morris says the man is a mystery. But because of Morris' book, I have more clues, more threads to tie together. While I would gladly change many things in my past, I know now there is nothing more I could have done to know my father better. Morris has lifted some of the shadows for me. But others remain and always will. After reading Dutch, I am content to leave them there. (Patti Davis, The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, October 17, 1999. From a piece that first appeared in The Washington Post.)
"Our culture is attached to information. We want to figure everything out. Why are we here? Why does illness happen? Why to me? Not all these questions can be answered. Some things will always remain a mystery. This is difficult for us to accept. The human tendency is to seek information, to grasp for the concrete, to fill in the details. Knowledge is power, after all, and if we have it, we can help ourselves. Yet not all knowledge is accessible all the time...In the end... there are some things we simply can never know." (Mona Lisa Schulze, Awakening Intuition, pp 308, 310)
"The purpose of the mysteries of our lives may well be to lead us out of our dependence on human reasoning and its limited ability to account for why things are the way they are and to acceptance that Divine intelligence is actually in control of our lives. Divine intelligence works in ways that we cannot understand, yet we can come to understand that we cannot completely trust much else. Always remind yourself that you are living a mystery not solving one. (Caroline Myss, Why People Don't Heal and How They Can, Three Rivers Press, New York, 1997, p.177)
Sharing Visions
How Can I Do This?
Kai McClinton
Then I said, "Ah, Lord God! Truly I do not know how to speak,
for I am only a boy." But the Lord said to me, "Do not say, 'I am
only a boy,' for you shall go to all to whom I send you, and you
shall speak whatever I command you. Do not be afraid of them,
for I am with you to deliver you, says the Lord." Jeremiah 1:6-8
In 1995, at the age of 25, I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. I felt as if God had let me down, abandoned me. I thought that I was being punished. I fell into a depression for three years. Feeling and knowing that I wouldn't be able to walk well, or run, was very painful to me. And to top this off, God was calling me into the ministry.
"How can I do this?" I asked God over and over again. "How can I minister or visit the sick when I can hardly walk?"
God came to me with an answer that totally changed my thinking. In January of 1997, I was serving as a student pastor, and I went to a religious bookstore to buy supplies for the children at church. I gathered my items and walked to the cashier counter. A woman rang up my items, and she took my name for their mailing list. I thanked her, and as I walked away she ran after me and said, "You're not working because of you disability."
I looked at her, stunned. I had not told her that I had MS, or anything about my situation. She went on to tell me that she was blessed with a gift by which she could communicate with the spirit within another person. She said that as we were talking, her spirit was talking to my spirit, telling her of my anguish.
She said that God did not do this to me, that God was going to cure me, and that I was to continue working for the Lord. I stood there, in shock, smiling and speechless. I thanked her and told her I would continue to work for God. Then I left with tears of joy in my eyes, once again assured that God had not left me, even in my time of pain and frustration.
Six months later, I went back to that religious store and I asked the staff and the manager where this woman was. They said no woman fitting that description had ever worked there. I felt a chill go through me, because I knew I had seen an Angel of God, and I was given a promise from God. This is a promise I still believe in, for today, January 2003, I am walking without my cane, and I am much stronger. God is still in the healing business. Praise the Lord!
Kai McClinton is a native of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who heeded the call to ministry in 1996, graduated from Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in 1999, and is pastor of Solomon Community Temple United Methodist Church in Milwaukee. This story first appeared in Sharing Visions: Divine Revelations, Angels and Holy Coincidences, John E. Sumwalt, Editor, CSS Publishing, Lima, Ohio, 2003.
Good Stories
Love Never Ends
John Sumwalt
Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful
or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is
not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrong-doing,
but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, hopes all things,
endures all things. Love never ends.... I Corinthians 13:4-8a
The boy didn't know what to do. Dad was drunk again. Mom was at work. How was he going to get to the game? Coach said he was going to start him at forward again tonight. It was his big opportunity to win a permanent spot in the starting line-up. Mom had forbidden him to drive the pickup until he got his driver's license. He would have to take the snowmobile. There was no other way. If he cut across the lake and followed the ditch along the back road into town he would save 20 minutes and almost make it on time. He put on his down leggings and coat, pushed the snowmobile out of the garage, started the engine, jumped onto the seat, edged slowly down the hill in the backyard and then out onto the ice. It appeared to be solid all the way across. He opened up the throttle and felt the power of the machine as it surged beneath him, thrusting him out over the hard level surface. He hunched himself down behind the windshield. The night air was bitter cold on his face, but he liked the feel of it. This must be what it feels like to pilot a jet, he thought to himself as his craft began to pick up speed. He didn't see the hole in the ice until it was too late. It was too wide to swerve around and he was going too fast to stop. His last thoughts were of the team gathered for the game -- and of his mom coming home alone in the dark. What would she do without him?
When the woman came into the house she found her husband asleep in his usual spot on the couch. There were empty bottles all around, and she could smell the beer on his breath, so she didn't try to wake him. Her son was nowhere to be seen. Where could he be? The game would have been over hours ago. There was a message on the answering machine. It was the coach asking why Jimmy hadn't been at the game. That's when she really began to worry. She went outside to look for him and quickly spotted the snowmobile tracks leading down to the lake. She knew what had happened before she walked out onto the ice, and it was in that terrible, excruciating moment that she made up her mind to do what she knew she should have done years before. She waited to tell him until the day after the funeral. He pleaded with her to stay, as he had always done before, and said that he would stop drinking and go into the treatment program. And then he cried, as he always did, and told her he couldn't live without her. But she didn't listen this time. "I can't help you," she said. "I thought I could, but I can't. And now Jimmy is dead because I haven't been strong enough to leave you." Then she picked up the phone and called her brother, and he came with his pickup truck and helped her move her things to the apartment she had rented in town.
The man drank three beers after his wife left and then walked out onto the ice to the hole where his son had died. He fully intended to end his life there, too, but he couldn't bring himself to do it. Something inside of him said no. He walked back to the house, got into the pickup and drove straight to the treatment center in town, climbed up the steps of the front entrance and rang the bell. When they opened the door to let him in, he said, "I don't know if there is any hope for me, but I have nowhere else to go."
Scrap Pile
The Passion of Christ
John Sumwalt
Mel Gibson's The Passion of Christ will open in theaters around the country on February 24. I have decided to invite members and friends of my congregation who plan to see the movie to go in groups led by members of the Church Staff and Bible Study teachers (see excerpts from our church newsletter below).
I must add that I am not eager to see this film. The focus on the graphic violence of the last hours of Jesus' life is not appealing. (Perhaps I will change my mind after I have seen it for myself.) I am waiting for the movie that shows as much detail about the resurrection. However, I know that many of my parishioners are going to see the film and it will be a good opportunity to talk about the meaning of Jesus' life. It may prove to be a good evangelism tool as some groups in the church are suggesting.
Joseph Shimex writes that he found the film both uplifting and distressing. "I thought about how I would feel if someone I knew had been forced to endure a gruesome death. I would want that fact to be remembered reverently, but I could not tolerate it being reproduced in detail." (The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, January 11, 2004. For the complete article click on: http://www.jsonline.com/news/editorials/jan04/198761.asp)
What is the movie about?
The Passion of Christ is a feature-length Hollywood movie capturing the last 12 hours of the life of Jesus of Nazareth. It is a vivid portrayal of His trial, condemnation, and brutal execution in and around Jerusalem. The movie, filmed in Aramaic, Latin, and Hebrew, artfully intertwines flashbacks to earlier episodes in Jesus' life, giving fuller meaning to His person, His sufferings, His relationships, and the message of His life to humanity.
Pope John-Paul said after viewing the movie, "It is as it was." Billy Graham wrote: "Every time I preach or speak about the Cross, the things I saw on the screen will be on my heart and mind." Lee Strobel said, "The movie will stun audiences and create an incredible appetite for people to know more about Jesus. I urge Christians to invite their spiritually-seeking friends to see this movie with them."
Not For Every One
The Passion of Christ contains graphic violence, suggestive violence and realism. It is a very realistic portrayal of the brutal crucifixion and flogging of Jesus. Because some viewers will be greatly disturbed by the shocking brutality and bloodiness of Jesus' beatings, they will be best advised not to see the film. The movie should not be viewed by children or youth under the age of 17. If you don't usually go to movies with blood and gore, don't go to this movie.
A Review of the Passion
These are excerpts from a review by Keith A Fournier
I really did not know what to expect. I was thrilled to have been invited to a private viewing of Mel Gibson's film The Passion, but I had also read all the cautious articles and spin. I arrived at the private viewing for The Passion, held in Washington, D.C., and greeted some familiar faces. The environment was typically Washingtonian, with people greeting you with a smile but seeming to look beyond you, having an agenda beyond the words.
The film was very briefly introduced, without fanfare, and then the room darkened. From the gripping opening scene in the Garden of Gethsemane, to the very human and tender portrayal of the earthly ministry of Jesus, through the betrayal, the arrest, the scourging, the way of the cross, the encounter with the thieves, the surrender on the Cross, until the final scene in the empty tomb, this was not simply a movie; it was an encounter, unlike anything I have ever experienced.
In addition to being a masterpiece of film-making and an artistic triumph, The Passion evoked more deep reflection, sorrow and emotional reaction within me than anything since my wedding, my ordination or the birth of my children. Frankly, I will never be the same.
When the film concluded, this "invitation only" gathering of "movers and shakers" in Washington, D.C., were shaking indeed, but this time from sobbing. I am not sure there was a dry eye in the place. The crowd that had been glad-handing before the film was now eerily silent. No one could speak, because words were woefully inadequate.
We had experienced a kind of art that is a rarity in life, the kind that makes heaven touch earth. One scene in the film has now been forever etched in my mind. A brutalized, wounded Jesus was soon to fall again, under the weight of the cross. His mother had made her way along the Via Dolorosa.
As she ran to him, she flashed back to a memory of Jesus as a child, falling in the dirt road outside of their home. Just as she reached, to protect him from the fall, she was now reaching to touch his wounded adult face. Jesus looked at her with intensely probing and passionately loving eyes (and at all of us through the screen) and said, "Behold, I make all things new."
These are words taken from the last book of the New Testament, the Book Of Revelations. Suddenly, the purpose of the pain was so clear and the wounds, that earlier in the film had been so difficult to see in His face, His back, indeed all over His body, became intensely beautiful. They had been borne, voluntarily, for love.
This is not a "Christian" film, in the sense that it will appeal only to those who identify themselves as followers of Jesus Christ. It is a deeply human, beautiful story that will deeply touch all men and women. ...It should be seen by as many people as possible. I intend to do everything I can to make sure that is the case. For the full article go to: http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/11/17/202149.shtml
For more information go to the following websites: http://www.passion-movie.com/english/index.html
Hollywood Jesus http://www.hollywoodjesus.com/passion_about.htm
Unofficial Movie Site: http://www.sassiweb.it/thepassion/
To view scenes from the Movie Click on: http://www.christiancinema.com/trailers/passion.html
++++++++++++++++++++
John Sumwalt will be offering a workshop on Vision Stories In The Bible and Today at The United Methodist Church in Osceola, Iowa, Saturday, February 28 from 10 AM - 2:00 PM. He will be preaching in the Sunday morning worship services on February 29.
The Bible is filled with many familiar stories of visions -- Moses and the burning bush, Samuel's call in the temple, Jacob's Ladder Dream, the angel's annunciation to Mary, and Paul's Damascus road experience, to name just a few.
John will tell modern vision stories and compare them to these familiar Biblical stories and some that are not so familiar.
Many modern Christians have had dramatic visions similar to those told in some of our favorite Bible stories. A recent study showed that as many as 44% of Americans have had some sort of vision experience. People didn't stop having visions after Biblical times. We just don't talk about them as much for fear people will think we are crazy. Sumwalt said, "Whenever I tell these stories people come up to me afterwards and tell me a vision story and then they always add, "This is the first time I've ever told anybody."
John will include vision stories by Joan of Arc, John Wesley, Pope Pius 12, King Hussein of Jordan, Presidents Harry Truman and Abraham Lincoln. He will also show excerpts of vision experiences from popular movies including The Messenger (Joan of Arc), The House of Spirits, Always, Field of Dreams, What Dreams May Come, and My Name Is Bill W (the story of the remarkable vision that led to the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous). For more information write to John at jsumwalt@naspa.net.
Books by John & Jo Sumwalt
Sharing Visions: Divine Revelations, Angels, and Holy Coincidences
Vision Stories: True Accounts of Visions, Angels, and Healing Miracles
Life Stories: A Study in Christian Decision Making
Lectionary Stories: Forty Tellable Tales for Cycle C
Lectionary Stories: Forty Tellable Tales for Cycle A
Lectionary Stories: Forty Tellable Tales for Cycle B
Lectionary Tales for the Pulpit: 62 Stories for Cycle B
**************
StoryShare, February 1, 2004, issue.
Copyright 2004 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., P.O. Box 4503, Lima, Ohio 45802-4503.
A Story To Live By:"Mystery"
Sharing Visions: "How Can I Do This?" Kai McClinton
Good Stories: "Love Never Ends" John Sumwalt
Scrap Pile: "The Passion" John Sumwalt
A Story To Live By
Mystery
"For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face.
Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been
fully known." 1 Corinthians 13:12
Patti Davis, the youngest daughter of former President Ronald Reagan, has spent much of her life trying to understand her elusive and distant father. Dutch, the 1999 biography about her father by Edmund Morris, gave her some new insights and peace.
"Dutch is dedicated to Christine Reagan, a half sister I never knew I had. Long before I was born she lived only nine hours -- long enough to have a name and an effect on her parents' lives. Christine was folded into history and hidden away. Until now. It says so much about my father. He lost a child, and I think that loss was more than his heart could bear and so it did what hearts often do -- shut down. Somewhere in the ache and silence and the ashes of a cremated child, he made sure he would never hurt like that again. No wonder he retreated from his children. No wonder he offered bewilderment instead of the demonstrative love my brother and sister and I wished for. I still don't fully understand my father. After all those years of exhaustive research, even Morris says the man is a mystery. But because of Morris' book, I have more clues, more threads to tie together. While I would gladly change many things in my past, I know now there is nothing more I could have done to know my father better. Morris has lifted some of the shadows for me. But others remain and always will. After reading Dutch, I am content to leave them there. (Patti Davis, The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, October 17, 1999. From a piece that first appeared in The Washington Post.)
"Our culture is attached to information. We want to figure everything out. Why are we here? Why does illness happen? Why to me? Not all these questions can be answered. Some things will always remain a mystery. This is difficult for us to accept. The human tendency is to seek information, to grasp for the concrete, to fill in the details. Knowledge is power, after all, and if we have it, we can help ourselves. Yet not all knowledge is accessible all the time...In the end... there are some things we simply can never know." (Mona Lisa Schulze, Awakening Intuition, pp 308, 310)
"The purpose of the mysteries of our lives may well be to lead us out of our dependence on human reasoning and its limited ability to account for why things are the way they are and to acceptance that Divine intelligence is actually in control of our lives. Divine intelligence works in ways that we cannot understand, yet we can come to understand that we cannot completely trust much else. Always remind yourself that you are living a mystery not solving one. (Caroline Myss, Why People Don't Heal and How They Can, Three Rivers Press, New York, 1997, p.177)
Sharing Visions
How Can I Do This?
Kai McClinton
Then I said, "Ah, Lord God! Truly I do not know how to speak,
for I am only a boy." But the Lord said to me, "Do not say, 'I am
only a boy,' for you shall go to all to whom I send you, and you
shall speak whatever I command you. Do not be afraid of them,
for I am with you to deliver you, says the Lord." Jeremiah 1:6-8
In 1995, at the age of 25, I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. I felt as if God had let me down, abandoned me. I thought that I was being punished. I fell into a depression for three years. Feeling and knowing that I wouldn't be able to walk well, or run, was very painful to me. And to top this off, God was calling me into the ministry.
"How can I do this?" I asked God over and over again. "How can I minister or visit the sick when I can hardly walk?"
God came to me with an answer that totally changed my thinking. In January of 1997, I was serving as a student pastor, and I went to a religious bookstore to buy supplies for the children at church. I gathered my items and walked to the cashier counter. A woman rang up my items, and she took my name for their mailing list. I thanked her, and as I walked away she ran after me and said, "You're not working because of you disability."
I looked at her, stunned. I had not told her that I had MS, or anything about my situation. She went on to tell me that she was blessed with a gift by which she could communicate with the spirit within another person. She said that as we were talking, her spirit was talking to my spirit, telling her of my anguish.
She said that God did not do this to me, that God was going to cure me, and that I was to continue working for the Lord. I stood there, in shock, smiling and speechless. I thanked her and told her I would continue to work for God. Then I left with tears of joy in my eyes, once again assured that God had not left me, even in my time of pain and frustration.
Six months later, I went back to that religious store and I asked the staff and the manager where this woman was. They said no woman fitting that description had ever worked there. I felt a chill go through me, because I knew I had seen an Angel of God, and I was given a promise from God. This is a promise I still believe in, for today, January 2003, I am walking without my cane, and I am much stronger. God is still in the healing business. Praise the Lord!
Kai McClinton is a native of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who heeded the call to ministry in 1996, graduated from Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in 1999, and is pastor of Solomon Community Temple United Methodist Church in Milwaukee. This story first appeared in Sharing Visions: Divine Revelations, Angels and Holy Coincidences, John E. Sumwalt, Editor, CSS Publishing, Lima, Ohio, 2003.
Good Stories
Love Never Ends
John Sumwalt
Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful
or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is
not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrong-doing,
but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, hopes all things,
endures all things. Love never ends.... I Corinthians 13:4-8a
The boy didn't know what to do. Dad was drunk again. Mom was at work. How was he going to get to the game? Coach said he was going to start him at forward again tonight. It was his big opportunity to win a permanent spot in the starting line-up. Mom had forbidden him to drive the pickup until he got his driver's license. He would have to take the snowmobile. There was no other way. If he cut across the lake and followed the ditch along the back road into town he would save 20 minutes and almost make it on time. He put on his down leggings and coat, pushed the snowmobile out of the garage, started the engine, jumped onto the seat, edged slowly down the hill in the backyard and then out onto the ice. It appeared to be solid all the way across. He opened up the throttle and felt the power of the machine as it surged beneath him, thrusting him out over the hard level surface. He hunched himself down behind the windshield. The night air was bitter cold on his face, but he liked the feel of it. This must be what it feels like to pilot a jet, he thought to himself as his craft began to pick up speed. He didn't see the hole in the ice until it was too late. It was too wide to swerve around and he was going too fast to stop. His last thoughts were of the team gathered for the game -- and of his mom coming home alone in the dark. What would she do without him?
When the woman came into the house she found her husband asleep in his usual spot on the couch. There were empty bottles all around, and she could smell the beer on his breath, so she didn't try to wake him. Her son was nowhere to be seen. Where could he be? The game would have been over hours ago. There was a message on the answering machine. It was the coach asking why Jimmy hadn't been at the game. That's when she really began to worry. She went outside to look for him and quickly spotted the snowmobile tracks leading down to the lake. She knew what had happened before she walked out onto the ice, and it was in that terrible, excruciating moment that she made up her mind to do what she knew she should have done years before. She waited to tell him until the day after the funeral. He pleaded with her to stay, as he had always done before, and said that he would stop drinking and go into the treatment program. And then he cried, as he always did, and told her he couldn't live without her. But she didn't listen this time. "I can't help you," she said. "I thought I could, but I can't. And now Jimmy is dead because I haven't been strong enough to leave you." Then she picked up the phone and called her brother, and he came with his pickup truck and helped her move her things to the apartment she had rented in town.
The man drank three beers after his wife left and then walked out onto the ice to the hole where his son had died. He fully intended to end his life there, too, but he couldn't bring himself to do it. Something inside of him said no. He walked back to the house, got into the pickup and drove straight to the treatment center in town, climbed up the steps of the front entrance and rang the bell. When they opened the door to let him in, he said, "I don't know if there is any hope for me, but I have nowhere else to go."
Scrap Pile
The Passion of Christ
John Sumwalt
Mel Gibson's The Passion of Christ will open in theaters around the country on February 24. I have decided to invite members and friends of my congregation who plan to see the movie to go in groups led by members of the Church Staff and Bible Study teachers (see excerpts from our church newsletter below).
I must add that I am not eager to see this film. The focus on the graphic violence of the last hours of Jesus' life is not appealing. (Perhaps I will change my mind after I have seen it for myself.) I am waiting for the movie that shows as much detail about the resurrection. However, I know that many of my parishioners are going to see the film and it will be a good opportunity to talk about the meaning of Jesus' life. It may prove to be a good evangelism tool as some groups in the church are suggesting.
Joseph Shimex writes that he found the film both uplifting and distressing. "I thought about how I would feel if someone I knew had been forced to endure a gruesome death. I would want that fact to be remembered reverently, but I could not tolerate it being reproduced in detail." (The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, January 11, 2004. For the complete article click on: http://www.jsonline.com/news/editorials/jan04/198761.asp)
What is the movie about?
The Passion of Christ is a feature-length Hollywood movie capturing the last 12 hours of the life of Jesus of Nazareth. It is a vivid portrayal of His trial, condemnation, and brutal execution in and around Jerusalem. The movie, filmed in Aramaic, Latin, and Hebrew, artfully intertwines flashbacks to earlier episodes in Jesus' life, giving fuller meaning to His person, His sufferings, His relationships, and the message of His life to humanity.
Pope John-Paul said after viewing the movie, "It is as it was." Billy Graham wrote: "Every time I preach or speak about the Cross, the things I saw on the screen will be on my heart and mind." Lee Strobel said, "The movie will stun audiences and create an incredible appetite for people to know more about Jesus. I urge Christians to invite their spiritually-seeking friends to see this movie with them."
Not For Every One
The Passion of Christ contains graphic violence, suggestive violence and realism. It is a very realistic portrayal of the brutal crucifixion and flogging of Jesus. Because some viewers will be greatly disturbed by the shocking brutality and bloodiness of Jesus' beatings, they will be best advised not to see the film. The movie should not be viewed by children or youth under the age of 17. If you don't usually go to movies with blood and gore, don't go to this movie.
A Review of the Passion
These are excerpts from a review by Keith A Fournier
I really did not know what to expect. I was thrilled to have been invited to a private viewing of Mel Gibson's film The Passion, but I had also read all the cautious articles and spin. I arrived at the private viewing for The Passion, held in Washington, D.C., and greeted some familiar faces. The environment was typically Washingtonian, with people greeting you with a smile but seeming to look beyond you, having an agenda beyond the words.
The film was very briefly introduced, without fanfare, and then the room darkened. From the gripping opening scene in the Garden of Gethsemane, to the very human and tender portrayal of the earthly ministry of Jesus, through the betrayal, the arrest, the scourging, the way of the cross, the encounter with the thieves, the surrender on the Cross, until the final scene in the empty tomb, this was not simply a movie; it was an encounter, unlike anything I have ever experienced.
In addition to being a masterpiece of film-making and an artistic triumph, The Passion evoked more deep reflection, sorrow and emotional reaction within me than anything since my wedding, my ordination or the birth of my children. Frankly, I will never be the same.
When the film concluded, this "invitation only" gathering of "movers and shakers" in Washington, D.C., were shaking indeed, but this time from sobbing. I am not sure there was a dry eye in the place. The crowd that had been glad-handing before the film was now eerily silent. No one could speak, because words were woefully inadequate.
We had experienced a kind of art that is a rarity in life, the kind that makes heaven touch earth. One scene in the film has now been forever etched in my mind. A brutalized, wounded Jesus was soon to fall again, under the weight of the cross. His mother had made her way along the Via Dolorosa.
As she ran to him, she flashed back to a memory of Jesus as a child, falling in the dirt road outside of their home. Just as she reached, to protect him from the fall, she was now reaching to touch his wounded adult face. Jesus looked at her with intensely probing and passionately loving eyes (and at all of us through the screen) and said, "Behold, I make all things new."
These are words taken from the last book of the New Testament, the Book Of Revelations. Suddenly, the purpose of the pain was so clear and the wounds, that earlier in the film had been so difficult to see in His face, His back, indeed all over His body, became intensely beautiful. They had been borne, voluntarily, for love.
This is not a "Christian" film, in the sense that it will appeal only to those who identify themselves as followers of Jesus Christ. It is a deeply human, beautiful story that will deeply touch all men and women. ...It should be seen by as many people as possible. I intend to do everything I can to make sure that is the case. For the full article go to: http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/11/17/202149.shtml
For more information go to the following websites: http://www.passion-movie.com/english/index.html
Hollywood Jesus http://www.hollywoodjesus.com/passion_about.htm
Unofficial Movie Site: http://www.sassiweb.it/thepassion/
To view scenes from the Movie Click on: http://www.christiancinema.com/trailers/passion.html
++++++++++++++++++++
John Sumwalt will be offering a workshop on Vision Stories In The Bible and Today at The United Methodist Church in Osceola, Iowa, Saturday, February 28 from 10 AM - 2:00 PM. He will be preaching in the Sunday morning worship services on February 29.
The Bible is filled with many familiar stories of visions -- Moses and the burning bush, Samuel's call in the temple, Jacob's Ladder Dream, the angel's annunciation to Mary, and Paul's Damascus road experience, to name just a few.
John will tell modern vision stories and compare them to these familiar Biblical stories and some that are not so familiar.
Many modern Christians have had dramatic visions similar to those told in some of our favorite Bible stories. A recent study showed that as many as 44% of Americans have had some sort of vision experience. People didn't stop having visions after Biblical times. We just don't talk about them as much for fear people will think we are crazy. Sumwalt said, "Whenever I tell these stories people come up to me afterwards and tell me a vision story and then they always add, "This is the first time I've ever told anybody."
John will include vision stories by Joan of Arc, John Wesley, Pope Pius 12, King Hussein of Jordan, Presidents Harry Truman and Abraham Lincoln. He will also show excerpts of vision experiences from popular movies including The Messenger (Joan of Arc), The House of Spirits, Always, Field of Dreams, What Dreams May Come, and My Name Is Bill W (the story of the remarkable vision that led to the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous). For more information write to John at jsumwalt@naspa.net.
Books by John & Jo Sumwalt
Sharing Visions: Divine Revelations, Angels, and Holy Coincidences
Vision Stories: True Accounts of Visions, Angels, and Healing Miracles
Life Stories: A Study in Christian Decision Making
Lectionary Stories: Forty Tellable Tales for Cycle C
Lectionary Stories: Forty Tellable Tales for Cycle A
Lectionary Stories: Forty Tellable Tales for Cycle B
Lectionary Tales for the Pulpit: 62 Stories for Cycle B
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StoryShare, February 1, 2004, issue.
Copyright 2004 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., P.O. Box 4503, Lima, Ohio 45802-4503.
