Sabra: Mother of Pearl, Father of Pearls an Epic Poem

By Xlibris US

This is a first person, as if, rendition of the New Covenant book of Mark from a perspective, a view not The View, but a view of the Unseen Substance of our most precious Faith.
It's viewpoint is through Jesus' eyes because where the Holy Spirit is Lord, there is Liberty; and so I take the Liberty to let His Word dwell richly in me and flow through me as through the bed of a stream in a land of milk and honey, in a land of grain and new wine, the same Mystery that is in you if Christ dwells in your heart by faith, if the Word-made-flesh abides with you. It is as a fire shut up in my bones, and herein its tongues have licked and have kissed the surface of that which I see.
Without His Call and His Equipping, His ever-present Help, I could have done nothing, and could not have sat down, day by day, morning by morning and evening by evening and taken up the Waterman He provided at The Chalice Thrift Shop, the the pen or a ready writer and given voice to the Voice that sings in me to you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 24, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499075977

Book preview

Copyright © 2014 by Edward A. Vinson.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the Holy Bible, King James Version (Authorized Version). First published in 1611. Quoted from the KJV Classic Reference Bible, Copyright © 1983 by The Zondervan Corporation.

Rev. date: 09/23/2014

Xlibris LLC

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

535851

Contents

What Others Have Said About E.A. Vinson’s Writings

Acknowledgement

Introduction

Notes On the Cover

Preface

Through Jesus’s Eyes    -The Magnum Dream-

Chapter    1.

Chapter    2.

Chapter    3.

Chapter    4.

Chapter    5.

Chapter    6.

Chapter    7.

Chapter    8.

Chapter    9.

Chapter    10.

Chapter    11.

Chapter    12.

Chapter    13.

Chapter    14.

Chapter    15.

Chapter    16.

Epilogue    -Passover 2014- (The First Blood Moon)

What Others Have Said About

E.A. Vinson’s Writings

Thanks so much for these fresh winds of the Spirit.

–Ros. Hershkovitz, Israeli Psalmist

What poetic and devotional gifting the Lord has given you.

–Bertha & Paul S., YWAM leaders

I thank God that there are still psalmists who can deliver the very essence and character of God … I see you as a bubbling brook whose waters flow from the springs on Mt. Zion. The waters that flow through you are life-giving …

–Stephanie Berry, Irish Worship Leader and Missionary

The writings were absolutely outstanding … What an uplifting expression the Lord has given unto you. Like the Psalmist David, in song and praise, you enter into His Gates and are able to speak real life thru poetry … Like the gentle breezes of April, so the words of your songs and poetry have a healing effect.

–Margie Minton, General Secretary,

United Christian Church and Ministerial Assn.

Thank you for your book of poems … Congratulations! … I deeply appreciate it.

–Ret. Gen. J. Curry

The poetry is very good, even for a poor benighted heathen like me.

–MHC, sailor

what treasures … your words leap off the page … The flow of words is always right.

–F. Morrisson, poet

Thank you for the attached poetry. As a daughter of Irish immigrants, I appreciate your words.

–M.M. Heckler, US Ambassador to Ireland

Your writings … evidence your exceptional assurance of God’s love, your faith and your desire to share this with others. You have captured all of this in your sea borne experiences which indeed have been rare but which few now living have been able to experience. Keep writing because you have a vital message to deliver.

–James A. Mackay, sailor, former US Congressman

Thank you, Ed, for your inspirational poems—Israel needs another great Psalmist.

–Dr. Ray L. Gannon, Assemblies of God, Missionary to Israel

I find your material and vision precious and worthwhile. You have a precious heart for the things of God.

–Daniel Juster, Tikkun Ministries

Ed’s poems inspired by the Lord have been lovingly put to song … This wonderful collection is sure to be a favorite of many … We highly recommend this prophetic CD.

–Review of I Have Heard your Cries by MessianicMusic.com

wow, the book was just wonderful. Thank God for his inspiration that makes man put it all together in print.

–V. Carter, reader

In every sense of the word these are inspirational and popular; that is, they have the kind of appeal which any reader of poetry would appreciate …

–Herb Francis, English Prof., Emory Univ.

I’ll be interested to see what comes of your fine efforts."

–Bill Dillingham, English Prof., Emory Univ.

Acknowledgement

Over many years, my soul has fed upon the Word. I have fed, inside, at depth, on many translations of the Book, the Bible, the Holy, God-Inspired Scriptures. I give thanks for ‘people of the Book’ who have lived and died for the Word and the spread of its Good Influence. I am thankful for the translations they have left us, freely given, as portions of an Inheritance, a New Inheritance from God. They have surrounded me and overflowed onto the Table God spreads for us to take and eat, to taste and see. Once a Seer prophesied over us, I see a picture of you surrounded my many books. And so I have been. To write for Me, to write for God, as some are called to do, we be seated with Christ in heavenly places and we must also pull up a chair at the Table where His Word is served and spread and shared by those who immerse themselves in giving us translations of the Bible. It is out of that rich, diverse fare, where East and West have met in one accord, that of my inmost being streams have bubbled up in me that have their source in the work of Bible translators. It is thus that, by the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, the Breath of God, the Ruach ha Kodesh, that morning by morning a fire ignites within these bones. In streams it has flowed out, in thanksgiving and in Imitation of Christ, and as a child, to imitate my Father Who is in heaven. I do this in memory of Him and of those who have gone before us and have been pioneers, and have made plain the way, made plain the vision of the Lord, that we, in our generations, may run with it – the Vision of His face that shines on us through words made flesh, through Word-made-flesh, and waters of His Word turned into Wine in such a marriage of our minds, from His, the Mind of Christ, from which I drink and have been satisfied, to thirst no more, yet daily thirst for more of Him and not forsake the Spring of Living Water, found.

Here, pause with me, and drink your fill.

Who has not walked a Trail of Tears,

from the Beginning, Sorrows known?

But God says this, "Arise and shine!

Your Light has come,

with Glory, risen

over you."

and

"Who are these who fly like clouds,

like doves to nests?

Surely the islands look to Me,"

thus says the Word,

the seamless garment of the Truth,

"to bring your sons back from afar,

your daughters from the ends of earth—

in honor of the LORD your God.

With splendor, He endows you thus"

as His and HIS alone,

in Love.

—from Isaiah 43:6 and 60:8 (paraphrased)

Introduction

This is why we need the tongues of poets …

Since New Testament scholarship is all but unanimous in its assertion that Mark was the first Gospel to be written, there has been a flood of articles, monographs, and books attempting to explain why Mark wrote. Despite the multitude of treatments the Gospel has received, however, there is a general consensus that one of the reasons Mark produced the first Gospel, if not the chief reason, was to make known to the reader what it means to have faith in Jesus. From Mark’s perspective, to believe in Jesus is to follow him and following Jesus is what discipleship is all about. Mark, therefore, is really the story of how people sometimes gloriously triumphed, and sometimes dismally failed, in their efforts to walk the road that Jesus so clearly walked before them.

But it is one thing to objectively and academically dissect Mark’s account of what it means to be a genuine disciple and something very different to read Mark’s book and react to it on the basis of nothing other than how it personally and subjectively gets under our skin. This, for me, is the value of what you are about to experience.

By the time I had completed my doctoral dissertation on the women in Mark’s Gospel, I had read more than 500 scholarly works on Mark. While I valued many of these works, either because they excited my intellectual curiosity, or especially because they buttressed the thesis I was attempting to set forth, only a few made me stop and feel what it means to be a follower of Jesus. And this, I believe, is not just a danger for academics, pastors, and other Christian professionals, it is a threat for every believer. Any person who has been a follower of Jesus for a while, and who has read the New Testament, can talk about what it means to be a disciple in a very objective and even detached way. We easily talk about how the original disciples demonstrated their ignorance and critically analyze their failures, we talk about what the discipleship passages actually mean, even to the extent of defining words in the original Hebrew or Greek, we echo what the great theologians and preachers have said about discipleship in the past, but what we don’t talk about is how all this makes us feel. It is amazing how much feeling is packed into the Gospel of Mark (just think about Jesus’ encounter with the Gerasene demoniac in chapter five or his encounter with the Syro-Phoenician woman in chapter seven), and yet when we read and study Mark we do all we can to cleanse our experience of every vestige of emotion.

That is why we need the tongues of poets and the voices of wild, unhindered, and even uncivilized prophets to shout aloud all the feelings that a Gospel like this ought to draw out of us. This is what our brother, Ed Vinson, has done for us. He has read and heard Mark, not with the intention of explaining it, but with the willingness to feel it in his bones. Take, for example, his treatment of chapter seven where Jesus must face the scrutiny of the Pharisees and teachers of the law who are riled up over the issue of the disciples eating with unwashed hands. Seldom do we imagine what Jesus must have thought when the minds he created were feverishly engaged in an attempt to find justification for rejecting him. But Jesus, Ed reminds us, understood better than anyone the poison that lodges within religious spirits. What they teach is BS, which, is short for Beelzebul. The greatest danger with religious spirits is that they build too much of what man builds apart from God. They do not want Jesus in their hearts because they do not want him in their religious stuff. They claim to care about the Law, but they are, in reality, a law unto themselves, and what they promote is rules on top of rules, motivated by a fear that leads only to slavery.

As chapter seven allows us to listen in on what Jesus thought of those who opposed him, chapter eleven shows us how Jesus responded to those who appeared to be his supporters. How would Jesus have seen that parade which the crowd viewed as an announcement of coming liberty from Rome, but which Jesus saw as the beginning of his suffering? In the author’s words,

The sound of chanting, welcoming, arose

but did not blunt

awareness of the way

ahead

that lay in wait

with Sorrows

that would crush my soul.

The sound of chanting

rose.

I rode .…

But if Mark is about what it means to be a disciple, why not focus on the responses of those who followed Jesus rather than looking at the Gospel story through the eyes of Jesus? The answer has to do with discipleship. Being a disciple is not so much what we do, but what Jesus first did as he walked the road before us. Our responses can only be genuine if they arise from our understanding of what he loved and sought to do with his life. By the same token, our responses will be inauthentic if they arise only from our own passions and desires. That’s why the more we get to know Jesus, the more we find it possible to actually follow him. The Gospel of Mark records the truth of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus the Christ, but in that story is every emotion and feeling known to human existence, and some that transcend human existence because they are the feelings and passions of the God-man. Ed’s purpose in writing is obviously to feel these things in himself and express them in such a way as to help the reader feel them as well. When was the last time you read the Gospel and sensed sweetness and light, or blood and thunder? This is your chance.

Pastor Kevin Goins, PhD

First Alliance Church

Atlanta, Georgia

Notes On the Cover

In the late 90’s we were back in the Cook Islands, S. Pacific, on Rarotonga where I had been shipwrecked in my youth in 1964 on board the Brigantine YANKEE which had often been featured in the National Geographic Magazine for her sailing voyages around the world with young people on board. For me that trip was a literal dream come true.

Some forty years later, returning to the place of my first child’s birth, my wife and I were walking along the road and I had picked her a Tahitian Gardenia, a Tiara Maori, to put in her hair, the kind of flowers with which family had crowned us when we got off the plane. We continued on to a shop run by the family of a Jewish Holocaust survivor. It was just inland, next to the beach, where I had waded ashore after the shipwreck.

There, in a locked glass cabinet, was the carved pearl shell the photo of which is on the cover. In the mother-of-pearl, the face of Jesus leapt out at me. I just knew who it was although there was no sign to say so. Under the Influence of the Excellence of the Holy Spirit, I began to quietly weep. And the Lord began speaking to me. These were his silent Words of Life: ‘When I return, I will not wear a crown of thorns. I will be wearing a crown of blossoms, the blossoms of my Loving-Kindness with which I have crowned you in life. I will be crowned with many crowns; yours will be one of them.’

The carving was not for sale, but I persuaded the owner to sell it to me anyway. And, sure enough, I found the Cook Islander who had done the carving. He is a relative of my son-in-law’s Cook Island family and a strong Christian leader. And, it was the face of Jesus, the Face of God Who shines on us with tender mercies new each dawn.

On the back, rough side of the shell I had him carve Words from the Book of Revelation, about the elders who cast their crowns before the throne, saying, Thou art worthy, 0 Lord, to receive glory and honor and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created. And, as in Revelation 4:3, you can see in the mother-of-pearl a rainbow, resembling an emerald". And yes, as we sing,