It was one of those days when Bible stories came alive around me. Sunday morning I was driving to a colleague’s congregation in the countryside outside Zomba. He had asked me to preach and celebrate the Lord’s Supper in his little church of 150 people. We turned off the tarmac road onto a narrow dirt track that wound its ways around—and sometimes right through—fields and settlements. A few hundred meters off the road a lorry with the insignia of a Scandinavian government blazoned on its doors was parked under a blue gum tree. Large sacks of maize were being unloaded under the watchful eye of an overseer, as a crowd of people with small burlap sacks in hand formed an unruly line to get their share. Here, villagers’ fields are still a month away from harvest but the hunger has already come. Just a few nights before I read to my kids at bedtime of a world they had never known until we moved to Malawi.
“Then Egypt’s seven good years came to an end and the seven years of famine arrived, just as Joseph had said….As the famine got worse all over the country, Joseph opened the storehouses and sold emergency supplies to the Egyptians. The famine was very bad. Soon the whole world was coming to buy supplies from Joseph” (Genesis 41:53-57).
Sundown over the Lower Shire Valley
Our pickup truck forded a small creek, two young boys ran in front, driving a dozen goats down to the water. One of them abruptly stopped, turned and scampered back to poke his stick at a kid that was struggling to keep up. So that’s what a good shepherd does, I thought to myself. His rod and staff they comfort me. We arrived at the brick church. Tombstones were scattered around the church, partly covered by long grass. A few small mossy stones showed where children had been laid to rest. One-year old. Two-year old. Three-year old. “No more babies dying in the cradle, or old people who don’t enjoy a full lifetime,” spoke the prophet. “One–hundredth birthdays will be considered normal––anything less will seem like a cheat” (Isaiah 65:20). Folks in central Africa are still waiting for this to come true.
Storm builds over Zomba at the end of the rainy season
The worship service began and I preached via an interpreter. I really did try my best but, as usual, my jokes were met with silence but the congregation chuckled at all the wrong places. Thank God that his presence and power can bind the pulpit and the pew, however different the people in them they may be! During the Lord’s Supper the congregation droned in Chichewa: “behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.” I thought of the goat carcass I’d just seen hanging in a kiosk at the highway turnoff. Freshly slaughtered, blood was still draining from its throat as the butcher quickly skinned it amidst a swarm of flies. Is this gore what the Bible means when it talks of the “lamb of God” and not the fluffy white lamb I’ve had in my head since childhood? After the service I spoke to an old man who told me that he had a son about the same age as me. He shook his head sadly. A few years earlier his son had rented out the fields his father had left him then hightailed it across a few borders to South Africa. He hadn’t been seen since. We drove back to Zomba with the radio news full off the latest scandal (called “Cashgate”) involving high-ranking government officials and a whole lot of disappeared aid and development money. Crooked politicians and helpless widows; women at the well; famine and food handouts; good shepherds and lost sheep. Sometimes Malawi feels like the days of Israel. A land where grey haired fathers sit on the frontstep and wait for their prodigal sons to come back from Johannesburg.
