Thursday, April 29, 2004
Thursday, April 29, 2004
They went to him and woke him up, shouting, "Master, Master, we are perishing!"
And he woke up and rebuked the wind and the raging waves; they ceased, and there was a
calm.
(Luke 8.24
NRSV)
In that beautiful movie, OUT OF AFRICA, the question is asked in a different way. A young Danish woman named Karen Blixen goes to Kenya. There she marries a man she hardly knows. She plants a coffee plantation. For a while, paradise belongs to Karen Blixen. Then, after about fifteen years of hard labor, within the span of a few months she loses it all. She loses her health, her lover, her friend, her coffee crop and her farm, and finally she loses her identity. Everything she lived for has been taken away from her. Suddenly, she is confronted with the meaninglessness of it all, and she asks, "If I know a song for Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the field and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Would the air over the plain quiver with a color that I had had on? Or the children invent a game in which my name was? Or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me? Or would the eagles of the hills look out for me?" She gives her life to Africa, but when she's gone, Africa doesn't remember. There's nothing there that remembers her, though she remembers it.
Do my griefs and heartaches matter? That is the question she is asking. Is there anyone there who sees and understands? Teacher, do you not care that we perish?
The answer is yes. Jesus calms the storm.
Dear God, even in the worst of times, you are there for our good to draw us close to you. Amen.
