A Distant Grief

A Distant Grief

By F. Kefa Sempangi

(His dates: ?- , Copyright 1979, Publisher: G/L Publications; Regal Books Division)

(No notation) = Direct Quote, [P] = Paraphrase/Summary, and [Magee] = Magee Observations

[Magee] Introduction

Visited Uganda in 2007 – African Bible College – Spiritual Emphasis Week

Contents

Forward

Preface

1. The Fugitive Woman

2. Stitching: Save a Child

3. Are You Being Broken?

4. Take Us Too!

5. Jolly Joe is Here!

6. Thunder in the Fire

7. You Are Burning Us

8. I Need a Vono Bed

9. Give Us the Gun!

10. Human Sorrow, a Distant Grief?

11. We Are Going to Kill You

12. I Hear Their Screams

13. Return to Amsterdam

14. We No Longer Follow Kefa

15. Standing in the Holy of Holies

16. Only Four Days Ago

17. Our First Tomorrow

Editor’s Postscript

Teaching Notes

Forward

Richard Halverson

Preface

Author

1. The Fugitive Woman

1962 – Independence

1962-1971 President Milton Obote

Amin “the champion of liberty”

“Welcome home to the freedom country!”

[P] The author began teaching art history at Makerere and met an impoverished woman with three children he had seen in fund-raising posters. People had given, but she received nothing. At first he was angry, but later convicted.

2. Stitching: Save a Child

[P] Dutch foundation provided help for the foundation of a children’s home in Kampala

For every child we were able to accept, twenty were turned away.

Penina (author’s wife): “The humble poor know a deep secret. They give from themselves, not from their surplus. They give from the abundance of their hearts.”

There is a giving to serve others and there is a giving to serve oneself. There is a giving to promote and a giving to dominate. But without love there is only paternalism and self-importance. There is only the giving of surplus, not the giving of special treasures.

3. Are You Being Broken?

1877 – Alexander Mackay – Scottish Presbyterian missionary and trained engineer

October 9, 1885, the first blood of Christian martyrs was shed in Uganda. In less than a year King Mwanga, the Moslem king of Baganda, had killed more than 40 Ugandan believers. Many of those victims were Christian page boys of the Baganda court who had refused to participate in the rites of sodomy.

Every time I met Mondo he would greet me with the threefold challenge:

“Are you repenting?

“Are you walking in the light?

“Are you being broken?”

Together we determined to make Christ the beginning and the end of all our expectations.

“Brothers and sisters, I fear there is too much brokenness here. We are walking too much in the light. We must remember that the devil will not stand for this.” He was silent for a moment. Then he trembled, and he spoke these words, “It is a frightening thing to be a child of God.”

4. Take Us Too!

Okelo was the first of many children to come to the Kijomanyi Home as a result of brutal killings by Amin’s soldiers.

I became convinced that the regime of Idi Amin was not merely tyrannical but demonic.

God taught me my own expendability.

5. Jolly Joe is Here!

[P] The story of Joe Kiwanuka’s conversion

6. Thunder in the Fire

[P] Battle with false gods

7. You Are Burning Us

[P] More battle with false gods

8. I Need a Vono Bed

A religion is true if it works, if it meets all the needs of the people.

9. Give Us the Gun!

[P] The story of a gentle elder who learned to trust God through the horror of an attack by some of Amin’s Nubian assasins

10. Human Sorrow, a Distant Grief?

There is a boundary beyond which human beings cannot comprehend evil in the world. There is a boundary beyond which everything is a senseless chasm. It is here in the nightmare of utter chaos that human feeling dies. It is here where death and terror seem to have full dominion, that even the deepest of human sorrows becomes a distant grief.

11. We Are Going to Kill You

We have not come for a church service. We have come to hear the Word of God! Go rest yourself and come back to preach again!

I do not need to plead my own cause. I am a dead man already. My life is dead and hidden in Christ. It is your lives which are in danger, you are dead in your sins. I will pray to God that after you have killed me, He will spare you from eternal destruction.

In that moment, with death so near, it was not my sermon that gave me courage, or an idea from Scripture. It was Jesus Christ, the living Lord.

12. I Hear Their Screams

Every night I go to bed and I see the faces of the people I have killed – (converted Nubian assassin)

13. Return to Amsterdam

[P] Studies in Amsterdam – urged by friends not to return to Uganda, but went ahead anyway.

14. We No Longer Follow Kefa

[P] In hiding in Uganda but in grave danger

15. Standing in the Holy of Holies

[P] Escape from Uganda after being betrayed to the authorities by one of the elders

16. Only Four Days Ago

[P] Back in Holland after only four days. They were not safe in Kenya because of the Nubian assassins in that country who would capture targeted Uganda refugees and return them to prison and death in Uganda. Example: Jolly Joe – He was not safe in Kenya. The account of His grace-filled but brutal death with Amin himself involved is a story of demonic brutality and Christ-like grace. This is the confrontation of the cross.

17. Our First Tomorrow

[P] Life at Westminster in Philadelphia… the simple idea that tomorrow I will go shopping brought tears to the eyes of a family that had lived only with fear. Yet there was a distance from God that had to be addressed. It was a movement away from the life of a dependant child of God into the posture of a more detached debater examining theological controversies…. So much suffering. Yet God is not detached. He is with us and is working out good purposes.

Editor’s Postscript

[P] At the writing of this book Amin was still in power, and the foundation started from their apartment in Philadelphia was helping Ugandan refugees in Kenya

[Magee] Closing Thoughts:

1. There is an ugly power to evil that is so very shocking and jarring. Why would human beings do the things that they did in Uganda under Amin?

2. It is within such a setting that the power of redemption is also seen.

3. The Lord is not far away from us in our suffering.

4. This world cannot be the end of our story.

5. Our life is not just a forum for Christian debate in a self-justifying insistence to be right. Our pursuit of doctrine needs to be about God and about others, and not about us. I am struck by something I thought about when I was in Uganda: The church in the west needs African ministers who care not only about Western immorality, but also Western heresy. They need to do this not to prove that they are right, but as an act of love toward God and toward the church in the West.

6. There is a detachment in the life of prayer in our world of comfort that is its own demonic problem.

7. The confrontation of the cross in the Christian life under oppression – Demonic brutality and Christ-like grace.