©  Megan M. Ramer ~ 

Epiphany 2 ~ 

Isaiah 1:16-20 ~ 

Martin Luther King, Jr. Joint Service

 

Today I testify to Leymah Gbowee[1].

Leymah is a Liberian woman who played a significant role in ending a 15-year civil war.

This led to the election of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in Liberia,

the first African nation with a female president.

Later, Leymah would graduate from Eastern Mennonite University

with her master's degree in “conflict transformation and peacebuilding.”

And in 2011, she would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

 

But before all that,

Leymah was just a woman tired of seeing her country devastated by war,

she was a mother tired of seeing children recruited as child soldiers

to rape and terrorize other children and adults.

For a time, she took all her children and fled to Ghana

where she lived as a refugee.

But that was only temporary—

she knew she needed to go back and work for peace in her own country of Liberia.

 

When she returned to her home and her people,

Leymah began volunteering with a Trauma Healing and Reconciliation Program

run by a Lutheran church.

Soon she began applying her training in trauma healing and reconciliation

to trying to rehabilitate some of the ex-child soldiers of dictator Charles Taylor's army.

Not long after, she began to focus on rallying the women of Liberia

to stop the violence that was destroying their children.

 

Leymah began reading widely in the field of peacebuilding,

including Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder,

works by Martin Luther King Jr.,

Gandhi

and a Kenyan expert on conflict and reconciliation, Hizkias Assefa.

 

One night, she awoke from a dream where God had told her,

“Gather the women and pray for peace!”

So…she gathered women and prayed for peace!

She gathered Muslim and Christian women alike,

building an interfaith women’s peace movement.

At mosques, marketplaces and churches, they came with flyers that read:

“We are tired! We are tired of our children being killed!

We are tired of being raped!

Women, wake up—you have a voice in the peace process!”

 

And they did.

We don’t have time for all the details this morning,

but the Liberian war officially ended in large part due to the efforts of the women,

led by Leymah and others.

 

Leymah has said this about her emerging role as a peace activist:

“I didn't get there by myself…or anything I did as an individual,

but it was by the grace and mercy of God…He has held my hands.

In the most difficult of times, he has been there…

‘Order my steps in your ways, dear Lord,’

every day I wake up, that is my prayer,

because there's no way that anyone can take this journey as a peacebuilder,

as an agent of change in your community,

without having a sense of faith…

As I continue this journey in this life, I remind myself:

All that I am, all that I hope to be, is because of God.”

 

In an interview, Leymah stressed that with God accompanying you,

you can “rise up and do something to change your situation…

Don't wait for a Gandhi,” she advised,

“don't wait for a King, don't wait for a Mandela.

You are your own Mandela, you are your own Gandhi, you are your own King.”

 

Before Leymah Gbowee was a Nobel Peace Prize winner,

she was just a woman tired of violence.

In the violence and destruction that surrounds each of you,

how might you be called to witness to Christ’s peace?

How might you be called to renew—or make—a promise to the wellbeing of the whole Beloved Community?

How might we?

 

 

 

Martin Luther King, Jr. on the Beloved Community

 

In a 1957 newsletter, King described the purpose and goal of the newly formed Southern Christian Leadership Conference: “The ultimate aim of SCLC is to foster and create the ‘beloved community’ in America where brotherhood is a reality…SCLC works for integration. Our ultimate goal is genuine intergroup and interpersonal living—integration.”

 

In a 1967 Christmas Eve sermon preached at Ebeneezer Baptist Church just a few months before his death, King declared, “Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation…No individual can live alone; no nation can live alone…Now the judgment of God is upon us, and we must either learn to live together as brothers or we are all going to perish together as fools.”

 

And somewhere in the middle, King said, “An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.”

 

Isaiah 1:16-20

 

Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean;

remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes;

   cease to do evil,

         learn to do good;

   seek justice,

         rescue the oppressed,

   defend the orphan,

         plead for the widow.

 

Come now, let us argue it out, says the Lord: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be like snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool. If you are willing and obedient, you shall eat the good of the land; but if you refuse and rebel, you shall be devoured by the sword; for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.