5th Sunday in Lent
Texts: John 11:1-45;
Romans 8:6-11
YouTube: https://youtu.be/bH26AZTyvxY
Sermon Take-Home Notes
Excerpt Page from John Dear
CALLING HUMANITY OUT OF ITS NATIONALIST ENTOMBMENT
The story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead holds a treasure chest of meaning. Little things, like ‘why is it that Jesus wept after this long build-up where he’s clearly confident that he’s going to raise Lazarus from the dead?’ Why is he weeping? I have more about this in today’s Excerpt Page from John Dear, which I think you’ll find both challenging and inspiring.
First and foremost in meaning, this story provides a preview for God raising Jesus from the dead, which we celebrate in two weeks. But also, in following John Dear’s book reading the Gospel of John through the lens of this story,1 we have talked about Lazarus representing all of humanity. With our cultures still seemingly so dependent on the use of deadly violence, we’ve talked about this story as God inviting us to step out of the tomb of our deadly cultures. Paul is really serious about this, too, in our Second Reading for today. Right? He talks about the ‘mindset of the Flesh is Death.’2 When Jesus commands Lazarus to come out of the tomb, he is also urging the rest of humanity to follow him in trusting God’s power of life. He is inviting us to trust in the power of love to stand against the deadly powers of violence. Our nationalistic cultures, which have dominated our governance for millennia, cause us to believe in violence to meet violence. Jesus came to help us believe in the power of love to meet the deadly powers of violence. He calls us out of the tombs of our cultures founded on death.
In the latter half of the book, John Dear turns to telling stories of people who did answer Jesus’ call to come out of the tomb, believing in God’s power of love, the power of life itself. There’re many stories he tells, but one of the stories he tells is near and dear to my heart. It’s the story of how the women of Liberia Africa won the peace after a dozen years of a brutal civil war. I have the basic details of that war in your Sermon Notes.
Next weekend, Ellen and I are going to visit our youngest son in Washington, DC. We adopted he and his older brother from an orphanage in Liberia in 2005, less than two years after the peace was won. But they had been born during that war. Our youngest son was born in 2001 and so doesn’t remember much. But the older of our adopted sons remembers things like walking through fields of dead bodies, fleeing their village to hide out in the rain forests for weeks, and having an automatic rifle held to his head. The people of Liberia were entombed in the violence of a civil war until the women of Liberia rose up to say, “Enough!”3
And a leader emerged: Leymah Gbowee, courageous and articulate. Her only credentials beyond an associate degree in social work from a Lutheran college, was her strong faith in Jesus’ way of nonviolence.4 Together the women declared themselves sick of war, sick of rape, sick of starving. They wanted peace. And, against conventional wisdom, they worked for it nonviolently.
In June 2002, Leymah Gbowee had a dream. In it, she invited the women of Liberia to come to a church and there discuss how they might make peace. She awoke and pondered the matter and set about to make that dream come true. She issued the invitation and hundreds turned out. With them, she founded the Women’s Peace Movement. Her call became the voice of Jesus crying out loudly, “Lazarus, come forth.”
Their first hurdle was to face their own potential divisions. Originally their name was to be the Christian Women’s Initiative. But a Muslim woman objected to the name. Here was a critical moment: What to do? Leymah quickly settled matters. She posed a question, a kind of a koan: “Does a bullet know a Christian from a Muslim?” The question pierced deep and swept aside their differences. They realized, in their common losses, they were one. And overwhelmingly Muslim women were embraced as sisters. The struggle was on.
They started off modestly, doing what they could. They prayed and fasted. Still, the killing went on. Rebels and warlords rampaged in the countryside; Charles Taylor’s death squads rampaged in the city. Everyone everywhere was terrorized. And in March 2003, the violence surged. Rebels went on a wide spree of rape, torture, and murder. And thousands fled to Monrovia, the capital, and found asylum of sorts in makeshift refugee camps.
In April 2003 the women organized a rally and asked the woman who ran the Catholic radio station to broadcast it. The organizers weren’t sure what to do, so they opened their Bibles and read from Esther, heroine to her own people. The Liberian women were emboldened to do the same and fashioned a modest plan. Why not wear white, symbol of peace, and sit near the fish market, where Charles Taylor often passed in his limousine? The sit-in was attended by twenty-four hundred women — the first time in their history that Christian and Muslim women had publicly acted together. They sang and chanted: “We are tired of suffering, we are tired of rape, we are tired of war. We want peace.” Their banner read: “The women of Liberia want peace now.”
It was a gesture that put their lives at risk. They dared contest Liberia’s perpetrators of violence. That is, the men. “We knew we were going to get killed,” one woman says, “but by taking this action, we thought, at least we will have died for peace.”
As the week passed, the women began to befriend one another and build community; they derived from each other a sense of strength. And they grew creative: What tactics might they employ to press their demands? One tactic they settled on goes back to ancient Greek literature — to Aristophanes: No sexual relations with their husbands until the war ends. As one woman later said, “All our husbands began to pray with us for an end to the war.” They also went to the Parliament building, sat down, and there demanded that all sides negotiate. Thousands of women came. And the contagion swept the city. More and more came, women marching in droves, waving signs and singing for peace.
Finally shamed, Charles Taylor agreed to a meeting. The occasion marks one of the great nonviolent confrontations in recent history. On April 23, 2003, with five hundred women behind her and lordly Taylor enthroned on a chair on the stage, the heroine Leymah Gbowee presented the women’s case. The speech shone with rhetorical brilliance and it concluded powerfully: “The women of Liberia are tired of war. We are tired of running; we are tired of begging for food; we are tired of our children being raped. We want a future for our children.” Taylor listened impassively — and then conceded to peace talks.
A date was set, June 4, 2003; the place, nearby Accra, Ghana. The two factions would meet face to face. The women, however, were incredulous. They knew enough that there would be no progress unless they were there. So they appealed for funds to make the trip. Money rolled in from all over the nation, enough to fund a delegation of hundreds. When deliberations got underway, the women were there, outside the doors, dressed in white. Quite a scene: inside, murderers and marauders, and on the street, the implacable women demanding peace. “We are your conscience,” they said.
The peace talks got underway but then stalled. And the women got frustrated. “What is this, a vacation?” they complained. To make a longer story short: after weeks of the men stalling, the delegation of women jammed themselves into the corridors of the negotiating place, packed so tightly that essentially they were locking the men in the room. When a warlord appeared at the door, trying to pass by, Leymah ordered: “Go back in there and sit down. If you were a real man, you wouldn’t be killing your people. That’s why I have to treat you like a boy. Go back and sit down and negotiate peace!”
Slowly, the tide turned. The United Nations were involved, and on August 11, 2003, Taylor left for Nigeria, setting off days of celebrations. But the women knew their work was not over. A transitional government was put into place; then, in January 2006 the general elections took place, electing Ellen Johnson Sirleaf as President, the first woman in all of Africa ever elected to such high office.
Reflecting years later in the powerful documentary film Pray the Devil Back to Hell,5 Leymah Gbowee said: “We stepped out and did the unimaginable.” Indeed they did. And in doing the unimaginable, they have so much to teach us. About faith and nonviolence, prayer and struggle. About giving our lives for justice and disarmament. About strength, power, and fearlessness. The only resource they had — the power of nonviolence, God’s power of love. Together they rolled away the stone, called their people forth, and let them live in peace. Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, March 22, 2026
YouTube: https://youtu.be/bH26AZTyvxY
Sermon Take-Home Notes
Excerpt Page from John Dear
Notes
1. John Dear, Lazarus, Come Forth!: How Jesus Confronts the Culture of Death and Invites Us into the New Life of Peace (Orbis Books, 2011).
2. Many translations, e.g., the NRSVue, translate this verse with “set” as a verb: “To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace (NRSVue).” But the Greek is strangely missing any verbs in the sentence: to gar phronēma tēs sarkos thanatos, to de phronēma tou pneumatos zōē kai eirēnē. A key here is that phronēma is a noun, “mindset,” not a verb. Beverly Roberts Gaventa (Romans: A Commentary, The New Testament Library [Westminster John Knox, 2024], 226-27) cites usage in the ancient Greek world in which phronēma, “mindset,” implies partisanship. I would suggest translating it, then, as “group-think.” Here’s a literal rendering of the 8:6 with no verbs: For the group-think of the Flesh, Death; but the group-think of the Spirit, Life and Peace.
3. The remainder of the sermon follows, often word-for-word, John Dear’s way of telling the story. See the section in Lazarus, Come Forth! titled “The Women’s Revolution in Liberia,” pages 103-09.
4. For more of Leymah Gbowee’s story, see her book telling her own story, Mighty Be Our Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer, and Sex Changed a Nation at War (PublicAffairs, 2013).
5. Pray the Devil Back to Hell is a 72-minute documentary about the Liberian Civil War and how the peace was won, directed by Gini Reticker, released by Fork Films LLC in 2009.
