On Wings of Grace

We’ve always had someone who believed in us.  If we hadn’t, we wouldn’t have made it this far through all the trials and tribulations of this life.  We wouldn’t have made anything of ourselves.

As a hymn puts it, “Blessed are the feet of those who bring glad tidings.”  Messengers of Grace.  On such wings we are buyoed up and develop our wings.  In scripture such are angelos, angels in English.  Messengers.

Though my father thought I’d never amount to anything, I had an English teacher in the eleventh grade, Mrs. Reiner, who had high hopes for me.

I remember one day in her class.  As usual I hadn’t done the reading.  When called upon, I had nothing to say.  And, as usual, I felt like a complete dolt.  As the class was leaving after the bell had rung, Mrs. Reiner pulled me aside.  She gently said, “John, I know you are capable of much more than what you’re doing.”

That was it.  As simple and as sincerely as that.  I knew deep down, she actually meant it.  She was the first teacher who had  believed in me.  Knew that I was capable of so much more.  Delivered by a blessed messenger of God.

It was later in my senior year, based on my remembered encouragement of her words, that I signed up for a class in world literature.  And loved it.  I actually think I would have lived up to her expectations.

Mrs. Reiner was the messenger of good news, of possibility I needed at that point in my life.

Jonah is such a messenger to ancient city of Ninevah.  I suspect his admonishments were not quite so gentle as those of Mrs. Reiner.  I suspect that he breathed fire, smoke and thunder on the wickedness of that people. 

And they listened.  And amended their evil ways.  God did not destroy that city as Jonah had said God would.  God did not bring calamity down on those wayward people.

Now, Jonah being very human, felt he had been dissed by God.  He feels himself to be in such disgrace that he would rather die. 

Jonah retreats to a barren hill to sulk.  Still waiting to see if God would destroy that city.  While he stews, a bush grows up to shade him from the scorching sun.  Grows up almost overnight and was a great comfor to Jonah as he sat under its shade.

But in a short while God appointed a worm to attack the bush.  It died and God took command of the elements.

“God prepared a sultry east wind,and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint and asked that he might die.  He said, ‘It is better for me to die than to live.’” 

“But God said to Jonah, ‘Is it right for you to be angry about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night.  And should I not be concerned about Ninevah, that great city, in which there are more than anhundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right from their left, and also many animals?”

Some of God’s messengers cannot abide such freely given Grace.  All so human.  In their petulence they actually hope God will smite the wrong-doers with the threatened sword.  Smite them dead to the very last one.

Again and again God sends messengers on the wings of Grace.  And sometimes we actually heed their warmings.  Live up to their encouragement.  God’s word to the Ninevites?  “You can do better than this.  Now, shape up!”

The Results?  There’s a “Wideness in God’s Mercy” which Jonah can’t comprehend or accept.

In the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard, hired at different hours of the day yet all paid the same generous wage, the first hired complained about the master’s extravagance.  Grace freely abounding.  Same Wideness.  In parable after parable, Jesus is the messenger with Wings of such Mercy and Grace.

Leymah Gbowee has been such a messenge of Grace to the nation of Liberia which had roiled in violence and turmoil since Samuel Doe overthrew the government of William Tolbert, the last Americo-Liberian president – a long line of Americo-Liberians dating from the arrival of the first American slaves on Liberia’s shores.

President Tolbert and most of his family and administration were publically executed on a beach, “murdered in front of screaming crowds” by machine gun fire.

Unrest again seized the nation when the forces of Charles Taylor, an army sergeant in bloody fighting overthrew Samuel Doe and brutally murdered him after hours of torture.  The army of Taylor’s ragtag boy souldiers raped and pillaged Liberia for months on end.  The full contagion of hell was soon to be unleashed on that impoverished nation.

The slaughter continued for months on end as bands of teenage boys roved the streets with AK-47s shooting at anyone and anything they took a fancy to destroy.  As looting had emptied virtually all the markets, hunger was rife.  Many now faced starvation.

Leymah witnessed one atrocity after another as the violence consumed Monrovia.  When one armed boy at a checkpoint didn’t like the sight of a woman nursing her baby, he grabbed her and with a knife sliced off her breast. 

Mighty be our Powers is Leylah’s powerful and redeeming story[1]

When thousands, including Leymah Gbowees’s family had taken refuge in the main Lutheran church in Monrovia, Taylor’s boy-soldiers raped and hacked to death or shot the hundreds taking refuge in that church.  Fortunately, Leymah’s family had left only days earlier.  U.S. Marines just stood by and did nothing to prevent the slaughter.

Finding herself in an abusive relationship with Daniel, a man who didn’t respect her, Leymah lost all self confidence.  Beating and shouted insults went on endlessly.  “Stupid, stupid, stupid.”  He used it so often that even her children picked it up and called her that.

Attempting to keep her three children alive and pregnant with a fourth, the walls had closed in.  Depression overwhelmed her.  Virtually disowned by her own father as just a “baby machine,” and unable to provide food for herself or her children, Leymah shut down.

Leymah and Daniel were now living with her parents as looters had destroyed her former house, and pretty much everything else in the old neighborhood.

One evening her mother asked her the question she had been dreading.  Gently, she asked, “Leymah, what are you want to do with your life”[2]

“’Let me tell you something,’ she said.  ‘I’ve endured those nights of listening to your dad say terrible things about what you’ve become.  But I know that’s not who you are, and I know you can do better,  I want to make a vow to you.  If you decide you want to do something for yorself, if you decide to go back to school—I will tie my waist.”  By now I couldn’t see the beauty of that night, because my tears were flowing.

“If an African woman tells you she will tie her waist, it means she will do anything for you, give you everything she has.  ‘I will support you Leymah.  I wil take care of your kids.  Until you make something of your life.’”[3]

Previously she had been a social worker at the local office in Monrovia of Lutheran World Federation.  Her mother, speaking those precious words of Grace and faith in her daugher were the wings on which Lehmah’s

courage would rise.  Yes, as upon eagle’s wings.  That unbounded faith of her mother gave her the courage to approach the director she had previously known before the carnage that had pulled Liberia into the darkest of nights.

The director, Tunde, this gentle man, also expressed an unbounded faith in Leymah.  When she entered his office, he rejoiced.  “I’ve been asking people about you.”  When he saw her one day with a bruised arm and she let him know that Daniel had done that, he urged her to leave that abusive relationship.

Later, when she told Tunde that she had finally left Daniel, Tunde beamed,  “Good for you.  Don’t worry, you’ll find someone else one day.”  Right now, she didn’t want anyone else.

She found that Tunde was easy to talk with.  He was polite and respectful and valued her ideas and opinions.  And while he had grown up in an abusive house and bore the scars of whippings, he was the gentlest person she had ever met.  He offered encourage that chipped away at her feelings of inferiority, of being stupid and useless.

When she said she certainly couldn’t go back to school as he kept encouraging her to do, he lifted her confidence in herself insisting. “Yes, you can.”  “I’ve lost my old abilities,” Leymah countered.  Tunde again insisted, “No you haven’t…You have too much potential.  Don’t throw it away.  You know this isn’t the life you want for yourself.”  She was afraid, but deep down she knew Tunde was right.  Actually, before the war she had been a very good student.  Long, long ago.

When her fourth child was about to arrive, Leymah was scared and confided to Tunde how vulnerable she felt.  So trapped. He responded, “What if I told you thatI would be there for you and this child?  What would you say?”[4]

“I would say that you’re lying.  Men are not to be trusted.”

Yet on delivery day, there he was.  He had rushed to her part of the city, forgetting to take anything with him that he might need.  “I was so excited,” he exclaimed.

“’This gentle giant,’ I thought.  ‘This was someone I could love.’”  Wings of Grace.  Wings of Mercy.

Leymah did go back to school and earn her A.A. degree.  She would go on to found an army of women of faith that would stare down Taylor’s maurading boy souldiers.  God’s Grace working through Leymah, the people who encouraged and suppored her.  Such abounding Grace would eventualy bring peace to Liberia through the united effort of millions of Liberian women.  But more about that later.

But here’s the secret.  Each of us has the same promise of being messengers of Mercy and Grace.  It’s our baptismal vow.  Each of us daily is present with opportunities to bring hope and promise to be bearers of Mercy on Wings of Grace.  If your life has been annointed by the Spirit, you have been given the gift to bring comfor, to bring restoration, to bring redemption.  If not you, who else?

Grace abides at the food banks where we provide veggies and fruit.  Grace happens when you gave a fiver to the fellow by the freeway, and then  demanded to know why is he there.  And what will we do about it?  And vote for folks asking that very same question, folks who could do a lot about it.  Grace happens when you give encouragement to a grandchild, or just sit down and listen to them with an open heart.

Grace descends on healing wings in manifold ways.  Ways that the Spirit opens to our imaginations.  Call a friend.  Be a friend.  Visit a shut-in can do wonders for them and for your soul.  Work in the Garden of Hope or St. John’s Food Bank.  That will do wonders for your health. And on October 17^th, Grace will arrive on soaring outstretched wings all across the nation at No Kings Day demonstrations.  Millions will be out in the streets proclaimng to America, “We Can Be Better Than This.”  And on Sunday, November 1^st, it will be “Souls to the Polls.”  All of us claiming our right as citizens to make our voices heard.  Grace abounding.  Let’s be the Change we Seek.  Pure unadulterated Grace that will “Pray the Devil back to Hell,” as Leymah and her sisters put it.  Each one of us, Wings of Grace.   Amen. 

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[1] Leylah Gbowee, Mighty be Our Powers: A Memoir, with Carol Mithers (New York: Beast Books, 2011).

[2] Op cit., 69-70.

[3] Op.cit., 72.

[4] Op. Cit., 79.

September 20, 2026
Pentecost 17, Proper 20

  “On Wings of Grace”
The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney

Jonah 3:10-4:11 Psalm 145:1-8

Philippians 1:21-30; Matthew 20:1-16