Today is World Refugee Day and my heart is broken at the state of the country. I say unequivocally that the St. A’s community stands in solidarity with all refugees and migrants seeking a better life in this country or any other. We also stand against any who would seek to separate families, destroy lives, or turn the world into their nightmare instead of allowing God’s dream for our world to reign.
As Christians, we are called to daily pick up our cross and follow Jesus, the one who came to bring good news to the oppressed, bind up the brokenhearted, proclaim liberty to the prisoners, and release to the captives (Isaiah 61). We must bind ourselves to this work, we must seek to follow in the footsteps of our Lord who called the powers of this world to task. We must “strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being”, as we promised in our baptism, until all refugees are safe, until every child is returned to their parents, until our God who loves justice reigns.
As Christians, we are inherently political, we are not partisan. We do not stand on the right or the left, we stand with Jesus, and the Jesus we know stands with the stranger, the orphan, the lost, and the lonely. Jesus stands with the mother, the father, the child seeking asylum and with the children who have been taken from their parents and put in camps, and where Jesus stands, there we stand too.
St. A’s will be participating in two demonstrations this weekend in support of families and refugees. You are invited to join us on Saturday for Families Belong Together at the Fayette County Courthouse and Sunday for Prayer Vigil in Solidarity with Families Seeking Refuge at the Church of the Ascension, Frankfort. It is important to remember that the crisis on the border is separate but related to the refugee crisis in the world today and that both crises need our attention and prayer.
With God’s help we will call the powers of this world back to sense and bring the fullness of God’s reign one step closer.
St. Augustine's Chapel 