In many ways, these eleven children are like any other children.  They love to play soccer on the lawn, laugh, and run around and tease each other.  Like kids at any summer camp, they love the counselors and staff who take care of them, and they bond with them and write thank you notes to them at the end of their week.  And, yes, they get so excited at times that they’re a little hard to control and have to be reined in and calmed down.  Like any other children at any summer children’s program.

            But these kids are different in one important way.  Not just that they come from all over the world, from just about every continent.  But these kids are all Refugee’s.  They all come from families who have fled their countries of origin –not for financial reasons, for a better life, but to literally to save their lives.  They come, having fled war, violence, or political terror.  And somehow, they have managed to come to the United States. 

This summer, some 50 refugee children in Atlanta are part of the summer program run by a branch of the Episcopal Migration Ministries*, a ministry of the national church.  (As an aside, we sometimes wonder what our National Episcopal Church does. Well, here you have it—important work that can only be done at a national level). 

The camp is located at the ICS, or the International Community School in Atlanta, founded by an Episcopal lay person and two Roman Catholic lay people who recognized the specific needs of refugee children and have a heart for this ministry.. 

At that school, there are these 350 refugee children, all speaking 57 different languages, with different religions, different cultures, different races and customs, but all having in common some trauma that led them here. As one of the teachers told us, “Each of these children are not just children, but each one is a story—an amazing story of survival.” 

2.

            And so, that’s how some 12 of these kids were introduced to me by the St. Mark’s Youth group this past week.  Elizabeth has worked with the International Refugee Center before, and she realizes that you don’t need to go overseas to do important mission work. You can find it right here in our state.  And so our youth group, with  some St. Mark’s parents and other adults helping through the week, by the way, spent the week with these remarkable children. 

            And you need to know something very important.  I arrived on day three of the week, and the minute I walked onto the camp, one of the staff members walked up to me and said, “The kids from your church are remarkable! They’ve just done a wonderful, wonderful job with these children. And it’s been hard, but they’ve shown patience, and understanding, and kindness, and hard work, and real personal depth—real character.”  Well, I cannot tell you how proud I was at that moment!

            But then I saw what she meant.  A soccer game, and there was Sam, and Steve, and Emerson, out there in the heat, running, encouraging, joking, calming down tempers.  And there was Megan, Elizabeth, and Molly, helping break up a fight, or swinging someone on the swings or chasing a loose soccer ball—It wore me out just watching! 

And some of these kids had no sense of “boundries” like you would expect at a normal camp.  During the game, one of our youth stopped and said, “There he goes again—Rio, get back here.”  Rio would just begin to wander off, toward the street.

            Or, when we took them to the Botanical gardens, the two kids from the desert of Chad saw the beautiful fountains and they assumed that it was pool time. “No, Ramisa, that’s just to look at—not to swim in. And no, Rwan, you can’t catch the goldfish.” 

There was one of those white cones where you can put a penny in to contribute to a wildlife fund or something and watch the penny go round and round and round and gets smaller and smaller and goes into the hole.  They just couldn’t let that happen. They just couldn’t bear to see a penny disappear into that hole.

            What really brought it home to me, however, was hearing about a disruption that had occurred the week before.  One of the teachers had an idea—he didn’t know this would be a big mistake—to have the kids make father’s day cards.  For some reason, he said, the class went haywire, completely out of control.  It took an hour to calm them down. 

Then they found out why.  Of the eleven in that class, ten students did not have their fathers with them any more.  Four of the fathers had been killed by warfare, three in Africa and one by the Taliban in Afghanistan.  Six of the fathers were still in prison for political reasons, usually because of speaking out against the government.

3.

Ten out of eleven families—no father.  Where do you even begin to address that kind of evil that happens in the world?  When Jesus asks the demon in this morning’s lesson, he says, “What’s your name?” and the demon says, “I’m legion, for we are many.”  That was this ancient scripture’s way of saying that evil is just so pervasive, so deep in the world, and it seems impossible to do anything about it.

And yet, Jesus begins with that one person, and heals him of the evil.  One person at a time.  That’s how you start.  One person at a time.  And how you do that is given us by St. Paul this morning in our 2nd lesson.

“As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”

This is Saint Paul describing to the Galatians what a community of God’s Kingdom looks like.  No more distinctions; all are God’s beloved children. 

As I watched that exhausting soccer game, all those kids of all colors and languages and backgrounds, all those stories, I noticed that their laughter was all the same. And that’s what I think must surely be one of the sure signs of the kingdom—great laughter, the sound of children laughing, and laughing, and just horsing around. 

And isn’t it interesting how St. Paul puts it, about how to get to that place?  He describes it as “clothing yourself with Christ. “As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.”  Isn’t that interesting?  To clothe yourself, as if Christ were a kind of garment to be put on. 

It’s interesting that Paul does not say a lot about what we are to believe.  John talks about that a lot, and that’s important.  What we believe is very important.  But for Paul, it’s not the most important thing.  It’s not the very top of the list.  The very top of the list is to “clothe yourselves with Christ,” which I simply take to mean, “act like Jesus.” Do what Jesus would do.  That’s the very most important part of Kingdom building. Use whatever gifts you have to help heal the world, one hurt at a time.

When these St. Mark’s Youth take a week of their lives and make themselves available to these children, and wear themselves out in that ministry, they are clothing themselves with Christ.

When many of you went down yesterday to sweep up dirt and Lysol the walls and move furniture around so that both DEO and the Carter Hope Center could have a nice place to meet, you were clothing yourselves with Christ.”

4.

When others of you spent most of the day Saturday learning to teach “Godly Play” to our youngest Children so that they might have a glimpse of the love of Jesus next year, you were clothing yourselves with Christ.

Or, for that matter, all you who take meals to the sick, communions to shut-ins, set the holy vessels for Eucharist, say prayers on the prayer cycle, make beautiful music in the choir or bells, or meet on a vestry committee—in all these ways, you are clothing yourselves with Christ.

So thank you, youth group, for helping to open our eyes to the world around us.  Yes, the name of evil is legion, for there are many forms of it in the world, and it seems impossible to heal it all.  And yet, let us put on Christ, so that, one hurt at a time, we may “declare how much God has done…” for us all. 

                                                                                

*Link to Episcopal Migration Ministries (EMM)
http://www.ecusa.anglican.org/emm.htm