Refugee Sunday

We welcome the stranger because we have been welcomed by God.  

A refugee is someone who can't go home. Going home means persecution because of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion. Refugees leave their country to save their lives, their dignity, their freedom.

Most often refugees flee from their country, by any means possible, to a country next door, or to a country within the region. Sometimes these people are then resettled in a third country, like the United States. Resettlement in their own country is the goal, but when this doesn’t seem possible in a lifetime, other options are attempted. Refugees come to the United States because they have been invited in as an act of compassion.  

Every year the United States makes room for a certain amount of people to settle here as refugees. The refugee system works differently than the immigration system. The nature of refugee resettlement is that of hospitality and openness to the other. It is a gracious act to allow those who have no future a home, a future here, in our country.  

We the church celebrate this gracious act of hospitality because we have experience it ourselves. Our gracious God took us out of our hopeless situation and gave us a future, a purpose, and a life.  

We the church welcome the stranger because we have been welcomed by God.  

So we open our country, our communities, our churches, our homes, to refugees, and we share with them the hope of a future. We walk with them through the hardship of resettlement, the pain of separation from home and loved ones, and we pray for peace, for security, and for hope that one day they may go home.  

We welcome, we pray for, we celebrate the history of 60 years of an international Refugee Convention.