5th Sunday of Easter--Youth Sunday, Camp Bratton Green Sunday

5th Sunday after Easter Year B Youth Sunday and Gray Center Sunday When we lived in the rectory in McComb, I had a terrible nemesis: kudzu. Now, I don’t know how many of you Coast natives know about the evils of kudzu, but it is a plant that is not native to Mississippi. (I think they brought it in from Japan for erosion control). And kudzu is a vine that just comes in and takes over. I fought it for years as it tried to devour my camellia bushes. And one of the interesting things about kudzu that I found is that the vines would grow incredibly long. As I was pulling one part of the vine off my bushes, I would discover that that single vine was stretched all the way to the other end of the flower bed, entwined with many other plants along the way. Jesus says, “I am the vine, you are the branches.” And I can’t help but think of kudzu when he says this—how we as the body of Christ are all inextricably connected with other parts that may be way down at the other end of the flower bed. I had an encounter with this truth a few years ago through Camp Bratton Green, our diocesan camp for young people in Central Mississippi. I had been to Bratton Green for one session as a child (5th grade), and it had been a pretty good camp experience, but I had not felt particularly plugged in to the life there. I had definitely felt like there were insiders and outsiders, and I was one of the outsiders. So I never went back, until I had just graduated from high school and decided I wanted to be a counselor. I was accepted to be on the staff of a priest I had never met, a man named Duncan M. Gray, III. And I made up my mind that as a counselor, I would actively work to make sure that every single one of the girls in my cabin felt a profound sense of belonging. I had a great week at camp that week, and it opened up a new sense of belonging for me in the life of that place. Fast forward ten years, and I had just come back to the diocese from seminary, and I was fulfilling my required two years of service on staff at Camp Bratton Green. On my first day there, one of the permanent staff (the college age kids who run the camp for the entire summer) came up to me, and she reintroduced herself and told me that I had been her camp counselor for her first session ever at Camp Bratton Green. She told me of how that beginning and that sense of belonging had opened the door for her for many happy summers spent out at Bratton Green and how she had come to be on permanent staff to help foster that sense of belonging in the children coming after her. Jesus says, “I am the vine, and you are the branches.” We have no way of knowing how our gifts and our offerings may affect and enrich the life of a member of the vine in another part of the flower bed. And in working with young people, especially, we never know how God will take and use the gifts that we freely offer and how God will multiply those small humble gifts into a radical abundance. But today, we are given the opportunity to do just that. This year, we are sending 10 children, students from the Arts Academy who are the cream of the crop at Pass Road Elementary school, to Camp Bratton Green for one week each of summer camp. We have no way of knowing how God will take and use that offering which we make in the life of those children, in the life of Camp Bratton Green, in the life of that school, and in the life of this community; but I believe that our small offering will be transformed by God into a radical abundance that will be beyond our wildest imaginings. We need your help to do this. If you are able to give money to the St. Peter’s by-the-Sea Camp Bratton Green scholarship fund, please do so. It costs $400 to send one child to camp. We will receive some assistance from the CBG scholarship fund and possibly some scholarships from the Okalona trust, but we still need to raise a significant amount of money to send these kids to camp. It is an ambitious endeavor on the part of this church, and any money given to this will be helpful and so appreciated. We have no way of knowing how our offering of love and support and the once in a lifetime opportunity for these children to go to camp will impact for good the lives of these children nor how it will make this world a better place. But we offer this gift to God in faith, and we trust that God will take it and multiply it in abundance. Kind of like kudzu.