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Bulletin 121 Date : 17th Dec 2007
Rich and Poor

One of the hardest things I have ever had to do as a Christian speaker is to lead the weekly fellowship which takes place every Sunday evening at the Friary Drop In centre in West Bridgford. I lead the worship once a quarter. The Drop In centre is there to provide support to the homeless and unemployed people of Nottingham. Many of the people who use the services of the centre are homeless, many have no family to turn to for help and many suffer an addiction of one form or another. Some find themselves on the wrong side of the law.

The challenge for me concerns the message I give to such people. By their standards I am affluent, I lead a comfortable life, I integrate well and am respected by society. In contrast, the users of the Drop In centre are poor, some sleep on the streets at night, they are shunned by society and are looked down upon as being worthless. What have I to teach them? What comfort can I bring to them? They could easily turn round to me and say, ‘it’s OK for you – you don’t know what it’s like to be in my shoes’. And they’re right! I’ve never had to endure the kind of hardship that many of them experience every day of their lives. D. T. Niles once described evangelism as ‘One beggar telling another beggar where to find food’. I hardly feel like a beggar when I walk into the Drop In centre.

This is why the Christmas story, in its raw form as depicted in the Gospels, is so vital. It was nothing like the images we see on so many Christmas cards and in the shop windows which entice us to spend and spend. Depending on which Gospel we read, it would appear that Joseph and Mary had nowhere comfortable in which to bring Jesus into the world. After His birth, the jealous fury of King Herod forced them to flee to Egypt. They knew some of the rigours of being homeless, at least for a while.

But all this silences any accusation we may make towards God that He doesn’t know what it’s like to be one of us. “It’s all very well looking down from heaven and imposing impossible standards upon humanity when You’ve never experienced what it’s like to be one of us!”, we might cry.

At Christmas we celebrate the ‘Incarnation’. It is the time when God cast off His privileged position and chose to become human, and did it in the most unlikely and dangerous of ways. There is little that we endure which hasn’t also been experienced by Jesus. Undoubtedly the most dramatic demonstration of the extent to which God is prepared to suffer with us is in the cross where ‘God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself’.

This coming Thursday evening, a group of us will be in the foyer of ASDA in West Bridgford singing Christmas carols to raise money for the Friary Drop In Centre. Although not everyone would be comfortable getting alongside the users of the Drop In centre in a personal way, carol singing provides everyone with the opportunity to proclaim the Christmas message in song as a witness to the community while at the same time raising money for the poorer members of our society.