In Shelter With God--December 16, 2021

In Shelter With God--December 16, 2021

My guess, if you are reading this, is that you have a place to sleep tonight.  The fact that you are in a position to read things like this internet devotional post suggests you have a place to sit and read for a bit as well as access to the internet.  I can't guess if you have always known what it is like to have a safe place to rest your head at night, but if you are currently enjoying the blessing of shelter as you read these words, then you probably also know how easy it is to take that blessing for granted.

We who know where our stuff is laying after we come home from work, we who have a consistent bed to sleep in, we who don't have to pack up our belongings every morning before the sun comes up so we can carry them all with us, we are greatly privileged in knowing what it is to have somewhere to call "home."  And of course, one of the terrible side-effects of such privilege is how well it can insulate us from caring about those who are without it.  If you're warm enough, you're not likely to think about who's out in the cold. If your belly is full, it's easy not to think about what it feels like to be hungry without a way to get a meal.  Comfort has a numbing effect on us, to be quite honest.  That's not to say that we should sleep out in the cold tonight as if our added suffering will give shelter to those without--but it is to say, we need to do something to prod our memories when physical comfort is prone to make us forgetful of others.  Once you're inside, it's easy to forget there was anybody else outside still waiting to be invited in.  And yet, as Dina Nayeri put it so well, "It is the obligation of every person born in a safer room to open the door when someone in danger knocks."

That is especially true for us as the people who God, and doubly so in this season leading up to Christmas.  It's not merely because of the weather, and the way December often brings a chill in the air in our part of the world, making it is dangerous to sleep out in the cold.  It's because at the heart of the story of Jesus' birth is God's choice to share what it is like to be without shelter, to be without a home.  A first night's sleep in a borrowed food trough rather than a proper crib, and then an infancy on the run from Herod living as a family of refugees in Egypt remind us--that in Jesus, God knows what it is like not to have a certain shelter for the night.  It is God's choice, then, to stand in solidarity with those who have fled their homes out of necessity for safety's sake.  It is God's choice to camp out with all those who do not have the luxury of a warm proper bed.  It is God's choice to bear the experience of those without privilege.

So if we want to get to know this peculiar God of our better, perhaps we should let our priorities and choices align with God's.  Maybe what we need is fewer pieces of cheap merchandise to wrap up and dazzle a friend or relative with on Christmas morning, and more of our resources to go to help give shelter to someone who otherwise has no safe place to rest their head.  Maybe a better measure of "Christmas spirit" is not how many blinking lights you have stapled to your eaves, but rather how we choose to create shelter for folks without a safe room to sleep in... and for the God who is among them, too.

Today's faith practice for embodying hope, then, is a step in that direction: what if we took some amount of our abundance--we who have a warm place to rest our heads tonight--and gave it to the work of an organization that offers shelter.   That could be local, like a temporary shelter for those without housing in your community, or a more involved program like Family Promise (or Interfaith Hospitality Network) that helps connect people with skills, training, and opportunities for permanent housing as well as shelter for families, or a refugee resettlement organization (in my tradition, we are grateful for the work of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, for example).  Our contributions might help resettle Afghan families who had to flee Kabul for helping US forces, or a family in your town whose kids go to school with your own children or grandchildren, or maybe will help the person who scans your groceries be able to have a permanent place of their own.  But any of those is probably going to be more in tune with the God we know in Jesus than another robe, pair of slippers, or new gadget.

This is an important realization for us as the followers of Jesus: the gifts we choose to give have a way of shaping us more than we might recognize.  As Jesus himself says, "Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also."  In other words, if we make our Christmas gift-giving all about the trendiest fashions or hottest toys, we will be reinforcing the message that these things are what matter most.  If we say, "We could all live without more stuff, but someone else's survival and well-being is far more important than getting another device with a screen," well, maybe we are on our way to having our hearts align with the heart of God.  And honestly, that's what I would rather spend myself on--becoming someone whose heart is pointed in the same direction as God's, even if my list of assets isn't as long as it might have been.

For us who are likely insulated from the cold of sleeping on the street tonight, maybe a way to prevent becoming numb to the needs of our neighbors is to put our treasures where we want our hearts to be--in the place where God already is: among those in need of shelter tonight.

Lord God, you came among us in Jesus as a refugee with a borrowed bed, and here we in our comfort have more than we need.  Lead us to use some of our abundance to care for the people who could use a safer room in which to sleep tonight.