Our community responded overwhelmingly to the challenge of giving.  The challenge of reaching out to a poor community in Venda.  Over the last few weeks our congregation bought some food and filled containers as an act of worship.  Tomorrow morning a few of us will travel 500 miles and disperse that food to twenty families …

It’s so easy to wrap ourselves up in our own concerns over Christmas, to envelope ourselves in our glitzy first world wrappers – as followers of Christ we will do well to remember that Jesus was born in poor circumstances, in an environment of displacement and harassment.  If we want to celebrate Christmas, then we have to bridge the gap between the rich and the poor; otherwise our celebrations will be drowned and misdirected by self and hypocricy – the opposite of the incarnation that we proclaim.

No one can celebrate a genuine Christmas without being truly poor. The self-sufficient, the proud, those who, because they have everything, look down on others, those who have no need even of God – for them there will be no Christmas. Only the poor, the hungry, those who need someone to come on their behalf, will have that someone. That someone is God, Emmanuel, God-with-us. Without poverty of spirit there can be no abundance of God.  Oscar Romero, December 24, 1978