When I was a student, a couple of us decided to open up a hostel for the homeless at Christmas.

We were the only ones left in college over the holidays, and we had keys to everything, about 120 free beds and an excess of youthful zeal. 

It was something practical we reckoned we could do. So about four o’clock one smoky December afternoon, just as the sky began to darken, we went out to pick up the destitute with the offer of a bed and pea and ham soup.
The destitute proved hard to find, and when we did find them, pretty reluctant to come with us.

One night we walked the streets until 4am, but they had all vanished – all the people who sat in the Cornmarket and begged, the Big Issue sellers, the women who hawked lucky heather and all the homeless and desperate. They had all gone.

It was as if they were invisible to us. We eventually gathered up a man in a doorway who had had too much to drink and brought him back with us. He was very disappointed to find that neither of us were prostitutes, and when he left in the morning he took the kettle and the bathroom taps with him as souvenirs.
The Christmas story turns a spotlight on people who would otherwise be entirely unnoticed.

It begins with a dubious teenage pregnancy, and the scandalous whiff of infidelity. There’s an arduous journey, doors slammed in the face, and a filthy makeshift delivery room in a shed round the back of a pub, with wondering and slightly perplexed local labourers on hand.

Even the kings are slightly sinister, offering gifts like myrrh, a commodity in the funeral business. And the scene ends, as Matthew tells us, with a terrified flight of these fragile little people into exile in the desert.
Let’s not forget the invisble, the silent, the voiceless and the marginal this Christmas. I think the reason God loves people whom we would consider to be down and out, is not because God is so gracious but because that’s how we all appear to God.

The Ven Lynda Patterson is Theologian-in-Residence at ChristChurch Cathedral.