A Christmas Message from Bishop Robert

Millions of us will take to the roads, seas and skies over the next few days to try and get home to be with loved ones over Christmas. It can be a lengthy and stressful experience with crowded trains, coaches and airports to contend with.

Of course, we aren’t the only ones journeying. Tens of thousands of others aren’t travelling home this Christmas, but are treading perilous paths to find somewhere safe, a sanctuary for their families. Harrowing pictures of the plight of refugees have filled our television screens: the toddler washed up on a beach in Turkey or the father whose wife and seven children, all aged under nine, drowned trying to get to safety. Unlike most of us, their journeys won’t end in time to wake up to presents and good food on Christmas Day.

These journeys and the terrible refugee crisis which has engulfed the Middle East and Europe bring the Christmas story into sharp relief this year. Jesus was born in a stable because there was nowhere else in Bethlehem: no one was prepared to give shelter to his pregnant mother and exhausted father. To make matters worse, not long after his birth, his parents had to flee to Egypt as refugees fearing for their lives and that of their infant son.

Would we have given Jesus and his parents shelter? Or would we have allowed them to get in a dangerously overladen boat, in the hands of corrupt and inhumane people smugglers, and cast them adrift on a perilous ocean? As Syrian refugees arrive in this country over

Christmas and the next few weeks, are we willing to welcome them and give them shelter? And what about the homeless in our own communities? Will they find a place at our inn?

Robert Atwell, Bishop of Exeter