Church for the Homeless

Last night I got the opportunity to spend an evening with the team who are running the winter night shelter for Glasgow City Mission. Our church are just the latest church to spend a week serving alongside the City Mission staff to provide a warm and safe place for people who otherwise have nowhere to call home.

Home is a word that we very much take for granted. Last night was a reminder in a bunch of different ways that it should not be so. The people I met ranged from those who had come from broken homes, who had homes and then lost them to those who had travelled from other coutries to find a new place to call home with all of the hope that tends to entail.

So when we consider what store we put in the idea of home it is perhaps no surprise that the Bible has much to say us about it. In fact the idea of home is something that is a rather vivid picture of what God has made possible for us and, in Jesus, promises to us.

I love the fact that our church family have been given this opportunity on Easter week. To be able to remember that there is an invitation to come home for 'we who once were far off have been brought near' (Ephesians 2: 13) and that 'if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens' this week of all weeks is superbly helpful (2 Corinthians 5: 1).

One of the great miracles of Jesus' work on our behalf on the cross is not just that He makes us forgiven (wouldn't that just be amazing by itself) but that He makes us family. Romans 8: 15 reminds us of this when it in saying: 'For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!' Easter is a reminder that God offers us a home, He offers to make you His child and the men and women who shared in a snoring crescendo on a hall floor in the East End of Glasgow His children. For that is one of the great reminders of Easter... there is no distinction... we all need grace, we all needed Jesus to die on a cross, in our place, for our sins.

One of the fun things about last night was being shown a room upstairs. One of the regular volunteers talked to me about how, for a couple of centuries, there had been a homeless church in Glasgow. The Lodging House Mission has hosted men and women from this city for decades who have no place to call home.

It was pretty remarkable to see this beautifully ornate room set up for a service while sleeping bags that had been slept in the night before hung ready to be used again the following night. The Homeless Church. A reminder that without Jesus we are all in some way homeless and that even at it's best this world is not home but through Jesus we now look at what is to come. An eternal home. For now we are sojourners and exiles (1 Peter 2: 11) in this world so that we don't call it home while at the same time 'no longer strangers and aliens, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God.' That is what the grace of God offers us.

Lord loosen our hands from one so that we may live our lives for the other.