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Good morning. A cross-party Public Accounts Committee report was published yesterday. It found that, in the last seven years, the number of people sleeping on English streets has increased by 134 per cent, while the number of those living in temporary accommodation has risen by about two-thirds. Yet the government says it’s investing more than a billion pounds on the problem. We’re just four days from Christmas. Once you take off the reindeer ears, the unwise sweaters, and the tasteful tinsel, the Christmas story is all about home. The message of Christmas is that God chooses to make a home with us. The whole purpose of the universe is that we can be at home with God, not just now, but forever. Simple as that. But for a story about home, there’s a lot of homelessness in it. Government policy, in the form of Emperor Augustus, leads to Joseph and Mary becoming temporarily homeless. Local hostels are all full up. Later the holy family have to give up the inadequate housing they’d found and take to the road, becoming refugees in Egypt. They’re displaced people. It’s not recorded whether the people of Egypt make them feel at home or resent or even fear them and the trouble they might bring. Meanwhile the shepherds are on the poverty line. We might imagine them on zero-hours contracts. Their work involves unsocial hours and outdoor hardships. We could say their sub-minimum-wage income levels mean they aren’t in a position to access private landlord-rented accommodation. And then look at the magi. They have homes, presumably, but they’re looking for something that isn’t available where they hail from. They’re searching for truth. They give up their homes to come across the desert. They find a home with the homeless one. Turns out everyone in this story is playing away from home. And the backdrop for the story is Israel. Six hundred years before the Christmas story Jesus’ forebears, the Jewish nation, had been destroyed and its leaders transported to Babylon. They were allowed to return 50 years later but since that time they’d been ruled by Persians, Greeks and finally Romans. They weren’t at home in their own home; they weren’t safe in their own surroundings. So the events and context of the Christmas story are a study in being at home and being without a home. In the last 200 years our culture has turned Christmas into a season of bonhomie and the idealisation of the nuclear family. The reason some find Christmas hard is because they have nowhere to call home – or the home they have is far from merry. ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½lessness isn’t just an issue of public policy or investment. It’s about our deepest longings and the heart of the religious quest: the search for our true home – now, and forever.