How do we pray for the poor, and for victims of disaster, at Christmas? The tsunami of Boxing Day 2004; the death, poverty and chaos of the earthquake in Haiti? One way of course is to give generously to relief, supporting the Disasters Emergency Committee in which Christian Aid is a partner. The Bishop and Archbishop and others urge us strongly to give what we can to those who currently have no future; and we can pass gifts on for you, if you put them in a yellow envelope and write Haiti on it. In that way we begin to answer our own prayers for those who suffer.

But there's always that incongruity between our own Christmas celebrations and the sorrows of others and of the world. It's hard not to feel guilty about sharing good things while others starve, at Christmas or at other times of the year. We can end up praying for those ‘less fortunate than ourselves’, which sounds like the self-consciously-pious Pharisee who knows he’s better off than that poor sinner over there. And yet we know that we should both *pray for */*and*/* help *the needy, the oppressed and the hopeless. How do we pray and act without feeling either superiority or guilt, at having something while others have nothing? Do we bargain with God - we'll give a reasonable donation to the poor so we can celebrate to excess with a /fairly/ clear conscience?

Our readings today give us a couple of clues. The Epistle comes from the beginning of 1 Cor 12, where St Paul tells the feuding and individualistic Corinthian Christians that really they're all on a level, and all share the one Spirit. In the rest of ch.12 he develops his great picture of the church as the body of Christ, that we're all in it together and need one another. If we’re one body, says Paul, then we care for each other, and when one part of the body suffers, the whole body suffers. You may suffer from chronic pain; or you may remember your last bout of toothache or shingles or earache or indigestion. When part of us suffers – the whole of us is implicated. We can’t just carry on as though nothing was wrong. Indeed, you shouldn’t. Diseases like leprosy which kill the nerves of communication result in decay and disfigurement because the body’s pain isn’t shared and addressed. There’s a horrible trend nowadays of advertising drugs that will keep you going in spite of your pain – got a headache? Keep it down so you can carry on as though nothing were wrong! Have a stomach ache because you’re developing ulcers and don’t eat properly? try our product and you won’t feel the pain. There’s a place for analgesics when pain needs to be controlled because it can’t be cured. But the modern use of drugs and alcohol in personal life mirrors the dis-integration in social life – one part of the human race carrying on as it wants to do, heedless of the consequences, and dulling itself to the pain that the rest of humanity suffers, because it doesn’t want to change.

Paul’s call to the church to be a body is also a call to us to pray for the poor by sharing their suffering. That doesn’t mean that we pretend that we suffer like they do, because we don’t. But it means /entering into/ their suffering – to see it as ours as well as theirs. /We/ are hurting because /they/ are in pain. When you have toothache, the foot doesn’t feel the pain of decay – but it’s part of the hurting body, and it gets the body round to the dentist as soon as it can.

To pray for the poor means to take time and trouble to listen to their suffering. Don’t turn off the TV or turn the page over quickly. Take a good paper or magazine that tells you what’s happening, and don’t imagine that the Daily Mail or the Telegraph or even the Guardian gives you that much of the truth. Take time in prayer to enter in imagination into what it feels like. To pray for Haiti, think of a homeless survivor, and what it feels like for them as evening draws on and they have nowhere to go and nothing to eat and there seems little hope. To pray for the poor is to enter into their suffering, as God in Christ at Christmas enters into our suffering world.

The other clue on how to pray for the poor is in our gospel reading about the wedding at Cana. It's a glorious way to begin a gospel account of Jesus being revealed as God’s Son, by starting with a hedonistic and celebratory miracle. It doesn’t help the poor, it undermines the local wine-producing economy – over 1000 bottles of really good wine – but God knows how to give a party!

My particular view of this miracle is that Jesus and his disciples, who after all soon got a reputation for being gluttons and drunkards, were calling for their fourth or fifth bowl of wine, and Mary came tut-tutting out of the kitchen to silence them by telling them there was no wine left, and since they’d drunk a lot of it, what were they going to do about it. But the key point is this: that someone came to Jesus who was poor. Not poor in body – having no wine isn’t a life or death issue – but poor in soul. They need to celebrate, but can’t do it. They need help, and aren’t afraid to ask.

One of the things about people who know they’re poor is that they also know how to celebrate. One of the things about people who think they’re rich is that celebration gets lost in worry and calculationThe miracle at Cana happens because people admit they’re poor. So when we pray for poor people, we need to begin with our own poverty. Where in ourselves and in our own life are we poor and needy? Maybe we have enough to eat and homes to go to; but we all have areas of poverty and darkness inside us, bits we don’t want to admit to, relationships which are unsatisfactory, weaknesses we cover up. I don’t know anyone, myself included, who isn’t actually poor before God; but I do know /some/ people who just won’t admit it. Until we learn to admit our poverty to God, and ask for help to be able to celebrate in the midst of our own weakness, we won’t know how to pray that others in /their/ poverty can do the same. But if we /can/ pluck up courage to admit our poverty – then we can also find the joy of whole-hearted celebration.

Last week we visited our daughter's mother-in-law who showed us the photos of her recent charity trip to Malawi. One of the things that had struck her was how generous people were in Malawi despite being desperately poor: the hospitality and kindness they showed her when they had so little was amazing. They knew how to be poor and yet to celebrate the good things they had. Do you decline the chicken a poor person has killed for you because they're poor? Of course not - you share it with them and others.

The Christian way to celebrate while others are poor isn't to give enough money to try and assuage our conscience. We should share our good things with them.: but more than that, when we celebrate good things, we celebrate with and on behalf of those who can't celebrate just now. They share our joys, as we share their sorrows.

I don't know if Jesus and the disciples in Cana felt guilty about helping a wedding party along; I doubt it, because in a village wedding the poor of the village would come along too, and they need to have the joy and hope of celebration too. As the body of Christ we need to share celebration as well as poverty – and that's not a one-way process.

How do we pray for the poor at Christmas – or any other time of the year? Well, we don't pray /for/ the poor – we pray /with/ them. We pray know­ing our own poverty and vulnerability alongside them. We are one body with them; their sufferings are our sufferings too, their joys too are ours. And we hope before God that they also share /our/ sufferings, that they too pray with and for us; and that when they and we celebrate we may share it together in the glory and love of God.