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Good morning,

I can’t have been the only one in floods of tears watching the final of The Piano on Channel 4 at the weekend. The TV contest to find Britain’s next piano superstar by searching for amateur musicians auditioning at train stations saw Brad Kella crowned the winner.

The 22-year-old is an unlikely piano virtuoso. He can’t read music, and grew up in care in Liverpool. ‘There’s a stigma with kids in foster care. We genuinely get seen as just a number. I want to show people what a number can do,’ he said.

And it's not the first time the newly-discovered stars have come from unexpected places. This series saw finalists including a young man with ADHD and autism, and a Ukrainian refugee.

´óÏó´«Ã½ presenter Ashley John-Baptiste also grew up in care before going on to read history at Cambridge. He too writes in his new book Looked After about wanting to escape the label of being a foster kid.

People expected less of Ashley, and of people like Piano winner Brad because of the circumstances in which they were raised; where they came from.

In John’s gospel, would-be disciple Nathaneal is invited to come and meet Jesus. Hearing he's from a backwater town called Nazareth, Nathaneal asks: ‘Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?’

No one would ever have thought the man on whose life the whole of the Western calendar hinges would come from a place like that. But greatness can absolutely come from unexpected places.

In the Bible, Jesus is often alongside the outsiders – the lepers, sex workers, foreigners, the tax collectors – people that society at the time would have shunned or overlooked. Jesus finds solidarity with those who are on the margins.

I find stories like Brad’s in The Piano so moving because they give a glimpse into the beauty of the upside down nature of the kingdom of God.

Where the last will be first; where the spotlight is on the unseen and the unheard. Jesus doesn’t just hang out with the oppressed, but embodies oppression. We’re told the all-powerful God literally ‘makes himself nothing’.

Christians believe God steps into powerlessness, into the fragility and vulnerability of a baby, and chooses to be born in an unlikely place.

Black liberation theologian James Cone writes that it’s actually in solidarity with the oppressed in the margins that God’s presence is found. ‘What is redemptive,’ he says, ‘is the faith that God snatches victory out of defeat, life out of death, and hope out of despair.’

There’s a lesson for us all here – and in the story of the talented Brad Kella - to not write anyone off.

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