Making Room
St. Paul’s United Methodist Church
Luke 2: 1-7, Rev. Marianne Niesen, December 14, 2008
Our advent series continues today with a focus on a less-than-popular figure of the Christmas story. The innkeeper. You know the innkeeper . . . that’s the person in a Christmas Nativity play who yells heartlessly at a pleading Mary and Joseph . . . we have no more room! Go somewhere else! This scenario is actually ritualized in the Mexican Christmas custom called ‘las posadas.’ The word ‘posadas’ means ‘inn’ or ‘shelter.’ Customs around this tradition vary from place to place but, ordinarily, the celebration stretches over 9 nights. Each night, a ‘Mary-and-Joseph’ led by a procession of children go house to house singing a special carol asking for lodging. They are turned away - with song - each night until they reach the final house on the final night where the inhabitants let them in and the party unfolds.
In a sense, according to las posadas, there was not only one innkeeper, there were many - and they kept slamming the door in the face of a truly desperate couple. Through the years, the innkeeper has represented heartless disdain for the poor, an individual who puts the ‘bottom line’ above charity. Sermons have proclaimed that just as Jesus was abandoned at the end of his life, so was he unwanted at the beginning. But, let’s stop all that speculating for a moment and do what is always good to do . . . go back to the actual text. Listen to it again: and she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.
Did you notice? There is no mention of an innkeeper at all! Over the years, assumptions have been made that, because there ‘was no place’ for them, someone must have told them that and that someone must have been an innkeeper who must have been mean about it all! But, it doesn’t say that! The nasty innkeeper is an imagined figure. He or she could have been there, of course, but we don’t know that.
And, the fact is that there is a lot we don’t know about the details of the birth of Jesus. If our aim in reading the Biblical nativity stories is to nail down the details and get our facts straight, I’m afraid we are destined for disappointment. The facts are sketchy and contradictory. We learn about the birth of Jesus through two sources - the gospels of Matthew and Luke. In Matthew, Mary and Joseph live in Bethlehem. When Jesus is born, he is born at home in Bethlehem. There is no angel choir singing to shepherds who come to the stable - because there isn’t a stable or a cave or an inn. Jesus is born at home. A star guides wise men - or magi - to the baby. King Herod, fearing a threat to his power, orders the slaughter of babies. Joseph gets a message in a dream that he needs to escape the wrath of Herod by taking his family to Egypt. When they finally return, they settle not back in Bethlehem, but rather in Nazareth - an out-of-the-way place in Galilee where they think Jesus will be safe. No adoring shepherds or singing angels. No census of the whole world. No traveling. That’s Matthew in shorthand. Jesus starts in Bethlehem, travels to Egypt and ends up in Nazareth.
Luke’s story is the one we know better. Mary and Joseph live in Nazareth. A census is called for which requires a pregnant Mary and a brave Joseph to travel to Bethlehem where they find an overcrowded town. When their search for lodging fails, they end up somewhere quite rustic, probably near animals since a manger is mentioned. After the birth, angels sing the news to shepherds who come to see the child. And, after it is over, Mary and Joseph return directly to Nazareth. There is no side trip to Egypt.
Both these stories are wonderful and in our home nativity scenes, they meld quite well together. Mary, Joseph and a ‘spruced up’ manger along with angels, shepherds and kings all arrive right about the same time - usually when we unpack the box in which we’ve carefully had them secured. And I wouldn’t have it any other way. Lyle and I have several nativity sets and I like putting them all out. We have a Native American scene and one from Ethiopia, Israel, Mexico and France. I love the nuance that each different one brings to the Christmas story. Still, when we go back to the texts in the Bible, we’re faced with the fact, that lovely though all those characters may be in our creche scenes, the stories Matthew and Luke tell are different. They cannot both be literally true. They agree on the names of Jesus’ parents and on the town of his birth. They differ on almost everything else. I tell you this not to dash your faith or suggest we throw away our lovely nativity scenes. No . . . it is simply a reminder of something I think we already know. The point of the Christmas story is not - and never has been - a literal review of historical fact. The gospel writers didn’t care much about that. But, they cared a lot about what it all meant..
From Matthew . . . what does it mean that a thoroughly Jewish baby is visited by thoroughly pagan magi? What does it mean that his orthodox parents accepted gifts from unclean hands? What does it mean that Jesus is born into a world ravaged by an abuse of power that targets even children? What does it mean that Jesus begins his life as a refugee? What does it mean that Mary and Joseph must give up everything - home, family, livelihood to protect their child from injustice and hate?
From Luke . . . what does it mean that Joseph and Mary are forced to bow to the empire and travel at a most vulnerable time? What does it mean that their relatives in Bethlehem - for surely there were some - would not provide shelter? What does it mean that the first resting place for Jesus is in a manger, among animals? What does it mean that he is visited by the poorest of the poor - shepherds? What does it mean that even they are made welcome? What does it mean that the message goes to shepherds first? What does it mean that the angels proclaim the coming of Jesus as good news bringing peace on earth - when everyone hearing the story would know that the Roman emperor, Caesar Augustus, was the Prince of Peace?
You see the stories of that first Christmas are powerful - not because we get literal facts from them but because we learn something about how God interacts with humanity. The invitation for us all - every time we hear the Christmas story is to grapple once again with the meaning and challenge of it all. Taken as historical fact, things don’t make sense - but, understood as a message about Emmanuel, God-with-us, we have much to learn. Dom Crossan and Marcus Borg in their book The First Christmas remark:
When . . . Matthew . . .and Luke . . .are combined into a single Christmas story - for instance in standard Christian imagination or the traditional Christian creche - that story is the entire Christian gospel in miniature. Get it, and you get everything; miss it and you miss all.
My point, quite simply, is that if we write off the Christmas stories because they don’t ‘jive’ with each other or because we just know, with all our scientific knowledge, that it couldn’t have happened like that, we miss the point. We miss the meaning and we give up on a message that is still desperately needed. The good news of Jesus is still the hope of the world!
Back to the innkeeper. Whether or not there really was an innkeeper is not terribly important. But this is . . . Jesus, like so many people in this world of ours - then and now - did not find the world a hospitable place. Still, through Jesus God entered the world of time and place. God is with us. God knows what we know from the inside.
Gustavo Gutiérrez, a liberation theologian, in his book The God of Life wrote,
It is often said at Christmas that Jesus is born into every family and every heart. But these ‘births’ must not make us forget the . . . massive fact that Jesus was born of Mary among a people that at the time were dominated by the greatest empire of the age. If we forget that, the birth of Jesus . . .loses its meaning . . . (he continues) the Son of God was born into a little people, a nation of little importance by comparison with the great powers of the time. Furthermore, he took flesh among the poor in a marginal area - namely Galilee; he lived with the poor and emerged from among them to inaugurate a kingdom of love and justice. That is why many have trouble recognizing him.
Is not the Christmas story God’s radical statement that there is no where God does not live? There is no where God will not go? There is no problem so great that God is not with us in it? According to Luke, there was no room for Jesus’ birth - but that did not stop the plan. God will be with us. The real question is will we make room for God? Will we look for the face of God in the people around us? Will we do what we can in this very scarey world of ours to make room? Even in these challenging economic times, compared to the rest of the world, we have so much. We’re the ‘innkeepers.’ What are we doing to make this world more hospitable for our children, for refugees, for the poor? Imagine what would happen if we became more like the errant innkeepers in some nativity plays - you know, the ones where the innkeeper forgets his or her lines and gets so flustered by the story that they say the first thing that comes to mind . . .something like sure, come on in - you can share my room!
Over twenty years ago, a pastor in Nicaragua - Ernesto Cardenal - began a rather controversial custom. Rather than preaching a sermon during worship, he would gather people together, read the scripture and then have a dialogue with the campesinos about what it meant. These campesinos, like Luke’s shepherds, were the poor - and lived in a place called Solentiname, a remote archipelago on Lake Nicaragua. They had a conversation on today’s text. Cardenal introduces the account by telling us that the conversation happened on Christmas eve, at midnight, the day after Managua had been destroyed by an earthquake. The dialogue he recounts is about 8 pages long. He says that, by the end of the conversation, the young people were really ‘into’ it. The long discussion ended like this . . .
Mary and Joseph were turned away from the inn because they were poor. If they’d been rich, they’d have been welcomed in . . . Jesus was rejected in Bethlehem because he was poor, and he goes on being rejected in the world for the same reason. Because when you come down to it the poor person is always rejected. . . but now this Christmas, Managua doesn’t have any houses, just like Jesus in Bethlehem was born without a house. And there are no Christmas banquets just like there wasn’t any banquet in Bethlehem when Jesus was born. Now this Christmas seems to me more Christian, and it can help raise our consciousness. And maybe someday everybody will have a house and everybody will be happy and nobody will be rejected.
And then, those folks who had nothing, took up a collection for newly homeless of earthquake ravaged Managua. They gave what they had - corn, rice, beans.
What does it mean that at a time of great economic and political uncertainty, a child was born in a tiny out-of-the-way place to people who had nothing, yet found room for him? What does it mean that, in the shadow of the Roman empire, angels heralded that birth as the real promise of peace in the world? What does it mean that in our time of economic and political turmoil, we still gather to celebrate that same birth, that same promise, that same hope? Could it be that the very fragility of our circumstance (the well documented ‘economic downturn,’ the ‘housing crisis’) allows us, like those campesinos, to ‘get inside’ the meaning of Christmas as we have never done before? How generous will we be with our corn, rice and beans? Will we make room for the message and promise of Jesus in the inns of our lives?
