Luke 2:7
Dec. 24, 1998
James R. Gorman
This story is known so well to so many. Mary, being great with child, and Joseph, still trying to hide his shame, make their way into Bethlehem. Everyone is coming from out of town. Families had scattered over the generations from the places of their origin and had to return this night in order to be counted in the government census.
This is the story that our children act out each year and as they grow up, this is the story they know the best. And this part of the story resonates beautifully with most of our lives. Most of us return to our homes or the homes of our parents and grandparents during this season just as Joseph and Mary did 2000 years ago. We come not to be taxed, but to affirm our rootedness in an age in which roots mean less and less. And it is good that we are here.
Children who learn this story have a way of adding twists and turns to the story that are not there, but cause us to think about the particulars and peculiarities of the story, discovering along the way that maybe the story is not that peculiar after all. The story is told of a group of kids who were acting out the Christmas story. When they got to the part where the innkeeper had to inform pregnant Mary and her husband that there was no room at the inn, the child playing the Innkeeper (a kind of a smart aleck) blurted out, "But there's a great motel with cable just around the corner from the church!"(1)
Scholars of the Bible play a similar role, adding dimension and depth to the Christmas story. They pick over the words in the Gospel story, trying to discern what the original meanings of these (Greek) words might be. And their interpretations often give us new insights into what this story might have been about. Often these teachers have a way of adding a new meaning to a story that has grown so comfortable that it is taken for granted. One scholar notes that the Greek word that we translate as "inn" actually should mean a sort of family guest room and not a motel at all. Instead of "there was no room in the inn," the sentence should read, "There was no appropriate place in the guest room."
Inns were reserved for traveling merchants, but visiting family members would have stayed in a guest room in the house of a relative. The travelers would sleep on cots in this special room and their animals would sleep on the floor. The implication of this interpretation might mean that there might not have been enough cots in the guest room and that the baby would have to be laid in an ox's manger, an inappropriate place in the guest room.
Some of you who are home for Christmas will sleep tonight on the sofa in the living room, or curled up in a sleeping bag on the floor elsewhere, because there is no other more "appropriate place" for you in the guest room. There are just too many of you. Uncle Frederick from St. Germain commandeered that room before you got here. And that may well have been the case for Mary, Joseph and Jesus. Rather than send you to the Ramada Inn on Mayfair Road, the familiy loves you so much and is so delighted to have everyone home for Christmas that they are giving you the honor of sleeping on the floor of the play room downstairs and letting the dog lick your face on Christmas morning.
This may put a different twist on this old story. Perhaps this aspect of the story is not as cruel as we have interpreted it over these centuries. Jesus was not born in the back stable of some cold impersonal hotel, but rather born in the front room of a home where doting aunts, uncles, and other random and sundry relatives cooed over him and talked baby talk three inches from his face.
For Mary and Joseph, these days among family may have been a peculiar treasure. Soon enough they would be forced to flee for their lives as refugees from the terror of King Herod. There would be dark and difficult days ahead. But for now, they were home, among family. When God was incarnate in this frail and vulnerable baby, he was cared for in the context of a home, safe amid the mundane blessings of a large extended family.
Some of you have made incredible efforts to be home for Christmas. Others of our congregation have gone to their families scattered all over the US. You and they have flown in crowded aircraft, arranged not so much for comfort as to increase the profit margin, or cruised down I-94 in vans with children asking the perennial question about when we will get to grandma's house. Tonight, even that fold-out sofa bed, the one with the bar running right through the middle of the one inch foam mattress, will feel good because you are home with family. Home for Christmas.
It is this aspect of the Christmas story that raises high, by contrast, the plight of those who have no home at this time of year. Those whose relationships with their families are so broken that they can't go home. Or those whose difficulties with drugs make finding their way home impossible. Or those spending the night in a homeless shelter because their husband has beaten them and they are afraid to go home with the children. These folks stand out on this night. If you have made your way to this place and you have no home, I hope that for a moment at least this can be your home, as we do what families always do: tell the most familiar stories and never tire of them.
Most of the Bible was written for people who have no home or who are getting ready to leave their home because of forced exile, or while in exile are getting ready to return to homes they haven't seen in 50 years. Most of the scripture we have been reading in the month before this night was about home, homelessness, exile and homecoming. "There's no place like home for he holidays" is not just a cliché. It is a central Biblical truth.
We long to belong to a place where everybody knows our name. We want someplace where we fit and where no questions are asked and you can just be there without worry about how you look or whether or not you might be embarrassed by some foolish observation you might make. Home is where you are so well understood that you don't have to pretend about anything. And we are all looking for places like that. Some of us have them and some of us don't, and most of us are somewhere in between.
But Christmas, as the Gospel writer Luke tells it, is not just about Mary and Joseph coming home, safe in the guest room of the family home; it's not even about your safe homecoming for Christmas. It's about God, King of Kings and Lord of Lords, Prince of Peace and Savior, finding a home with us. We couldn't get to God, so God got to us, coming among us in this mundane, ordinary family story we cherish from year to year. What we call "Incarnation" is about somebody sleeping on the foldout sofa downstairs in the rec room. It's about us making room in an altogether too crowded household so that our God might dwell most mysteriously in it. Our God came out of the cold of this night to dwell among us. And that is the central joy of this story.
There are not many religions that would tolerate this much domesticating of the divine. Most faiths are scandalized by our story of a God who takes on our flesh and is born among us, one of us, in a manger on the floor of the family's rec room and then as a baby no less.
Why are so many of us here tonight? I'll tell you. It is to proclaim the central Christian mystery that our God is moving right into the middle of our families with all our problems, secrets, sins and silliness. In the midst of the laughter, the kidding and the retelling of family stories, comes God Immanuel to proclaim, "I'll be at your home for Christmas."
At the very end of the New Testament is a reaffirmation of the Christmas mystery. Behold, the dwelling place of God is with us. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his people, and God himself will be with them. Home, finally, is the dwelling place of our God, wherever that might be.
1. From William Willimon, sermon for December 24, 1998