The Christmas story in the Gospel tells us that babe Jesus was born in a manger because there was no room in the inn. Now, have you ever wondered whether it was true that there was no room in the inn?
Maybe there was room at the inn –maybe the innkeeper had a couple rooms left.
But he saw this unmarried couple with this woman who was obviously pregnant, and decided maybe he didn’t want to rent them a room. So, Jesus wasn’t born in the inn, rather in a stinky manger.
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Have you ever wondered whether the innkeeper ever realized who he had turned away? Did the innkeeper ever realized that he had missed a chance to open his doors to the Son of God? Oh, what an insensitive, foolish, mean innkeeper!
And yet — let us be honest — sometimes we behave the same way as he did – don’t we?
If it happens to me, I’m inclined to suspect it may happen to you too –perhaps not as frequently as it happens to me. Sometimes God knocks at my door, and I am asked if there is room in my own inn.
And sometimes I look out, and I don’t really like what we see, or I don’t like what it would mean to let Christ in, and I close the door and hung a sign that says: “Sorry! Sold out!”
Friends, the Christmas Story is much more than a story about an extraordinary event that happened centuries ago. It is a living story that reminds us that God would love to hear from me, actually from all of us, “Yes, Lord, yes, there is room for you, and for anyone you may send our way.”
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A few days ago, I received the customary Christmas letter our Bishop sends her pastors and churches year after year. There was something in that letter that caught my attention, but then I forgot about it for a few days until I began to sketch this meditation.
With so many services in a few days, I suddenly feared I was running out of ideas.
So, I went back to Bishop Easterling’s letter, and there it was, a very short phrase that caught my attention.
Our bishop wrote: “The Christmas love is a love that confronts us in our vulnerability, refuses to leave us the way we are, and calls us into deeper communion with one another and with God.”
That little phrase –“refuses to leave us the way we are” — sounded so provocative, I wanted to know more, so I kept reading. And I’m glad I did, because Bishop Easterling helped me mature and organize my own thoughts.
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At some point in her pastoral letter, our Bishop reminds us that genuine love is not sentimental, not a mere emotion, but a force that is at the very heart of God. And she goes on to explain that God became human flesh to show us that love is not a mere theory nor an abstraction.
“Love becomes flesh,” our Bishop says. And just in case you wonder why, our Bishop reminds us that genuine love is personal, present, and always engaged with the world.
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Friends, you have already discovered that genuine love is not simply something we talk about –it is something we do. It is not a Hallmark kind of love, the kind of love that reads beautifully but is not embodied.
From his first breath, Jesus modeled that love is better provided than professed.
In the words of theologian and pastor Howard Thurman, the grandson of a former slave, “Love means dealing with persons in the concrete rather than the abstract.”
For Pastor Thurman, and this is something that he discovered and experienced in his own life, “to speak of love for humanity is meaningless. In this instance, there is no such thing as humanity. What we call humanity has a name, was born, lives on a street, gets hungry, needs all the particularities of life to live in dignity.”
Such is the Christmas message for us today and every day: if we are not willing to meet concrete human needs, we are not prepared to love as Christ teaches us to love. And once we do love as Christ us teaches to, we are transformed. Individually or as members of this congregation, we are transformed.
That’s what Bishop Easterling means when she says that “Crist’s love refuses to leave us the way we are.”
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When the tree is put away, when Christmas dinner has been eaten, when the nativity sets go back into their boxes, the ultimate test of how well we have celebrated Christmas this year will not be what was under the tree or anything like that.
It will be how wide we have opened our hearts.
Have we hung a big sign that reads “Sorry! Sold out!”? Or rather one that reads “Please, come in, there is plenty of room in my manger!”