Scripture: Matthew 1:18-25
You know those optical illusions where you look at a picture and it looks a certain way, but you sort of squint or blink and it can suddenly appear like a completely different picture. There’s a needlepoint you see of the name of Jesus that’s that way, where if you look at it as (let’s say) white on green, it looks like just a bunch of strange shapes but if you look at it as green on white, suddenly the name of Jesus appears clear as day. Well, I want to look at the Christmas story this morning sort of in that way—try to describe two different views of it, both of them it seems to me perfectly legitimate, depending on how you are looking at things.
The first way of looking at the Christmas story that I want to talk about is what I would think of as the more common way. I don’t mean that in a derogatory way at all. The fact that it’s the more common way of approaching the story doesn’t mean that it’s untrue or superficial or anything like that. It’s just that it’s familiar, at least it is to me, and I suspect it will be to you as well.
What I’m referring to is the idea that Christmas is about God sending Jesus to us as a gift and our response should be to prepare a place for him, to receive him into our lives, into our hearts, make room for Christ so that he has a place among us and/or within us. Tonight we will sing “Joy to the World”. “Let every heart prepare him room,” we will sing. There’s a poem called “Nests” by Joyce Rupp that goes:
Looking high into winter trees
I see the distant nests
Cradled in arms of branches
Nests: round, full of warmth,
Softness in the welcoming center,
A circle of earth’s tiny goodness,
Flown from the far corners,
Patiently pieced together,
And hollowed into a home.
Nests: awaiting the treasure of life,
Simple, delicate dwelling places
From which song will eventually echo
And freedom of wings give flight.
Advent has been on my mind.
Prepare the nest of the heart.
Patch up the broken parts.
Place more softness in the center.
Sit and warm the home with prayer.
Give Christ a dwelling place.
The invocation we said together this morning is a prayer that I wrote several years ago. “Help us,” I said, “to make room in our cluttered lives for the gift of Jesus, sent from your heart.” That kind of sentiment, that kind of imagery seems to be come naturally for us. At least, as I say, it does for me.
And part of the reason it does, is that it’s there in the story. Not only do Isaiah and then John the Baptist quoting Isaiah, not only do they tell us to prepare the way for the Lord. There is, of course, the famous verse in Luke where it says that Mary “gave birth to her first-born son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.” And the poor innkeeper, who technically doesn’t even appear in the story—appears in many Christmas pageants but doesn’t actually appear in the Bible—the poor innkeeper becomes the symbol, the prime example for all time, of not making room for Jesus. We don’t want to be like that mean old innkeeper who made Mary go out to the stable to have her baby, who refused to find someplace or make someplace at least for Mary to give birth, and for the Christ child to be cradled.
“No Room” the innkeeper in Christmas pageants sometimes sternly says, and he has come to stand for all the ways we may have of denying Jesus a place in the inns of our spirits, all the ways we have of keeping God at the margins of our lives rather than at the center, all the ways we have of not letting God get too close, all the ways we have of not opening the homes of our hearts to God, all the ways we have of shutting ourselves off from wonder, or from miracles.
And there are lots of directions a preacher could go with this basic story outline. There is of course the straightforward and sometimes sentimental approach of urging that Christmas be a time when we take Jesus into our hearts, that we accept Jesus or re-accept him into our heart’s core, that we make a place for him inside us, that Christ be born in us again each Christmas. A variation on this might be that we not so much take this gift of God in the form of the baby Jesus into our hearts but that we take him to heart, not so much the baby Jesus but the person he is to become, the Jesus of the Beatitudes who blesses the poor and those who mourn and the peacemakers and who says that he has come to set free the oppressed, that we take this Jesus to heart and not just welcome the sweetness of the Christ child.
Or we could reflect on the need to make room in the midst of a season so often filled with artificial cheerfulness, to make room in our hearts for those who mourn, because of personal losses they have experienced or because of the troubled world we live in, to make room for those who mourn which in some way surely must include most all of us, and so to make room in our hearts for our own mourning. And then of course there is the idea of resisting the cash Christmas maybe by remembering that Jesus is the reason for the season or by focusing on the more spiritual values of peace and goodwill or by making sure to make room in our lives for reflection and for prayer.
The idea of making room in our lives for Jesus, for God, for gifts of the spirit, all this I am suggesting is one way to approach the Christmas story, even though it can really be lots of ways and there can lots of different kinds of messages that come out of this approach, and I’m not suggesting that there’s anything wrong with any of them. I’ve given sermons more or less along the lines of everything I’ve mentioned so far and then some, all different but all having in common the idea of receiving, accepting, preparing a place for, making room for Jesus and what Jesus represents, all the holy gifts God sends us.
However, there is another way to look at the story. Everything I have been saying so far basically assumes that we are the hosts, that we are the ones who will be welcoming Christ, who will be making a place for him—or not. The world is our home and it is up to us whether we will let Christ in or not. He is coming as though he were a traveler from some foreign land intending to take up residence among us. Will we let him? Will we welcome him? Will we make a place for him? Nothing wrong with those questions, however we may interpret them, but they all have in common this idea that fundamentally the world belongs to us and it is up to us whether we will let Christ in, or God, or the Holy Spirit. Nothing wrong with any of that.
But what if we blink once or twice or squint or do whatever we have to do to see things in a different way. The other view I see is one where the question of whether we will make room for Christ is irrelevant because it is not up to us. In this other view of things we are not the host, like the innkeeper, with the option of turning Christ away. In this other view we are the guest, not the host. In this other view the world does not belong to us. It belongs to God. And God’s entry into the world, in the form of a child, is a sign of just that: that the world is God’s home and we are God’s guests in it. The language is archaic, but that is what the idea of the new-born king means to me. Not someone who has come to rule over us, but one whose birth reminds us that the earth is not ours to do with as we please. We are the travelers here. We are the sojourners. God is the host.
One thing this means to me is that we overstep ourselves when we set up divisions and distinctions, when we act as though it is our decision who we will welcome and who we will exclude. It is certainly not the role of the guest to decide whether the host will be welcome, whether we will choose to make room for him. It is also not the role of the guest to decide who else is welcome. If the earth belongs to God, if God has chosen to make her dwelling place here, to make this her home, if the whole earth is God’s home, then there can be no confusion. All of us, all people, all living things, all of us are guests and all are welcome. We are not innkeepers or gatekeepers with any ability really at all to decide who is favored, who is welcome, who is included. That decision has already been made, and it is ours simply to take our place among shepherds and magi and other travelers in the night, fellow guests in the household of God.
Another thing this alternate view of Christmas says to me is that the message of the Christmas story is not just to confront us with the need for a decision about whether we are going to make room for God in our lives, whether we are going to let God in or shut God out. The message of Christmas is rather—or also—that we are accepted into God’s heart, all of us and every part of us—our believing and disbelieving and wondering and wonderment, all the craziness and horror and loveliness of our very human lives, our blindness and our brokenness, the tentative steps we take toward justice, the often clumsy ways we try to love each other, the weariness that overtakes us and the hopefulness that persists in us, all of us, every one of us, every part of us, taken up, received, welcomed, embraced within the heart of God, our gracious host on this miraculous place God calls home where God has made a place for us to dwell as well.
Behold, the dwelling of God is here among us mortals. Behold, we have a dwelling place in the heart of God. Praise be to God. Amen.
Jim Bundy
December 24, 2006