Making Room for Christ
Luke 2:1-14 

Christmas is a family occasion. Some of our King of Peace church family is away this Christmas gathered with family in other states. And some of you here tonight have traveled to be here with family. If this is a typical Christmas, someone here tonight is wondering how they are going to be able to sleep on that fold out couch that awaits them. That bar across the back starts to get really uncomfortable some time in the middle of the night. And someone else is on the floor, perhaps on an air mattress or in a sleeping bag. 

That’s what it likes when families gather, the house overflows with people and we make room. Sure, some folks might need a room in a nearby motel, but that gets sorted out as well and most folks pile in the family home. 

In some cultures, this idea is even broader than either Christmas, or immediate family. I once worked with a pastor from Zimbabwe who could never understand the homeless problem in America. He would insist that the men and women should go to their family. I would insist that perhaps they had no family. This was impossible from a Zimbabwe perspective as even a distant uncle or third cousin, removed not nearly as much as they should be would still consider him or herself a relative enough to make room for the homeless person to live with them. In Zimbabwe he said, it would not just be your duty, you would want to do it. You would not want a family member, no matter how distant, left to fend for themselves. 

Now, I know that urbanization and the AIDS pandemic have brought changes even to Zimbabwe in recent years. But in the Middle East of 2,000 years ago, it was still customary to view the term family more broadly and in more binding terms than we use for it today. In the Palestine of Herod the Great, families still looked out for their own. And extended families could get quite extended in some circumstances. 

This is what makes Mary and Joseph’s dilemma such a problem. There is that most puzzling verse from Luke’s Gospel telling us that Mary, “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.” 

What were they doing in a stable with no bed for their baby but a manger, which is a polite word for a feed box? Where was their family? 

Yes, this was Joseph’s ancestral home, not his own town. This was not Nazareth where the carpenter now lived and was better known, but a town on the outskirts of Jerusalem in which his family had not lived perhaps for generations. Yet, if Joseph had to go to Bethlehem, so would have his brother and sisters, father and mother and his cousins too, at least whichever of those family members were still alive. Each of them would have had to have found room in Bethlehem and once they found room, they would have been obligated by duty to make room for Joseph and his very new, so obviously pregnant wife, Mary. 

So why were Mary and Joseph in a stable? Perhaps the family had piled into the inn and Mary and Joseph were living in the overflow section. That explanation would work, except for Mary’s pregnancy. Surely even old Uncle Mordecai would have given up a bed for a woman on the verge of childbirth. And second cousin Eli could have gone and slept in the stable so Joseph could be near his wife. 

But to read the story and take it at face value is to understand that Mary and Joseph were alone in Bethlehem. The shepherds did not find a stable overflowing with extended family knocking themselves over to make some better arrangements for the new baby. The shepherds found a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.  

I’m told that even today among more traditional Palestinian women, it is common when pregnant to wear a clothe girdle around your waist as birth comes near. That cloth wound around your waist stands at the ready to wrap the baby when he or she is born. The snugly bound strips of cloth are to help a baby grow straight and tall. And as Mary unwrapped hers and wrapped Jesus, she had no one but Joseph to help her. No mother-in-law, no aunt, no cousins and no sisters-in-law. Just a very young mother, doing for her baby what she knew to be best, with the father trying to make things a bit better the best he could under the circumstances. 

Why this happened is a mystery. We can guess, as some have that it was because Joseph was older, Mary being his second wife. He had no surviving relatives to make room for him and his young bride. Or we can guess with others that the scandal of Mary’s pregnancy had stretched the limits of family to the point that the Holy Family was left out when it came time to sort out sleeping arrangements back in Bethlehem. 

But what we know, and know with certainty, is that Mary and Joseph were left to fend for themselves. No family had made room for them in Bethlehem and neither had any strangers. In a town packed to the rafters with fellow ancestors of King David, no one could find room for Mary and Joseph who were so obviously in need. We know that Jesus was born to a couple who would have every reason to be feeling quite alone as they laid their baby in that manger. 

This scene makes the words of Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel all the more poignant, 

‘…I was hungry, and you gave Me nothing to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me nothing to drink; I was a stranger, and you did not invite Me in; naked, and you did not clothe Me; sick, and in prison, and you did not visit Me.’ “Then they themselves also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry, or thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not take care of You?’ “Then He will answer them, ‘Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to Me.’” (Matthew 25:42-45) 

Mary and Joseph were strangers and no one invited them in. And those who shut their doors to Joseph as he looked for room for his great-with-child wife, were shutting there doors on God incarnate. When they did not make room for that one pregnant girl, they did not make room for the maker of heaven and earth to be born among us. 

Jesus taught us that we could see his face in the face of a needy person. And so he taught us to find him in all times and in all places. I think in the 2,000 years since that night in Bethlehem, we have learned a little. For this sermon is not one to beat you up for things left undone. No, I think we can and should take some small pride in what we have accomplished together this Christmas.  

If you will pick up a copy of our latest issue of our newsletter, The Olive Branch, on your way out tonight, you can read a thank you note from Father Harold Roberts and the people of the Church of the Redeemer in Biloxi, Mississippi. That congregation whose church buildings, homes and community were devastated by Hurricane Katrina is thankful for the $1,000 that this congregation gave them recently.  

If you look in the entry hall, you will find our Christmas trees are bare, but a week ago, presents were piled high in the hallway, and have now been distributed to needy families in Camden County. Through the discretionary fund of this church this week I have helped to keep electricity on for a couple of families this Christmas and bought car seats so that a pair of twins could come home from the hospital, and threw in a crib and mattress for when they get home for good measure.  

Then just last evening, after having met a family in need at a local supermarket to give them a gift card to get food for Christmas week, I received a call of yet another family slipping through the cracks. I sent out an email last night and today, a single mom struggling to make Christmas happen for her six children found that King of Peace was willing to reach out yet again. By three this afternoon we had a very satisfying group of gifts together with gift cards for the Mom to do a little shopping on her own for both Christmas gifts and food. 

It may sound like bragging, but it is just relating some of what we as a congregation have accomplished this Christmas. We have not just remembered Jesus birth; we have made room for his birth to be celebrated more fully by our neighbors. And in making room for our neighbors to celebrate Christmas, we were making room for Christ to come once again in their hearts and ours. 

As we move ahead from this silent, holy night, we carry this message with us. Christ was born to parents who were shut out when they were most in need in order to show us how God is most fully present among those who are the neediest. People who have everything, find little need for God and people who have nothing find need for little else. The best advice for this Christmas I received today at Publix. In the checkout line, someone remarked on how busy the store was and the cashier said, “Yeah, but everyone is in such a good mood. It’s nice.” Then the woman bagging groceries added, “If we could have Christmas every day of the year, wouldn’t that be a miracle.” The cashier added, “Wouldn’t that be nice.” 

The wonderful realization in this is that we can find that that joy of Christmas does infuse the whole year. As we can find Christ in all times and all places as we find in all times and all places people in need of the love that God has shown us. Those in need are not needy just one week a year. And we can see Christ in the people we reach out to and they can see Christ in us all through the year. 

I want to close with an alternate vision of Christmas. It comes from the movie Christmas with the Kranks. Having tried to skip Christmas for a Caribbean cruise the Kranks have been rude to their neighbors. Now with their daughter arriving home unexpectedly with her fiancé, the Kranks find themselves in need. Watch what their neighbors do. 

[show video clip of the neighbors coming together to create Christmas for the Krank’s daughter, Blair,
in spite of how her father has been treating them]