It’s a Wonderful Life. Miracle on 34th Street. Home Alone. Polar Express. National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, and depending on who you ask, Die Hard.
Pretty much everyone has at least one favorite holiday film.
This time of year, perhaps more than any other, we seek stories out for their ability to touch the heart and soul. And for many of us, this season just isn’t complete until we’ve watched our favorites.
It’s no wonder Christmas Day is traditionally the busiest day of the year for movie theaters.
Christmas is the season of stories.
Sometimes though the familiarity of even a beloved holiday film can turn it into little more than a static of nostalgia playing in the background as we busy ourselves with more pressing tasks like wrapping presents, preparing feasts, and compulsively checking on that one package you really hope arrives on time.
These stories just become another assumption of the season.
Unfortunately, I think the same can often be said of the beloved Christmas story itself from the Gospel of St. Luke. For much of the world, the Christmas story has simply become the background noise for the season, no different than any other holiday film.
And yet.
And yet, here you are.
You’ve come here, friend and stranger alike, to place this holy story at the center of the season. There are so many other things you could be doing with the dwindling hours until Christmas morning, but instead, you’ve made room to hear again about a holy family, shepherds and angels, an inn with no room, a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manager.
I am so glad you’re here.
Even still, gathered here tonight, it’s okay to admit that, after hearing it for the umpteenth time in your life, even this story can lose a little of its magic.
Maybe it’s comforting, but no longer startling like it was for the shepherds keeping watch over their flocks by night. Familiar, but no longer bewildering, like it was for Mary who could only ponder its mysteries in her heart. Warm and well-worn but no longer wondrous and bright like the choirs of angels singing in the night.
And, on top of that, you’ve got to try to listen to a sermon about the same-old, same-old when most of us are here to sing carols together!
If that’s you, don’t feel embarrassed. That’s pretty much where I was a few days ago until I was unexpectedly visited by a ghost of Christmas past.
A ghost of the first Christmas past actually.
As I read and re-read the age-old story of that miraculous night in Bethlehem, one character kept trying to get my attention, a character who isn’t explicitly mentioned but who is frequently inferred, who lives just off the page, and is often portrayed as something of a bad guy.
I’m speaking, of course, of the so-called innkeeper, who we’ve come to believe turned Mary and Joseph away the night Jesus was born forcing them to find a lonely stable for lodging.
He’s not in the text, so he doesn’t have a name, but I’ve come to think of him as Larry.
And he had something to say.
But before he could get a word, I asked him the question that’s been on so many minds for so many centuries.
“So why’d you do it?” I asked.
“Do what?” He replied.
“Why’d you turn the Holy Family away?” I continued. “It just seems so heartless to deny a pregnant woman a place to sleep and to give birth.”
Larry paused for a long, long time, his face a mask of bewilderment that I mistook for regret. After all, I was asking him to re-live probably his biggest mistake, his one decision that would brand him as the very first Scrooge, the miserly, inhospitable grump of the Christmas story.
“What exactly do you think happened that night?” he asked, finally.
By that time, we’d arrived at the crèche, the Nativity scene here at the altar.
“Well this,” I said, pointing to it.
And I told him the whole story as we’ve typically come to imagine. Joseph arrives with a very pregnant Mary to Bethlehem late in the night only to be greeted by an innkeeper who tells him there’s no room in the inn, and so the Holy Family are forced to find shelter elsewhere. They wind up in a stable where, that night, Mary goes into labor and gives birth surrounded by nothing but dirty animals, hay, and the smell of manure. Joseph, playing the part of the most unprepared midwife in history, delivers the baby, wraps him in swaddling clothes, and with nowhere else to lay him, places the babe in the feeding trough.
Because of the innkeeper’s refusal of the Holy Family, our Lord and Savior was born an outcast, in lonely and desperate circumstances, deprived of the meaningful human connection and community so vital at birth.
After a long silence, much to my surprise, Larry the innkeeper began to laugh.
“That’s the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard,” he said.
I was offended. “You mean to tell me, after all that, you still don’t believe Jesus, God made flesh, was born in Bethlehem?”
“No, no,” he replied. “That’s definitely true. That actually happened. I was there. The rest of it, though?”
He shook his head.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Well, so much of what you just said is misunderstood or just plain wrong it’s hard to know exactly where to begin,” Larry replied.
“How about just starting at the beginning then?” I suggested.
“That’s part of the problem. Your beginning is all wrong. Mary and Joseph didn’t show up the night Jesus was born. My wife and I met them weeks and weeks before when they first arrived at our doorstep at our humble home in Bethlehem. You see,” he said, “I’m not an innkeeper.”
And this was the story he told.
Knowing they had to register in Bethlehem and knowing Mary was pregnant, the Holy Family left Nazareth and arrived in town with plenty of time before she was due to give birth. Of course, I didn’t recognize them because Joseph was a very distant cousin and I didn’t know him from Adam. So he began to introduce himself as Joseph, son of Jacob, son of Matthan, son of Eleanor, Son of Elihud, and so on, until we finally recognized our common ancestor several generations back.
And from that moment, Joseph stopped being a stranger and started being family.
So, my wife and I welcomed them into our home. I know your story says there was no room in the inn, and I guess that’s true in a way. Our upstairs room was indeed already full with a different long-lost relative coming for the census. I just don’t know why your story calls it an inn because in my language that word simply means a typical guest room. In my culture, hospitality was so important even poor folk like me built their homes to ensure there was always guest room for visitors.
So, instead of putting them in the guest room, we made room for them downstairs, on the ground floor, in the family room, partly so we could keep an eye on Mary and partly so she wouldn’t have to navigate the stairs after birth. And the family room was right next to a small area where we’d bring our animals in for the night to keep them out of bad weather, safe from bandits, and to feed them. For poor folks like us, animals were some of our most valuable possessions, and with the hay already there, we thought the manger would make a great makeshift crib for a bed.
Over the next few weeks, the midwife came by to check on Mary several times and we did all the things the she said would encourage Mary’s labor, particularly frequent walks around town. I suspect those walks were mostly to keep folks from stopping by at all hours but to still let them keep tabs on Mary.
Everywhere she went, perfect strangers knew her and offered their prayers and blessings. And as is our culture’s tendency, folks were soon competing to see who could be the most welcoming and caring.
Mary wound up with enough to eat not just for two, but for 12 or more, and enough prayers to turn her into a saint.
Eventually, Mary went into labor, and word rippled through town. The midwife arrived, along with various other townsfolk, men and women, boys and girls. It was an exciting excuse to get together, to pray, give thanks, and hopefully, if things went well, to celebrate. The women packed into the family room and the midwife directed the labor and the traffic. We men stood in the courtyard talking of small things we pretended were important … as men often do when women are busy transforming the world.
Late into the night, we finally heard the baby’s cry in the dark.
A shout and a cheer went up.
That would have been enough joy for one night, but just when the celebrations were finally quieting, the shepherds arrived, stars still in their eyes and angels’ voices still in their ears. They told us extraordinary things about good news, about true peace on earth, about the favor of God on normal, ordinary people like us not just the folks in the lap of luxury and halls of power. They told us that this little baby, born in our family room and lying in our manger, was going to be the Savior, the Messiah, the prince of Peace.
It’s the happiest we’d been in a long time. That Roman census had hung over us like a sword, one more way for our occupiers to force us to hand over what little we had, to keep us downtrodden and captive, to remind us they owned everything we had. We lived in fear of that so-called Roman Peace, which we all knew was really just punishmment and death to anyone who dared stand up to them.
How ironic that that same terrible census, meant to remind us of our poverty and powerlessness, had brought us one thing the Romans and their endless campaign of fear and death could never take from us: new light and new life, the true peace of God and a new kingdom not made by human hands, but birthed into the world with the help of ordinary ones.
And the baby’s name, of course, was Jesus.
And with that Larry left, having turned the whole story right side out.
Because if what Larry says is actually how it happened, and I think it probably was if we look closely at Luke’s text in its original language and context, how the world changes in the midst of darkness, violence and fear may be a little simpler and lot more hopeful than we ever thought.
What if the point of Jesus’ birth, in the way Luke tells it, was actually the very first lesson about how salvation actually comes into the world?
Salvation is born in the world whenever we turn strangers like Mary and Joseph into our holy family and make room for them even when there is no room
Salvation is born when our assumptions of deprivation and scarcity are transformed into parables of abundance and joy.
Salvation is born when we seek peace that comes not through a sword or the powerful but through the love and care of ordinary, humble, every day people who without fanfare create a community in which God can be born over and over again.
Now, that’s a story for this season of stories.
The first Christmas story.
A story of good news, of great joy, for all people, for all time.