Luke 2:1-20
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
When we hear this very familiar Christmas story, it’s easy to hear what we remember from childhood and from past Christmases. The challenge is to hear what this living Word is saying to us today, in our lives and our world, because the story of the birth of our Savior Jesus Christ, the wonder and mystery of the Word made flesh, isn’t just something that happened in history. The incarnation – God made human – matters today to all of us here and now.
As I was thinking about how we hear this story I remembered the scene near the beginning of Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life” when the angel Clarence is summoned and begins to learn about George Bailey. From the heavens above, he and Gabriel look down on earth and, at first, it’s a little blurry and then Clarence can see the town of Bedford Falls where the story takes place. Reflecting on the gospel story tonight, we are zooming in from far above to pay closer attention to what is happening on the ground.
In tonight’s gospel the very first person Luke names is Emperor Caesar Augustus, immediately putting us in the Holy Roman Empire, and in any other story of the birth of a king, we’d expect to see a palace or castle. But Luke keeps moving and next he names the governor of Syria which then was a Roman province and we have a little better sense of where this story takes place. A place that looks different from here, a place where people lived thousands of years before the birth of Jesus. But Luke doesn’t stop there; he keeps going, on to Nazareth, and then to Bethlehem, where Joseph and Mary have traveled.
Those details may not seem important, but they are, because we are hearing the story of the Savior of the World, and at that time, that was the title given to Caesar Augustus. He was called the Savior and he was called the Son of God. So from its very beginning, the birth of Jesus turned the world as it was known on its head.
It’s also important to hear that this isn’t a story about Joseph and Mary traveling to be with family; if the governor ordered a census, it was required and they had to make the trip. Maybe Joseph couldn’t pay for someone to stay with Mary, maybe Mary didn’t want to be left in Nazareth when she was heavy with child; we don’t know. What we know is that when we meet them in the Gospel, they have traveled a long way to an unfamiliar place, and now the time has come for the baby to be born.
And that is when Luke tells us that there is no room in the inn.
Sometimes that is heard as Joseph, Mary and Jesus are on the street; other times, we hear the word “manger” and recall nativities we’ve seen and imagine a cow stall and a wooden trough. The finer points of Palestinian sociology and archaeology aren’t really the point.
Whatever their surroundings, it feels very cold and very lonely for Joseph and Mary, if it were not for the presence of this Child in whom so much has already been promised in the words of the angel who visited Mary: “the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God.” (Luke 1:35)
Writing about the birth of Jesus, Martin Luther said there was nothing fearful or frightening about God coming to earth as vulnerable infant. Instead God who comes to us as a baby brings us comfort and consolation. [i] In her poem Amazing Peace, poet Maya Angelou wrote, “Hope spreads around the earth brightening all things.”[ii] This is the Child whose birth we celebrate tonight.
Presbyterian Ann Weems wrote in her poem, “In Search of our Kneeling Places” about being “Bethlehem-bound.” All Advent we have been Bethlehem-bound, and tonight we find ourselves alongside Joseph and Mary bearing witness to this wondrous miracle.
In his Christmas sermons, Luther scolded Bethlehem for being inhospitable to the Baby Jesus, and he didn’t give the rest of us much credit either. He said that we would have been happy today to help the Baby and wash His linen because we know Christ, but if we had been there in Bethlehem, we would have done no better. [iii]
Weems is gentler but her challenge is similar. She wrote, “In each heart lies a Bethlehem, an inn where we must ultimately answer whether there is room or not.” [iv]
That is the question we hear tonight as we listen again to the Christmas story: “Will we make room for Jesus?”
God has come and is offering us God’s own Son, who comes into this world to give us life eternal, to make us children of God, just as He is. God makes space in our hearts to receive Christ with all the wonder and mystery of the Incarnation. If anything has distracted us from Jesus before tonight, it is gone now. We are here this Christmas Eve to receive our King, our Savior and Messiah.
Will we make room?
Let us pray…
Holy God,
We give you thanks for coming to us as an infant,
God enfleshed, without titles above us or power over us.
We give thanks for the hopefulness, comfort and consolation that the birth of Jesus brings to us and to the world.
Help us make room in our hearts and lives that we may known your abundant love and grace.
We pray in the name of our Lord and Savior, Jesus the Christ.
Amen.
[i] Martin Luther’s Christmas Book. 33
[ii] Maya Angelou, Amazing Peace.
[iii] Martin Luther’s Christmas Book. 31.
[iv] Ann Weems. “In Search of Our Kneeling Places.” Kneeling in Bethlehem.
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