Ok. So we are getting started with Advent, which means we are already thinking about Christmas coming. So let’s imagine for a moment that we were organizing a Christmas Pageant for Sunday School, and we were handing out parts. What parts do we have to find for the kids to play? No fair looking a Christmas pageant up on your phone, but you can use your Bibles if you want. Everything is in Luke 2 or Matthew 2. Let’s make a list together. Ready? Go!
[Take responses from the congregation.]
Great! You forgot one person: the innkeeper. You know why? Because he’s not in the Bible! The Bible mentions an inn, so we all just imagine there has to be an innkeeper, right? So I have to confess that I have always imagined the innkeeper as one of those older men who shouts, “Get off my lawn!” and complains about kids these days. “There’s no room at the inn,” I can hear him say, as if wondering what could Joseph and Mary be thinking of traveling at night without a reservation.
But I have been reading Ed Robb’s Making Room: Sharing the Love of Christmas, and I think I’ve changed my mind. I wonder if the innkeeper is the one who found space for the couple after all. I remember when Cynthia and I were traveling with our first child as an infant, we booked a hotel, and we asked for a crib. But they didn’t have one. We were just too tired by that point, and we gratefully went to find our room. It was clean and the bed was fine. Cynthia pulled out a dresser drawer and lined it with an extra blanket and some towels, and Morgan slept fabulously well that night. I wonder if Joseph and Mary were just glad to have a place out of the wind, warmed by the animals, a place where they could find refuge. So maybe, as Ed Robb suggests, the innkeeper was “doing the best he could to provide accommodations in a nearly impossible situation.”[1] Everything was full, but still this person found space.
I think Jesus calls us to make space in our lives for loving on people too. Of course, we have to prepare our hearts for what “making space” doesn’t and does mean. First, “making space” does not mean that we have to be perfect. In fact, how many times do we not invite someone into our car or our home or our office because it’s perfect enough? If we are honest, we are all a mess. Some of us are messy on the outside. Some of us are messy on the inside. We don’t have to be perfect to make space for someone, just real. So we can’t let our desire to be perfect keep us from making room.
Second, “making space” does mean showing hospitality. Ed Robb writes, “True hospitality involves providing shelter for others with our words and actions. True hospitality involves [the] healing of lonely hearts, of disconnected lives, and of the fear of being unknown and unloved.”[2]
Let me give you an example that may make things clearer. When I was growing up, people said of my mom that she “loved to entertain.” I’m not really sure that was true. You see, entertaining pressures us to be perfect, to have a perfect house, cook a perfect meal, and have a perfectly wonderful time. I think my mom’s real passion was hospitality—taking care of people, providing a place they could relax and be themselves, and know that however they were, they were loved. Sometimes we have to let go of the illusion of perfect entertaining, to find the reality of loving hospitality.
Amazing things happen when we make space for people.
When they first moved into their house, [Jenn] and her husband [Guy] did not take the time to get to know the neighbors…But Jenn’s three whippets and the two neighbor dogs began to engage in exuberant barking “conversations”…Often these barking matches would escalate, and the dogs would lean into the fence, eager to crash through to the other side. The result was frequently broken fence slats.
With each broken slat, Jenn and her husband, Guy, slowly got to know their neighbors, through exchanging names and phone numbers, contributing to a joint lumber fund for replacement slats, and exchanging ideas to outwit their persistent pups. Then late one afternoon, Jenn’s doorbell rang.
It was her neighbor, with another broken fence report. As he was about to leave, he stopped, paused for a minute, and then said, “I know you are a woman of faith. My wife and I see you and your husband going to church on Sunday mornings. Would you mind praying for my daughter?”
The neighbor’s eyes filled with tears as he told Jenn that his daughter, a relatively young woman, had recently been diagnosed with cancer. After listening to his story, Jenn…[asked] if they could pray together right then and there….In that moment, what had first been small acts of reaching out (mostly because of the actions of their dogs) became true neighborly bonding.[3]
We never know when making a little space might lead to God really making a difference through us.
I think lots of us approach the run-up to Christmas like the old version of the innkeeper. So many things to be done, so many people to think about, parties to go to, and traditions to manage. Does it ever seem to be too much? Do you ever feel overwhelmed, even grouchy? Does your life ever seem so full, that like the innkeeper we say, “There’s no room in the inn!” and close the door? “Whew!” we might say to ourselves. “There’s one thing I am not responsible for!” But, “All of us need to connect with someone who cares. Perhaps this was the first gift presented to Mary and Joseph on that bustling starry night in Bethlehem, before the wise men arrived with frankincense, gold and myrrh. Perhaps it was the gift of the innkeeper who cared. Someone with a listening ear who heard their need; someone who, though the inn was filled, made room.”[4]
This Advent, the Deacons and I believe God is calling for us to make space in our lives for Jesus to be born. The idea is that as we make room for our neighbors, not to entertain them, but to show them hospitality and acceptance, we make room for Jesus. In fact, we never know how God is going to use the space we make, to heal a wound, to offer forgiveness, to share a bit of the peace. When we make space for our neighbor, in fact, we are really sharing the love of Christmas, the love that Jesus came to share with us.
[1]Ed Robb, Making Room: Sharing the Love of Christmas (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2020), p. 7.
[2]Ibid, p. 20
[3]Ibid, p. 17
[4]Ibid, pp. 21–22.