Your Faith
No Room at the Inn
Churches are beautiful at Christmas. Greenery and Advent wreaths, old familiar carols, ranks of red poinsettias, candlelight on Christmas Eve, and adorable children in a Nativity tableau are all fond images we see during the Christmas season.
Whether you align yourself with a denomination or not, if you are in a small congregation or a megachurch, or whether your preference is for contemporary worship or traditional, at Christmas, the feeling is the same everywhere because the beloved story is the same one told in the churches year after year. Indeed, to the eye and to the ear, churches are beautiful at Christmas. But look carefully. The infant Jesus may be missing.
The birth of Jesus was a non-event in first century Judea. All the talk and action were about the taxation census, and Bethlehem was overrun with people who had come to register. Joseph and Mary, and what was happening in their personal lives, were crowded out of the busy world of commerce and politics. All the places where they might have stayed on that important night were filled up. There was no room for them at the inn, so they were directed to a stable, which was where Jesus was born. And his mother Mary laid him in a manger, a feeding trough for lowly animals. So, you see, Jesus was on the sidelines from the very beginning.
The 21st century picture is not so very different. Jesus is being crowded out in this day and age as well. Crowded out of our churches and crowded out of our lives.
For decades, membership in the mainline denominations, and churches in general, has been declining. Bitter arguments rage over inclusiveness issues and orthodoxy. Misconduct is widespread. Finances are strained. We are entangled in church politics, wrangling with one another like the ones who did find a place to stay at the inn and stayed up late arguing over Augustus Caesar’s tax policy. If only we would get out of the inn and turn toward the simple stable. If only we would focus again on what Jesus taught and what Jesus would have us do: love God above all else and our neighbors as ourselves.
Jesus is also being crowded out of our personal lives. The weight of the world’s obligations is heavy upon church-going Christians. Worship is supposed to be the central act of the Christian community. We come together for praise and thanksgiving, confession and prayer, to hear the Word, to rededicate ourselves to Christ and to support one another in fellowship. But more and more, we let the world impose its demand upon us and encroach upon that worship time. Sunday is no longer a day of rest, no longer the Sabbath. Work, shopping, children’s sports teams, travel, entertainment, weddings, and birthday parties all demand attention and attendance, so that going to church becomes what somebody might do when they’re not busy with something else. If only we would focus again on the stable instead of busying ourselves in the inn.
Because that’s where Jesus is born – in an outbuilding. And that is where Jesus continues to be born – in lowly, out of the way places, in places where there is poverty, injustice and fear, places where the least among us live, places like soup kitchens, nursing homes, subsistence level small farms and urban homeless shelters. And Jesus is being born where people are lonely and dispirited, discouraged and sad, abused and disheartened. In short, Jesus is being born on the peripheries of life and wherever people suffer.
We know that it would become a focus of Jesus’ life and ministry to issue a dramatic call for repentance and an invitation into service in his name. That is the real church. So even as you take in the beauty of a sanctuary adorned for the Advent and Christmas season, consider where Jesus is being born. Leave the busy inn and come to the stable. 