CELEBRATING CHRISTMAS IN A HOTEL 12-04-11 Sermon
In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria. All went to their own towns to be registered. Joseph also went from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to the city of David called Bethlehem, because he was descended from the house and family of David. He went to be registered with Mary, to whom he was engaged and who was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child. And she 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. Luke 2:1-7
When Wilbur and Orville Wright finally achieved their historic airplane flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, one December day in 1903, they sent home a telegram reporting their success. The telegram concluded with the words, “Home Christmas.”
That commonplace message may seem like an anticlimax for a telegram that announced success for one of the most revolutionary inventions in human history. But not if you’ve ever been in doubt about getting home for Christmas! Anyone who has ever sat in an airport, a railroad station, a bus depot or in stopped traffic on an interstate during the Christmas season, or anyone who has ever guided a car down an icy highway toward a Christmas destination, knows well enough that “home Christmas” is as lovely a brief declaration as human language can carry. Of course we want to be home for Christmas. Even those who have been neglectful of home throughout the year think about it at Christmastime. And those of us who have grown older, who no longer return to a childhood home, still return there in memories at this season of the year.
So it is ironic that the first Christmas came to a hotel, of all places. A hotel is where you stay when you can’t be at home. A hotel serves its purpose very well through the rest of the year, but on Christmas day or even Christmas eve, even the best hotel seems rather dismal. The few workers on duty are likely to act as if they have been drafted into service. Many times the dining rooms are closed. There’s a peculiar stillness about the building. Christmas decorations are everywhere, including perhaps a big tree in the lobby, but somehow the decorations seem like someone is trying too hard to be cheerful. A hotel just isn’t the place we choose to spend Christmas.
In spite of all that, the first Christmas came to a hotel! It wouldn’t have qualified for a modern chain, like a Hilton or Marriott, or even a Motel 6. As a matter of fact, it would have made even the most meager of our contemporary economy chains seem luxurious. But it was a hotel. It was probably a series of thatched rooms built around a central courtyard—looking more like covered porches than like rooms. Travelers brought their own food—and even the pot to cook it in. They brought their own bedding, and often their own firewood.
One Christmas season a first grade teacher was teaching her students about Christmas customs around the world. It was an ideal opportunity to share the Christmas story. She explained that Mary and Joseph had gone to Bethlehem to pay taxes. And that it was time for the baby to be born so they needed somewhere to spend the night. She told her students that when they got to the inn there were no empty rooms and she compared the inn to a modern-day hotel or motel. She was leading up to the stable when she asked, “What do you suppose they had behind the inn?” One little guy, who had been listening intently, began to frantically wave his hand. He knew that he knew the answer. And his answer was “A swimming pool!”
The hotel in Bethlehem was probably a shabby sort of place, perhaps several hundred years old. If so, it was like most hotels out in the provinces. They were usually dirty, uncomfortable, badly kept, and badly managed. Innkeepers in those days generally had an unsavory reputation, probably because their properties were so often used for immoral and criminal purposes.
This is the sort of place to which the young carpenter, Joseph, and his wife, Mary, came. They were tired and dusty from the road. Even though the voluminous garments of the Middle East were quite concealing, almost anyone could detect that the girl was soon to deliver a child. So the couple asked for a room. Have you ever traveled too long, wanting to make just a few more miles, and then come to a place without having a reservation? Even with a car and with money or a credit card in your pocket, it’s an unpleasant experience to have a desk clerk shake his head negatively. But how would you feel if you were traveling by foot, carrying your luggage along with you? [Note that the scripture never mentions a donkey that often appears on Christmas cards or in Nativity paintings.] And how would you feel if you simply can’t go to another town? Joseph had to go to Bethlehem by law. And still worse, how would you feel if you were a woman, ready to deliver, or the man responsible for her care? You can only imagine how it felt when the innkeeper says, “Sorry, no room. We’re all filled up.”
But you know what? I’m glad Christmas came to a hotel! Hotels and all that they represent as temporary lodging, are part of life. If Christmas isn’t inclusive enough to come to a hotel, it would seem that some of the most inevitable elements of our human experience are somehow beyond God’s concern and redemption.
But Christmas did come to a hotel. That means, for one thing, that Christmas comes to the world of business. And that’s a good thing. All of us have to spend a certain amount of time on matters of business, whether in writing checks or paying bills online, or signing contracts, or purchasing items. And some of us spend a good share of our lives that way, especially this time of the year. If Christmas bypassed the hotels of life—the world of cash registers, and stock market reports, and computers and business trips—it would leave us feeling that somehow the basics of daily life didn’t matter to heaven. In the beginning of John’s Gospel he says that the Word, who was God, became flesh and dwelt among us. God sent Jesus to come live among the everyday issues of our daily lives.
Hotels not only represent the world of business, they represent a particularly complex kind of business. Novelist Arthur Hailey says that hotel employees become used to seeing “an exposed slice of life.” Most of what happens in a hotel is routine, of course, and not at all glamorous or shocking. It’s mostly people on vacation, people staying the night so they can continue their travel the next day, people attending a conference or convention, or people needing a room from which to carry on their business for a few days.
But there is a seamier side to hotels, too. Hotel managers know they must not inquire into the private conduct of their guests as long as their activities don’t interfere with the rights of other guests. So for some people, a hotel is a place to go for a weekend of blind drinking, and in some places gambling, and for others, it’s a place for extramarital sex; and for some a hotel provides the anonymity that allows conduct that would otherwise be forbidden. This is nothing new. Even in the first century, many hotels were frequented for immoral purposes.
Like it or not, that’s part of the world in which we live. While the Christ child was being brought to birth in the stable of the hotel, it’s likely that several soldiers were gambling in some part of the hotel, and two government employees were padding their accounts in another, while in still another area, a man was choosing a young woman for the night.
When we think of the first Christmas, we usually think of angels singing for a group of shepherds, or the “cattle lowing” where the “baby awakes”: but in that Bethlehem hotel it was no doubt business as usual. Through the years of Jesus’ ministry, he never tried to isolate himself from the shoddy, shadowy side of life. Indeed, some condemned him for associating with what they would call the “less desirable elements of society.” He was called a drunk and a glutton because he ate and drank with tax collectors and sinners. But Jesus was always trying to redeem human life, always seeking to restore it to its divine purposes. His birth was appropriate for these intentions, for he was born behind a first-century hotel. Christmas comes to the world of business, even to businesses that are less than reputable.
Further, since Christmas comes to a hotel, it comes to the lonely. A hotel may seem like a lively place when you’re attending a convention, a wedding reception, or a family reunion or birthday party, but for many people it’s the loneliest place in the world. That’s part of the story for the person behind the desk or for the sometimes nearly faceless people in the housekeeping crew. The salesperson who spends half his life on the road will tell you that the four walls of a hotel room are the living definition of loneliness. Every city has some permanent hotel-dwellers. Often they are people with no family ties, living in the busy, crowded loneliness of a hotel.
Christmas comes to the lonely and says, “God loves you.” The news reports at frequent intervals that the world is growing more crowded. Ironically, it’s also growing more lonely. So many are learning that you can live in the midst of lights, action and crowds, and yet be desperately alone. In a world where loneliness is almost epidemic, Christmas announces, of all things, that it’s a friendly universe, because the God at the center of the universe is a loving God who sends his Son into the world to embrace its lonely heart.
But let me say something still more important. When Christmas came to that first-century hotel, it reminded us that Christmas comes even to those who don’t want it; specifically, for those who don’t have room for it. You remember that this first Christmas story carried a sad line—“There was no place for them in the inn.” Christmas comes not only to those who choose to seek it, like Simeon and Anna, who we read about in Luke 2, but it also comes to those who are indifferent and preoccupied. It invites even them to share its benefits.
When I was younger, I thought of that ancient innkeeper in the Christmas story as cold hearted and uncaring. However, as I’ve grown older I’ve come to see that at times I am like him. I realize that he probably didn’t refuse a room to Joseph and Mary because he was a mean, evil person; it was simply a case of no room.
In those days, government officials and soldiers on the march could claim free lodging in the hotels, and there was a census of the empire going on. It’s quite possible that he was a sympathetic person, and may have even preferred to house Joseph and Mary—especially if they were going to be paying guests. But the inn was full.
I’ve learned that so many shut God out of their lives, not necessarily because they are hostile to him, but simply because they are already “filled up” with other things. That’s the tragedy of so many lives. So many times people pass through a critical illness and they say that at the edge of death, they get a new understanding of what is important in life, a new understanding of what is worth living for. Everything seems to conspire to fill our days with less important things and then, when Eternity knocks at the door, we have to report that our rooms are all full, and maybe they have been for some time.
You and I are often like the innkeeper. We shut Christ out, not because we hate him, but because we are preoccupied with other things. In fact, the innkeeper never knew that he had shut out the very Son of God; he was simply filled up. And that is just the way some of us go through life—not knowing that Jesus is knocking at the door of our life. We get so occupied with other matters that we don’t even recognize God is calling.
Jill Briscoe wrote:
Room in my inn for my business affairs; Room in my inn for my worries and cares. Room in my inn for the drink and the smoke, room for the act, for the off-color joke. Room for my family, room for my wife. Room for my plans, Lord, but no room for Your life. And room for depression, when the party’s all through, room for myself, Lord, but no room for you.
Room in my stable, Lord, room out of sight. Room in the darkness and room where it’s night. Room with the cattle, the pigs and the sheep, room where a newborn babe can’t get to sleep; Room with the dirt, Lord, the rats and the mice, room with the maggots and room with the lice. Room, you can have it, how generous am I--, I like to be good when my Savior comes by; Room in the filth and the mire of my sin, Room on the cross by redemption to win, Room in my stable, but no room in my inn!
And so Christmas comes even to those who aren’t seeking it, who don’t particularly want it. It comes to hotels that are filled, to lives that are crowded, to people who are preoccupied. And always, it comes saying, “I love you. May I come in?”
One word more. Because Christmas comes to a hotel, we know that Christmas comes to those who are away from home. I said earlier that Christmas is the holiday when we want most to be home. But a hotel seems the opposite of home. It’s a place of transience, a place that says we’re away from home. And that’s another glory of Christmas. It comes to those who are homeless.
Which is to say, Christmas comes to all of us, to all in our wandering, homeless human race. We humans are never quite at home on this earth. Something within us knows there is another home, an Eden we somehow lost long ago. I wonder if a great deal of our running may spring from the instinctive sense that we don’t fully belong where we now live? Those who analyze the wide use of drugs, ranging from alcohol and marijuana to heroin and pills say that people are trying to escape. But what are they trying to escape from and to where? Is it because our hearts know that our address should be Eden, or heaven, and we’re constantly hoping to find our way home?
So Jesus was born away from home. Not in the village where Joseph and Mary had lived, and to which in time they would return, Nazareth. But Jesus was born in Bethlehem, where his family had gone to enroll for taxation. And he was born, not in a quiet peasant cottage, but in back of a poor hotel. He was born away from home. Indeed, he was! Because, as the New Testament writers tell us, his home was heaven, and he made himself homeless in order to restore us to our original home.
So it is that Christmas comes to a hotel. It comes to the world of business, where sometimes we shut Christ out and where the style is sometimes so very contrary to his. He comes to the lonely place. And he even comes to the place where he is not wanted, where there is simply no room for him. He comes, especially to those who are away from home—to you and to me.
And then, of course, the question comes, just as it did over 20 centuries ago, will we make room for him?
One final story. There was an old woman who lived in a big, old Victorian house filled with the many treasures she had collected over her 81 years. When the time came that she could not care for herself any longer, her relatives arranged for her to have an estate sale. They told her that everything had to go because there wasn’t going to be much space in her room at the nursing home.
After the sale, they packed her few remaining things into a big leather suitcase and an old chest of drawers that she had inherited from her grandmother. The woman also insisted on taking a very large battered wooden trunk, which she said her father had crafted from scrap lumber when he worked at the trunk factory.
When they arrived at the nursing home they expected that she would be very sad, that it would be a day of many tears. But the old woman was smiling as they walked in the door behind the cart that carried the suitcase, the old chest of drawers and the battered trunk. She was absolutely beaming, as if this was one of the happiest days of her life.
Just then the load on the cart shifted and the contents of the trunk spilled out on the floor. There were packets of carefully folded Christmas wrapping paper, bundles of aged Christmas cards tied with string, a carolers songbook, hand-knitted monogrammed Christmas stockings, a string of red, green, blue and white lights, a porcelain angel in a yellowed plastic bag, more than a dozen Christmas ornaments in their original boxes, and a miniature nativity set carved from ivory.
Oh my, the old woman laughed, I guess I need to travel lighter! She knelt down, picked up the tiny baby Jesus figure from the nativity set, and gently laid him in the manger. You are all I need, she whispered, as if speaking to Him alone. Then she gathered up the remaining pieces of the nativity set—the stable, the donkey, the cow, the sheep and lambs, the shepherds, the wise men, the camels and Mary and Joseph—and tucked them all into the pockets of her coat. And turning to her nephew, the one who had driven her to the nursing home she said, Jerry, why don’t you take the trunk home. And if you don’t want it, give it to one of your sisters. Maybe they can get some use out of some of this old stuff. She laughed again as Jerry helped her to her feet.
One of the aides who had come to escort the old woman to her room asked her how she could be so happy on a day like this. She said to the old lady, You haven’t even seen your room yet. And she said it in a tone of voice that implied that it wasn’t going to be very nice.
The old woman smiled and said, Oh, I don’t have to see it. I know it will be all right. I’ve learned to be content wherever I am. God has been so good to me. I feel so blessed.
You see, all those years that woman had been packing Christmas in her heart, the kind of Christmas you can take with you wherever you go. She had made room in her heart for Jesus
Let us pray:
Is there room in your heart for Jesus today, or do you need to do some housecleaning? What needs to get thrown out before the Lord can come in and fill your life?
Lord, we blame the innkeeper for only giving you the stable, when his inn was full. But what about all the others who lived in Bethlehem that night when you were born? Why were all their houses that weren’t filled with guests fast closed against the one who was carrying you?
God bless the little homes of our hearts this Christmastime. Make them big enough to welcome you.
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