Making Room

Isaiah 9:2-7; Luke 2:1-20

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

December 24, 2024

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41gwl0lFgpY

In a few days, our family will gather at Jim’s parents’ home. We’re not a large family, so there has always been plenty of space, enough that everyone had their own bed. But the whole family is going to be there this year, some of the adult grandchildren now with partners in tow. For the first time ever, we had to think about making room for everyone. For the first time ever, one of the adult grandchildren will be sleeping on an air mattress in what they used to call the playroom. That kind of thing is happening in many places tonight, someone is sleeping on an air mattress or a sofa bed or in their childhood bunkbed, because someone else already claimed the guest room.

When Judah read the first part of the story tonight, you might have heard a word that surprised you – the word “guest room” in the Bible story. We are used to hearing that Mary laid her baby in the manger because there was no room for them in the “inn.” But tonight, we heard there was no room in the “guest room” because a few recent Bible translators have dared to tread on years of traditions of Christmas pageants with innkeepers and no vacancy signs.

There is a word for “inn” in Greek. It is the word that Luke uses in the parable about the Samaritan who helped the man on the road to Jericho. The Samaritan bandaged his wounds and took him to an inn and paid the innkeeper to look after him. That story uses a Greek word that means an inn.

But Luke uses a different word here. The word here is kataluma. The one other time that kataluma occurs in Luke’s gospel is when Jesus sends his disciples to find a place to celebrate the Passover. Preparing for what we now call the Last Supper, Jesus told them to ask the homeowner for the use of the kataluma, the upper room or the guest room. The kataluma was an extra room, added on top of a house for the purpose of providing space for guests.

In the first century, Palestinian homes usually had two main areas – one large room used for cooking, eating and sleeping. We might call this the living room. The second area, usually down a few steps, was a night shelter for animals and a day room for people. Into this lower level, the family cow, donkey and a few sheep were brought each night. In the morning, the animals were taken out into a courtyard, the area was cleaned and the house was ready for the day.

In these homes, mangers were built into the floor of the main room. If a cow or donkey got hungry at night, it could stand and reach the food on the floor of the living room. So, when a first century person heard this story about the baby being laid in a manger, they would immediately have understood that Jesus was not in a barn or a stable, but in the living room. If they thought to themselves, but “why not the guest room?” that it is answered immediately. The guest room was already taken.[1]

So, Jesus was not born in the stable of some cold, impersonal one star hotel but rather in the living room of a home where aging aunts cousins, and other relatives may have doted on the new baby. God was welcomed into a world with room for Mary and Joseph, into a family, with rituals and holiday traditions, and all the quirks and characters that our families have.

That is what we celebrate tonight, that God came to share out humanness, our pain, our fear, our hopes and joys, and our love. God arrived as vulnerable and weak as any of us. Jesus lived and dwelt among us. God made room for us.

I want to invite M to join me up here. M is 7 years old. Several weeks ago, M called me with some questions. It is a pastor’s privilege to get to make room for the theological questions whenever they occur. We spent almost half an hour on the phone. M had so many good questions and some of her own good answers. I’m still thinking about a lot of them. M is willing to share just a few of them with us tonight. She started with questions about Jesus’ crucifixion, like:

M: Did the people who killed Jesus get arrested and go to jail for doing that? Why didn’t Jesus just run away? Did Jesus come back to life? Did he transform or something?

Kathy: She didn’t make it easy for me. M would ask a question. I would try to answer. She would say “Uh huh” and then fire off another one. And then, in a few minutes, she would circle back to an answer I had offered to a previous question and provide her own comments on that. For example, I talked about Jesus being God and also being God’s son. That Jesus could be both of those at the same time didn’t faze her. But when she circled back, she asked:

M: You said that there is God who is the parent and Jesus who is the son. Is there anyone else in Jesus’ family?

See what I mean about good questions and comments? I took that opening to talk about the Holy Spirit who we might think of as a kind of sister in Jesus’s family. Got to get an understanding of the Trinity in at an early age. But then she circled back to the question that I’m thinking about now. When M had asked me why Jesus was killed, I said that Jesus came from God to teach people how to love each other, how to love their neighbors and their enemies and how to be kinder. When M circled back, she asked:

M: After Jesus died, were people more loving? Did they learn to be kinder to each other?

Kathy: M, that great question is one that I am still thinking about tonight. Thank you for sharing this conversation with all of us.

M: You’re welcome.

Behind M’s questions I heard “Was it worth it? All that God went through to become human, to live with us as one of us, to be executed and then raised from death – did it make a difference? Did people learn to love? Are we kinder as a result of all that?

My first reaction was to think about all the wars being waged, all the atrocities being committed, all the petty cruelties and systemic injustices we inflict on each other – and I might have said “No, people still have not learned to love like Jesus taught.”

But you can’t really say that to a 7-year-old, can you? So, I said that we are still learning and that is why we keep remembering Jesus’s teachings and telling them again and again to each other, because it is not always easy to love our family or our neighbors or especially our enemies.

But then, I thought about those who have followed Jesus across the millennia. I thought about how the Jesus movement spread in the first century and how the first Christians were known by the love they had for each other. I remember how they broke through one cultural boundary after another, caring for foreign widows, making room for the poor, accepting the leadership of those from within and also from outside their religious tradition. I remember people whose faith compelled them to start schools or reform prisons or abolish slavery or shelter refugees because they believed so fervently in Jesus’ teachings. And I realize that people have learned to love like Jesus loves and we are also still learning.

I also recalled one last story about making room for each other. You might know it already, but maybe it’s ok to re-tell a familiar story on Christmas Eve. The events of this story happened in 2008. They happened to Naomi Shihab Nye. Naomi is a Palestinian-American poet and novelist. She grew up in Missouri, Jerusalem and Texas. Today she makes her home in San Antonio.

Naomi says Wandering around the Albuquerque Airport Terminal, after learning my flight had been delayed by four hours, I heard an announcement: “If anyone in the vicinity of Gate A-4 understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately.”

Well, one pauses these days.

Gate A-4 was my own gate. I went there. An older woman in full traditional Palestinian embroidered dress, just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing. “Help," said the flight agent. “Talk to her. What is her problem? We told her the flight was going to be late and she did this.”

I stooped to put my arm around the woman and spoke haltingly in Arabic. The minute she heard any words she knew, however poorly used, she stopped crying. She thought the flight had been cancelled entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for major medical treatment the next day. I said, “No, we’re fine, you’ll get there, just later, who is picking you up? Let’s call him.”

We called her son, I spoke with him in English. I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane and ride next to her. She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and found out of course they had ten shared friends. Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian poets I know and let them chat with her? This all took up two hours.

She was laughing a lot by then. Telling of her life, patting my knee, answering questions. She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies—little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts—from her bag—and was offering them to all the women at the gate. To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the mom from California, the lovely woman from Laredo—we were all covered with the same powdered sugar. And smiling. There is no better cookie.

And then the airline broke out free apple juice from huge coolers and two little girls from our flight ran around serving it and they were covered with powdered sugar, too

. . . .

And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and I thought, This is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in that gate—once the crying of confusion stopped—seemed apprehensive about any other person. They took the cookies.

Naomi concludes, “This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.”[2]

Christmas reminds us that the promised peace on earth comes as we learn to love one another. We make room for weary or frightened travelers. We make room for those who are exuberant and overly loud in the center and also for those who insist on withdrawing just beyond the perimeter. We make room for a child’s eager questions, for a young adult’s cynicism and for a senior with the weary wisdom of their years. We make room for family and strangers, for neighbors and for enemies. We make room for each other, in all the ways and places we find ourselves, because this is good news of great joy for everyone. Thanks be to God.

[1] Kenneth Baily, https://pres-outlook.org/2006/12/the-manger-and-the-inn-a-middle-eastern-view-of-the-birth-story-of-jesus/