“No Room In The Inn”
Sermon Transcript for December 18, 2005
By Rev. Mike Beck
“No Room in the Inn” is probably one of the most used sermon titles in the history of the church! In most of those sermons, we focus on the cold-heartedness of the Innkeeper…of how Mary and Joseph were turned out into the winter night…and of the ways in which we turn away Christ and make no room for Him in our busy lives.
But I want to invite us this morning to look at the story in a different way. I want to say: “Thank God for the Innkeeper!” Yes, you heard me right. Thank God for this much maligned little man that too many ranks right up there with Herod, Pilate, and Judas Iscariot. We don’t like the phrase, “No room in the Inn”. And perhaps we would like to change the story. You see, we want Mary and Joseph to have the nicest room in the Bethlehem Hilton so that the King of Kings can be born in an appropriate place. We want it to be the way a nine year old boy depicted it who played the Innkeeper in a school Christmas pageant. As the story goes, there was quite a stir in the auditorium that evening. Mary and Joseph stood at the doorway to the Inn and the young boy playing the Innkeeper said, “Be gone, be gone”. But then his face filled with tears as he looked at Mary and Joseph and he added to the script: “No, don’t go, Joseph. Bring Mary back. You can have my room.”
Now, that would be a heartwarming story--the baby Jesus touching the heart of someone before He was even born. Now if you read the Christmas stories in Luke and Matthew’s gospels carefully, neither one of them even mentions an Innkeeper. It’s probably like we’ve invented the fact that there were three Wise Men when I would defy you to find the number three anywhere in the Christmas accounts. Luke has no dramatic story line, just the phrase “no room in the Inn” almost as an after thought tucked away at the end of the narrative.
No room in the Inn. I want to suggest that there is something very wonderful about those five words. As William Carl suggests in his little book, “Waiting For the Lord,” the story as Luke records is a symbol of something very profound and positive as he writes, “It is the symbol of a God who comes into the little villages of our lives, who comes into the lowest points of our existence and identifies with us when we feel on the outside.” Without these five little words, “no room in the inn”, there would have been no stable, there would have been no manger, there would definitely have been no shepherds. They were the riff-raff of society. Let them appear at the door of the inn and you can guarantee they would be run out with a stick. No symbol of God’s compassion for the poor and the outsider. Yes, thank God for the Innkeeper.
Let’s stop making him out to be the epitome of Ebenezer Scrooge’s lack of compassion for Tiny Tim and his family. Rather, maybe there was a note of compassion in his reply that night as he said, “I’m sorry. The rooms of my inn are all full, but I have a stable at the edge of town. You can have that. At the least you will be warm and you’ll have a place to rest.” The Innkeeper, you see, was just doing his job. But unaware to him, he was allowing you and me to see in a vivid way that God identifies with the outsider, that God identifies with the poor, that God identifies with the person who feels that they have no place left to turn.
We see in this beautiful story that God will make a way for us even when we feel we are out of options. Luke and the other gospel writers carry on this theme throughout their accounts of Jesus’ life. The Jesus the gospel writers reveal to us hangs out with what we might call the riff-raff of society. They remind us that His greatest enemies were persons within the religious establishment of His day. Throughout Jesus’ ministry, we see Him having a special place in His heart for the poor, for the sick, for the lonely, for those who feel like they have lost their way in life. And the Jesus portrayed by the gospel writers went to die on a cross between two thieves as the soldiers gambled for the only possession and property He owned to His name.
No room in the Inn, no home to lay His head, no throne but a cross. That is the real Jesus that the Gospel writers’ portrayed. The prophet Isaiah put it this way hundreds of years before. He said, “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to Him, nothing in His appearance that we might desire Him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces, He was despised, and we esteemed Him not. Surely He took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows. He was pierced for our transgressions; He was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon Him; and by His wounds we are healed.”
You know it is natural for us to see God in the beauty of a sanctuary such as this, to be able to experience God in the stirring music of the bells this morning, to see God in the face of a new baby or to experience God in the rich fellowship with other Christians “like us”. What I want to invite you to do this morning is to learn to experience the message of Christmas in the faces of the poor, in those persons whose hearts have been hardened by the struggles of life, for those whose perspectives on life may be very different than our own. And I always, like you, look forward to the Christmas Cantata that was held last week and Christmas Eve services coming up this coming Saturday evening. Oh, it is so easy for us to get in touch with God in those stirring moments. But as I reflect back on this last week as wonderful as the Cantata was and as the Christmas Eve services will be, I wonder if the true message of Christmas wasn’t seen even more clearly out there in the lobby by noon on Wednesday almost a third of the space in the lobby was filled with gifts to the Angel Tree that you had brought in. And then volunteers, many of them from Grace Church, came in on Wednesday, moved those gifts, and combined them with the gifts of others in the community. And, oh, I wish all of you could have seen what Price Hall looked like on Wednesday evening when it was filled from wall to wall including the stage with gifts. And then underprivileged families in this community by the dozens came on Thursday and Friday. Many of you volunteered time in this busy season of the year to come in and to serve them. And a brighter Christmas will be had by dozens of needy families in this community because of the Santa store. And I wonder if maybe the true message of Christmas might have been more fully revealed in that Santa store than even in the beauty and majesty of our services in this sanctuary.
There are times when all of us feel left out in the cold, when we wonder where we will turn in the anxious, confusing moments of life. When you feel that way, I invite you to look out at the edge of Bethlehem, look out to one of the campfires and the smells of the animals bedded down for the night and remember this, “The Word became flesh and lived among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. And to all who received Him, to those who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God.” And all of God’s people said, “Amen”.
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