No Crib for a Bed

I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like Christmas.

I know people who don’t like pizza or chocolate. I know people who don’t like dogs.

I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like Christmas.

But I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like Christmas.

What’s not to like? There are trees and mistletoe and sleigh rides and carols and eggnog and chestnuts roasting by an open fire.

There are cantatas and candy canes and gifts galore. Long-lost cousins and uncles and aunts mysteriously show up at your door. There are nights so cold that you can see your breath when you go outside.

Along with many others, I confess that Christmas is my favorite time of the year. I inherited that from my mother, who loved this season.

I still remember her making mountains of meatballs, which she marinated in grape jelly and chili sauce. She served them in a fondue pot and let us eat them with toothpicks. She also made creamy chocolate fudge filled with walnuts.

Christmas is my favorite time of the year.

Christmas at our house started right after Thanksgiving when Mom would go to the closet and pull out a big stack of 33 rpm, long-play, high-fidelity records that gathered dust for 11 months out of the year.

For a few all-too-brief days we would listen to the Christmas music of Henry Mancini, the Ray Coniff Singers, Bing Crosby, the Robert Shaw Chorale, and something called the Norman Luboff Choir

No More Flocked Trees

Over the years I’ve changed my thinking about Christmas trees.

Growing up, we always had real trees. For a few years, Mom would “flock” the tree with some sort of sticky white powder.

When we got married, I talked Marlene into flocking our Christmas tree. That experiment thankfully ended because with three boys plus me, we ended up with white powder scattered across the living room.

For a few years, we went to a Christmas tree farm, hiked into the field with a hand saw, and cut down the tree. Then we’d have hot cider and go through the adventure of tying a tree to the roof of the car.

We drove home (sometimes more than an hour away), hoping and praying the tree didn’t slide off the roof.

We were making memories, as they say.
It was all good.
I swore I’d never get an artificial tree.

I swore I’d never get an artificial tree.

Bah, humbug.

But times change.
People change.
You get older and maybe wiser.

So, about seven years ago, I surrendered to the inevitable, and we bought our first artificial Christmas tree.

Let me say this simply.
We aren’t going back.

No flocking, no tramping in the cold, no tying the tree on top of the car.

19 Stockings

More than forty years ago, Marlene started making Christmas stockings for each of our children and their spouses and then one for each of our eleven grandchildren. That means this year we have 19 stockings, which is too many for the mantel, so we have an upper row of stockings for the adults, and a lower row for the grandchildren.

We threw away our records and our record player long ago. Now we get all our music from Spotify, which means we can still listen to the Robert Shaw Chorale sing on the finest Christmas album I know: “The Many Moods of Christmas.”

Great With Child

Best of all, there is the story of the first Christmas, the story we heard before we could even walk or talk. There is the ancient story of Mary and Joseph, and something called “great with child.” There are angels and shepherds, and strange people called Wise Men who traveled a long way to see the baby Jesus.

Now we get all our music from Spotify

The story even has a villain—a bad man named Herod who hated Jesus and wanted to kill him.

 Let’s focus for a moment on these familiar words from the gospel of Luke, chapter 2, verse 7, from the King James Version:

 And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.

The scene portrayed in Luke 2:7 is so familiar that it has become unmistakable. We call it a crèche, a representation of the birth of Christ, either with statuary or in a painting or sometimes with actors portraying Joseph, Mary, and Jesus. Usually, the setting is quite pastoral, with Mary and Joseph watching as Jesus sleeps in the clean wooden feeding trough. Sometimes there is a glowing light emanating from baby Jesus. The straw is fresh, overhead the stars twinkle in the sky, nearby the cattle and the sheep rest contentedly, and the faithful donkey (there’s almost always a donkey) watches the happy parents.

Very often the shepherds and the Wise Men bow before the Babe in the manger. As I said, it is a sweet and beautiful scene.

The Son of God from heaven comes to earth and is born in a stable because there was no room in the inn.

It is also misleading. This peaceful scene bears little connection to what really happened that night in Bethlehem. It wasn’t very peaceful, it couldn’t have been as clean, nothing would have been as beautiful as we make it appear, and there is no reason to believe that the shepherds and the Wise Men saw Jesus at the same time.

But the major problem rests in one fact: The Son of God from heaven comes to earth and is born in a stable because there was no room in the inn. We hear this so often that we take it for granted, but it does not seem right. To help us think about this one fact of Jesus’ birth, let’s consider three questions:

1) What’s wrong with this picture?
2) Why does God allow it?
3) What do we learn from it?

From our point of view, Jesus should not have been born in a stable—but he was. Surely this was not an accident—but a message from God to our hearts.

1) What’s wrong with this picture?

Perhaps the place to begin is with a note about Bethlehem. If you visit Bethlehem today, you’ll find it is a large, bustling Arab town located seven or eight miles south of Jerusalem. You reach Bethlehem by traveling to Jerusalem and then driving down a wide paved road. The situation in that part of the world is very tense nowadays, and although it would not be advisable to walk from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, you could do it easily in an hour or two. In Jesus’ day, Bethlehem was a tiny Jewish town, a small out-of-the-way village, one of the least important towns in all of Judah. One writer called it a “hamlet,” a quaint little village. A few shepherds, farmers, and merchants lived there, and that was about it. It was a small Jewish village made famous only because it was King David’s hometown.

One part of the story involved a man named Caesar Augustus in faraway Rome who (prompted by God) decreed that a census be taken so that taxes could be collected throughout the Empire. The census required that all Jewish males go back to their ancestral hometowns to register. Since Joseph was descended from David, he had to return to Bethlehem. It “happened” that Mary was in her final stages of pregnancy when they arrived in Bethlehem. I put “happened” in quotes because God arranged everything so that the emperor issued the decree at just the right moment so that at just the right time Mary and Joseph arrived in Bethlehem so that they were exactly where the prophet Micah said they would be when Jesus was born (Micah 5:2). It all seemed to just “happen,” but what seemed to be by chance was actually the hand of God moving through history to accomplish his purposes.

Part of our problem in understanding this story revolves around the word “inn.” We are so immersed in American culture that we read the text this way: “There was no room for them at the Bethlehem Holiday Inn.” Or “They couldn’t find a room at the Greater Jerusalem Hampton Inn.” Or the Ramada Inn. Or the Sheraton. Or the Hilton. We tend to think of a nice building near a freeway exit, three or four stories tall, with a nice parking lot, a large lobby, a pool and a hot tub, a Coke machine on every floor, with hot showers, cable TV, and free Wi-Fi. To us, roughing it is what happens when the ice machine is broken.

Part of our problem in understanding this story revolves around the word “inn.”

Try to clear your head of those notions. In all the Roman Empire, there was not a single inn as nice as the average Holiday Inn. In those days, travel was dirty, difficult, and dangerous. Creature comforts were hard to come by. Travelers needed safety and security from the robbers that could be found on every highway. An “inn” was simply a building where you could rest safely during the night. Indoor plumbing was not an option—and cable TV was 20 centuries in the future.

To properly understand what happened, it helps to know that Luke used two different words for “inn” when he wrote his gospel. One word refers to a small building dedicated to serving travelers. You tied up your horses and donkeys at one end of the building. For a fee, the innkeeper allowed you to sleep on a rough mattress on the floor. He also kept the fire going and provided fodder for the animals. This was the “inn” Jesus mentioned in the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:34). If you ever travel on the old road from Jericho to Jerusalem, your bus will probably stop at the “Inn of the Good Samaritan,” a simple building found at the traditional site of the inn that existed in Jesus’ day.

When Luke told the story of Jesus’ birth, he used a different word for “inn” in verse 7, which basically means a guest room. This “inn” would be even smaller and simpler than the one in Luke 10. The animals would be kept in a stable that was often nothing more than a cave in a hillside with low rock walls to keep the animals from wandering away during the night. It was an “inn” such as this that had no room for Mary and Joseph and Jesus on that holy night in Bethlehem.

Why were they turned away? Perhaps other descendants of David had come to Bethlehem to enroll for the census. And the innkeeper would not have known Joseph because he was from Nazareth. Perhaps because they were poor, they could not pay. And perhaps the innkeeper did not want to drive off the other customers, seeing that Mary was very pregnant. We only know for certain that there was no room for them. Everything else is just conjecture.

And that brings me back to the major point. From a human point of view, nothing in this picture looks right. Jesus deserved better; God could have done better. So why did it happen like this? That leads us to the second question.

2) Why does God allow it?

If we believe in the sovereignty of God, then we must believe that God did not simply “allow” his Son to be born in a stable; we must believe that God “ordained” it. There was no room in the inn because God wanted it that way.

In order to work our way to an answer, let’s back up. Joseph and Mary were compelled (by the census) to return to Bethlehem in the latter stages of Mary’s pregnancy. They arrived in Bethlehem just a few days before she gave birth to Jesus. The journey itself would have been difficult and dangerous. Pious Jews traveling from Nazareth would have gone east across the Jordan River, then south through Perea, crossing into Judea at Jericho. They would have ascended through the mountains to Jerusalem and then made the seven- or eight-mile journey south to Bethlehem. That jagged journey—east, south, west, south—allowed them to avoid Samaria altogether. The 90-mile journey might have taken six or seven days, traveling slowly because of Mary’s advanced pregnancy.

There was no room in the inn because God wanted it that way

So they arrived in Bethlehem and were turned away at the inn. The baby was born in a stable—outdoors, in the cold, with the animals no doubt nearby. They had no privacy, no sanitation, and very little protection from the elements.

The fact that there was no room in the inn turns out to be much more than an incidental detail. Indeed, it is central to who Jesus is. Now that we know why he came, surely we will say, “He had to be born like this. It couldn’t have happened any other way.”

Nothing about the baby Jesus appeared supernatural. There were no halos, no angels visible, and no choirs singing. If you had been there, and if you had no other information, you would have concluded that this was just a baby born to a poor young couple down on their luck.

Nothing about the outward circumstances pointed to God. Yet all of it—every part of it, every single, solitary, seemingly random detail—was planned by the Father before the foundation of the world. To the unseeing eye, nothing looks less like God; to those who understand, God’s fingerprints are everywhere.

3) What do we learn from this?

Some amazing truths emerge if we stand back and consider this one aspect of the Christmas story. We learn something about God, something about the world, something about Jesus, and something about his followers.

First, we learn that God uses adverse circumstances that make no sense at the time to accomplish his purposes. Being turned away at the very moment when the baby was coming must have been devastating. Giving birth in a stable no doubt tested their faith to the limit. Indeed, it would not have made sense at the time.

Mary and Joseph—no matter how devout they were—could not have foreseen how this “negative” turn of events would be part of God’s plan to bring his Son to the world. They might have believed it, but they would not have seen it in advance.

Life is like that—we don’t know what is coming around the corner, and many things we endure make no sense at all. Sometimes they don’t make sense for years to come. And sometimes they never make sense to us.

Life is like that—we don’t know what is coming around the corner

Second, we learn that Jesus’ humiliation started early and continued to the very end. He was born outside because they wouldn’t let Mary and Joseph come inside. During his ministry, Jesus told his disciples that “Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head” (Matthew 8:20). He owned nothing but the clothes on his back. When he was crucified, the soldiers gambled for his robe. When he died, they buried him in a borrowed tomb. The whole story is quite remarkable if you think about it.

After I preached on this, a friend said, “It’s a miracle. We worship a man born in a dumpster.” If that’s an exaggeration, his point is still true.

Another person asked me what I thought the stable smelled like. “Like a stable,” I replied. It wasn’t a nice place to be born.

What happens to Jesus happens to his followers sooner or later. Just as there was no room for Jesus, there was no room for Mary and Joseph either. This week I noticed a detail in the Christmas story I had never seen before. Whenever I had read or heard Luke 2:7, I always read and heard the last phrase this way, “because there was no room for him in the inn.” But that’s not what Luke said. He actually wrote, “because there was no room for them in the inn.” Remember, the innkeeper had no idea that the Messiah was about to be born. I had always read it as if there was no room for Jesus.

What happens to Jesus happens to his followers sooner or later

True enough, but there was no room for Mary or Joseph either. Even that detail tells a story. They are also “outside the inn” when Jesus is born. What happened to him happened also to them. That, too, is a pattern for the future.

Third, we learn that Jesus was born in a stable so the humble might feel free to come to him. When Spurgeon preached on this text, he pointed out the meaning of the manger:

We might tremble to approach a throne, but we cannot fear to approach a manger.

The King of England has valets who care for his personal needs and an army of servants ready to do his bidding. If we understand monarchy, we know this is how royalty is treated.

We might tremble to approach a throne, but we cannot fear to approach a manger.

There were no valets in Bethlehem.
Mary had no ladies in waiting.
There were no servants to wrap Jesus in strips of cloth.

If we had been planning the Nativity, Jesus would have been born in Windsor Castle. But it was not to be.
If Jesus had been born in Paris or in Beverly Hills, only the rich and famous would feel at home with him.

But since he was born in a stable, all the outsiders of the world instinctively feel a kinship with Jesus.

And so we come to the end of the story. The fact that there was no room in the inn turns out to be much more than an incidental detail.

Indeed, it is central to who Jesus is.

Do You Have Room for Jesus?

Because there was no room in the inn, the final call is always individual. The world has no room for Jesus. Will you make room for him in your heart?

The story is told about a little boy chosen to play the innkeeper in the annual children’s Christmas play at his church. When the night came, all the children were in their places, nervously waiting for the play to begin. The girls were dressed as angels, the boys as shepherds and Wise Men. While the little girls talked and giggled, the boys poked each other with their shepherds’ staffs. The little boy chosen to play the innkeeper had only one line. When Joseph knocked on the door, he was to open it and tell them there was no room in the inn.

As the play began, parents and grandparents wondered how their children would do that night. Everything went ahead as planned. At last, the big moment came for the innkeeper.

Will you make room for Jesus in your heart this year?

Joseph knocked on the door. The young boy opened it and saw Joseph and the very pregnant young girl. Something about the sight of Mary touched his heart, and he blurted out the show-stopping lines, “There is no room left in the inn, but you can share my room.”

Some people thought the Christmas pageant had been ruined. Others thought it was the best one ever. The little boy told the frustrated director later: “I just couldn’t send Jesus away. I had to find a place for Jesus.”

There was no room for Jesus that night in Bethlehem. Will you make room for him in your heart this year?

Here is good news for the worst of sinners. Though the whole world may turn away, you can open your heart and let him in. And if he comes in, he will never leave you. May God grant each of us faith to believe and an open heart to say, “Yes, Lord Jesus, there is room in my heart for you.”