An elementary teacher and her class were studying Christmas customs from around the world. It was an ideal opportunity, she explains, to share the Christmas story. She shared with her class how Mary and Joseph had gone to Bethlehem to pay taxes. It was time for the baby Jesus to be born and they needed somewhere to spend the night. She told her students that when Mary and Joseph went to the inn, there were no empty rooms. 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. “A swimming pool,” he responded.
Well, no, there was no swimming pool at that particular motel. But, in back, there was a lowly stable. A shed, perhaps, or even a cave, where cattle and sheep were kept. An unsanitary place at best. Certainly no place for the King of Kings to be born. But there was no room in the inn.
In his wonderful book Seven Stories of Christmas Love the author Leo Buscaglia writes about arriving in Bali on the day before Christmas. Bali is a Hindu land. He spent the day in the village of Ubud. The natives of that village welcomed him with open arms and invited him to join in their feasts and celebrations.
At one point Leo mentions to his hosts how happy he is to be with them at Christmas. The natives of Ubud ask, “What is Christmas?” Leo then tells them the Christmas story. The villagers are entranced by the beauty of the story, but one point confuses them. Why did no one invite Mary and Joseph into their home? Why didn’t anyone make room at the inn for the pregnant mother about to give birth? In their culture room would always be made for visitors. Leo left a few days later with them still puzzling over why no one would make room for Mary. (1)
Even before he was born, Jesus was rejected by this cruel world. I thought about this because of a story I read recently, a really sad story about Christmas. It’s a true story about a woman named Carolyn Jones.
Carolyn was born in rural Georgia in 1946. She was eleven when her mother died and her father abandoned her. She supported herself by working at local farms, cleaning houses, and babysitting the neighbors’ children.
Carolyn recalls one Christmas that forever after shaped her life. She was but a child when her mother died, and her father abandoned her. Little Carolyn felt so alone, and she hadn’t eaten a good meal in a while. On Christmas Day, the feeling of loneliness overwhelmed her. Carolyn decided to visit her best friend, whom she calls simply, “the preacher’s daughter.”
The preacher’s house was warm and dry, in marked contrast to the conditions at Carolyn’s cold, damp cabin. The table was covered in platters of food. For a moment, Carolyn thought she would get to celebrate a real Christmas at her friend’s house. But then the preacher did something that devastated little Carolyn. He asked her if she would come back some other day, so that the family could spend time together at Christmas.
I’m a pastor. I can understand that Georgia pastor wanting to spend time with his family. But here is what Carolyn Jones wrote many decades later about that event, “I haven’t been strong enough to find forgiveness . . . for what he did.” She goes on to mention others who have sought to hurt her, but, she says, “I don’t hate them the way I hate that preacher, because they never professed to be loving and gentle and kind and then turn around and turn someone away who just wanted something to eat.”
That’s painful. We’ll come back to Carolyn’s story in just a few minutes. It has a happy ending, I’m happy to say. But, for a few minutes, let’s focus on what it means to say that there was no room in the inn. This is no accidental part of the Christmas story.
We live in a world in which many people find no room. We don’t like to think about that on this night when we await dreams of fairies and sugarplums dancing in our children’s heads, but it’s true. There are people all over this world who find no room at the inn. They are shut out. Rejected. Maybe some of them are simply from the wrong side of the tracks.
The Rev. Andrew Fiddler, an Episcopal priest, tells a hilarious true story that could have come from the Griswald family’s Christmas Vacation. It’s about a couple of strangers who appeared at his Christmas Eve service years ago. They were as huge as football linemen, he says. They both had shaggy, dark beards, and were wearing identical denim jackets with cut‑off sleeves. Their big, hairy arms were decorated with tattoos. And there they were kneeling at the altar of this sophisticated Episcopal Church.
As he came up to them to serve them the Lord’s Supper he couldn’t help thinking that these two men resembled grizzly bears, if only grizzly bears smelled like tequila. He served them the communion bread; behind him, the chalice bearer served them the wine. However, the two huge men continued kneeling at the rail long after the other communicants had gone back to their seats. The other chalice bearer at the far end of the communion rail, thinking they had been missed, unwittingly served them wine again which they received and drank deeply. They then returned to their pews.
When the service was over, Rev. Fiddler gathered up his wife and her mother who was visiting them from her home in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and they walked to the car. It had started to snow. Fiddler’s wife got in the front seat, and her mother got in the back. And just as they were about to drive away, the two large men reappeared by the car. They had only their sleeveless denim jackets, and their hair and arms were wet with snow. They said that they were visiting from out of town, that the friend who had driven them to church hadn’t returned to pick them up, and they couldn’t remember how to get back to his house.
Looking at their cold plight, and feeling an irresistible wave of Christmas spirit, Rev. Fiddler said, “That’s right on our way. Just climb in the back.” And so one got in the back seat on one side and the other got in the back seat on the other side with Fiddler’s poor uncomfortable mother‑in‑law squeezed in between them. He says he thinks his mother-in-law held her breath the entire journey.
When Rev. Fiddler let them out at their friend’s house, these two huge men thanked him politely, wished him a Merry Christmas, and stood there for a moment under a street light. Fiddler saw for the first time that on the back of his guests’ jackets there was lettering. It said, “Hell’s Angels ‑ New York.”
He says his mother‑in‑law said nothing during the remaining two‑block ride to their house. Probably she was unable to speak. When they went inside she said, “I’ve never been so terrified in my entire life, so please open that bottle that I brought you. I need a very large drink!” (2)
As I look over this congregation this evening, I don’t think I see any members of the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang. I would hope, however, that if any of them were to show up, we would welcome them just as we would welcome any others of God’s children. There are many people in this world who feel that there is no room for them. Some are from the wrong sides of the tracks. Some live in desperate parts of the world. There are refugees, millions of them in Africa, in the Middle East displaced by war and famine. They can relate to the story of the first Christmas. “She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.”
It is for such people that the Bethlehem babe was born. I said earlier that the fact that there was no room in the inn is no accidental part of the Christmas story. Indeed, it is the heart of the Christmas story. This babe born in a stable because there was no room in the inn identified with the least and lowest on earth even from the moment of his birth. He was left out, rejected. That is how he was born and that is how he died. And those in this world who are also rejected are the very ones he came to seek and to save, whether they be refugee children in Africa, or members of a Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang, or a poor, hungry eleven-year-old girl in Georgia named Carolyn Jones whose mother had died and whose father abandoned her and whose only wish on a Christmas Eve was a meal with her best friend, the preacher’s daughter. To such belongs the Kingdom of heaven.
By the way, I’m happy to say that I can give you a report on Carolyn Jones. Today, she is a successful business woman who owns and runs C&S Paving in Atlanta. One consequence of that long-ago rejection is that every year she cooks enough food at Christmastime to feed dozens of people. If anyone were to drop by at Christmas and need a meal, she wants to be ready to welcome them. (3)
I wish all shut-out people around the earth could have their lives turn out like that. If you and I do our part, maybe some of them will. No room in the inn. The people of Bali were surprised that anyone would turn away Mary and Joseph under those conditions. How about you? How about me? Would we have turned them away? We need to make room in our hearts for all those who are troubled this night and lonely and forgotten. For when we make room for them, we make room for Christ.
Maybe there is someone here this evening who feels rejected, abandoned, alone. Some people carry around feelings like that all their lives. The Bethlehem babe was born for you too. [Perhaps as we take the bread and the cup this night you will feel the acceptance and love that only the Christ of Christmas can bring.]
1. Christian Voices. Cited by www.monday-fodder.com/.
2. http://www.trinitynewhaven.org/sermons/2005/1224.html.
3. Carolyn Jones, A Foxfire Christmas, edited by Eliot Wigginton and his students (Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina Press, 1989), pp.125-130.