The manger space

Luke 2: 1-20
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
Christmas Eve, 2016

 

            How many of us are on Ancestry.com? Have you completed a DNA swab? My aunt, my father’s sister, is the genealogist in the family, and she has been trying to get the rest of us Robinsons to do it. I ordered a test earlier this year, near my birthday, wondering if there would be any surprises. There was really only one: I’m about a quarter Irish. I always thought I was more Scottish than anything else but in fact not so much.

            Even so, I doubt I could travel to Ireland, knock on the door of a distant relative I’d never met, and expect to be taken in as an honored guest.  And yet that is precisely what Joseph could expect traveling to Bethlehem, the town of his ancestors.  Kenneth Bailey, a first-century Palestine scholar, writes that all Joseph would have to do would be to go to the home of a distant cousin, recite a piece of his genealogy (“Hi, I’m Joseph, son of Jacob, son of Mat’than, son of Eleazar, son of Eliud”), and he would have been welcomed with open arms.  There was no innkeeper with a bad attitude, who refused a refugee family, a pregnant teenager.

            When Luke says there was no room in the inn, he wasn’t talking about a public house or a place to stay for money.  The Greek word, ketaluma, which is translated as “inn”, means something more like a private guest room or upper room, above the one-room family living space below.  Many Palestinian homes are the same today.  There was no room for Mary and Joseph in the guest room (other relatives must have arrived earlier), so they had to stay with their distant cousins in the family living space.

            First century Palestinians, Jews, and Gentiles who listened to this story would not comprehend a stable set apart from the house.  The animals would have had a sheltered stall adjacent to the house, several steps down, with feeding troughs or holes dug into the floor of the main room for them to then stand outside reaching over the foundation of the house to eat straw out of these in-ground mangers.  We’ve imposed our modern Western minds on this story and domesticated it:  we’ve set the animals at a sanitary distance from the living quarters, turned an overcrowded guest room into an unfriendly bed and breakfast, and put an imaginary gap between Jesus and ourselves.

            Remember, this is a story.  I don’t think we can say with any certainty when or where Jesus was born, only that he was.  But the story still has implications for not only how we celebrate his birth, but how we are to live our lives.

            In this story, what if Jesus was born not apart from others but in a crowded room of distant cousins and warm animals?  What if Mary and Joseph didn’t have to birth this baby alone but had loads of help?  What if the manger wasn’t a lonely place but one filled with strangers who behave like family?  If Jesus is Emmanuel, God-with-us, wouldn’t that make more sense?

            In these days of heightened xenophobia, what we need is a heaping helping of xenophilia, the love of strangers: the word the apostle Paul uses for hospitality in his letter to the Romans.  The welcome of the United Church of Christ is one of extravagant hospitality: no matter who you are or where you are on life’s journey, you are welcome here.  Which is good.  We need our safe havens, places and people where we can find acceptance and connection without judgment.  

         What if we practiced an even more radical hospitality, one in which we journey out of our familiar places and offer welcome, a love of strangers, and made within us a manger space where, as in Bethlehem, there’s always room for one or three more?   What if we behaved like family and saw everyone as if they were distant cousins (DNA says we’re all 99% related) and opened our arms and hearts to them and listened?  What if someone realized what God-with-us means because we treated them that way?

Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, Solstice and Yule are occurring all in one week of each other.  Maybe our little corner of the universe is trying to tell us something.