For the Inn Keepers

 

I was going to preach another sermon tonight. But I couldn't get away from the image of the innkeeper in tonight's familiar Gospel. "There was no room for them in the inn," Luke writes. How did the innkeeper feel about that? Guilty? Grouchy? How would he feel today? This Christmas, there's no room—from cancelled flights and rolling blackouts from the frigid weather across the country. Here in Colorado there's no room, with the influx of new migrants seeking shelter and safety, with the shortage of housing.

Before, I'd always made this sentence into a metaphor: there's no room in my cluttered heart for God, no room in our busy lives for the Christ Child. But for so many people, the lack of room is hard, physical reality, not mere poetry. My mind today drifts back to one Christmas, not too long ago, when I became the reluctant inn-keeper.

At first, like the inn-keepers of Bethlehem, I didn’t realize that the intrusion of this unknown little family into my world had anything to do with God. I was at home in Louisville, Kentucky, sleeping soundly, enjoying the blissful and dreamless sleep of post-Christmas clergy. Suddenly, the phone rang. At four in the morning. A clergy colleague from across the state apologized for waking me up so early and then asked for my help. As she unfolded her rather complex tale, my stomach began to wrap itself in knots, and my heart began to sink. “Not today,” I pleaded with God. (I imagine that those innkeepers in Bethlehem were reluctant to get out of bed, too.)

“There’s a young couple,” she said breathlessly, “trying to get home to Nebraska for the holidays. They don’t have any money, so I bought them tickets on the Megabus.  A church member drove them the two-hours to downtown Louisville to catch the bus, but the Megabus driver wouldn’t let them on the bus without proof that I had paid for the electronic tickets. He shut the door in their faces and ran over the mother’s foot as he drove away. I’m out $400, and they are downtown with my church member and don’t know where to go. There won’t be another Megabus tonight.”

 The first “inn” had violently shut its doors. I was too sleepy to be indignant.

My colleague continued: “It’s 19 degrees outside, and they have two small children. Can you help them?” (At least it wasn’t below freezing in Bethlehem.)

My mind still foggy with sleep, I tried to think of some way to help this family, without inconveniencing myself. I could certainly get up and drive downtown and take them to my house or even to church. I could get up and take them all to breakfast and put them on a Greyhound bus. But I wasn’t feeling very generous. After all, I was on vacation, and I had no idea who these people were! I  wanted to make this my colleague’s problem. I would help her solve her problem. That usually works when I want to look like I'm being helpful.

“Why don’t you find them a motel? I’ll pay for the room,” I offered. [I tend to throw money at problems when I don’t want to deal with them.] I snuggled back down into my pillows, happy to have solved the problem so easily.

Thirty minutes later, the phone rang again. It was my tired colleague.

“The family drove over there, and the motel won’t let them stay. They won’t take payment from credit cards if you aren’t there to show them the card.” The second inn had shut its doors. The nerve of those untrusting innkeepers, I thought.

I, however, was determined not to get involved. “I guess the Cathedral isn’t open yet,” I muttered, eying the clock. It was about 5:30 a.m. “I know, what about the warming shelter? Maybe they could stay there for a few hours, and then I can come down and take them to the Greyhound station later?”

“Give them my phone number,” I added with new-found generosity, “in case there's any more trouble.” And I pulled up the covers and shut my eyes.

At 6 a.m. or so, my phone rang again. This time it was the young mother. “The shelter won’t let us in!” she fumed. They say we have to wait out here in the cold until 8 a.m. before we can go in the lobby. I’m so tired. Can you please help us?”

What, a shelter that won’t take in a freezing family?! You’ve got to be kidding me! I start to wonder if the young mother is making up all of this rejection. I get suspicious and try to trip her up in her story. But that church member is still there with her, so she must be telling the truth. The third inn had barred its doors.

 I was finally waking up, and I started to feel a twinge of moral outrage … or was it guilt? I could understand the voice of an exhausted mother who was worried about her babies. And besides, it was after 6 a.m. now.  I might as well get up. I offered to meet them at the Greyhound bus station and buy them tickets home.

I still didn’t think about the Nativity, until I saw the baby. There he was, only a few months old, nestled in the manger of an old car seat. He looked just like the Baby Jesus in those paintings by Rubens, with chubby little arms and legs, and pale, white porcelain skin. His eyes were shut tight, as if they had been painted on, and “no crying he made.” He just looked different, like something the Holy Spirit might have conjured up.

Animals didn’t stand around this baby’s bed, but his two-year-old brother tottered unsteadily around him with the jerky movements of an exhausted child. Mary stood there nervously, too, a tiny mother who looked to be about sixteen years old, though she must have been older. She talked a mile a minute, clearly in charge of this little family and going on pure adrenaline. Joseph looked much older and stood quiet and removed, often looking down at the ground. He was the one who kept thanking me.

Instead of shepherds, there were other early morning passengers shuffling around the baby, all a bit down on their luck, all looking tired. Instead of angels, there were Amish women in starched white bonnets and stiff dresses, looking very righteous and yet kind at the same time. Instead of wise men, there was an evangelist of some sort with a kingly gray beard and a thin black tie and shiny shoes. He was handing out little gifts and tracts to all of the waiting children, with a smile. The downtown Greyhound Station was a perfect stable for this child of God, a typical refuge for the modern family that everyone, including me, had turned away.

As life would have it, I learned later that this little family was far from divine. As a real-life human family, it was troubled, and the story that they had told my colleague and me wasn't quite the whole story. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that they did make it back home, and they opened my eyes to my role as inn-keeper, an inn-keeper with the tendency to keep my neighbor--not just my God--out in the cold for much too long.

Howard Thurman, a theologian we'll be discussing here at St. Ambrose in January's Adult Formation, wrote a poem for us innkeepers tonight. Here's part of it:

Where refugees seek deliverance that never comes ...
Where children age before their time
And life wears down the edges of the mind ...
Where fear companions each day’s life,
And Perfect Love seems long delayed.
CHRISTMAS IS WAITING TO BE BORN:
In you, in me, in all mankind.

 

God is born tonight so that there may always be room for Love, not just in our hearts, but in our lives.

 

 

Consider Joseph

We usually think of Mary’s story when we talk at Christmas about faithfulness and obedience to God. We imagine the courage and deep faith that it must have required for Mary to bow her head and say to God, “Let it be with me according to your will.” We have centuries of Christian art to portray her reward: We see her holding the radiant baby close to her breast, as creation bows down before her. Joseph doesn’t usually occupy our Christian imaginations in the same way, except in the verses of Matthew’s Gospel that we read today. Only Matthew makes Joseph’s faith and obedience the doorway to the Incarnation. We would do well to join him and to consider Joseph carefully today.

          My own sympathy for Joseph has grown ever since I saw him portrayed in a marvelous fresco in the crypt of Basel Cathedral, in Switzerland. In this small painting from the Middle Ages, the Holy Family is seated underneath the rickety shelter of the stable. In the center of the scene, cloaked in long blue robes and crowned with a huge halo, Mary is holding the baby Jesus. Although she's gazing with some trepidation into his sleepy baby-eyes, she's clearly the center of the painting. Beside her, a cute donkey and a cow are smiling and contentedly munching on something green in the manger.

Way out to the left, our eyes finally fall upon Joseph, a forlorn caricature of the new father. Head on one hand, elbow to knee, he's staring down mournfully at the floor. It's clear from the look on his face that he's pouting at his lack of a role in this drama. He's obviously worried, too, about what the future will bring. Imagine the mocking words of the chorus from W. H. Auden’s Christmas Oratorio swirling around in his head:

Joseph, you have heard/ What Mary says occurred;/ Yes, it may be so. Is it likely? No. …Mary may be pure,/ But Joseph, are you sure?/ How is one to tell?/ …Maybe, maybe not./ But Joseph, you know what/ Your world, of course will say/ About you anyway.”

 

          Or perhaps you have heard the Appalachian “Cherry Tree Carol?” Don's going to sing it for us today at the offertory. This old ballad tells the story of Mary and Joseph walking along one day during Mary’s pregnancy. They come across a cherry tree full of fruit. Mary, in high-maintenance, pregnant-wife fashion, asks Joseph to climb up into the tree and to pick some cherries for her, since she is craving them. Joseph, clearly upset, cries out: ‘Let the father of the baby/ Gather cherries for you.’” All of a sudden, Jesus’ voice comes down from heaven, and the cherry tree actually bows its limbs to the ground, so that Mary can pick her own cherries, (quote)“while Joseph stood around.”

Poor Joseph. He must feel superfluous, mocked, confused. Matthew describes him as a “righteous man.” In Judaism, to be “righteous” was to live a life of right relationship with God and with other people. It meant living with integrity, caring for others, following God’s teaching, obeying the Torah, the Law. Job is actually referred to as the most righteous man in the Old Testament. That's why Satan wanted to tempt him, to see if his integrity and obedience to God could stand the test of unmerited suffering. Joseph might have felt like Job, as he was placed in the position of either having to believe a strange tale about the purity of his future wife or having to accuse her of adultery, a charge for which Scripture prescribed stoning. Wouldn’t a righteous man like Joseph choose to follow the Law, to separate himself and his family from scandal, to uphold God’s decrees, to do what the Scriptures clearly said to do? Luckily for us, Joseph doesn't do the expected thing. He doesn't follow the Law and quietly set aside his betrothed; he doesn't listen to Scripture and have her and her unborn child stoned to death. He listens instead to a dream, to the strange whisperings of the Holy Spirit, and he adopts this mysterious baby.

When Mary's asked to trust in God, she puts herself at terrible risk of rejection. She, however, isn't asked to trust any human being but herself. Joseph, however, must trust both God and Mary. I'd have trouble if I were Joseph, asked to overlook the possible betrayal by a loved one, asked to withhold judging someone else’s revelation. Growing up, I was taught that people show their righteousness by living by the rules, by doing what church and society expect of us. I don’t always find fuzzy lines helpful, and I definitely have a tendency to choose the “rules” over what somebody else claims that God has revealed to them. I’m not even sure that I would have trusted my dream like Joseph did. I might have felt as if I needed to hold the hard line against any possible wishful thinking, against any chance of misunderstanding God and losing my precious righteousness. Righteousness is a hard-won treasure, easily tarnished by shame and guilt. It takes a lot of wall-building to keep it safe. Yes, it’s a good thing that I wasn’t Joseph, for look what we would have missed.

Our lectionary skips over the first seventeen verses of Matthew’s Gospel. They contain a long genealogy, in which the Evangelist carefully places Jesus into the history of Joseph’s people, the history that becomes Jesus’ own through adoption. What's interesting in this long list of “begats,” is that, interspersed with the generations of fathers and sons, beginning with Abraham, just four women are included. And who are these women? Are they the great Matriarchs of Israel, virtuous women like Sarah, Rebekah, and Rachel? No, indeed!

Instead, Matthew gives us Tamar, the Canaanite daughter-in-law of Judah. She dresses like a prostitute in order to trick her father-in-law into getting her pregnant. Matthew includes Ruth, the Moabite foreigner.  She has to seduce her kinsman Boaz so that he'll redeem her and her mother-in-law Naomi from the poverty of widowhood. Matthew even includes the infamous Bathsheba, the wife of poor Uriah the Hittite. Remember that King David had Uriah killed in order to take Bathsheba as his own. Finally, Matthew ends with Mary, the Mother of Jesus, whose fiancé Joseph must decide whether to reject her or to adopt her son. Do you see a pattern here? Foreigners, people who break the rules, people whom we would least expect God to choose as examples of faith .... from this lineage God brings God's Son, our Savior, into the world.

 

These days, it seems to me as if it is getting harder and harder to get a “yes” out of us Christian Josephs. So many Christians seem more concerned with holding the hard line against change, or against a loss of privilege, or against what they deem as immorality, than they are with loving others. We want our truths to come in neat packages and with clear checklists. We want to see and understand before we can trust. We feel that it's better to know than to love.

But today’s Gospel asks us to be like Joseph, unafraid to bind ourselves to what we do not know, more concerned with Love than anything. As the holidays approach, we too might be given choices, difficult choices, about how to deal with complicated relationships in our families, choices about where to give and when to save, choices about when to trust and when to condemn. Can we trust God enough for us to replace rules with forgiveness? To replace a grudge with grace? To open our arms in Love, even if it means risking ridicule or suffering or even the taint of sin? Perhaps poor Joseph is pouting in the corner of the stable not over his lack of a role in God’s story but in ours?