Making Room
“Navigation is the art and science of determining the position of a ship, plane or other vehicle, and guiding it to a specific destination.”1
(Footnote 1: National Geographic Resource Library, “Navigation,” accessed November 9, 2021, https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/navigation/.)
Early seafarers and other travelers had no GPS to count on. They depended on landmarks, their own sense of direction, whatever maps they may have had, and constellations in the sky. The North Star or Polaris makes a very small circle above the planet’s northern pole. So, for millennia, travelers have used it to help them identify true north in order to understand where they were and how to get to where they wanted to go.
Personally, I’m pretty poor at that kind of orientation. I’ve spent less of my life wandering the wilderness and more of my life with my nose in books and my heart at prayer, wondering about the ways we metaphorically orient ourselves as we navigate life’s journey.
Luke 2 tells us, “In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. 2 This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria. 3All went to their own towns to be registered.” In that time and place we are to understand that in the eyes of the Roman world Caesar was in charge, and Caesar’s citizens were to respond to demands for census and taxation, lest they face the wrath of Rome.2 Yet, in the far-from-Roman-power town of Bethlehem, another kind of ruler was born and placed in a lowly manger. Over and over again, the gospels overturn our conventional human ideas about what true power really is and ask us to consider to what kind of power we pledge our allegiance.
(Footnote 2: Joel Green, “Luke 2: 1-7,” New Interpreter’s Study Bible Commentary, (Pub. info). Biblical scholar Joel Green shares that this “census symbolized Augustus’s sovereignty over what was understood by the Romans as the civilized world.)
How do we orient ourselves? What is our true north in our thoughts, actions, and decision-making? Is it the laws of the land? Is it the conventions of our culture? Is it the expectations of others? Or is it the merciful life, teaching, and resurrection of the one we know as God made flesh? It’s not always easy to figure out if we’re navigating by that North Star as well as we’d like.
But it is a mercy and joy that we need not be ruled, ultimately, by the Caesars of this world, by unjust laws and systems, by fear and violence, or by unhealthy expectations and obligations. Rather, we can point ourselves in the direction of the one who mercifully invites us to hope, peace, joy, and love.
I wonder if it was by constellations that Joseph navigated. Or did he simply have that journey home to Bethlehem memorized? Gospel storyteller Luke doesn’t say. For Luke, Jesus’ earthly father Joseph mostly figures in the story as a link to the deep and beautiful tradition of ancient Judaism. Joseph is from the line of David evidenced as he returns to his ancestral hometown of Bethlehem for the census. Jesus’ earthly lineage descends from honored ancient earthly rulers. Yet, he also came to renew, revive, and reimagine all that was known about life and faith. I would argue he did so then and he continues to do so now.
Our families, our community, and our traditions can be a tremendous support as we seek to orient ourselves and navigate by that star. Paradoxically, they can also hold us back from aligning ourselves as fully and easily as we might. In the places where our traditions lay stale and unexamined, they can breed unhealthy assumptions and even violence. In places where our traditions have been mined for their treasure, they can grant a mercifully deep connection to the past that can lend compassion for our present and wisdom for our future.
We live in a time when much is being renegotiated, including how we do church, how we do community, what makes a family, what is respectful, what is safe, and how we address injustice. Especially given these conditions, conflicts will inevitably arise. Many of us may have these conflicts in mind as we discern if and how to gather with family or friends with whom we do not see eye-to-eye on pandemic precautions, political perspectives, or simply personal practices for respectful interaction. In these places of conflict, how do our traditional assumptions get in the way of understanding and caring for each other? How do the best of our traditions lead us to new ways forward?
Singer songwriter Carrie Newcomer writes a poem story in which she and another woman break down on a rural Indiana highway. They find themselves coasting Carrie’s liberal-leaning bumper sticker-laden Prius into a garage designed to serve much larger industrial trucks. Everything about the place tells them they should be unwelcome from the political signs to the cultural markers. The big, burly mechanic grunts at them but agrees to fix their car. Waiting in the office the women wonder if they have made a mistake and if at the very least they are about to be very highly overcharged. The mechanic, though, reappears in a jiffy. Their car is fixed, and he won’t take a dime. “Never assume,” they remind each other.
Her story reminds me, too, of the tradition of hospitality that runs deep in the parts of rural America in which I was born and raised. At its best, that hospitality is extended beyond our own kin and reminds us that indeed, in the eyes of Christ, we are all kin to each other.
Danusha Lameris writes a poem titled “Small Kindnesses” in which she names some of those traditional habits of extending such non-assumptive care even to strangers. She writes,
“I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you” when someone sneezes, a leftover from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying. And sometimes, when you spill lemons from your grocery bag, someone else will help you pick them up... We have so little of each other, now. So far from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange. What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here, have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” “I like your hat.”3
(Footnote 3: Danura Laneris, “Small Kindness”, accessed December 11, 2021, https://womensvoicesforchange.org/small-kindnesses-by-danusha-lameris.htm.)
What such fleeting temples have we known? What such fleeting temples have we made? Of the hospitality the holy family received in Bethlehem we are told, “while they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child. 7And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.”
I don’t know about you, but these lines have often been interpreted to me in terms of a stingy hotel manager charging exorbitant prices and mercilessly turning a visibly pregnant couple away so that they have no recourse but to seek shelter with the filthy stable animals. A lot of that interpretation relies on the word “inn” (i-n-n) in today’s story: “There was no place for them in the inn.” Yet, the scholarship I’ve been reading the past few years suggests a better translation of that word would be “guest room.”4 As in, “there was no place for them in the guest room.”
(Footnote 4: Joel Green, “Luke 2: 1-7,” New Interpreter’s Study Bible Commentary, (Pub. info).)
Like an extended family returning for Christmas, everybody had come home for the census and the guest room was already full. Maybe Aunt Ida and Uncle Eli were already bunking next to Grandpa David and Grandma Esther on the straw-covered floor of the family’s upper room. What happens then? Well, in lots of families I’ve known folks who can get creative. Rather than turn away their loved ones in need, they bring a space heater out to the garage and borrow an inflatable mattress from a friend.
In this time period, it sounds like there was some kind of accommodation nearby for the animals. Perhaps surrounded by the donkey’s body heat and the goat’s gentle calls, the holy family found some merciful rest and respite. It was no Ritz-Carlton but perhaps it was creative and kind hospitality.
About the birth of Jesus there are so many details Luke leaves out. Was there a midwife available in the census-crowded town? Who provided the swaddling clothes? Did other couples who had been through births surround Mary and Joseph with wisdom and love? Did the extended relatives provide unsolicited advice for baby names or birthing techniques? Did the whole gathered family rejoice to hear mother and baby were doing just fine?
We don’t know. All we know is that someone made room. Someone, likely guided by a deep sense of mercy, made room for this sweet family. And that’s just where the Christ child was born.
At its best this church is pretty good at making that kind of room. I was reminded of that this week when I learned that a home for Afghan refugees is now ready in nearby Schaumburg because of our partnership with the Mennonite Church there. They had the vision--the Mennonites. Without a pastor right now, they decided they could use their parsonage to house refugees. Thanks to the connections, initiative, and good work of a number of you, our church offered funds, materials, and skills that helped get the parsonage in order and ready to be a home once again. We worked together to make room.
May we each and all be guided to experience mercy as we make room for the birth of the Christ child in the inns of our world, the inns of our families, and the inns of our hearts this Advent season.
May it be so. Amen.
