No Room? (Luke 2:1-14) • Geoff Bradford

Chapter two. This is one of the classic Christmas passages. So if you would join your voices with me, let's turn our attention to God's word. Let's read out loud together. Luke 2:1-14.

In those days, a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration when Quirinius was governor of Syria, and all went to be registered each to his own town. And Joseph also went up from Galilee from the town of Nazareth to Judea to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David to be registered with Mary his betrothed, who was with child. And while they were there, the time came for her to give birth. And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths and laid him in a manger because there was no place for them in the inn. And in the same region, there were shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And an angel of the lord appeared to them, and the glory of the lord shone round, and they were filled with fear. And the angel said to them, fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of a great joy that will be for all the people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a savior who is Christ the lord. And this will be a sign for you. You will find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger. And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, glory to God in the highest and on earth peace among those with whom he is well pleased. — Luke 2:1-14

This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

The Importance of Home

Home is such an important word for us, isn't it? You know the phrase "home is where the heart is"? For some of you who are Wizard of Oz fans, remember what Dorothy says? She clicks her heels together: "There's no place like home. There's no place like home. There's no place like home."

And even though the realty industry would tell us that they sell homes, the reality is that they sell houses, and we hope that houses become homes. Home is so important. It has connotations of being known, of belonging, of warmth, of being loved, of comfort, of safety, and of peace.

Home is such an important word to us. It's such an important word that's part of our vernacular around the holidays. That's why the theme for this year's Christmas series as we're preaching through is "No Place Like Home for the Holidays." We associate home with the holidays. Those go together in our minds so deeply.

In these weeks leading up to Christmas, we're looking at the very famous passages around the coming of Jesus and the hospitality of God—the making a home with God that these passages are about. Last week we looked in John 1 about how it's part of the incarnation, part of what Jesus is up to. He comes among us and pitches his tent among us in order to call us his children, to invite us home.

And today, I want to flip that and talk about the other side of that. Part of what it means to be a Christian is to make your life, your soul, a home for God. Do you hear the words in "Hark the Herald Angels Sing"? There's a line in that hymn:

Fix in us your humble home.

That's part of the theme of what we hear over and over at Christmas time. And this passage is the famous one that Linus reads in the Charlie Brown Christmas pageant. It contains a line that's really critical for us to consider this morning about home: "No home"—as in no place for Jesus. No room in the inn.

What does this mean, "no room in the inn"? And how does it inform us with what we do with Jesus? That's what we're speaking about, thinking about this morning.

The Traditional Story

Now, the traditional understanding of the Christmas story goes this way. A holy family gets news that there is a worldwide tax. They go back to Joseph's hometown. Joseph's got a very pregnant Mary on a donkey, and he's leading her through the Judean countryside. They arrive in town, and there are "no vacancy" lights up in all the windows of the hotels, right? And there's an innkeeper—traditionally the innkeeper who's standing at the door like this going, "Nope, no room in the inn."

So they go to a cave, or they go to a stable, and they have the baby. And of course, they have nowhere else to stick the baby. Because you're trying to stick the baby somewhere, so you put it in the feed trough, right, the manger. And angels too—this is the sign they give to shepherds. You're not going to believe it. This is how you'll know that this is the baby king: because he's in a manger of all things. Right? Like, unthinkable. Nobody puts babies in mangers. And that's the folklore around the story.

And I want to ask: is that really the real story?

Misconceptions About Christmas

I want to look this morning at some of the misconceptions of Christmas, particularly this one: the "no room in the inn" misconception. As if the inn had lots and lots of rooms, and all the keys to all the rooms were already handed out at this point. And mangers—I mean, who has a manger? Who has a manger inside a house? Well, turns out everybody.

The Reality of First-Century Homes

In the Middle East, even up to today, in most villages and poor communities, people don't have stables or barns. In fact, if you read some of Jesus' parables, when he talks about barns or stables, usually the word there is for a storage room. It's kind of brought into our language as "barn," but only people of incredibly great wealth had a separate building apart from their house for agriculture. Ninety-nine point nine-nine percent of people in first-century and even twentieth-century Judea had one house, one building, with in most cases one, maybe two rooms.

The main room is a family room. That's where everybody eats, cooks, and sleeps. There's a little line there which symbolizes a change in elevation, not a wall. There's a drop down where the animals live. The animals come in at night. Think about this: there's a door that serves as an entrance for people at one end of the house. There's a door for the animals at the other end of the house. Because every night, the family—who is of very limited resources—would bring their most valuable possessions, their livestock, into the room with them, and they would stay in the lower section. They're separated by a lower wall right there, but they're in a lower section of the same room.

This is for warmth. This is for security. This provides heat. I mean, animals give off heat. And every morning, they clean out that entire area and drive the animals outside. The mangers for the larger animals were up on that wall. So a cow sleeping upright overnight could reach over and eat out of the manger. The mangers for the smaller animals were on the floor below—for sheep and goats. Dirt and water naturally move downhill, so every day, part of the family's chores would be to roll up the sleeping mats, sweep out from the top of the family room all the way down into the animal area, and then clean all that out from overnight.

So for more than a hundred years, scholars in the Middle East have understood this passage, Luke 2:7, as referring to a family room with mangers cutting the floor at one end.

Understanding "No Room in the Inn"

If this is true, why do we say there was no room in the inn? What was full? A lot of times we have in our minds this sort of "no vacancy" light—like the holy family trudges into Bethlehem, really tired, about to have the baby. All the inns are taken, so there's nowhere to go. But the word for "inn" right there in Greek is just the word that means "space." It's like, "I don't have any space in my trunk for those boxes. There's no space."

Now, what space are they referring to? The word for "inn" actually is a word which means "guest hall" or "reception room" in Greek—a place for receiving guests. And there's a word for that in the New Testament. In the Good Samaritan story, the Samaritan finds a man beaten up on the road, lying in a pool of blood, and he patches up his wounds and takes him to a guest hall, to a hotel, a commercial inn—a place that would receive guests. But that's not what's here.

In fact, I think this is what's being referred to. In a house, there was often another room, and sometimes this would be on top of the house, built like an extra room up high. Sometimes this would be in a corner of a house. It's the word kataluma—a word which Jesus uses later on in Luke 22. It's right before he's about to be crucified. He tells his disciples, "Behold, here's how you can get ready for our last supper. Go into the city, and you're gonna see a person carrying a water jar. You're gonna follow them into the house, and you're gonna say, 'Tell them the teacher needs the guest room, the kataluma, where I'm gonna eat the Passover with my disciples.' And he will show you a large upper room furnished."

Tell them the teacher needs the guest room, the kataluma, where I'm gonna eat the Passover with my disciples. — Luke 22:11

Hospitality is and was an enormous value in the Middle East—always has been. It goes back to the first chapters of Genesis. Taking in strangers, bringing people into your home was a huge value. Elijah found a woman who had this upper room built on top of her house for him to stay in.

So here's what we learned about the Christmas story.

Luke tells us that when the family arrived, there was no room in the guest room, so the family must have put them in the only room that they had—the animal room. And wrapping up the baby, they put the baby in what was right there: the manger. Not a dirty, smelly stable, but a warm place that was prepared every day for not only their own animals, but for hospitality.

This is what we read about in the Christmas story, and this is confirmed by what happens in the exchange between the shepherds and the angels. The angels tell the shepherd they would find the baby wrapped and lying in a manger, and what the shepherds hear in that is: poor home, like mine. Poor house, poor family, like my family. The baby didn't come to the Governor's palace or a mansion or to the wealthy, and so they rejoice. They go follow this good news and they go see the baby, and upon arrival, they praise God for all that they had seen and heard. And I think that probably includes the accommodations, the hospitality that they saw.

Clearly, they found the Holy Family in perfectly acceptable accommodations. If on arrival they'd found a smelly stable and a frightened young mother and a desperate Joseph, they would have said, "Oh no, you've got to come stay with my people. This will not stand." Instead, they rejoiced and went on their way. The shepherds knew from this that they couldn't offer better hospitality than what had been offered the Holy Family.

Now I know just reading this info on the Kataluma—the no room in the inn—it messes up some nativity scenes, maybe some Christmas cards, definitely blows up some Christmas pageants with the angry innkeeper. By the way, did anybody ever play the angry innkeeper? Nobody here? Okay. I've been in churches before where people have definitely taken that role. But it's just not a story of rejection. It's not a story of inhospitality. It's a story of hospitality, of welcome, of welcoming Jesus in. So Luke 2, instead of showing us what not to do with Jesus, actually shows us what to do with Jesus: to welcome him in, to offer him hospitality, to welcome him into your life and your home. And Jesus loves to make his home with sinners.

Have You Made Accommodation for Him?

Here's the first application for you this morning out of three: Have you made accommodation for him in yourself, in your soul, in your life?

As I said at the beginning, this idea of home works two ways. As I said last week, all humans—no matter how great your family of origin was or how awesome, if your parents still have your original bedroom from when you were a kid and everything was awesome in your childhood—every human comes into this world with a deep feeling of homesickness. Homesickness for a home you've never been to, a place where everything's not quite right here, and never has been, and you're not sure it ever will be. And this is because you are made by God as an infinite being on the inside. On the outside, skin and bones—you look like everybody else. On the inside, you have an eternal soul. If you could take a big rock and drop it down that well inside of you, you would never hear the splash, because you are made for God.

And the story of John 1, the story of the incarnation, is God coming and saying, "You—I want you, children of God." The other side of that, though, is that God wants to make a home in you. He comes to give us, to enter into us. There's an old passage that is referenced and made into images many times from Revelation 3:

Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come into him and eat with him and he with me. — Revelation 3:20

There's a famous painting of this: Jesus on the outside of a door knocking. There's no doorknob on the outside. Only the person on the inside can open the door and let Jesus in.

And Jesus—this is the hope of Christmas, right?—Jesus wants to be with you. Jesus wants to come make his home in you. He wants to take up residence in your life. This is our God. This is what he's like.

But I want you to hear something else in that invitation. Jesus knocks and Jesus brings dinner. And we always have college students among us in our church. It's a regular thing we expect. College students know all about Parents' Weekend. Am I right? Parents' Weekend is a big joke. I think it was invented by college students, because this is how it works: you come visit me, spend money on me, take me out to eat, and buy me some stuff. That's Parents' Weekend.

And essentially, this is what Jesus is doing. This is the ultimate Parents' Weekend. Jesus knocks on the door. "Can I come in?" And by the way, "I'm bringing the feast. I'm bringing the feast with me."

One writer and preacher, Charles Spurgeon, in preaching on that passage from Revelation 3, he says this: "Jesus will come in and sup with us"—old language—"sup with us. He'll come in and eat with us. That is, we shall be the host and we'll entertain him, but then he says, and with me, that is, Jesus will be the host and the guest by turns. We will give him our best, but poor fare, that is, too poor for him, and yet he will partake of it because he's that gracious. But then he shall play the host, and we will be the guest, and oh, how we will feast on what he gives."

Christ comes and brings the supper with him, and all we do is to find the room. The master says to us, "Where's the guest chamber?" And then he makes ready and spreads out his royal table.

There is no life too sinful, too vile, too broken, too dirty, too stained that Jesus does not want to enter in. None. Jesus is no respecter of persons. No dirt, no sin, no hypocrisy, no unworthiness, no stupid choices, no life changing consequences will keep him out. The only thing that keeps Jesus out—two things—pride and fear. "I don't want him to mess with me," or "I don't know if I can let him in." Pride and fear.

But he isn't afraid, and your life isn't too jacked up. It isn't too bad. Jesus wants fellowship with you. He wants to make his home in you. He doesn't want to just come for parents weekend. He wants to move into the dorm room. He wants to make his home in you, in you.

Do you see what kind of ridiculous hospitality that Jesus offers sinners? Look, I want to invite you—if you've never opened the door to him—to risk this Christmas. Let him come in. He's not going to make it worse. He can only make it better. He will only bring his beauty and his life and his peace and his joy. Will you let him in?

Making Room Continually

A second application: this is for those of you who call yourselves Christians, who've maybe been a Christian a long time. Because making room for Jesus is not just a one-time thing, and it's not an all-at-once thing. So you can't just say, "Oh yeah, I remember back in October 2017 when I opened up my life to the Lord. That was great back then." No. No. You're missing it because what Jesus wants to do in us is so much bigger.

There was a little book written by a pastor in the last century named Robert B. Munger that imagines a house as an allegory for discipleship. It was called My Heart, Christ's Home. And it was an imaginative reading of this passage, and this little bit pictures your life as a giant house. Now, don't think of the first century Palestinian houses we just saw—think the board game Clue. Think mansion. Think expansive house.

Now why would I say that? Didn't I just tell you that on the outside you look finite, but on the inside drop the rock down the well? It just keeps going. Because on the inside, you are made for God. So your life is like a house with so many wings and rooms.

And Robert Munger imagines inviting Jesus into a tour of your house. You've invited him in, but now he wants to go walk around with you and see some of the rooms. So you've got your keys. You're like, "Okay, I'm going to start opening some doors and showing him around."

So let me walk through this. First, imagine the study. Now again, picture the board game Clue—a big room with shelves on the walls filled with books and magazines on magazine racks and tables with periodicals and pictures on the wall. And Munger says: "I invited Jesus into this room, and I watched him. I followed his gaze as he looked around, and I became uncomfortable. Strangely, I had not felt self-conscious about any of what I'd had in there before, but now that he was there looking at these things, I sort of felt embarrassed. Some of the books were there where his eyes were too pure to behold. On the table were a few magazines that I probably had no business reading. As far as the pictures on the walls—the imaginations, the thoughts of my mind—some of these were shameful."

And red-faced, I turned to Jesus and said, "Jesus, I know some things in this room need to be redone, need to be cleaned out and made over. Would you help me do this?" Jesus said, "Oh, I'd be delighted to help clean up your thoughts."

Then imagine going with Jesus to the dining room, and you pull out the keys and you unlock the door. This is the room of your appetites and desires. Munger says: "I spent a lot of time here. One of my favorite places to go was the dining room. I spent a lot of time here working hard to satisfy my wants and desires. I say to Jesus, 'Jesus, this is my favorite room. I'm sure you're going to be happy with what we serve here.'"

He seated himself at the table and asked, "What's on the menu for dinner?" Oh, I said, "My favorite dishes."

Being attractive, being successful, being liked by other people, having lots of securities and stocks and money in the bank, having a great home, having a great body, great vacations and experiences—these are the things that I liked. This is what I wanted to eat. But when the food was placed before him, he said nothing. He didn't eat it. I said, "Jesus, don't you like my food? What's the problem?"

Jesus says, "I have food that you know nothing about. If you want food that really satisfies you, do the will of my father. Stop seeking just to satisfy your own pleasures, desires, and satisfaction. Seek to please the Lord. That food will satisfy you."

Next, we went out to the garage and Jesus saw my workbench. Out in the garage of the home, I had a workbench with some equipment, but I wasn't really doing much with it. He looked over the workbench and said, "Well, hey, this is quite well furnished. Seems to be a little projects that you've got going on here. What are you working on?"

I showed him my projects and he said, "Is this the sort of thing that you want to produce in your life?"

Well, I said, "Lord, I know it isn't much, but I kind of like to do more, but I don't have much strength or skill."

"Would you like me to help you?" he asked.

"Yes," I replied.

He said, "Let me have your hands. Now relax in me and let my spirit work through you. I know that you are unskilled, clumsy and awkward, but the Holy Spirit is the master workman and if he controls your hands and your heart, he will work through you."

Next, we went on to the rec room, right around the corner in the basement. Again, I had to unlock the door, and this represents your entertainment, your downtime, your fun. While Jesus loved a good party and loved laughter and fun, he offers deeper joy and happiness than the escapes and distractions that I often go to at the end of the day. Coming into this room, Jesus says, "Solid joys and lasting pleasures. This is what I have for you, not momentary diversions."

Finally, the hall closet. Munger then imagines walking up the stairs with Jesus and Jesus saying, "Oh, what does that go to?"

"Oh, you don't need to see that, Jesus. That's just a hall closet."

"Well, it smells bad. There's something in there that doesn't smell good." He goes over and tries the handle, and of course it's locked. So I pulled out the keys. Reluctantly, I went with him over to the door and as he asked to open the door, I said, "You know, this is really too much. I've let you in to all these areas of my life. Isn't that good enough? I mean, you've been in the dining room, you've been in the rec room, you've been in the work room, you've been in my study. I mean, that's plenty for you, Jesus."

And Jesus says, "You can't imagine that I want to stay in this house with that smell."

So reluctantly, I opened the door. "Jesus, I can't clean this out. You're gonna have to do it."

"Gladly," he said.

The allegory is a little trite. Maybe you're like, that's kind of hokey, but I love it because I think the picture that Munger gives is this: a Christian is a person who's enormous on the inside. All these rooms that Jesus wants to inhabit and bring his light and his life and his joy into all these areas. He wants to make your life, all of it, his home. He wants you not just to open up a few doors, but to say, "Jesus, here you go. All the rooms, here are the keys. It's all yours."

If you think about this morning, there are plenty of ways you could draw this out, but are there areas of your life that are closed off right now? I would hesitate to say that's not true for everybody, every person. There are parts of my life that I'm like, "Jesus, you are in, but I don't want you to be in that part." There are parts of our lives that are unyielded, unopened to him. And part of the invitation of Christmas is to release the grip of your hands on your life. We walk around so closed, so uptight, so guarded. And I want you to hear this invitation: just like for that family opening up their home, open up your home on the inside, your interior life to him and allow him in.

Hospitality

Last application. This one's going to feel like a complete change of subject, but bear with me because it's not. Letting strangers into your home. Letting strangers into your life. Now, hospitality in our world is a thing you can go get a degree in. You can learn all about the hospitality industry, and you learn that it can mean convention centers and hotels and providing banquets and all those things, and that's great. But that's not what our world means by it. That's not what the Bible means by it.

Hospitality is a word that has some deep roots in the Bible that combines two words that we would normally not put together: philos, which is love, and xenos, like xenophobia, being afraid of strangers—love of stranger, love of somebody different. Jesus tells us anybody can show hospitality, or kindness, or welcome, or generosity for people who could pay them back and are like them, that they know. But kindness to the stranger, welcoming the stranger—I mean, that's what happened in Luke 2. There's a family in history who opened their home, who opened up the animal part of their home to a family who needed a place to stay, literally welcoming in the stranger.

Listen to the New Testament, all these words about this:

Offer hospitality with one another without grumbling. Share with the Lord's people who are in need. Practice hospitality. Do not neglect to show hospitality for strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.

This is our call to demonstrate our faith by offering hospitality to strangers, and this is nowhere pictured better, of course, than in this one parable Jesus tells right at the end of his life: the parable of the sheep and the goats. It's a picture of the final judgment where Jesus separates people. All these are livestock, and he separates them on which demonstrated their faith by demonstrating it toward the stranger, toward caring for the sick, the poor, the naked, the prisoner. And at the final judgment, these people who are designated sheep don't even know that they did that. Jesus says, "You did this. When you did this, you were actually doing it unto me. You were doing it—those acts of kindness—you didn't know were acts of kindness counted even toward me."

Now don't spiritualize this sermon away. Yes, God wants to dwell inside of you, in your life, in every part of your soul. He wants to come make a home inside of you. He wants to fill every part of it with himself. Man, this is what's awesome about being a Christian. We don't have a God who's out there somewhere; we have a God on the inside who wants to come in and fill our whole very selves with light and life. But that's not only true on the inside of us, but on our real houses too, our actual cars and our lives.

If the calling of my heart—Christ's home—is to invite Jesus, give him the keys to your interior life, then the calling of this last point is to give him the keys to the rest of the outside part of your life, your stuff, your house. Again, I know we are such careful people. We're so afraid of being taken advantage of, being inconvenienced, being exhausted by draining people. I understand that. There are lots of ifs, ands, and buts you can make to this sermon right now. Stop it.

What if this is what God wants to do? What if God wants to not only fill the inside of your life, but the outside of your life with him? What if God has plans that will disrupt your plans? And what if God has purposes and people that will disrupt and yet bring joy? You know, if you had been in Bethlehem two thousand twenty-three-ish years ago, there would have been a young couple who needed a place to stay, and someone in history—I wish we knew their names, don't you?—some family, "You can use our animal area. The guest room's full, but man, we're glad to have you." You can be sure that that family was blessed and encouraged by that Christmas.

Here's my call: Here's the do this with yourself, with your life, with your soul. God, I'm so closed up, so closed off, so guarded, so careful. See what he does.

Let's pray together. Father, we thank you for the Christmas story, which is old and yet new all the time. Thank you for a Savior who wants so much to be with sinners that he would come in. Thank you that it is really true that there is no life too broken, too sinful, too dirty. Lord, thank you that you promise to bring joy. Thank you that you want to get into the hall closet. Thank you, Lord, that you actually want to come and disrupt our schedules and our lives on the outside too. Open our hearts, open ourselves, open us up to what you might do in us. We pray this in Christ's name. Amen.

Would you stand and respond in song together?