No Room

 

All around you the hustle and bustle of the season is crescendo-ing. The chaos of Christmas is continuing to lather itself into its final frenzied sales pitch next week. The countdown calendar declares and demands that there are only thirteen shopping days left, and have you gotten a special gift for Aunt Phoebe ~ because you don’t want to disappoint her with something you get last minute, do you?  What kind of person could do that to Aunt Phoebe?

Where is your soul amid all the activity of shopping and packing and wrapping and parties with expectations?  Do you feel elation or exhaustion or some strange collaboration of both?  Maybe you feel a bit meh this Christmas…not in the holiday spirit.  Let me remind you, this is not only okay, but there is also actually, honestly, a holiness to feeling on the fringe and fray of the frenzied pace.  Step into the story of Christmas, not as depicted on Christmas cards or portrayed in plays.  Remember that Mary and Joesph felt exhausted traveling 90 miles because when Ceasar said, “Go,” you went.  Remember that Mary and Joseph felt pushed about amid the crowd that didn’t see them.  Remember, that in a culture that valued hospitality and welcoming strangers, there was no room for them.  How could this be? 

We tend to dramatize this Christmas pageants with two kids dressed in bathrobes knocking on doors and having some other kid, the innkeeper, say, “What do you want?”  We picture “no vacancy signs” in neon signs of the hotels.  We wonder why they didn’t use Priceline to book a room before they left on the journey.  In Jesus’ day, given that Mary and Joseph were clinging to one of the bottom rungs of the economic/social ladder for dear life, you often stayed with relatives.  What does it mean that Mary and Joesph’s relatives didn’t have room?  This could be physically or maybe emotionally or relationally or spiritually for them.  Maybe Mary and Joseph felt canceled by a culture (religiously and relationally) that could not understand or accept why she was having a child before they had exchanged wedding vows.  Maybe Mary and Joseph were worn down and weary from the gossip and behind the back whispers of this “girl” who thought she had been visited by an angel.  How foolish and fanciful, people might have mocked. 

Have you ever had an experience of feeling like there was no room for you?

This could be because grief this year has you feeling out of sync and out of sorts.  This could be because you were passed over for a promotion at work because of your race, orientation, gender identity, or age.  This could be because your family decided that it was easier to act like you did not exist than deal with their own brokenness ~ always easier to blame than face our own shadows.  This could be because you did not have the “right” shoes or jeans or hair cut in school or make it into the fraternity.  This could be an illness right now or some soul ache that words can’t capture.

Let Mary and Joseph’s story this week connect to a part of your story.  Hold this amid the buzz and busy-ness of this season.  May you discover and uncover a sacred space where you open your heart to the truth that Christmas is more than exhilaration and excitement, God enters this world still through the weariness of a world that is spinning too fast to notice.  It is often amid the less-than-perfectness of life that Emmanuel, God with us and for us, resides.  Amen.