Making Room in the Inn - by The Rev. Donald L. Hamer, Rector
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Trinity Episcopal Church
Christmas Day 2015
John 1:1-14
Twentieth century writer G.K. Chesterton wrote that “When a person has found something which he prefers to life itself, he for the first time has begun to live.” The passage from the prologue of John’s Gospel is testimony to the choice of God in Christ. The One through whom all creation occurred chose to enter the world in a new way – to actually take on the body of a human being – to be at once both fully human and fully divine.
That is God’s gift to us – an invitation to draw more closely and more deeply into relationship with Godself in human form. And we all have to ask for the grace to prefer that life that Jesus offers to our small life because we have been offered the shared Life, the One Life, the Eternal Life, God’s Life that became visible in this world in the person of Jesus. All we have to do is allow the connection.
But we find opening ourselves to Jesus difficult today even as his contemporaries found it difficult during his lifetime. John writes, He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.
Franciscan Fr. Richard Rohr observes that in Jesus we come to find out that the Kingdom of God is ultimately to be identified with the person of Jesus. Think of all the occasions in the Gospel when Jesus offers a parable that begins, “The Kingdom of God is like . . .” – The completion of the sentence is always something that the person of Jesus stands for.
You may recall that during the season of Advent each petition in our Prayers of the People always concluded, “Lord Jesus, come soon.” So when we say, “Come Lord Jesus,” on this Christmas Day, we are preferring his Lordship to any other loyalty system or any other final frame of reference. If Jesus is Lord, then Caesar is not! If Jesus is Lord, then the economy and stock market are not! If Jesus is Lord, then my house and possessions, family and job are not! If Jesus is Lord, then I am not! That multileveled implication was obvious to first-century members of the Roman Empire because the phrase “Caesar is Lord” was the empire’s litmus test to determine cultural purity and political loyalty.
What we are all searching for, Rohr says, is Someone to whom we can surrender, something we can prefer to life itself. And the good news here is that God is the only one to whom we can surrender ourselves without losing ourselves. The irony is that when we surrender ourselves, it is only there that we can begin to become most fully the person Jesus is calling us to become.
But surrendering ourselves is not something we humans – and particularly we Americans – are good at. It is hard. But that is what God calls us to do in offering us the gift of God’s son, Jesus. Mary and Joseph had trouble finding room at an inn. As we celebrate Christmas, let’s make sure that Jesus doesn’t find a “No Vacancy” sign on our hearts as he seeks a place there. Christmas really comes when we are intentional about opening that place in our hearts – then every day becomes Christmas as we see Christ in every human being and live our lives as though Christ is in us.
So in or Anglican tradition of focusing on the goodness of the Incarnation, humanity has the right to know that it is good to be human, good to live on this earth, good to have a body because God in Jesus chose and said “yes” to the humanity that we now share with the God who created us. AMEN.