Let every heart prepare him room

And 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. There’s a tradition in the Mexican community called Las Posadas. In the week before Christmas, people go knocking door to door, looking for room […]

And 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.

There’s a tradition in the Mexican community called Las Posadas. In the week before Christmas, people go knocking door to door, looking for room for Mary & Joseph to stay. House after house refuses them, until they come to the home that is hosting the Nativity that evening. When they can finally come in, they pray and sing together and have a party. The next night, it is someone else’s turn to host, and again the group of pilgrims seeks door to door until they find the place that will take them in. This repeats for nine evenings in a row, the nine months that Mary carried Jesus in her womb. The tradition has been going on for some 400 years. It strikes me that somehow that detail of the story, Mary & Joseph looking and looking for a room in Bethlehem and being turned away over and over, has caught the attention of generations of people.

It’s part of our worship tonight as well: Tonight we’ll end our service with the hymn that ends pretty much every Christmas Eve service, ‘Joy to the World.’ ‘Let earth receive her king. Let every heart prepare him room,’ we’ll sing. That hymn was written by Isaac Watts in 1719, nearly 300 years ago. Again that detail, the need to make room for God to come. We think we’re busier and more preoccupied in the 21st century than ever before, but it turns out people 3-400 years ago had problems with the same thing – perhaps it’s always been hard for us to make room for God. And maybe too, people long ago knew, and we know, that feeling of looking for room and being turned away.

I talked with the kids at the 5:00 service about how sometimes our bags and our rooms and our houses get full and cluttered, and it’s hard to find room to put new things. It’s easy for us to collect too much stuff, especially living at the level of affluence most of us have in America. We all have closets and boxes we need to sort through, old things to get rid of. But sometimes it’s not just our bags and closets that get full. Sometimes our hearts and our lives get full. We get full of worry over things big and small. Will the test show I have cancer? Is there time to do all the errands I have to do today? Do we have enough money to pay the bills? When we worry, it can be hard to think about anything else – it can keep us up at night, and there’s no room in our thoughts for anything else.  Or other things can take up our attention: our focus on getting ahead, succeeding and doing well in the world, can preoccupy us, so that we can think of little else. Our work gets a little workaholic and takes over all our priorities, and there doesn’t seem to be time for anything or anybody else. Or sometimes it’s just a bunch of little things that fill our minds – busy days with lots of different things to do, schedules packed with activities and tasks, TV shows and smartphones and all the other distractions that clutter our brains.  Even if we’re not busy, we find ways of keeping ourselves busy – somehow that looks better, more purposeful, than doing nothing.

But when our hearts and our lives get too full, it’s hard to have room for the things that really matter – room for loving our family and friends, room for concern and care for those less fortunate than ourselves. It’s hard to have room for God. Maybe you’ve seen those pictures of ‘Jesus knocking at heart’s door,’ with a wispy-looking Jesus standing with lantern in hand and his other hand raised to knock on a door. ‘Behold, I stand at the door and knock,’ Jesus says in the book of Revelation. And indeed, God does come knocking, wanting to move in and love us, but we don’t have room. We don’t mean to tell God to go away, but sometimes it happens that way. We’re busy with other things and focused on other stuff, and we don’t have time to think about God and God’s desire for us – or to remember, even, that God loves us.

Of course, sometimes God will make room anyway. If we can’t stop to focus on God, God has ways of making us focus – bringing us up short in those times and situations when we realize we don’t control everything after all. God has ways of breaking our hearts open. A colleague of mine said the other day that it’s no wonder God came as a little baby, because babies have a way of breaking our hearts. Something in us softens when we see a baby, and especially so when we see a baby suffering. Having children of our own, or loving any child, is a sure way of opening ourselves to risk and loss – children are vulnerable in so many ways, physical and emotional. If Jesus had shown up in the world a fully-grown man, we could dismiss him the way we dismiss so many people we pass every day. But a baby – there’s a reason, not just a sentimental one, why we return year after year to the idea of this little vulnerable child sleeping in a manger, sleeping with the animals because there was no room for him in the inn. Our hearts soften just enough to notice our own vulnerability. We long to protect that poor little Jesus – and we long to be protected ourselves.

We could still turn away, of course. We can always choose to pass on relationship with God and with other people. All of those other things we spend our hearts and time on can fill us up so completely that we think it’s all there is. But deep down in each one of us, there’s a hole that’s made to be filled by God and God’s love for us. Nothing else satisfies that hunger – not even the latest Air Jordans. Give a baby a pacifier, and it will calm down. But give a hungry baby a pacifier, and it won’t – because what it needs is food and nourishment. We can pacify and occupy ourselves with all manner of things. But none of them feed us. None of them fill the hole that is there.

And so the other part that touches us at Christmas is that longing to be loved ourselves. So many secular Christmas carols sing of wishing to be home, in the perfect home where all is well, all is loving and bright. So few of us really find that in our homes, try as we might to make them perfect. We try knocking on a lot of doors ourselves throughout our lives, and sometimes we find ourselves turned out of them – people leave us, employers fire us, other people’s perfect lives don’t include us in them somehow. We long to be in that place where, as the poem says, they have to take you in.

God with us, Emmanuel, means just that. It is God making a home with us and in us in order that we can be at home in God. It’s mutual hospitality – we make room for God in our hearts, and God envelops us within the vast love he has for us.  When God knocks on our door, if all we have is just a little bit of room, God starts with that. God can be quite comfortable as a baby in a manger of straw. If all we can muster tonight is a little space, a little quiet within ourselves as we sing ‘Silent Night,’ then God can use that. Baby steps are ok – it’s not an all or nothing proposition God is making to us…at least, not at first. But as God grows within us, other things will start to give way. Some of those little things will become less important for us to spend our time on. Some of those big worries won’t be so anxious after all. Instead, what happens to other people will matter more to us; our hearts will break more easily at the need of another. We’ll have more room in us than we thought was there, to love. And we will find ourselves more and more at home in love.

It’s ok tonight to get a little sentimental and teary. You’ve come to a place where God is at home, and where others want you to feel at home as well. This is a chance, one of so many chances God gives us, to set aside some of that stuff that takes us up and let God come in instead. Your heart has room – it was made for this. May the peace of God and the joy of this season fill you tonight – and may you know always that God loves you. Merry Christmas.