Preached · December 24, 2023
Text · Luke 22; Luke 2
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Introduction
I want to tell three stories this morning — a personal story, and then two Jesus stories — and try my best to tie them together.
The Alaska Story
When I was six years old, I was living in a car with my biological mother, Toni, up in Seward, Alaska — a tiny little port town, sometime in the late fall. It was cold. Our car was our source of home, transportation, heat, and shelter. My mom had made a mistake in the way she cared for the car, and so the car had stopped working. We had all of our belongings in there; it's where we lived, where we slept, where the heat came from — and the car stopped working.
I don't know how — I was six at the time, I have some memories, some distinct and some less so — but somehow a family came up to our car and asked what was going on, how we were doing, and Toni, my biological mom, explained what had happened. And this family invited us into their home, and we stayed there at least one night, maybe two. I remember there was a baby younger than me, very, very small, with this big, bushy head of hair that I would just brush and brush and brush, while my mom talked to this family that took us in, gave us a meal, gave us a place to stay for the night.
Now, my story goes on from there. I'll eventually be put into foster care in Alaska, live with an aunt and uncle, and be adopted. But there were those days — a day or two, these liminal, in-between moments, when the car had died, there was no more heat — and a family whose name I will never know this side of heaven took us in and provided care for us. So that's story number one.
Luke 22: The Guest Room
Story number two comes from the Gospel of Luke, chapter 22. We're talking about the last week of Jesus's life — and I'll tell you why in a little bit. We read this in Luke 22, starting in verse 7:
Then the day of Unleavened Bread came. That was the time the Passover lamb had to be sacrificed. Jesus sent Peter and John on ahead. "Go," he told them, "prepare for us to eat the Passover meal." "Where do you want us to prepare for it?" they asked. Jesus replied, "When you enter the city, a man carrying a jar of water will meet you. Follow him to the house he enters. Then say to the owner of the house, 'The Teacher asks: Where is the guest room, where I can eat the Passover meal with my disciples?' He will show you a large upstairs room with furniture already in it. Prepare for us to eat there." — Luke 22:7-12
Just interjecting here for a moment: I love that Jesus is subversive to the very end. Because it was typically the women's job to do all of the preparation for the holiday, for all the festivities at Passover. And Jesus has female disciples — there was a gang of women who followed him around, who financially provided for him, who would be the only ones to follow Jesus to the cross. But Jesus doesn't turn to the women and say, "Go prepare the meal." He turns to Peter and John and says, "Go get ready." Maybe that's applicable for you today, I don't know, but there's a word for you.
So Jesus says, "Peter and John, go get ready for the Passover meal." And Peter and John are like, "Jesus, you are famously homeless. You have no place to lay your head. We don't have any property; we're not real estate moguls. Where do you want us to prepare for it?" And Jesus says, "When you enter Jerusalem, you're going to see a man carrying a jar of water, and he's going to meet you. Follow him to the house he goes into, and say to the owner of the house, 'The rabbi asks: Where is the guest room?'" Pay attention to that word — the guest room. "Where can I eat the Passover meal with my disciples? And the owner of the house will show you a large upstairs room with furniture already in it. Prepare for us to eat there."
So there's Jesus being subversive to the last, sending the men to go prepare the meal, to go find a place to stay. It's very espionage spy movie: "Into the city, you'll see a man carrying a jar. That's the sign. Follow him. He'll tell you where to go." Jesus sends Peter and John; they find the man, and they go to the guest room.
Now, "the guest room" is a Greek word: kataluma. It's related to the Greek word luo, "to loose." The idea is that it's the place where you let loose, where you let down your hair, where you relax — the guest room, the kataluma. So the disciples find the man, who leads them to the big house, who leads them upstairs to the kataluma, the guest room where Jesus will have his final meal.
I say this quite often when we do communion: when you picture the Last Supper, where Jesus institutes communion, do not picture Da Vinci's painting of Jesus and twelve men posing for a portrait on one side of a table. No — it's Passover. It's a big family meal. There are men and women, and children running around. It's a little bit wild, a little bit crazy. And they all settle in together and hear the stories of God's redemption in the life of God's people. So that's Jesus's last meal with his friends before his resurrection — surrounded by friends, men, women, children, all in a borrowed guest room that Jesus doesn't own, that John and Peter and the disciples don't own. Just some connection Jesus made along the way during his life and ministry, during his thirty-some-odd years on planet Earth — some friends who lent them a guest room to stay.
Luke 2: No Room in the Guest Room
Now, why do I bring up this story on Christmas? Well, you have to go back to the beginning of Luke's Gospel, to Luke chapter 2. This story might make more sense to bring up today. It says this:
In those days, Caesar Augustus made a law. It required that a list be made of everyone in the whole Roman world. It was the first time a list was made of the people while Quirinius was governor of Syria, and everyone had to go to their own hometown to be listed. So Joseph went also. He went from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, where Bethlehem, the town of David, was. Joseph went there because he belonged to the family line of David. He went there with Mary to be listed. Mary was engaged to Joseph —
I like to lovingly call him the Virgin Joseph.
— and she was expecting a baby. While Joseph and Mary were there, the time came for the child to be born. So she gave birth to her first baby. It was a boy. She wrapped him in large strips of cloth and placed him in a manger — a feeding trough for animals — because there was no place for them in the guest room, the kataluma. — Luke 2:1-7
Now, you may have grown up hearing this story a little differently. Maybe A Charlie Brown Christmas presented something a little different from what I just read — about there being no room at the (what's the usual word?) inn. Maybe the children's play of the grumpy innkeeper kicking pregnant Mary and the Virgin Joseph away from the hotel where they were supposed to stay. But that's not actually what Luke says. Kataluma is used two times in the Gospel of Luke: once in Luke 22, about going to find the guest room where the Last Supper will be had, and here in Luke chapter 2.
So I know we're pushing back on hundreds of years of biblical tradition, translation tradition, church tradition. But I want to paint a different image in your mind. The story is that imperial bureaucracy makes everybody's lives go upside down, and you have to go back to your hometown to get your name put on a list, probably for tax purposes. Joseph and Mary — their lives already turned upside down due to an unexpected pregnancy — are forced to travel. They get to Bethlehem. Joseph's family is there. They get to their cousin's house: "Hey, Cuz, how's it going? Yeah, we're here for the same thing. Federal bureaucracy, like everything else." But the guest room is full. The kataluma is full.
Most places had somewhere family could expect to stay. But there's family there already, most likely, because everybody has to go to their hometown. So the guest room is full. But the family doesn't kick them out. The family says, "It's okay. Come on in anyway. We'll make room."
Now, the place where they have to make room is at the center of a Mediterranean home. If you go look — you can see some of them today, you can go look at the archaeology — a Mediterranean home is built around a courtyard. You have a gate, an initial place where you enter in, and then you keep going back to an area with no roof, a courtyard where you might keep a goat to milk or a couple of hens for eggs. That's in the middle of your home. If you're rich, you've got two stories that look down into the courtyard. If you're probably just subsistence living, you've got one story with a little courtyard in the middle where your goat and your hens stay.
So the family sees Joseph and a very pregnant Mary and says, "Yes, we know about the census. We know about the list-making the empire is making us do. We already have family here, but please, come on in. We will make room for you." Is it glorious? No. It's a baby who has to be born into a feeding trough for the goat. But is it radical hospitality? Absolutely it is.
We Make Room
This month, we've been asking and attempting to answer the question: How does a weary world rejoice? From that hymn "O Holy Night" — "a weary world rejoices." It admits our weariness, and yet there's something joyful in the air. We've talked about singing songs of hope together. We've talked about finding joy in community. We talked about naming our weariness — not ignoring it, not pushing it, not shoving it down. And so today's final Advent sermon on "How does a weary world rejoice?" is this: we make room.
We make room for our weariness and for our rejoicing. We make room for our grief and for our gladness. We make room in the large guest rooms provided to Jesus at the end of his life, surrounded by family and friends — even one friend who will deny, one friend who will betray, and another friend who knows death is near. We make room for the stranger, for a son and a mom whose car is broken down. We make room for the people we knew were coming, and yet when lots of people come, we shove things aside to make sure they have a place to stay. We make room for the grief of what we thought Christmas would be like and what it actually is — for the Christmases we remember with such fondness and the Christmases we have now.
We make room by shunning frantic busyness. We make room by betraying our culture's gluttony of being too full for anyone else, or for any other emotion but exhaustion. Sometimes making room means we cast everything overboard except what is essential. Sometimes making room means standing room only, awkwardly leaning against the wall with a plate and a cup full of wine because every table is full. Sometimes making room means we need to cast every belief aside except the one that really matters: yes, Jesus loves me. Sometimes making room means embracing a friend who hurts you and wants to make amends. Sometimes making room means saying farewell to those who want to keep hurting you.
Making room takes wisdom and conversation. It takes an attempt and a failure, messiness and serendipitous, accidental beauty. Making room means giving up perfection. It means it's better to have a Messiah born into a manger than out in the street. When we don't make room, we risk too much. We risk cauterizing those still-fresh parts of ourselves that are able to experience joy. When we don't make room, we risk leaving something out in the cold that belongs in our lives. By making room, we risk — and every once in a while, when we risk, it's worth it.
How do we find rejoicing in a weary world? Finding weariness is easy. How do we find rejoicing in a weary world? We do it together. We do it singing songs of hope from ages past. And we do it by making room.
"As on a Day of Festival" by Jan Richardson
I want to conclude with a poem by Jan Richardson called "As on a Day of Festival." She writes:
Call it the waters of salvation, or the garlands of gladness. Call it the grave-clothes falling away, or call it the loosing of the chains. Call it what binds us together: fierce but fragile but fierce. Call it: he will rejoice over you with gladness. Call it: he will renew you in his love. Call it: he will exult over you with loud singing, as on a day of festival. Call it the thin, thin place where the veil gives way. Or call it this: the path we make when we go deep and deeper still into the dark, and look behind to see the way has been lit by our rejoicing.
This is a transcript of the sermon as preached, lightly edited for readability.
