Here is my offering for Christmas Eve midnight Holy Communion. Thanks for
the idea to those who drew my attention to the nature of the inn.

Nigel

From: Rev Nigel Coke-Woods <Nigel@COKERY.ABELGRATIS.COM

Christmas Eve Sermon

My grandfather was an innkeeper. He was landlord of the Banks Arms in Corfe
Castle, and later when I was born the Sandford Hotel near Wareham in Dorset.
Some of my earliest memories are spending Christmases there in what was
really a large pub with half a dozen large rooms upstairs which could
accommodate a few guests. As a four year old boy I remember a gigantic
fridge in the kitchen which always had wonderful ham inside it. I remember
when the pub was closed being able briefly to go behind the bar, where
amongst the bottles of Strong¹s brown and pale ale was a little corner of
brightly coloured cherry and lime aid. If we were good my sister and I got a
bottle of pop and a packet of crisps.

Is that the inn we imagine which had no room for Mary and Joseph on that
first Christmas night in Bethlehem? Was the innkeeper a round face and even
rounder bellied host just like my grandfather? Were there bottles of beer
and packets of crisps? Of course being a Jewish inn there was no ham in the
fridge, but there will be other good things. Are pickled eggs kosher? Is
this what we imagine? If so you are thinking of what the New Testament
writers call a pandoceion.

A vicar has recently been in trouble, as you might have gathered from the
news, for letting it slip in a school assembly that there is no Santa Claus.
I don¹t think telling you this tonight will land me in the News of the
World, but I have my own revelation for you tonight. Jesus was not born in
the stable of the Bethlehem Arms. I know that since the year dot we have had
our nativity plays with an innkeeper and his wife playing that leading role,
but if you listen to what St. Luke tells us these characters simply are not
in the story. In fact, although our English Bibles tell us there was no room
at the inn this is not exactly what St. Luke wrote.

What St. Luke wrote literally is this, "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 guest room". This is not a pandoceion, it is a
kataluma, a guest room in an ordinary house. Most people had one in first
century Palestine, just as many of us have a room in which we can put our
guests.

Now I have either shocked you rigid, or more likely you are falling fast
asleep at this late hour, but I have my reasons for telling you this, so
please wake up now! St. Luke tells us that the Good Samaritan took the
wounded man to the inn, just like my grandfather ran, but he tells us that
Jesus was born in a stable because there was no guest room in anyone¹s house
available. It isn¹t that there wasn¹t any room at the Bethlehem Hilcrest
Hotel, or the Everglades, rather no-one in their ordinary homes had room for
Jesus to be born. No-one in Beaconsfield Road, or Farnworth Street, or Upton
Lane would take Mary and Joseph in. Even more shocking is the fact that they
had gone to Bethlehem to be registered in Joseph¹s home town. The people who
have no room for them are Joseph¹s own family, his cousins, uncles and
aunts. There is no spirit of Christmas here, no family feeling at all.

John¹s Gospel tells us that in Jesus God came to his own people, but they
would not receive him. Luke tells us exactly how deep that rejection of
Jesus went, even at his birth, just as thirty years later Luke tells us that
Jesus was thrown out of the Synagogue at Nazareth, his own home town, right
at the start of his ministry. He truly was despised and rejected by men.

Those who we would most expect to welcome the birth of Jesus, his own
family, turned him away before he was even born. So Jesus receives into his
life a new family in the shape of ragged, dirty shepherds. These shepherds
were the gypsies of their day, mistrusted outcasts living on the fringe of
society. The angel appears to them and brings them to the manger, and here
those who had no family become the part of the holy family of Jesus. And
later Jesus himself would call the tax gathers, the prostitutes, the
swindlers, the lepers and the social rejects to follow him and be his
brothers and sisters.

Jesus doesn¹t insist that they change or clean themselves up before they can
become his family. He welcomes them in with open arms just as they are, his
love unconditional, and because of his love they are changed, cleansed,
reborn, his brothers and sisters, children of God the Father.

St. Luke mentions a guest room, a kataluma, just once more. It is the upper
room in Jerusalem where Jesus gathered with his friends, his assorted family
of repentant sinners and rough fishermen. In a guest room very similar to
those guest rooms years before where there was no room for him to be born,
Jesus shares the new birth to eternal life with those he welcomes in for
whom there was no place else to go. He took the bread, and having giving
thanks he broke it and gave it to his disciples saying "take, eat, this is
my body given for you". After supper he took the cup and giving thanks he
shared it with them all saying "this is my blood, poured out for you and for
many for the forgiveness of sins. Do this as often as you drink it in
remembrance of me".

Tonight, on this Christmas Eve two thousand years later, we gather in our
own upper room and share the same bread and wine. Tonight there will be no
cold and dirty stable, only the best guest room we have to offer, our
hearts. Tonight, and every day and night we are open to Jesus we make our
lives a Bethlehem, and as we allow Christ to become incarnate, the Word made
flesh in us, so as Christ is born once more in us, so we too are reborn to
eternal life.

The bread and the wine, the manger and the angels are all part of a piece
here tonight. We are God¹s children, the family of Jesus, gathered together
into one place to share together his welcome and his saving body and blood.
Here there is room for everyone. And here we receive our call to open our
hearts and our minds to the world outside, where others need a family, the
poor, the hungry, the rejected and the hurting. We go with the words of
Jesus in our ears and in our intentions, "for as much as you did it for the
least of these my brothers and sisters, you did it to me." We go with the
song of the Angels in our hearts to make it real in our world, "glory to God
in the highest, and peace, goodwill towards all people". Amen.