The Rev. Austin K. Rios
25th December 2023: Christmas Day
Every Christmas, despite the joy I feel as the music and memories of the season accumulate, my heart breaks to hear that there was no room for the Son of Man in the inn.
If there’s no room for even God’s own Son, what chance do any of us normal people have for finding a place in this world?
And yet, part of the wonder of the story of salvation is that God chooses what the world rejects and transforms it into a channel of blessing.
A mysteriously pregnant girl becomes the mother of the new creation.
Shepherds, fisherman, and former persecutors become proclaimers of good news.
The hopeless and heartbroken find connection and community in the crucified one.
While there are so many ways to celebrate Christmas and receive the joy and wonder of it once again, today I want to encourage us to focus on just one.
Making room.
It’s one of the lines from the hymn Joy to the World—“Let every heart prepare him room”—and I believe making room for the gift of Christ in our lives is one of the most important things we can do.
What does it mean to make room for this gift?
It starts with allowing the love of God to overshadow you and to implant within you a seed of new life.
For many, this means letting go of the need to control our lives and surrendering to the path that God will reveal to us.
It means sharing community life with those outside our ethnic and language group and trusting that participating in the multi-lingual and multi-cultural Body of Christ will lead us to more abundant life than we might be able to acquire on our own.
And once the seed of faith begins to stir within us, we begin to realize that for it to keep growing, it has to move beyond the safe quarters of our own hearts and lives and into the greater world.
Making room means sharing the good news that has changed our lives, and it means doing so primarily by the way we treat others—especially those who have been broken and rejected.
Here at St. Paul’s, we make room for refugees through the work and ministry of the Joel Nafuma Refugee Center, and our members know that making room for those who speak differently, understand God and the church differently, and who may even initially set themselves up as our enemies is an essential part of our spiritual growth.
The more room we make for the Christ in our hearts and souls, the more room we begin to make for others both within the church and beyond it.
And doesn’t the world need this gift now more than ever?
When division and disagreements lead us to discount the humanity of the other and entrench us into separate camps of interest—let us make room to hear one another anew.
When wars seem preferable to peace and innocent people are caught in the crossfire—let us make room for reconciliation.
When our planet groans under the pressures we place on it as one key thread in the greater fabric of creation—let us make room for the species we are called to steward and make room for new ways of being that will preserve the earth for future generations.
Whether you are seasoned at making room for the holy to be incarnate in you, or whether you are just today imagining what your life might be like if you tried—I encourage you to let the joy and wonder of this day seep into the parched places of your soul.
Drink deep of the season, take lots of deep breaths, pay attention to your motivations for doing the things you do, and above all let the same love of God that came into the world in Bethlehem come into the world through you.
Let Christ grow in you, let Christ flow from you, and make room to receive Christ freely from others.
When you do, God will fill your life with grace, and open your eyes to the wonders under the surface of each day—the blessed gifts that are always available to us when we pause long enough to witness them.
And in making room for God and for others, YOU will find welcome in the halls of heaven on earth, community among the ragtag, but beloved, family of God, and continually have opportunities to open the gift of the peace that passes all understanding.