Foundry United
Rev.
“Room In the Inn?”
Sunday, November 27,
2011
Rev.
Because there was no place for him
Luke 2:1-8
Advent begins today. As of today we have four weeks to prepare for Christmas.
This Advent I am focusing on one phrase from the birth-of-Christ story in Luke. It is the phrase "there was no room for them in the inn."
Luke 2:7 says "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 room for them in the inn."
In my personal spiritual practice, I am meditating on this phrase everyday during Advent and every time I get up to talk during Advent I will talk about this phrase. I will talk about this phrase when I teach, in staff meetings, anytime I talk.
I will talk about this phrase until I run out of things to say about it and then I will try to go even deeper still until I discover new truths in this phrase – "There was no room for them in the inn."
Let's start with some translation issues. I talked about this last year. The translation: "There was no room for them in the inn," is a loose translation.
The Greek word translated here as them is a Greek word that really means the last person referenced. So a literal translation would be: “She gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for the same in the inn” … the same referring back to the last person referenced which, in this case, was clearly him, the firstborn son wrapped in bands of cloth. So a strict translation would be “there was no place for him in the inn.”
Mary and Joseph were not the problem. The problem was the son. The problem was
Jesus. There was no room for him.
Then, too, the translation "room" is not the best translation. The Greek word is "topos," the source of our word topography. "Topos" is best translated "place" as the New Revised Version translates it.
So the better translation is: "There was no place for him in the inn."
There was no place for him.
This is important because Luke is not writing biography but theology.
From the very beginning Luke wants to make a theological statement about Jesus. There was no place for him.
There was no place for him in the inn; there was no place for him in Bethlehem; there was no placed for him in Israel; there as no place for him in this world; there was no place for him in our homes; there was no place for him in our lives.
Later in his gospel, Luke will quote Jesus as saying "Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head." (Luke 9:58)
There was no place for him.
The word "place" implies more than the word "room" does.
Place, like the Greek word "topos," is rich in connotations.
Think of the expressions we use the word "place" in.
We talk about people knowing or not knowing their place. We talk about a woman's place. I saw a new bumper sticker on the internet that says "A woman's place is in the house…the Senate and the oval office."
Place is a word with lots of connotations.
We talk about a sense of place. Architects say that buildings should be designed with a sense of place. Not every building belongs everywhere. A building that fits in Washington, DC, may not necessarily fit in Chicago or San Francisco.
Some of us have a sense that we might fit in one place better than others. We have a sense of place. I had a friend who believed that something within him shriveled up here in Washington and that he was really only fully himself in Colorado. His wife felt she was really only fully herself in Washington. They had a problem.
Some of us believe we belong to a certain place.
Social psychologists talk a lot about place. Robert Putman, the author of the book Bowling Alone, talks about first, second and third places. He says we need not only a first place and a second place in our lives, but also a third place.
Our first place is where we live and the people we live with. Our second place is where we work and the people we work with. Our third place, Putman says, is where we find a different kind of community from home and work. Our third place might be a bowling alley, a church, a coffee shop or a bar like "Cheers." Somewhere where everybody knows your name and they are always glad you came.
Place implies a sense of belonging…a sense of fitting in…a sense of being at home.
"There was no place for him," Luke says.
One of Foundry Church's goals is to end homelessness in Washington, DC.…to help lead a movement to create the political will to end homelessness by 2015 by creating 2,500 units of permanent supportive housing in Washington, DC.
In three week, Sunday, Dec. 18, Bishop John Schol and Rosanne Haggerty will be here at
Foundry to celebrate a new partnership to develop permanent supportive housing.
Washington, DC, houses more than 6,000 people a night in emergency shelters according to the latest HUD report. More than 6,000 people live in emergency shelters. More than 2,000 are chronically homeless which means they have lived in shelters or on the street for more than a year.
Jana, our Director of Social Justice, tells me that shelter beds are already tight and winter has hardly begun. One night this week she was on the phone trying to find a shelter bed for a woman who was seven months pregnant. She called everyone she knew, and Jana knows everyone. She could not find a bed. There was no place for a seven-month pregnant woman in Washington, DC. Not even a shelter bed for one night.
“There was no place for her,” Jana said.
"There was no place for him," Luke says.
"Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has no place…" Jesus says about himself.
It is possible to have a house or an apartment to live in and still not have a place. It is possible to have a physical place to be and to still be spiritually without a place.
Some people have been spiritually forced to live in closets…gay people, but not just gay people. Some women have been forced to live in closets, some intelligent people who are too smart for their own good, some Christians in some places, some Muslims, some people who are unconventionally religious, some atheists, some immigrants, some differently-abled people, some people who struggle with mental health, some political radicals…lots of people have been forced to live in closets and still do. They are denied their place in the world.
Yesterday we had a memorial service here in our chapel for Mayard (Bob) Mobley who came from North Carolina to Washington DC in 1947 and lived a good rich life here. Washington was his place.
His family selected John chapter 14 for one of the readings, a chapter we read often at funerals and memorial services.
I was thinking about the verse from Luke that says "There was no place for him…" when I heard John 14 read yesterday. I noticed something I had never noticed quite the same way before.
John 14 says: "Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?" (John 14:1-2)
I go to prepare a place for you. Same word in Greek: "topos."
There was no topos for him…I go to prepare a topos for you.
We've always thought John 14 was about heaven and I have no trouble with that. I believe in heaven.
But I also think that John 14 might be about Jesus' ministry here on earth. After all he taught us to pray "Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven."
Jesus was going to the cross to prepare a place for us…for all of us for whom there is no place…those whose only place is a cot in a shelter; those whose only place is a closet.
The work of Jesus' followers is to create place for everyone.
It has occurred to me lately that Foundry's two big holy goals of ending homelessness in Washington DC and changing the United Methodist Book of Discipline to end discrimination against gay and lesbian people in the United Methodist Church might be sort of similar. They are both ways of making a place for people.
When you think about it, even something like Hospitality 5-10-2 is about making a place for people.
In the early 1950 the writer Arthur Laurents came to Leonard Bernstein with the idea of a musical based on the story of Romeo and Juliet set in contemporary New York City. The play was called West Side story. It became perhaps the most popular musical ever produced in the modern era.
It is the story of two people who are part of rival New York gangs who fall in love: Tony and Maria. I think the most poignant song in the musical is a song entitled “Somewhere” that Tony and Maria sing to each other. Somewhere there is a place for us.
The song so touched a longing within the human heart that it has been recorded hundreds of times by everybody from Barbara Streisand and the Supremes to Tom Waits and Devo and Celtic Woman and Jennifer Hudson.
Somewhere there is a place for us.
Because Jesus knows what it is like for there to be no place for him, he goes ahead of us to prepare a place for us…he goes to the cross to prepare a place for us.
This is the phrase I am going to spend some time every day meditating on this Advent, and I invite you to join me – "There was no place for him in the inn."
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