Christmas comes with all the feels.
When I was eight, I opened all my presents, went upstairs, and crashed on the couch. My mom concerned that I was pouting for not receiving an unnamed gift that morning provided a rousing verbal reminder of the true meaning of the season. In response, I threw up.
We all handle the holidays differently.
Some of us hide out.
Some of us party.
And some of us throw up.
I would say there is not a wrong way to handle the holidays because it is typically the holidays that handle us. Even before a relentless global pandemic and the sharp edge of political divisiveness, the holidays were challenging.
The holidays force us to confront our interconnectedness to our family systems, our economic systems, our religious and political systems. Even if we distance or disengage from one or more of these systems, the holidays still challenge us to make the decision and perform the actions necessary to detach.
Each year the world around us shifts and changes, falls apart and comes together, in ways that require us to decide how we will handle the holidays. How will we handle the holidays in the absence of the presence of the person who once held the festivities together? How will we handle the holidays when we can’t bear to answer the questions about when we will have kids or when we will get married or get a job or graduate or we do whatever it is we know we are expected to do to be normal. Whatever we have been taught we need to do to belong.
Christmas comes with all the feels a family system can offer. And if it makes you feel better, all evidence suggests that Jesus’ parents had a hard time with their family at Christmas too.
The Bible never mentions the words stable or innkeeper in the Gospel account of Jesus’ birth. The Bible says there was no room for them in a place defined by a Greek word that refers to a “guest chamber,” not a public inn for strangers. This means Mary and Joseph were not in a barn because there was no vacancy at a hotel. Mary and Joseph were staying with relatives in Bethlehem but there was no place for them in the guest room.
So, yes, Jesus was born in the lower room of the house where animals were brought in for the night; a place where a manger, or feeding trough, would have been nearby for Mary to use as a crib. But the reason Jesus was born in this place was because the family didn’t make room.
From the outside, it’s hard to believe that someone wouldn’t have volunteered to trade spaces or to make room for a woman who was about to give birth. If not for the right reasons at least for the optics of the situation. But this is family. And making room for Mary and Joseph doesn’t only require physical rearranging but an emotional reckoning.
This was not their plan for Mary and Joseph. This marriage, arranged by their fathers long before the announcement of miraculous birth, had specific expectations. Mary would have been living with her family during her betrothal, a one-year period where she was considered married in every way except cohabitation and consummation, while Joseph was busy preparing a place for her in his father’s house after which he would arrive and retrieve Mary as his bride.
This is the story for which the family had room. The story that each generation had been told was their story if they wanted to have a place to belong.
There are times we can pass for perfection in the architect of the systems that surround us and there are times when it’s obvious we are at risk of having to find a new place to belong. Arriving to your relatives about to give birth would make it impossible to pass for perfect. And while Joseph could have passed himself, it was Joseph who stood by his best friend’s side. Joseph claims Mary’s story as his story and chooses to go where Mary is sent because there was no room for her story in the place they both should have known as their home.
In this life, some of us are Mary and some of us are Joseph. Some of us are sent to the mangers and some of us choose the manger for reasons that are always our own. But the message of the birth of Christ is that eviction empowers risk-taking adventures in a journey to accept ourselves and our situations out in the open is where every one of us belongs.
Christ is born in celebration for all those who find the predetermined stories of who we are to become intolerable and inadequate compared to the reality of the beloved children we have always been. You were created to stand out and it is the story of these differences that will send you to the places where others will stand for you and with you and around in the We must pull and push and encourage one another never to settle for cramped rooms and tight spaces where there is no room for us to be who we are and fit in. You deserve to be in a house that rearranges its walls so everyone can see the fullness of who God created you to be.
And this is the message of Christmas.
Not a remembrance of a historical event but a celebration of belonging through the announcement that even the divine manifest in human form caused the walls to shake and the doors to close in the places that should have housed those who loved him most.
The presence of the divine in the manger speaks with final authority. It is not you who are broken but the house that needs desperate repair. This is the living message manifest in the beating of our hearts and the flow of our blood. That even when it feels as though the holidays are handling us, it is the love of Christ and the openness of the manger that holds us and carries us through a season that swells with the paradox birthed in grief and hope, in rejection and welcome, in the darkness and in the light.
The Land’s Christmas Message
