No Room

The Rev. Dr. Whitworth Ferguson III

Manassas Presbyterian Church

Manassas, Virginia

December 26, 2010

No Room

Matthew 2:13-23

It is Luke who gives us the Christmas story we love:

Gabriel visiting Mary to tell her she will give birth to Jesus;

Mary and Joseph’s journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem;

No room at the inn;

The newborn baby wrapped in swaddling clothes,

lying in a manger;

Shepherds abiding in the fields;

The heavenly host singing,

“Glory to God in highest heaven                                   

and on earth peace and goodwill to all.”

Matthew gives us none of that;

Nothing lyrical or poetic;

nothing that Linus could recite to Charlie Brown.

As we heard last week

Matthew gives us the whole birth story in eight verses.

Matthew’s and Luke’s stories are so different.

About the only thing they agree on is that

Jesus was born in Bethlehem,

but even there the circumstances differ:

Luke tells us that Joseph and Mary

traveled there to register for the tax census,

while Matthew says nothing of any journey,

suggesting instead that they lived there.

We draw that conclusion from reading that when

the Wise Men saw that the star they’d been following

had stopped, it stopped over a “house,”

and when they entered the house

they found Jesus and his mother.

No stable, no manger,

no inn,

not even a cave as some apocryphal stories suggest.

We talked last week about an even more noticeable difference:

while Luke focuses on Mary,

Matthew all but sets Mary aside to shine his light on Joseph.

An angel of the Lord,

unnamed in Matthew’s story,

speaks to Joseph three different times,

always in a dream as Joseph slept.

The first time the angel spoke to Joseph

it was to reassure him about Mary,

to tell him that Mary’s child had been conceived by the Holy Spirit,

and that he should marry her with no worries.

Most important, the angel told Joseph to name the child Jesus.

This morning’s text tells of the other two times

the angel spoke to Joseph:

The first message is chilling for us to hear even now:

“Get up, take the child and his mother and flee to Egypt

and remain there until I tell you;

for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.”

King Herod was a psychopath;

his corrupt reign left bloodstains everywhere.

He was so frightened by the mere prospect

of someone challenging his power and authority,

that his reaction was the wholesale slaughter of anyone

who fit the profile given him by the Wise Men:

any infant boy born in Bethlehem within the past two years.

The wailing and lamentation of twenty mothers, thirty,

perhaps even more,

could be heard throughout Bethlehem

as they watched their infant sons ruthlessly,

sadistically murdered,

all so Herod could sleep at night.

But Joseph, having been warned in his dream,

bundled up Mary and the baby,

packed up whatever possessions they could take,

and fled to Egypt,

set out on a journey of more than two hundred miles

along a dusty, rocky road,

with bandits and thieves lurking around every corner.

Matthew tells us nothing about where they lived,

or for how long they remained in Egypt.

Our best guess is about two years,

when the angel of the Lord

visited Joseph in a dream for a third time,

telling him that it was safe to return to Israel.

And once again Joseph faithfully and obediently

packed up Mary and the young boy

and took them on another long, difficult,

and dangerous journey

across the Sinai, back to Israel.

But this journey turned out to be longer,

and even more difficult,

for we learn that Joseph feared returning to Bethlehem,

and so, guided by the Spirit,

or possibly one last angelic visitation,

he and his little family

trekked an additional 75 miles north to Nazareth,

where they settled

and where Jesus grew from boy to man.

Eleven verses in Matthew’s gospel,

some three hundred words,

and we are left overwhelmed by the sheer drama

that Matthew packs into these paragraphs.

Is it any wonder we prefer Luke’s version of the story?

Matthew gives us no inn, no stable, 
no manger, no shepherds,

but more than anything else 
Matthew gives us “no room.”

Matthew gives us a Judea, gives us Israel
with no room at all for the Messiah,

for the Son of God,

for Immanuel, God with Us.

No sooner was Jesus born than his life was danger,

and he and his parents were forced to flee their country.

No sooner was Jesus born than he became a refugee,

forced to live in a foreign land.

In Matthew’s gospel Jesus begins his life

as an illegal immigrant

because there was no room for him in the hearts and minds

of the children of Israel.

As the first chapter of John’s gospel tells us,

“He was in the world,…

yet the world did not know him.

He came to what was his own,

and his own people did not accept him.”

The bitter irony is that in Matthew’s story,

the only ones who had room for Jesus were three foreigners,

three men from far distant lands,

who made their own long and difficult journey

to kneel in Jesus’ presence.

“No room” is the thread that ran through Jesus’ life,

a thread that connects us today

with the people who lived in Jesus’ day;

a thread that connects us even farther back

with our ancestors in faith,

all the way back to David, to Moses.

God squeezed out, time and time again,

No room in minds,

in lives,

in hearts.

Words spoken by God’s children claiming room,

but actions speaking so much louder

demonstrating time and time again,

how little room for God there was, there is,

how often there is no room.

We are called to love the Lord God with all our hearts;

We are called to welcome the Messiah with all our hearts,

to follow the Messiah with hearts and minds.

We are called to make room in our hearts:

room for grace, for love, for mercy, for peace,

all the fruits of the spirit given us by God.

And yet what room we have

we are quick to fill with

judgment, rancor, cruelty, warfare,

jealousy, envy,

and as this past year has made so clear, greed.

Read through the gospels and we find

that the ones most willing to make room for Jesus

are those for whom society makes no room:

the poor, the outcasts, the destitute, the sick,

the different.

In Matthew’s gospel it is a leper, a paralytic,

the blind, a Samaritan.

                                   

Matthew’s gospel leaps from Jesus’ infancy

to the beginning of his ministry,

starting with the Sermon on the Mount,

that magnificent Sermon we often reduce

to a handful of Beatitudes,

but which goes on for three full chapters,

well over two thousand words.

Jesus tells us how to make room for God:

• “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you”
• “Do not judge”
• “You cannot serve God and wealth”
• “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you”
• “Be reconciled to your brother or sister”
• “Blessed are the humble”
• “Blessed are those who work for peace”
• “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.”

Who in Jesus’ day made room for Jesus’ words?

When he returned to Nazareth, his hometown,

the people scoffed and mocked,

“isn’t this the carpenter’s son?...

Where did this man get this [teaching]?”

(Matthew 13:54ff)

The people “took offense”

that he dared to teach them of God’s grace,

God’s love, God’s mercy.

They made no room for Jesus, for his teaching;

they made no room in their hearts and minds

for the Word of God.

We all struggle to give Jesus room,

give him room in our minds,

give him room in our hearts.

Our busy lives crowd him out,

crowd out grace,

crowd out forgiveness,

crowd out mercy,

crowd out a hunger for righteousness and justice.

On Friday evening our Choir performed a magnificent anthem

entitled “The Dream Isaiah Saw”.

The lyrics came from Isaiah’s vision of the advent world

that we’ll behold when Christ comes again

and God’s Kingdom is established,

a world in which the “wolf shall live with the lamb,

the leopard shall lie down with the kid…”

and all the earth will live in peace and goodwill

because all the world will be

“full… full of the knowledge of the Lord”

full of the knowledge of the Lord

because every heart will have made room for God;

every mind will have made room.

The choir sang:
“Little child whose bed is straw,
take new lodgings in my heart.

Bring the dream Isaiah saw…
Nature reordered to match God's intent,
nations obeying the call to repent,
all of creation completely restored,
filled with the knowledge and love of the Lord.”

Filled – everyone of us filled,

filled with knowledge of the Lord,

our hearts and minds so completely filled

that we’ll have no room left for anger, enmity,

envy, greed,

judgment, violence, warfare

and on and on,

all those things that will simply disappear

when Christ comes again.

The Trappist monk Thomas Merton wrote,

“We live in a time of no room…

the time when everyone is obsessed with lack of time,

lack of space,

with saving time, with conquering space…

There is no room for nature,

no room for quiet,

no room for thought,

no room for awareness…

[There is] no room for God.”

As we turn from Christmas to the New Year,

we can all make more room for God,

make more room for Christ,

more room for grace,

more room for peace,

more room for kindness,

more room for justice,

more room for hope.

As we prepare to turn the calendar from 2010 to 2011,

go into the New Year singing:

“Little child whose bed is straw,
take new lodgings in my heart,

for I will give you room,

more room, even more room,

until you fill my heart, 
my mind, 
my life.”

AMEN