I don’t know about you, but for me, decorating for Christmas always requires a fundamental reassessment of how my home is furnished. It’s not like there is open space year-round that is big enough to plant a literal tree in it for a month.
No, I have to move a side table that sits in a corner for the 
other eleven months from the living room to the dining room, where I do have a corner that is open. Of course, before I can do that, I have to take the photos and lamp that are on that table off and put them to the side so they don’t slide off and break while I’m moving it. Then, once the table is in its new temporary location, the lamp and the photos go back on the table, which is a little silly, since there’s no power outlet near this new location, so the lamp just sits there forlornly with its plug dangling under the table like some kind of appendix until it can finally return home in January.
Once all that is done, then the tree stand can come down from the attic and go in the middle of the new space created in the living room with the table out of the way. And only then can the tree come in and be set up in the corner of the living room. All of this gets repeated on a smaller scale in other parts of the house, too, until the holidays pass and the whole process gets reversed for all the special decorations to be removed and the old things restored to their normal place as everything reverts back to “normal” at the end of the Christmas season.
I think this kind of thing is why the Christmas holiday season is often so stressful for people, because pretty much everything about it is figuring out how to make room for the celebration in the midst of already busy lives. It’s not like work or school or family responsibilities or healthcare challenges or running a household take the month of December off. At best, some of them decelerate right before the holidays, but often some of them, especially family responsibilities or housekeeping or school, actually increase as the holiday itself draws near. And so we find ourselves in a mad scramble to keep up with our normal obligations while simultaneously adding on layer after layer of special activities like decorations, shopping, wrapping, cooking, attending parties, and so on, until we start to hope for a holiday from the holiday once everything is done.
The funny thing is, the original Christmas, the birth of Jesus, was not unlike all of this for Mary and Joseph. Making room for the coming of the Christ child was a challenge from the very beginning. To be fair, making room for a baby is always, always a challenge; there are few things that are more disruptive than that. Unless you live in an extremely large house, you’re usually converting a room from some other use into a baby’s room, whether that’s a guest room, an office, a breakfast nook, you name it.
Then there’s all the things you have to make room for to take care of that baby, plus the things that people give you that you don’t really need. Mary and Joseph got spared that kind of frenzy, of course, but that doesn’t mean it was any easier. In fact, figuring out how to make room for a baby when you’re living in a modest carpenter’s home of just a few rooms in a first century Middle Eastern village would be at least as disruptive, just for different reasons. And that’s before you take into account that the two of you aren’t even married yet while you’re expecting a baby, which would have been a massive scandal in that society.
And all THAT is before receiving the notice that the Roman Emperor wants to improve the efficiency of his taxation system and so YOU have to go on a three to four day trip to another village halfway across the country while one of you is nine months pregnant. So they have to do all the normal parts of regular life, all the “normal” parts of getting ready to have a baby at any moment, and now take the whole show on the road, which almost inevitably means that the baby is going to come while you’re traveling. How are they going to find room to do all of that?
Well, they don’t. Sure enough, while they’re staying in Bethlehem, the time for Mary to deliver her baby comes. And the thing about babies is, one way or another, you have to make room for them. You can’t negotiate with a baby that is coming: “you know, this isn’t a great time for us, what with the road trip and the limited accommodations and everything. Do you think you could come back in, say, a month or two?” Nope, once that baby is on its way, everything else has to make room for it. Which is what they do, quite literally: “[Mary] 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 inn.”
Here’s the thing, though. We’ve almost certainly been translating that verse wrong for centuries. There is actually no mention of an “inn” in this verse in the original Greek; the word there is translated as “guest room” elsewhere. And there’s an entirely different word that means “inn,” that is used elsewhere in Luke’s gospel, but not here. The translation of an “inn” came out of medieval and Renaissance European sensibilities, but the Arabic and Syrian translations of Luke’s gospel have, for more than 1900 years, called it a guest room instead of an inn.
It also makes far, far more sense in the story itself for it to be a guest room. Why? Because Middle Eastern codes of hospitality and family responsibility in the first century would have never allowed Joseph and Mary to stay at an inn instead of with relatives, and Joseph most certainly would have had relatives in his ancestral village. And for his relatives not to have offered him hospitality would have been an act of such social insult and shame that we it’s hard to even imagine an analogy in contemporary U.S. culture. Now, the rest of the story starts to make more sense. If Joseph and Mary are staying with relatives when it came time for Mary to deliver, she would normally have done so in the guest room.
Except she can’t, because Luke tells us it’s not available, presumably because other relatives are staying there for the census, too. That would be what a first century Middle Eastern reader of this story would have assumed, anyway. So what do they do? They make room for Jesus. They go down to the ground floor of the house, which would typically have had a space for domestic animals to sleep in overnight: only nobles and kings would have had a separate building for them. For everyone else, the family cow or goats or whatever would be brought into the house at sundown and allowed outside again at sunrise. That’s why there’s a manger there inside the house; a typical Judean home would have had one made out of stone on the ground floor to feed the animals once they’re inside.
So the point that Luke is stressing in telling this story is not that the Holy Family was displaced to a stable because there was a “no vacancy” sign at the inn. The point is about Jesus lying in the manger; not an inn, not a stable, but the manger. And he’s pretty focused on it. After Mary lays Jesus in the manger, the angels appear to the shepherds with their amazing news that the Messiah has been born. “This will be a sign for you,” they continue; “you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.” And, sure enough, when they hurry into town they find Mary and Joseph, “and the child lying in a manger,” Luke says.
Why does that matter? Well, first, it highlights our struggle to make room for Jesus, to make room for God to come into our lives and be active in them in the midst of so many other competing forces that try to crowd him out. As one preacher colleague has put it, “it might have been the first time that people had trouble making room for Jesus, but it wouldn’t be the last.” But even that is not the most important part, I think; the real point is what we are making room for. And it is not just for a decoration that we pull out once a year and then store away again. A manger is a place for feeding, where life is sustained by eating on a daily basis.
This manger is in Bethlehem, and “Bethlehem” means “House of Bread,” as you might know. So Jesus is born in the House of Bread, in a feeding place in the house. This is the child who will grow up to eat with sinners and outcasts, who will feed 5000 people simply because they are hungry, who on his last night with his disciples tells them to remember him not through words but in the breaking of bread that is shared together. From the first moments of his life, when room is made for him, Jesus is associated with feeding, because his whole life and ministry can be summed up in feeding the hungry, literally and figuratively; feeding us to give us life, real life; feeding us so that we, in turn, can help ensure that everyone is full and satisfied. This is what God was making room for in the birth of Jesus.
So, whether you find yourself on this Christmas Eve ready to serve, or aching with hunger, come to the manger and see what has taken place, which God has made known to us. For here at the manger, there is always enough room.