Christmas is a time when we remember our childhood. We nostalgically return to our childhood homes in memory at this season. In what home do you have your fondest memories of Christmas? Some of us stayed in the same home all our childhood. Others moved from home to home and have differing memories of them at Christmas time. I spent my entire childhood in one place, and it wasn’t a house, it was a hotel. The hotel was owned by my parents. My mother took it over from her parents, my grandparents, when she was only 22 years old. My great grandparents owned a hotel. My uncles and aunts owned hotels. Hotels were a very large part of my life. That is why I am interested that Joseph and Mary went to a hotel in Bethlehem that first Christmas. They could not stay in the main building because there was no room for them, so they had to spend the night in the stable (or garage) at the back of the hotel. It was there that Jesus was born.

A hotel is where people stay who are away from home. It accommodates travelers. It is a public house rather than a private home. Its business is to provide hospitality: beds for sleeping in, bathrooms to refresh ourselves, restaurants to eat in, bars to drink in. Jesus was born away from home. His parents were from Galilee. He came from heaven. He was born in a public place where there was little privacy. He became a public person where everything he said and did was recorded and remembered. The traveler from heaven entered our world through being born in a public place, where the means of transportation were kept.

The hotel I spent my childhood Christmases in would not have qualified for a modern resort. It was a small family-style hotel that served a county seat of 3,000 people. It was not luxurious. My grandfather took it over in 1922 and my parents in 1935. They added onto it, but it was still small compared to modern hotel chains. Eventually they retired and sold it to a national chain. When it was renovated the electrical system shorted and it burnt down.The inn in Bethlehem likewise was a small affair. It was probably a series of thatched rooms built around a central courtyard. It was to a small, provincial hotel that Joseph and Mary came. Despite its size it was a busy place. It was so much in demand that there were no rooms left for Joseph and Mary. The innkeeper must have been harassed by the demands of his guests, but he still had time to find them a place in his stable. It was Mary’s time – she was due to give birth. She had to find a place to have her baby. Jesus was born at a busy time in the midst of a place of business. Jesus came into our world of work and trade, into a world in which people were coming and going, on the move. He came to where people were earning a living, a commercial world, not an oasis of quiet, separated from the marketplace.

When the heavenly traveler came to be with us – he chose to come, not in a moment of leisure, but in the midst of our busy lives. He came to find us where we work, to rescue us, to bring us God’s love, joy and peace, where we make and spend money, where we run up bills, where there is no free lunch, where we have to eventually pay for what we order. A hotel is a business. Every meal and bed has to be paid for. Most of life is spent working because we enjoy it, and because we need to earn a living. God came in Jesus into the midst of real life because we need his ‘life in all its fullness’ Monday through Friday, and not just on Sunday morning.

Living in a hotel you worked seven days a week, and were on call 24 hours every day. God is on duty all the time. He is never off duty. Jesus came to a hotel to remind us that the way, the truth, and the life are not optional extras for when we have time; they are not just for one day in the week, or one day in the year; they are part of everyday, of a personal relationship that is always present. By coming where, and how he did, Jesus made the point that his invading presence is basic to meaning in life, not a trimming or garnish or something extra or optional.

Living in a hotel exposes you to all kinds of people: the moral and the immoral, the known and the unknown, the famous and the infamous, the cruel and the kind, the generous and the miserly, the coarse and the refined, the rough and the gentle, the ignorant and the educated. Jesus came to them all. He never tried to separate himself from the unsavory characters. Some condemned him for associating with the less desirable elements of society. Jesus saw life as a hotel sees humanity. A hotel serves all without discrimination. Jesus came to embrace all types, for all are sinners. He came to bring all salvation, so that everyone would find the love and forgiveness of God, and the opportunity to become what God wanted them to be. Jesus comes at Christmas to the world of the disreputable as well as to the rest of the world.

Hotels are places of celebration. The restaurant and bars of a hotel are filled with people celebrating important occasions in their lives. They may be celebrating a wedding, or an anniversary, or a family reunion, or a sports victory, or a business merger, or a convention or conference gathering. At Christmastime there are office parties, and end of year celebrations. On Christmas Eve and Christmas Day hotels are venues for dinner parties. Those of us who worked on those days would wait on tables, and assist the kitchen staff so that our guests would be able to enjoy the festival. It is no accident that Christmas is a time of great celebration. Even in that poor little hotel in Bethlehem there were angels, and shepherds, and wise men, celebrating the coming of the Savior, who is Christ the Lord. Christmas is a time of celebration for God has come to be with us, to free us from our sins to enjoy his presence, and peace, and power.

Hotels are homes to the lonely. The hotel in which I spent my childhood had permanent guests. They were single men who had no family, no children, and no earthly future. Jesus comes to the lonely at Christmas and reminds them that God loves them and wants them to become part of his family. Jesus was cared for by his father and mother in that hotel stable the first Christmas. He cares for those who are alone each Christmas and wants them to find the faith community they need.

The innkeeper had to put the Holy Family in his stable, because there was ‘no room for them in the inn.’ That was true for so many people who crowded the hotel in which I spent my childhood. They had no room for Jesus in their lives, not necessarily because they were hostile to him, but simply because they were filled up with other things. People whom I met in our hotel were so busy filling up their lives with business, entertainment and sports, card playing and gambling, and numbing their personal pain with liquor and contrived joviality, that they gave no thought to the Savior knocking at their door seeking entrance. They shut Jesus out, not because they disliked him, but because they were preoccupied with trivia, which was their escape from having to deal with the emptiness in their lives. They were so busy that they didn’t recognize Jesus when he sought admission into their hearts. He wanted to come into their lives but there was no room for him. So Jesus got relegated to the back room of the hotel. “He was in the world, the world was there through him, and yet the world didn’t even notice. He came to his own people, but they didn’t want him. But whoever did want him, who believed he was who he claimed and would do what he said, He made to be their true selves, their child-of-God selves.” (John 1:10-12)

Don’t shut out Jesus this Christmastime. Make room for him in your inn, in your heart, in the busyness of your life. He is central to the human story, to the story of your life. He has come to be your Savior, to fill you with life in all its fullness. No matter who you are, what you have done, where you have come from, what you are going through, what you are trying to escape from, or what you are celebrating, the Savior, Christ the Lord, has come for you. He came for me. Make room for him.

No ear may hear his coming,

But in this world of sin,

Where meek souls will receive him still

The dear Christ enters in.

(Phillips Brooks)