12/12/48

“And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped

him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger;

because there was no room for them in the inn.”

(Luke 2:7)

Paul Tillich in his book, The Shaking of the Foundations, records that in the Nuremburg War-Crime grails a witness appeared who had lived for a time in a grave in a Jewish graveyard in Wilna, Poland. It was the only place he  and many others could live when in hiding after they had escaped from the gas chamber. During this time he wrote poetry, and one of the poems was the description of a birth. In a grave nearby a young woman give birth to a boy. The eighty-year-old gravedigger, wrapped in a linen shroud, assisted. When the newborn child uttered his first cry, the old may prayed: “Great God, hast thou finally sent the Messiah to us? For who else than the Messiah Himself can be born in a grave?” But after three days, the poet saw the child sucking his mother’s tears because she had no milk for him.

How reminiscent of the Lucan nativity narrative is this contemporary tale of horror — “And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.” Has it been “forgotten that the manger of Christmas was the expression of utter poverty and distress (and of unfeeling inhuman rejection) before it became the place where the angels appeared and to which the star pointed?” (Tillich)

Well, surely we haven’t forgotten that inhospitable Bethlehem innkeeper! The traditional tragedy of Christmas has been echoed down the centuries in those forlorn words — “because there was no room in the inn”. And how that poor innkeeper of Bethlehem has suffered at the hands of complacent Christians every Christmas season! The very idea, that hard-hearted old rascal! Not opening his house to the holy family, so the little Christ Child, that holy one, had to be born in a manger — in a cold stable: “because there was no room for them in the inn”. Oh, if only we had been there — how differently the story would have turned out! If only we had been the proprietors of that Bethlehem hotel — then the little Lord Jesus would have lain his sweet head in the best room in the house! Oh, yes?

So the Christmas season for all good Christian souls has come to mean two things principally, and both have to do with having room at Christmastime.

First, Christmas means having room for ourselves — a place in the home and hearts of those we love. As the tragedy of the first Christmas was not finding room at the inn, so a great part of our Christmas joy and gladness is in knowing there’s room for us at Yuletide.

1. K. Chesterton says that the genius of Charles Dickens’ charm in writing about Christmas was his discovery of this secret. And so Dickens pictures tenderly and touchingly the Christmas festival in terms of home and hearth. All the members of the family, together with some favored friends, gathered inside the home — warm, cozy, clustered about a roaring log fire with hearts and hearth aglow — while outside the cold, wild winds beat their ice and snow about the cornices and gables. And a part of the warmth and joy within is due to the contrast of the cold and desolation without — which cannot touch the family circle’s coziness within. “To our good Christmas dreams,” says Chesterton, “this dark and dangerous background is essential; the highest pleasure we can imagine is a defiant pleasure; a happiness that stands at bay.” Yes, at heart, this is the secret charm and joy of Christmas, knowing, feeling, experiencing that somewhere there’s room and warmth and welcome for us — where we belong. That’s Christmas.

How the plaintiveness of that song lingers on, long after its timeliness has slipped away: “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas, just like the ones I used to know.” The boys, our boys, in the war years, far away from home at Christmastime in a strange land — the islands of the South Seas — where the palm trees and the warm breezes and the hot summer’s sun brought at Christmastime, not a glow to the heart, but a stab of icy loneliness, for there was for them none of that heart warmth which comes only with a sense of belonging — of knowing and experiencing “there’s room for me”.

Grantland Rice put his finger on this key chord which sets off the whole Christmas symphony aplaying in the human heart, when, as a sportswriter for The New York Tribune one Christmas season when he couldn’t go home, back south to Nashville, Tennessee, he sat down at his typewriter in the press room and dashed off these lines:

I’m going home someday

If I can only find the pathway back,

For I have come too far, too far away,

A wanderer on a strange and alien track.

I saw the world ahead and only meant

To go a little way beyond, and then,

To seek the old time highways of content

And live back home among my clan again.

I’m going home someday —

So moves the dream of all this roving world;

The seekers of far lands who’ve lost their way,

God’s countless aliens, by the current whirled

From out the harbor, and tempest tossed

To unknown lands where they must ever roam;

And this is all that makes life worth the cost —

This endless dream — someday, I’m going home.

Ever since that first Christmas when the holy family found no room for them at the inn, a great part of Christmas, for all Christian souls, has been this: a feeling of belonging, of knowing and experiencing that in life’s cold and wintry storm there is a place where there’s room and warmth and welcome for us. Fundamentally, that’s Christmas.

But Christmas for every Christian soul means not only having room for ourselves, but also making room for others in our homes and hearts, especially for those who by misfortune or harsh circumstances are temporarily or permanently homeless. Last week I was talking with a friend whom Christmas will find this year, for the first time in many a year, without a home of his own. He told me of a letter he had just received from an old uncle and aunt with whom he had lived when he was a boy: “You’ll have to come spend Christmas with us,” they wrote, “for it won’t be Christmas for us unless you are here.” That aunt and uncle knew what Christmas means — making room for others.

To Ebenezer Scrooge, the stingy, crotchety bachelor in the Dickens’ story, Christmas was just a “bah” and a “humbug”, until he made room in his heart for poor Bob Cratchit and crippled Tiny Tim and all the other hungry Cratchits and Scrooge’s own estranged nephew — then the Christmas joy entered his heart, and its warm thrilling glow pulsed through his veins.

I was in a meeting last week where a very frank discussion took place about D.P.’s. Do you know what a D.P. is? Why, of course you do. Everybody knows that a D.P. is a “Displaced Person”. We just call displaced persons “D.P.’s” because that is our quick, hurried, impersonal way of referring to men and women and little children who, in the agonies of the last great war, were uprooted from their native land, driven from home, perhaps to a concentration camp, or perhaps to a slave labor battalion, and who now, some three years after the war is over, have managed by some miracle to keep body and soul together, and are still alive and still displaced. The D.P.’s are the folks who have no place of shelter, no security, no home, no job, no love or meaning in life. The D.P.’s are the folks to whom our world is saying this Christmas and, has been saying for several Christmases, “there’s no room for you”.

We were talking about the D.P.’s in this meeting the other day, because, at long last, our national government has made arrangements to open the gates of our immigration barriers to welcome and resettle in our country some 205,000 D.P.’s within the next two years, and because two boatloads of D.P.’s have already arrived in the United States: 813 in the first boatload and 808 in the second.

The folks in this meeting I attended were impressed with the fact that the Roman Catholic church and the Jewish church of America were at work efficiently resettling D.P.’s but that as yet no organization had been set up by the Protestant churches of North Carolina to make room among us in our great state for these homeless ones. They felt that this was the church’s business and opportunity. So plans were laid and work begun which will open the way for our churches to share in this business of helping the displaced to become the well-placed.

But you say: “Mister, all that’s rather sentimental and touching, and I wish the undertaking well. But it’s all so far off from where I am, and, after all, what could I possibly do to make room for the D.P.’s at Christmastime?” Well, one family in our congregation is momentarily expecting the arrival of a couple of D.P.’s who are coming to live and work with them. They heard of the need, they saw the opportunity; they’re opening their home. They are making room.

The United States government requires that “each displaced person or family have a sponsor in this country”.

There’s not a one of us who could not do something toward making room this Christmas for one who’s been shut out, oh, so long. What will you do? Call the church office and say: “I’ll offer a job”, or “I’ll find a home”, or “I’ll give so much for transportation”. We can all help. What will you do to make room?

Our United States government is making room at this Christmas season in our nation for thousands of Hungarian refugees who are, indeed and in fact, the homeless this Christmastime. By the hundreds they are arriving via airlift every day at Camp Kilmer in New Jersey from which 20 divisions were shipped overseas to fight in World War II. And Americans across the country are giving their dollars through Red Cross, Church World Service, and various other relief agencies to supply, temporarily, a refuge and comfort in the refugee camps. But these homeless people will not be at home until something more is done for them.

Our government can let down the immigration bars and welcome them to our shores. Relief agencies can supply temporary shelter, but they won’t be at home among us until individuals and church groups bestir themselves and send in assurances for jobs and housing to the accredited resettlement agencies, and receive these people into our communities and congregations.

Some members of this congregation are already concerned and have bestirred themselves. One family has dispatched assurances for sponsoring a Hungarian physician and his family. One woman has agreed to provide housing and work for a refugee.

In the bright, blue waters of New York Harbor, on a tiny island stands the Statue of Liberty, holding aloft her torch, looking confidently, calmly, out to sea.  Beneath Liberty’s triumphant, welcoming form are carried these words:

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses, yearning to be free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,

Send these, the homeless, tempest tost, to me!

I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

Again rolls around the Christmas season. Again there shines the star of hope in wintry skies. Again there comes a knocking at the door; it’s the holy family, for every family is “holy” in the Father’s sight. Will there be room this Christmas?

Daily there are arriving on our own American shores in this Christmas season refugees from Hungary bearing children in their arms because there is no room for them in the land of their birth.

Such a story, together with the poignant human interest accounts we read daily in our newspapers of the harassed Hungarian people fleeing their cruel Soviet masters and arriving in America with their little children, often with their sole possessions the clothes on their backs, recalls the old familiar Lucan nativity narrative —

“When the Son of Man shall come in His glory, and all the holy angels with Him, then shall He sit upon the throne of His glory; and before Him shall be gathered all nations … Then shall the King say unto them on His right hand: ‘Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: for I was hungered and ye gave me meat; I was thirsty and ye gave me drink; I was a stranger and ye took me in; naked and ye clothed me.’ Then shall the righteous answer him, saying: ‘Lord, when saw we thee hungered, and fed Thee, or thirsty, and gave Thee drink? When saw we Thee a stranger, and took Thee in? Or naked, and clothed Thee?’ … And the King shall answer and say unto them: ‘Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.’”