The question the Christmas story asks us

[Link to recording of sermon]

A member of St. Paul’s introduced me to a book of short stories about Christmas written by a science fiction author named Connie Willis. Many of the stories are well worth reading, but the one I haven’t been able to forget is called Inn.

The story is set in a church—a church not unlike this one. It’s December 23, and the final rehearsal for the Christmas pageant is in full swing. It’s frigidly cold outside, sleeting, with temperatures in the single digits. The clergy and volunteers are doing their best to make sure nothing goes wrong on Christmas Eve. The pageant director gives the children some pointers: “Balthazar, lay the gold in front of the manger, don’t drop it. Mary, you’re the Mother of God. Try not to look so scared,” she says.

And one of the pastors reminds everyone that they need to make sure the church doors stay locked. She says she’s worried that homeless people might break in and cause a mess—or, worse, steal the Communion silver that’s set out for Christmas. She’s already called for a shelter van to pick up some people who had knocked at the door earlier.

A choir member named Sharon steps out of the sanctuary for a moment, and she hears a soft knock at the building’s door.

She cracks it open, and encounters a young couple who speak a language she doesn’t recognize. They seem vulnerable, cold, lost. Sharon notices that they’re wearing sandals in the snow, and she can’t bring herself to leave them outside. But she also knows the rules. And so, when she lets them in, she hides them downstairs in the nursery. It’s clear that the girl is pregnant. And slowly, Sharon begins to realize who they are—impossible though it seems.

“How did you get here?” Sharon wonders. “You’re supposed to be on your way to Bethlehem.”

“They didn’t look at all like they did in religious pictures. They were too short, his hair was greasy and his face was tough-looking, like a young punk’s, and her veil looked like a grubby dishtowel and it didn’t hang loose, it was tied around her neck and knotted in the back, and they were too young, almost as young as the children upstairs dressed like them.”

Sharon offers Joseph a paper cup filled with water, but he takes it too firmly, crushing the cup and spilling the water. He’s never seen a paper cup before. And so she goes looking for something more solid. The kitchen is locked. But she finds the Communion silver. Fills the chalice with water. And offers it to Mary, who drinks deeply.

The story continues. Sharon shepherds Mary and Joseph through the church building. She dodges clergy, volunteers, even police summoned to investigate suspicious characters reported in the area. As they pass through the sanctuary, Sharon prays that Mary won’t notice the cross on the altar. Eventually, all ends well. Sharon finds a door that leads Mary and Joseph back to their own time—and onto the road to Bethlehem.

This story is fiction, of course. But it’s also theology. And it makes me ask myself how I would react if Mary and Joseph turned up at our church door on a cold winter’s night. Would I help them? Or would I lock them out because I’m too busy keeping everything safe and tidy and just as it should be inside?

Questions about safety and boundaries are real and complex. We have legitimate concerns about security, about our capacity to help, about protecting vulnerable members of our own community.

But when our first instinct is to lock the doors, to guard what’s ours—we risk missing the very encounters God places in our path. We risk clinging so tightly to our version of the sacred that we miss the sacred itself, standing quietly before us.

I love Christmas Eve. I love the pageantry of what we do in church tonight—the candles, the carols, the story we tell together. I find God here, in this place, among you. But there’s also a truth to be found in Connie Willis’s story—a truth about a church carefully preparing to reenact Jesus’s birth while turning away the actual Holy Family. It’s a truth we all need to hear.

We romanticize the Christmas story. We know it almost too well. We’ve heard it so many times that we’ve turned its scandal into sentimentality. We hear the angel’s proclamation—“I bring you good news of great joy”—and we forget the strangeness of what actually happened. We forget that Christmas is the story of God showing up as someone easy to overlook, easy to send away, easy to miss entirely.

The lesson of Jesus’s birth isn’t just that God became human. It’s that God became this kind of human—vulnerable, displaced, easily dismissed. Born to an unmarried teenage girl in an occupied country. Laid in an animal’s feeding trough because there was no room anywhere else. Announced first to shepherds working through the night, not to priests or kings or anyone who mattered in the eyes of the world.

God could have arranged a more dignified entrance. But God chose this. Chose vulnerability. Chose the margins. Chose to enter the world in a way that most people would miss, or ignore, or—if they noticed at all—turn away from their door.

So the question the Christmas story asks us isn’t really about Mary and Joseph showing up at our church in the snow. The question is: Who takes the place of Mary and Joseph in our lives right now? Where is God showing up in ways we’re not expecting, in forms we don’t recognize, among people we’ve been taught to overlook?

This Christmas, may we have eyes to see Christ in unexpected places—among the vulnerable, among the displaced, among those our world has pushed to the margins. May we recognize the God who chose not dignity, but lowliness. Not power, but love.

Tonight, as we light our candles and sing carols we know by heart, may we remember that the light we celebrate tonight first appeared in the most unlikely of places. And still appears in such places today. The Christmas story doesn’t end in this sanctuary. It continues wherever God shows up unrecognized. Wherever the vulnerable seek shelter. Wherever love opens the door.