From Your Minister
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When I was a kid, I pictured the part of the Christmas story about “no room at the inn” as a kind of neon no vacancy sign, blinking from the ancient motels of Biblical days. Kind of like the times when my family, on our rare summer vacations, hot and cranky after a long day with each other in the VW microbus, tried to find a motel with a pool and they were all full. Annoying.
It took me years to realize that innkeepers saying there was “no room at the inn” was more like turning away someone in a Minnesota blizzard: an act of flagrant indifference about the survival—or not—of those turned away.
At each door to each inn, rather than a blinking neon sign, Mary and Joseph read the signs that marginalized people see all the time: looks of disgust and indifference, the power to slam a door with righteousness. “Let the likes of you in? Why, you are probably diseased, illegal, crazy, violent…”
So Joseph and Mary-great-with-child are surrounded by signs from the powers that be, telling them they are nobody. They do not matter—because they are poor, because they are homeless, because they are young and physically vulnerable.
But—and here’s where the story gets really compelling—they refuse to read those signs, or to believe them. Right from the beginning Mary—an unwed teenager when she learns she is to become a mother—believes that this coming child is holy. She listens not to the wealthy powers that say the baby and she are unworthy, but to the angel who whispers the baby’s holiness in her ears. She believes the angel! And she acts on her belief. I like to imagine her sending energy to the life growing inside her all those months: You are holy. You.
We humans depend on signs to stay alive. We come into the world, whether in a stable or in a hospital or in a flotation tank, as scrawny, screaming, animal bodies. Immediately, we begin to develop into humans through the interactions we have with the people around us. Those early signs our caretakers give us then create viewfinders that we use to figure out which signs are meant for us as we wade through the morass of signage that surrounds us throughout our lives.
If we’re driving to New York City, we really don’t care about road signs that direct us to Buffalo or Poughkeepsie. We know our destination, and we look for signs that will help us get there, the signs that matter to us.
Similarly, as we walk around with the question, “Who am I?” we look for signs to help us answer that central question. As we do so, we are always choosing which signs to read. Mary chose to read a sign that said, “The child you are going to birth is holy, a child of God.” No matter her poverty or her uncertain social status, she claimed the holiness of her child as his birthright. And it was into that birthright that he came, the harsh opinions of kings and innkeepers being irrelevant. Perhaps it was because of Mary’s confidence in her baby’s place in the world that he could live with such courage and joy and compassion.
We walk around with the question “Who am I?” and the world gives us all kinds of answers besides “a child of God.” We are told that we are bad, we are not enough, we are unworthy. Sign makers get paid billions of dollars to encode these signs into our cells.
What if, like Mary, we refused to read those signs? What if we walked around reading only signs that said “You are a child of God”? Or, if you don’t like the word God: You are a part of everything that is alive and healing and interconnected. You matter. You. Right where you are. Right as you are. Even though you are poor, or homeless, or pregnant and unmarried, or don’t have the right papers, or are fat, or imprisoned, or unemployed, or sick, or speak with an accent, or are trans*, or all of the other things that the corporate sign makers denounce—still and all, you are holy. You matter. And not only you, but everyone else. Holy. One Kin-dom.
“Each night a child is born is a holy night,” as Unitarian Universalists often say in our Christmas services. And what if we believed it? What if we believed that each child, including us, was holy not only when they were cooing and freshly powdered, with a tiny bit of drool coming out of their toothless smile onto a bright clean bib, but also when they were covered with excrement and screaming, projectile vomiting on our best clothes? What if we believed they were holy as teens with acne and attitudes and drug problems, and as adults with every struggle known to humankind?
What if, in our complicated, wildly imperfect lives, we looked only for signs that pointed us to our own and everyone else’s holiness?
In this holiday season, that’s the gift that this radically incarnational faith offers us. To know that each of us is an embodiment of the holy. May our lives help to point one another to this truth. No matter how hard we have to work, may we follow signs that affirm our very being, and presume that other signs point to destinations we do not want to visit.
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