Make room for whom there was no room

This Christmas, I'm thinking of tinsel. One of the strongest memories of growing up is seeing the shiny silver strands dangling from the branches of the tree. My wife says in her family of origin, tinsel didn't appear until it was time to open presents. When she and her brothers were allowed to approach the tree on Christmas morning, tinsel -- not seen on Christmas Eve -- now adorned the evergreen. Santa brought it along with gifts from the North Pole. We can't have tinsel today. We have cats. Cats try to eat tinsel but can't process it. It's something to behold pulling undigested tinsel out of the mouth of a feline. Ugh. It's as disgusting as you imagine it is.

This Christmas, I'm thinking of a souk. A souk is the name given to open-air markets in the Middle East. A couple of days after Christmas 2009, our family found itself in a souk in the Old City of Jerusalem. The Old City souk is the mercantile heart of this 3,000-year old city -- and has been since the Ottomans conquered Palestine in the early 16th century. Stalls in the souk or market have food and touristy chintz of possibly questionable quality (I bought a belt there that fell apart within a couple of months). I have no desire to visit the Old City again -- a cluttered warren of junk of every variety with too many tourists, featuring merchants who can be exceptionally ill-mannered. I've had the opportunity to travel internationally over the last 10 years and while my overseas travels have been confined to western and central Europe and Israel, no place in my experience matches the Holy Land for the lack of common courtesy. I attribute it to a clash of cultures and the deep variety of languages. If you can't understand one another, then it gives license to bumping and pushing people, cutting in line and ignoring the deference vivified by the phrase: "Oh, please, after you," so common in the United States. Yet I'm grateful for the experience because it gave a fleeting glimpse into the sort of experience Jesus must have had when entering Jerusalem for the final week of his life. The chaos, the collision of cultures and the uncomfortableness of too many people in too small of a space, must have been unpleasant. People aren't very nice there -- frankly. Christmastime in the souk of the Old City is therefore a permanent memory.

This Christmas, I'm thinking of wisdom offered by prolific Christian author Max Lucado. The best-selling Baptist writer says the saddest words of the Christmas story are these: No room. No room in the inn. No decent place in which to be born was available. No birthing suite, no fetal monitors, no obstetrician, no attending nurses and an utter lack of what by contemporary standards could be called acceptable hygiene. This is what is meant by the phrase, "a humble stable place sufficed," found in the most sober (and honest) of Christmas hymns, "In the Bleak Midwinter."

No room in the inn for baby Jesus. No room in polite society for the man Jesus, who was plotted against by jealous and worried Pharisees and other high-ranking Jewish leaders. With the complicity of an expedience-minded Pilate, they saw to it that he was eliminated through death on a cross. Jesus knew the truth of his status in 1st century Palestine: "Foxes have holes and birds have nests but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head." (Matthew 8:20/Luke 9:58)

No room. The saddest words of the Christmas story. Have you made room for Him -- by loving your neighbor, by doing good to those who hate you, by forgiving 70 times seven? It's a tall order to make room for the one who came at Christmas, isn't it?

Dr. Jeff Long is executive director of the Chateau Girardeau Foundation, is president of the Cape Girardeau Public Library board of trustees, and is a part-time instructor in religious studies at SEMO.