Each Christmas as I read this famous story, I find myself focusing on a different character, identifying with a different part of the story. Some years we’re like Mary, both tenderly and fiercely protecting the sacred within us. Some years, maybe we feel like Joseph, neglected, underappreciated but still quietly doing the right thing. Maybe we’re the magi, trying to find a new way home for ourselves after a life changing revelation.

But this year, I’ve been thinking about the inn keeper—often portrayed as something of a minor villain, but I think, painfully relatable. Maybe some of you have hosted or are preparing to host guests during this holiday season and feel exhausted, like you want to post a “no room at the inn” sign on the door (If you are an out of town visitor here with someone tonight, I am sure you are an exemplary guest and that is not the case for your host).

But seriously, I think the inn keeper gets a bad rap. We don’t have all the backstory. We don’t know what was going on in their life before Mary and Joseph showed up at their door. There must have been a lot of travellers, for Luke tells us a decree went out to all the land and all had to return to their towns to be registered. We don’t know how many other weary travelers had already come looking for shelter that night. Or how many of the inn’s employees were themselves travelling for the census, leaving our harried inn keeper short staffed. Maybe he believed stories he’d heard that some of these travellers were criminals, very dangerous people, using the census as an opportunity to scam small business owners. For all we know, the inn keeper had spent the day organizing a No King Herod protest and Mary and Joseph found him when his empathy had worn thin. He was burnt out. He was listening to his therapist and setting boundaries.

I can easily come up with a hundred plausible reasons why the inn keeper turned away Mary and Joseph, probably because I can easily come up with a hundred plausible reasons why I might have done the same. And why I do, why we all do, every day. At the end of the day aren’t we most often like the inn keeper? Trying to do our jobs and care for our families, trying to decide which battles are worth fighting, and trying to get through another day living in the shadow of empire, with an insecure and greedy king breathing down our necks.

We may aspire to live lives where we see Christ in every person we meet, where we treat every unhoused neighbor, every hungry child, every immigrant family as holy, but we don’t. We pretend to be on the phone when a canvasser asks us to donate to charity, we avoid eye contact with the person asking for change on the street corner, we ignore the alerts that ICE is in the neighborhood because we’re busy with work or kids. We aspire to live out the lessons of the Christ child story, but nearly every day we fall short. It’s almost impossible not to. There is so much suffering and need all around us.

And that’s, in part, by design. Those in power, both then and now, need us operating with a mindset of fear and scarcity. They need us to make decisions out of resignation, overwhelm, and exhaustion. They need us unsure of if and how we should care for our neighbor. Because that’s how they uphold their power.

The Roman empire didn’t want a new king to be born— one who casts down the mighty and brings a reign of justice and peace. They had a vested interest in making sure there was no room at the inn.

The census described in Luke was no simple head count. Theologian Kat Armas writes, “A census in the Roman world was a tool of the empire. Censuses existed to assess taxes, conscript labor and make land and people legible to empire’s control. To be counted was to be claimed- your body and your labor. The holy family does not travel because of prophecy or devotion but because of bureaucratic coercion.” There was no room in the inn not just because the innkeeper was unsympathetic, but because the Roman empire’s actions ensured there was no room in the inn.

Through tactics of coercion and control they ensured there was no convenient place for hope, peace, joy and love to be born.

So then how do we respond in our own time, as weary innkeepers who want to do the right thing, living in a world that makes it increasingly difficult?

We ready the inconvenient places.

We get creative. We prepare the mangers and the stables. We go to the places on the margins that the forces of hatred and greed dismiss and overlook and we make them into maternity wards for sacred, revolutionary love.

And there we write a new story, a more liberating story, a story of hope that can only be written from locations that lie outside of the empire’s limited imagination.

In this story, Hope is not born at some elite address in a gated community, but outside under the stars, with a navigation system accessible to all.

In this story, peace is born amongst the animals, helping us understand that there is no true peace without an acknowledgment of our interdependence with all of creation, without an understanding of our place in the interconnected web of life.

In this story, joy is born in a stable, a humble place where no one feels excluded from entering and where there is room to welcome and share good news with all people, even lowly shepherds.

And in this story, love is born in a manger, a feeding trough for animals, reminding us that love is not merely a decoration to be gazed at but a powerful and active force, meant to be put to use. This love is food for the hungry and nourishment for the soul.

Whatever the inn keepers' faults, what he is able to offer, this imperfect solution that circumvents an unjust government’s best laid plans, is more than enough to allow this new story to take hold.

Thomas Merton wrote,“Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for him at all, Christ comes uninvited.” Thankfully for us, the Christmas story is one of humility and grace and a power greater than any one of us. Christ comes. Even though there is no room, even though the conditions aren’t perfect, even though the empire is mighty, even though we fail to live up to our professed ideals, Christ comes. Still. God conspires with the marginalized and powerless to birth love into an unwelcoming world again and again.

So on the days when we don’t feel like Mary or Joseph or even the shepherds, brave enough to follow the words of an angel and the direction of a star—on the days where we feel most like the innkeeper, simply struggling to do the best we can in a broken world, may we remember the power of this story. We don’t have to be perfect, we don’t have to fix everything, we don’t have to topple empires by ourselves. We just have to be creative and courageous enough to carve out a little extra space, however unconventional, where love can be born.

May it be so. Merry Christmas, dear ones. Amen.