despised and rejected

My bed is piled high with gifts to be wrapped and i'm only to the "D"s in the Christmas card list. But it struck me last night just how much Jesus was despised and rejected from the womb.

Luke, in his matter-of-fact way, reports that Jesus was born in a stable and laid in a manger because "there was no room for them in the inn."

Whoa. Hold your horses, donkeys and sheep, for that matter. No room in the INN? Joseph had returned to his family's hometown! How many hundreds of kinfolk lived there? This was a world in which one never stayed at an inn unless one were a person without introductions, connections, without anyone in town with whom to stay.

That means that Joseph and Mary had already knocked on quite a few family doors before they tried the inns. They had already gotten the look from a number of cousins, aunts and uncles which revealed that they'd quickly calculated Mary's fully pregnant belly in relationship to the date on which they'd received the news that she and Joseph had married. They all knew it didn't fit. They all knew that this baby was conceived out of wedlock. And they all, apparently, had already closed the door in Joseph's face, whether gently or with a little slam of emphasis, to let them both know that this pregnancy had not begun in an acceptable way and that no matter what, they weren't letting two such bad examples influence the kids in their households!

Would we have reacted any differently? How uncomfortable are we around people whose stories don't fit, whose dramas tire us with their repetition, whose ways are not ways we want our kids to pick up? The Pharisees had been watching even before the Baby had come to the manger.
So, not only were the inns--the sleeping places of last resort for those who had no family--closed to them (and who can tell just how much prejudice there was in those polite refusals?), but also the very fact that they went to inns seeking shelter in the hometown of a man descended from King David himself with no success, tells a story of rejection that ran deep, indeed.

Mary had known this rejection from the moment she'd said yes to the angel; Joseph had joined in from early on to share this burden, believing that what they were doing in obedience to God Most High was more important than the opinions of everyone else...yet, it had to rankle, to ache, to hurt every single day.

"He was despised . . . a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief" said the prophet Isaiah. We often think of that in connection with Jesus' adult life and His death. But rejection was His hallmark from the very beginning. The shame of having no family member who would take you in for the night was tremendous. It meant that in that close-knit community, you had become a stranger, a Gentile, a dead man. Joseph, descendant of David himself, was in effect declared a nonperson in the town of his fathers. His wife, also a descendant of David, was equally despised, for certainly this had once been the hometown of her family, too, however far back they had moved away to Galilee. They could find no relative with whom to lodge. They could not even find an inn where they could be admitted for money.

But caves are free and animals are generous, and perhaps cleaner than some of the people they might have encountered at an inn. And although shepherds were ritually unclean because their work sometimes involved dead animals, they were just poor enough, ignorant enough and obedient enough to make perfect messengers of the good news that a Baby who had been born in a unique place was the Messiah!

What if Joseph's uncle Levi had admitted them to his house? The Baby would have been born indoors, like any other baby. He would have been put in the waiting arms of relatives, in the way every baby was. His very rejection was a sign in the tradition of the prophets to those who rejected Him as well as a sign to those who came to bow in worship.

And what of it? Who will come to our doors as Jesus, Mary or Joseph this year and find rejection? Life is a continual posada, played out within us as we open--or close--our hearts to those who are despised and rejected--often with "good reason" and certainly always with our finest rationalizations in play.

I close with this story. Perhaps it's a reason i am passionate about including the excluded:

It was Christmas Eve at Grandpa's. The traditional family buffet supper was in full swing in the dining room and the tree, as usual, was in full splendor and seemed to touch the high, vaulted ceiling. Soon we'd unwrap gifts until the floor was covered in drifts of beautiful torn paper. Everything was beautiful, as always.

There was a knock at the back door. My grandfather went to the door, which had a window in it. He could see a young black man standing there. He opened the door a crack but couldn't understand what the man was saying. He was, in his defense, a little deaf.

"My car has broken down and my wife is outside waiting in the cold. Could I use your phone?"

Grandpa was already shaking his head no when another relative stepped up and said, "Go away. Can't you see we're celebrating our family Christmas?" The tone of voice said, "How dare you interrupt this important event with your broken-down concerns?"

The young man turned and left. I ran to my purse for money so he could make a call but when i got outside, he had disappeared.

Perhaps he had wanted was to break in and steal our Christmas presents. Or maybe all he wanted was to step inside such a house on sudh a night, just to see what it was like. Or perhaps he was an angel, sent to show us who we really were--Pharisees, whose first and last response was to despise and reject any man who was not celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ, the ultimate despised and rejected One, in the way we ourselves were celebrating. Forgive us. And
God bless us, every one.