The Innkeeper's Tale

Dec. 24, 2006

I’ve been thinking about the innkeeper this week. He gets short-shrift in the story we tell on Christmas Eve. We’ll read it again tonight, and our focus then will, and rightly so, be on the birth. Then we’ll light the Christ candle in the center of the Advent ring and celebrate the coming into our world of God’s light in Jesus Christ.

But this morning, we’re not quite there. We’re still in Advent. We’ve lit four candles. We are still preparing.

Oh, sure, you’d better be just about ready at this point.

But we’re not quite there. There’s still time to consider other parts of the story. There’s still time to consider “The Innkeeper’s Tale.”

Now scripture doesn’t tell us much. In fact, there’s just a hint that we find in Luke’s account in that famous phrase, “She wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger because there was no room for them at the inn.”

Setting aside for now all of the historical questions about this text – the “did it really happen like that?” questions – let’s consider this from the innkeeper’s perspective. For, whether or not there was an actual Bethlehem innkeeper with an overflowing guest registry, surely there have been lots of us with no room for Mary, Joseph and the Christ child. His story is our story; mine, in fact. Let me tell you, then, “The Innkeeper’s Tale.”

Once upon a time, not that long ago really, I had myself a little inn, a bed and breakfast, right near the center of town. It was really a charming place: big front porch with rocking chairs and a porch swing, a bright, airy breakfast room that always drew the morning sun through windows that pulled in the freshest air to mix with the smells of fresh-baked bread or muffins. Despite my outward appearances, I endeavored to keep a respectable establishment.

About those outward appearances, well, I had to be a jack-of-all-trades, for we barely made ends meet. If there was a busted pipe or leaky sink, I was a plumber. When the weeds took over the vegetable plot, I was a gardener. When we needed more flour or sugar, I was the delivery boy. When the place needed tidying, I was the cleaning crew. If our equipment needed repair, it was out to the shed to be Mr. Fixit. And, in the evenings, when things quieted down, I would pull out my guitar and be the entertainment, as well.

We kept the place spotless, my wife and I did. She was in it just as much as I – cooking, keeping the books, welcoming guests. Fresh linens on the beds, fresh towels by the bath, freshest food in the kitchen. Over the years we gained a reputation for hospitality that was unrivaled in the town, and we almost always had a waiting list – especially when there were big events in the area.

I remember one time, way back it was and my memory’s a bit faded with the years. There’s was a festival – a seasonal celebration of some kind near the beginning of winter. People came from all over. Lots of our regular guests. The place was full and just brimming with excitement that comes with a change of seasons, crisp cold air and a fine big party.

Oh, not that everything was a celebration in those days. Times were tough. It seemed like everyone was worried about jobs, and the international situation was particularly tense, I recall. There were lots of folks really struggling to get by, or just hang on. The government was worthless and business was ruthless, and it seemed like we were always in some war that most of us didn’t understand. I suppose it was a bit like now. But those worries were set aside for the festival.

Then one evening, a bit past supper time, there was a knock at the front door. We were in the living room, taking a break after a long day of cleaning, cooking, and playing tourist information agent for the guests. I remember this part just like it was yesterday. I was strumming my guitar, playing “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door,” when someone rapped on the door in perfect time to the music. I laughed at the coincidence as I got up to see who was there.

It was a young couple. She was obviously pregnant, and they both looked tired and disheveled. Their clothes were not fashionable, and they looked well worn. Looking beyond them, I saw a battered old vehicle that looked to be older than the couple standing at our door.

I stood in the doorway, holding the door open against a cold wind, and asked, “may I help you?”

The man answered, “yes, I hope so. Do you have a room tonight?”

“No,” I said. “I’m sorry but we’re completely full.”

“Oh,” he said, his eyes downcast. Then he looked at the woman and said, simply, “I’m sorry.”

I was about to close the door on them, when something in her eyes caught me. They were so full of sadness, but also, somehow, of hope. I could not simply close the door on those eyes. So I said, “why don’t you come in for a few minutes and let me get you a drink, perhaps some tea?”

“Thank you,” she said. “That would be nice.”

I held the door for them and nodded toward the chairs close to the fire place.

“You can warm up there while we fix some tea. This is Sophia, my wife. My name is Daniel.”

“Thank you,” said the man. “I am Jose and this is Maria.”

They sat, and Sophia and I went through the doors into the kitchen.

“Oh my lord,” she said when we were safely out of earshot. “She looks like she might drop any minute. What do you suppose their story is?”

“Don’t know, but I’d guess their car broke down. It looks like an ancient piece of junk out there.”

“Well, they don’t look in the best of shape either,” Sophia said. “I wonder if they’re run-aways. They look so young. I bet she’s not more than 16, and he doesn’t look much older.”

“Do you suppose we ought to call the police?” I wondered out loud.

“No. Let’s give them something warm to drink. And, here, we’ve got still got some soup from dinner and a bit of bread. We’ve got no space for them, but we can give them something to keep warm.”

We carried a couple of trays with tea, soup and bread back to the living room. It did not look like our unexpected guests had so much as moved a muscle between them. They just sat, looking into the fire, weary to the bone.

They accepted the food with thanks and ate with the quiet of the tired and hungry.

As he finished the last swallow of tea, Jose asked of me, “do you know of any other inns? We have tried every place we have come across between here and the edge of town.”

“No. I’m afraid you have picked the worst possible time to come to town without reservations for a room. With the festival, every inn in town has been booked up for months in advance.”

“Yes. We had not planned to travel at this point,” said Maria, patting her very round belly. “But Jose just got called to a new job working on a construction site about another day’s drive from here, and we were on our way when the car started acting up.”

Then Jose spoke up, again. “You have been very kind, and we thank you. Look, I know that you don’t have a room, but do you even have a garage or shed where we could park our car out of the wind a bit and sleep in it there?”

I glanced at Sophia, who shrugged a “well, why not” look back at me.

“You know,” I said, “we would give you our room tonight, but the law requires that we be in this house while there are guests overnight. We do have a small barn out back where I keep my workshop; it’s attached to an animal shed where we keep chickens and goats. We’ve got a couple of old cots in the loft where Sophia’s sister’s kids like to have sleepouts. We could put them down in the shed with some blankets.”

The whole time I was saying it I was thinking, “Lord I hope no one ever hears about this. We could get in so much trouble. And, oh my gosh, what would the neighbors think if they knew we were putting up such kids? I wonder if they’ve got drugs in that car? Well, they don’t look dangerous, at least.”

Jose and Maria did not have any such reservations; they accepted the offer immediately.

Sophia, on the other hand, must have been having the exact same thoughts, because as we went to pull out some extra blankets she just looked at me and said, “are we sure this is a good idea?” Neither of us answered the question, we just carried the blankets out to the shed.

As we sorted out cots and blankets, I warned Jose and Maria that one of us – who was I kidding: it would be Sophia – would be out collecting eggs at 5:30 the following morning. We’d have a hot breakfast available a couple of hours later. Hoping that they would be both warm and unnoticed, we left them and headed off to bed ourselves.

I remember sleeping soundly that night – tired and untroubled. Sophia later told me that she’d tossed and turned and worried about the young couple sleeping in our shed.

Her sleeplessness did not keep her from climbing out of bed first thing in the morning. She pulled on a robe while I snuggled deeper under the blankets, catching a few minutes more snoozing while Sophia fetched eggs. I was dozing when she came breathlessly back into the room.

“Get up, quick!” she hissed. “The baby came last night.”

“Huh. What baby? Came where? What are you talking about?”

“The baby. You know, Maria’s baby. The girl in the barn. She had her baby last night. Come help me. Right now.”

It all came back in a rush.

“Oh my gosh. You mean we’ve got a newborn baby in the barn?”

“Yup. In fact, they’ve got him bundled up in the goat’s trough right next to Maria’s cot. They all seem just fine, but we need to get them some breakfast, and we probably need to call a doctor or something.”

I was pulling on clothes as quickly as I could, and we were stumbling down the stairs and out the back door. It was cold and dark, and the sharp air hit me in the face.

I remember, the most disconcerting thing of the entire experience, from some house back beyond ours someone had left a radio on in an outbuilding, and music was drifting across the yard. It was choral music – the Sanctus from Rutter’s Requiem – the most beautiful music. It was like a dream.

So was the scene in the barn. Mother and child; father and newborn son. Chickens waking up in their perches. Goats rustling just a bit at our arrival. The smells of engine grease mixing with the smells of animals.

Remarkably, everyone was, just as Sophia had reported, fine.

We offered to call a doctor, but they declined.

“We’re going to go home. We’ve got family who will care for us. It’s only a couple of hours back the way we’ve come and I’m pretty sure the car will get us there,” Jose was saying, but I was just watching the baby sleep.

“What his name?”

“Hm?”

“The baby. What are you naming him?”

Jose and Maria looked at each other for a moment, and then laughed quietly.

“We’re not sure, yet,” she said. “We’ve been arguing about that for weeks now. He wants to name him Jose, Jr., but I was to call him Jesus.”

“They’re both beautiful names,” Sophia offered.

It’s funny, but we never did find out what name they chose. In fact, they were as good as their word that morning. Soon after eating breakfast, that packed into their old car – in the light of day I could see that it was a Ford Pinto; that should tell you all you need to know about their means. They left mid morning.

A couple of months later we received a nice card from them, with a picture of the baby – but, again, no name mentioned. They also enclosed cash; the precise amount for spending one night in our inn’s finest, most expensive room. There was no return address. We never heard from them again, but, for some reason, we kept the picture.

That was, oh, forty some years ago.

I’d not thought much about that night until about ten years ago.

About that time, a young man around here began organizing in communities where poor folks live. He was on TV all the time and in the papers, always talking about “lifting up the lowly and filling the hungry with good things to eat.” Everywhere he went, the papers reported, he’d begin his talks saying the same thing: “I bring you good news! You’re going to get new eyes to see, new ears to hear, a new mind for a new time, because God is near!” He apparently rapped it. Something I never quite got, but the crowds loved it.

His name was Jesus.

People said that those who met him were changed forever. Others said he had healed them. Folks came from all over just to hear him speak, and many of them joined his movement.

We received an invitation to one of his rallies, but we were overloaded at the inn and couldn’t get away. Another time there was a big celebration – a kind of community meal that his people put on down by the riverside. But we had a full house again that time.

There were pictures in the paper, and it was amazing to look at. He let all kinds of people into his movement: folks from around here and foreigners, too. There were lots of poor people, street people, really. He had white folks, and black folks and Latinos – why he even had gay and lesbian people working right out in the open – all working together.

He worked in these parts for just a short time, but more and more people followed him. Not everybody, though. Some people hated him. For one thing, he kept getting himself arrested; for another, he was insisting on changing things that some people didn’t want changed; things we always like to call around here, “our way of life.” In our way of life, people stick with their own kind, and some things we just don’t talk about. It’s not hateful, or anything. It’s just the way it’s always been, and it’s comfortable.

Me? I’ve never been much interested in those things. I’m an innkeeper. I keep out of politics.

Then, when he started talking about how people spend their money, well, let’s just say things were getting a bit out of control. In the end, one of his own followers turned against him; set him up.

He was finally arrested on some pretty serious charge – I think it was sedition. And they sent him away. He hasn’t been heard from since, but people still talk about him.

I remember soon after he was convicted, there was a picture of him in the paper. For some reason, I cut it out and saved it. It was a close up shot; in color. And I noticed his eyes; they were so full of sadness yet, somehow, full of hope at the same time. They reminded me of that night. They looked just like hers.

Was it him? I don’t know, but I’ve always wondered. And I’ve also wondered, what would have happened if I’d accepted his invitation? Would I have been changed? Would I have followed him? I don’t know.

And that’s my story. I wonder … I wonder if anybody else has ever had such an experience.