© 2025 Evan D. Garner
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It was late, and it was cold. It wasn’t the kind of cold that makes droplets of condensation from your breath freeze in your mustache, but it was windy, and it had started to rain. It was the sort of cold you can’t shake off by stomping your feet or blowing into your hands—the kind of cold that sinks into your body and won’t go away.
The couple needed a place to settle down for the night, but all of the obvious choices were unavailable. Although they had ties to this community, they weren’t from here. No one in town was expecting them. They didn’t have anyone they could call upon to take them in. Neither could they get a place in a local motel. And there were no shelters open for them.
They found a spot they thought would be safe. It was off the main drag a ways, dark, out of sight, behind a building, and under an awning where they could get out of the rain. To get their meager possessions off the wet ground, they put their packs in a dilapidated wooden trough, which had been left under the overhang—a sign that this yard may have once been used for the livestock of a poor farmer. There was no bed to sleep in, of course, just a pallet they made from the spare clothes they had with them and a small blanket they shared. They lay close to each other, hoping in vain that their commingled body heat would keep them warm. There was not much sleep to be had in these circumstances, but, as they dozed off, they were jolted awake by a familiar sound—a police car’s siren trailing off down the highway in the distance.
Luke begins the nativity story with words so familiar and particular to our observance of Christmas that we forget how common the experience of Mary and Jospeh is. While the parents of Jesus did not routinely experience homelessness, as is true for many unhoused people in this country, circumstances beyond their control combined with an overall lack of resources to leave them without adequate shelter.
Every night, here in Fayetteville, right here at St. Paul’s, men and women with nowhere else to go unroll their blankets and climb into their sleeping bags on the sidewalk and behind the bushes and on the front steps of the church. You will probably see them as you walk back to your car tonight. Although they are living manifestations of the housing crisis in our community, they are not abstract examples of an insurmountable problem. They are our neighbors. They are our friends. We see them every day. We know their names. They volunteer in the kitchen and help take care of the grounds. On a relatively warm night like tonight, they sleep outside because St. Paul’s only opens its doors for overnight shelter when the temperature drops below thirty degrees.
Mary and Joseph didn’t go to Bethlehem because they wanted to. They didn’t have a choice. To suit its own economic purposes, the government mandated that everyone return to their ancestral home to be counted so that they could be taxed more efficiently and effectively. It did not matter to the empire that Mary was nine months pregnant or that the hazardous, ninety-mile journey would take the better part of a week to complete—in each direction. Even a first-time mother would have known that she was likely to give birth before she returned home. How terrified Mary must have been, knowing that she was leaving behind the women who could best support her during childbirth! How scary to be travelling to a village where no arrangements for the delivery of her child had been made!
We do not know exactly what sort of place the holy couple found to stay in Bethlehem, but we do know that they tried to get a room in the inn and were turned away. And we know that they used a manger—a feed box—as a make-shift cradle, which means they were sleeping in a place more suitable for livestock than a woman in labor. In first-century Palestine, it could be hard to tell where a barnyard ended and a bedroom began, but we know that Mary and Jospeh arrived in Bethlehem with nowhere to go and no one to care for them. And that is where our savior is born.
On this night, Jesus is born—not in a palace or in a temple, not in a hospital or in a clinic, not in a bedroom or even a hotel. At Christmas, God comes to us as the savior of the world who is born in the only place Mary and Jospeh could find—a spot where the temporarily homeless couple could take refuge amidst the livestock—and that matters.
Nine months before Christmas, when the Holy Spirit conceived within Mother Mary’s womb the child who would be born in Bethlehem, God untied Godself to us. Inside Mary’s belly, the divine took upon itself our human nature, uniting the perfection of God to the inadequacy of humankind and, thus, purifying the imperfect, fragile, broken essence that every single one of us carries inside. But that God-child didn’t need to be born in a stable. Our savior could have been born anywhere.
Jesus could have come to one of David’s other descendants—one who had a nice house and a nice job and a bank account full of security and self-determination. The fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecies could have been accomplished through a noble birth or a middle-class birth or even a Medicaid-covered birth. But our savior was born in a barnyard—in a place where livestock bedded down for the night—and that matters.
Struggle and hardship come in many forms, and some are harder than others. Some of our neighbors don’t have a place to sleep tonight, but you don’t have to experience homelessness to know a longing that has no home in this world. Grief and pain and frustration and failure are the universal language of the human condition. If Jesus were born in a nice, tidy, comfortable birthing suite, who would bring healing to the dark, gritty corners of our lives? Who would bring hope to those who have no safety or security in this world? Who would promise rest and salvation to those who have no place to lay their heads?
It matters that God is born and laid in a manger. It matters that the savior of the world comes to a couple who has no home in which to seek shelter. It matters that the salvation Jesus brings to us is revealed in the humblest of circumstances—in a situation that none of us would choose for ourselves. It matters because we need God’s salvation in all those places that we don’t choose. We need hope that comes to those places where hope is hardest to find. We need a savior who is born in poverty because it is our poverty that needs saving. And that is God’s gift to us this night.
On this night, God opens up to us a world in which hope and love and salvation are manifest not in the bright and beautiful lights of gated communities and four-star hotels but in the lingering shadows of alleyways and the feeble protection of lean-tos, and that matters to all of us. On Christmas night, a savior is born and laid in a dilapidated feeding trough so that those among us who lack food and shelter might be the first to receive the good news of God’s love.
We believe in a God whose salvation is manifest first among the poor and the vulnerable, the broken and the forgotten, and, because of that, we believe in a God whose saving love is meant for us all. Because our savior was laid in a manger, we know that there is no one and no situation beyond the redemption of our God. That is the miracle of Christmas. That is the good news of this night. And, for that we say, thanks be to God.
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