What If There Was Room for You All Along?

21 Dec

YouTube Video of the Church Service

Picture a seven-year-old with a tea towel on his head, shuffling across a school stage, trying to look interested in a plastic baby in a cardboard manger. Most of us have been there. The tinsel halos, the teachers desperately stopping the wise men from fighting, the one kid who gets the innkeeper's big line. The nativity play was a rite of passage. But what if the story we learned—the cold stable, the heartless innkeeper, the rejected family—isn't quite right?

This week at Crowd Church, Matt Edmundson unpacks the Christmas story a little more in the final part of our Nativity series. And not to ruin anyone's childhood memories, but there is something far more hopeful in there than we ever imagined.

The Story We Think We Know

We all know how it goes. Mary and Joseph arrive in Bethlehem, exhausted. Mary's about to give birth. They knock on doors, desperate, but everywhere they turn, they hear the same thing: no room. Finally, a grumpy innkeeper takes pity and lets them use his stable. Jesus is born surrounded by animals, essentially homeless and rejected before he even takes his first breath.

It's in every nativity set, every Christmas card, every school play.

But here's where it gets interesting.

What the Story Actually Says

In Luke's Gospel, we read that Mary placed Jesus in a manger because there was no room in the "inn." But the Greek word used here—kataluma—doesn't mean a commercial inn like a hotel. It actually means "guest room." It's the same word Luke uses later to describe the upper room where Jesus has the Last Supper.

In fact, the New International Version changed its translation from "inn" to "guest room" in 2011. And ancient Syriac and Arabic translations used by Middle Eastern Christians for nearly 2,000 years never translated it as "inn" either.

So it was the guest room that was full. Not a hotel.

Why does that matter? In a typical Palestinian home of that era, there were two main living areas: a raised platform where the family ate, slept, and lived, and a lower section where they brought in animals at night—partly for security, partly because the animals served as a kind of central heating system. Feeding troughs, or mangers, were built into the floor between these two areas.

When Luke says Mary laid Jesus in a manger, any first-century reader would have immediately understood: this birth happened in a family home. Not a stable. Not a barn. But a house.

The guest room was already occupied by relatives who had arrived earlier for the census. So the family made room in the main living area. They gave Mary and Joseph the best they had available.

Why This Changes Everything

Think about it. Joseph was returning to Bethlehem, the city of David. He was a descendant of King David. In Middle Eastern culture, to turn away a descendant of David in his ancestral village would have brought real shame on the entire community. It simply wouldn't have happened.

And the idea that a pregnant woman would be rejected and forced into a dirty stable? In a culture where hospitality was sacred? The village midwife would have come. The women would have helped. This wasn't abandonment. This was a community doing what communities did.

"The nativity isn't a story about no room. It's a story about making room."

Matt grew up picturing Jesus born into cold rejection—alone, unwanted. But the actual story is different. It's messy. It's crowded. It's chaotic. And it's full of people squeezing up to make space for something extraordinary.

The Shepherds and the Open Door

We see the same pattern with the shepherds. Luke tells us that on the night Jesus was born, shepherds were in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks. Then an angel appears to them.

Here's the context we often miss: shepherds weren't the romantic figures from Christmas cards. They were at the bottom of the social ladder. Many rabbis considered them unclean. They couldn't testify in court because their word wasn't considered reliable.

And yet these were the first people invited to meet Jesus. Not the religious leaders. Not the wealthy. Not the socially acceptable. The outcasts.

And what did they do? They didn't wait in the fields, hoping someone would come find them. They didn't assume the invitation wasn't really for people like them—which would have been easy to do. They went to Bethlehem. They knocked on the door.

And when they arrived? The door opened.

"They didn't arrive with entitlement. They didn't demand to see the baby. They came with wonder and with news and with encouragement. And then the door opens wide."

The Problem of Preemptive Rejection

Matt shared a story from his own school days that hits close to home for many of us. During break time, football teams would get picked. Matt wasn't sporty. He wasn't fit. He definitely wasn't going to be picked first.

So he developed a strategy. He'd wander away when teams were being chosen. Pretend he wasn't feeling well. Make sure he was never standing there waiting to be last.

He called it "preemptive rejection." If he removed himself before they could reject him, he stayed in control.

But he didn't realise at the time that by never playing, he never got better. It became self-fulfilling. He was so busy protecting himself from rejection that he guaranteed he'd never belong.

As he got older, he found other strategies too. Lying. Making himself sound more successful, more sorted, more impressive. If people thought he was better than he was, maybe they'd accept him.

Sometimes it worked. But only briefly.

"You can't build real relationships on a lie. The acceptance was never for the real me. It was for a version of me that never existed."

No Room at the Inn Theology

Many of us live with what Matt calls "No Room at the Inn Theology." We've absorbed the rejection version of the nativity so deeply that we apply it to ourselves.

There's no room for people like me.

God might tolerate me, but he doesn't really want me.

I'll stay on the edges. It's safer out there.

Maybe you go to church but don't really know anyone. So you sit at the back, ready for a quick exit. It avoids the complications of nobody speaking to you. Protects you from that awkward moment of standing alone with your coffee.

But it also means you'll always be an outsider. You've pre-decided your own rejection.

What if that story is just as wrong as the heartless innkeeper?

What Happens When You Knock

Matt shared about when he first started going to church in North Carolina. He was the guy from outside—different country, didn't know the songs, didn't know when to sit or stand, didn't even know what to wear.

But the people at that church went out of their way to welcome him. They opened their homes. They made room at their tables. They were pivotal in his coming to faith.

They understood something about God that the nativity actually teaches us when we read it in context: there is a God who makes room for us.

And why? Because the baby in that manger grew up. He didn't just offer hospitality—according to Christians, he paid for it. The welcome we receive isn't free. It cost him everything.

Jesus made room for us by taking our place. The cross is where rejection landed on him, not on us.

And because of that, he says something extraordinary in John 15: "I no longer call you servants. I call you friends."

Not tolerated guests. Not barely welcome visitors.

Friends.

Your Next Step This Week

If any of this resonates, here's what you might try:

Stop wandering away. Notice when you're removing yourself before anyone has the chance to include you. What would it look like to stay?
Start simple. If you're not sure what "knocking" looks like, just tell God you're curious. Ask him to show you if any of this is real. That's enough.
Find a table. Is there a community, a group, a church where you could stop hovering at the edges and actually sit down?
Drop the performance. Real relationships can't be built on a version of you that doesn't exist. What would it mean to show up as yourself?

The Door Is Open

The nativity we learned from tea towels and Christmas cards makes good drama. The cold stable, the heartless innkeeper, the rejected family. But it's not the full story.

The real story is messier. More crowded. More human. And more hopeful.

Because the real story says that when God came into the world, there was room. Not a perfect room. Not a palatial room. But real, human, squeeze-up-and-we'll-make-it-work kind of room.

If that was true in Bethlehem 2,000 years ago, it's true now.

Maybe this Christmas, it's time to stop standing in the fields. Maybe it's time to end the journey. Maybe it's time to knock.

The door is open.

# The Nativity's Open Door
[00:00:00] Matt Edmundson: So welcome to Crowd Church, non-live, live stream. This is where we're kind of live, but we're not really live. So Merry Christmas. Uh, I hope you are having a good start to your festive holiday. My name is Matt, part of the Crowd team here, so it's great to be with you the week before Christmas. Wrapping up, uh, nativity talks.
So lemme take you back to when I was about seven. Years old. There was a tee towel on my head and I was standing on the stage in the school hall. I wasn't wearing my, uh, very fetching Spider-Man jumper, but I'm obviously talking about a school nativity as I'm trying hard not to fidget. Now, I wasn't, uh.
Mary, thankfully, uh, I'd make a very ugly Mary. I wasn't Joseph either. Uh, which was a shame because Joseph actually in Asco Nativity got to give Mary A. Little kiss. I wasn't even the innkeeper with his one big line. I was just a shepherd. One of the many background cast who was shuffling on stage trying to look at the baby in the manger.
And maybe, I don't know, maybe most of you have a very similar memory to me. The t tal, you know, the tinsel halo, um, teachers desperately trying to stop the wise men from having a fight. It just takes me back, you know? And for a time, the nativity play was a rite of passage in this country. And the nativity play.
You know those Christmas cards, the Christmas carols, they all teach us a story about Christmas. But what if that story. Is wrong now. About 10 years ago, the British supermarket chain Sainsbury's released its Christmas advert. It's a bit of a thing in England. You, you try and do, you know a Christmas advert that was better than last year and they did one about the Christmas truce of 1914.
If you're not familiar with it, this is where you had during World War I. British and German soldiers in the trenches on Christmas Eve, and it's based on a true story. And somebody on the German side starts singing Silent night and then the Brits, they join in and the guns, they go quiet. And on Christmas morning, young men who, um, had been killing each other climb out into what they call no man's land, which is the land between these two trenches.
They shake hands, they exchange gifts. And according to Legend and the TV commercial from Sainsbury's, they even play football together, which is in itself a Christmas miracle. And it's also a beautiful story, and this version tells us that the Christmas spirit brings people together and even stops wars.
But the problem is that this version of the story. Is. Because the next day, the killing started again, and in some places it was the very same afternoon. And in fact, the commanders on both sides of the trenches were absolutely furious and issued orders that there was to be no more fraternization with the enemy and doing so could be treated as treason.
And in fact, the following years and the following years, both sides deliberately ordered artillery barrages over Christmas to make sure it never ever happened again. So you can see that understanding the meaning and the context of the story is important. And in this case, out of context, it's a really heartwarming story, isn't it?
But in context, it's actually a really heartbreaking story because the real version is darker, much, much darker. But thankfully that's not the case with the Christmas nativity story. In fact, the full context doesn't make it worse or darker. It actually makes it much, much better. So think about the nativity story that we've grown up with, right?
Let's look at that first. So we have Mary, and we have Joseph. They travel to Bethlehem on a donkey, uh, or if you've been at Frontline because there was no room on the bus either story works now. They arrive late at night, Mary is about to give birth. They go from door to door, kind of knocking on the doors.
Hello, you know, desperate. But everywhere they turn, they hear the same thing. There's basically. No room. And then finally, a grumpy innkeeper takes a little tiny smidgen of pity on them and lets them use his stable. And Jesus then is born surrounded by animals. He's essentially homeless and rejected before he even takes his first breath.
And it's this version in every nativity set, in every Christmas card and in every school play. But does this story look like this in its full context? That's a really interesting question. So in Luke's gospel, chapter two, we read that Mary placed Jesus in a manger because there was no room for him in the inn.
And this is the version that we've grown up with. But the word in, in Greek. Isuma, forgive my very bad Greek, uh, translations, uh, uh, pronunciations maybe, and it actually means guest room. It's not a commercial inn as we would understand it. It's the same word. If you're familiar with the Bible, Luke uses later to describe the upper room where Jesus has the last supper.
And in fact, there's a version of the Bible called the New International Version, which many people use. It changed its translation in 2011, uh, from into guest room and in ancient Syriac and Arabic translations used by Middle Eastern Christians for almost 2000 years. Never was it translated in. It was also, it was always translated as guest room, so it was the guest room that was full and not the inn, like a hotel.
But why does that matter? Well. In a typical Palestinian home in that era, they had two main living areas, right? There was a ray sort of living platform where the family ate and slept and lived, and then there was a sort of a lower section still inside the house where the family sort of brought the animals in at night for two reasons.
One, to keep them secure. And two, to keep the house warmer is like their own version of central heating. And so they had these mangers or feeding troughs, uh, built into the floor between these two areas. Okay, so when Luke says Mary laid Jesus in a manger, any first century reader would've immediately understood that this birth did actually happen in a family home.
Not stable, not a barn. A house and the guest room was full, means it was already occupied by relatives who had arrived earlier for the big census that was happening. So the family, they make room in the main living area for Mary and Joseph. They gave Mary and Joseph the best they had available and think about it, right?
I mean, Joseph is returning to Bethlehem. The city of David, he is a descendant of the King David. And in Middle Eastern culture, to turn away a descendant of David in his ancestral village would've bought real shame on the entire community. It simply wouldn't have happened. And of course, there's this idea isn't there, that a pregnant woman would be rejected and forced.
Into a dirty, stable, kind of staggers the imagination, uh, especially in a culture where hospitality is sacred. Okay, so the village midwife would've come, the women would have helped. This wasn't abandonment. This was actually a community doing. What communities did, and I, I, you know, I grew up sort of picturing Jesus born into a sort of a cool cold rejection, you know, alone, unwanted, but the actual story is different.
It's messy, it's crowded, it's chaotic. In other words, the nativity isn't a story about no room, it's actually a story about making room. And we also see this with the shepherds. Okay? So Luke tells us that on the night Jesus was born, there were shepherds in fields nearby, okay? And they were keeping watch over their flocks and then an angel pierce to them.
Which, you know, that's pretty intense, right? And this is also important context to our story, okay? Because shepherds weren't the romantic figures that we imagined from the Christmas cards. They were the bottom of the social ladder. And many rabbis at the time even considered them unclean, which is, you know, it's not a great thing to be considered.
Um, because they would work with animals and that meant they couldn't keep the ritual purity laws. They couldn't testify in court. They were looked down on, they were distrusted the night shift, sort of nobodies that respectable people avoided. That's who the shepherds were, and yet an angel appears to them, and these are the people that God sort of chooses for the first invitation.
And the angel's words. Well, they're quite extraordinary when you think about it. It says, do not be afraid. I bring you great noise, uh, great noise, great news that will cause people great joy, uh, and not some people, not the right people, but literally. All the people will have this great joy and then heaven itself opens.
You've gotta picture this, right? So not only am I shepherd in a field, not only does an angel appear to me and tell me this incredible news, but then all of a sudden the entire sky opens up and there is a multitude of angels praising God, and the sky is filled with this insane glory and song all. For the shepherds in the field, and it's one of the most extraordinary and incredible events in the Bible.
What everybody saw as an outcast, God puts on the most incredible 3D IMAX, pro Dolby surround sound you've ever heard, right? And it wasn't Mary or Joseph who invites the shepherds. It was God, God almighty, you know? Uh. The invitation came directly from heaven and the shepherds. Well, they went, I mean, why would you not go?
Uh, they didn't wait in the fields hoping someone would come and find them. They didn't assume. The invitation wasn't really for people like them, which would've been easy to do. They went to Bethlehem and they knocked on the door, and when they arrived, the door opened. I can picture them at that door, right?
Breathless stumbling over their words. You are not gonna believe this. The whole sky lit up. Angels, hundreds of them. You know, they told us to come here. They said we'd find a baby in a manger. Is it true? Is he here? They didn't arrive with entitlement. They didn't demand to see the baby. They came with wonder and with news and with encouragement, and then the door opens wide, right?
That's what happens because the nativity. Like has said, right, isn't a story about no room, it's a story about making room. And that night the shepherds met Jesus and it changed their lives when they did and that left, oh, and then they, then they sort of leave the house, don't they? Glorifying and praising God for all they had seen and heard, I mean, all of it, including the hospitality, including the welcome, including the open door.
It's remarkable in so many ways, and it's why I think Christmas still feels quite magical. Now. Earlier I mentioned the school nativity, you know, with the T detail, the shepherds, the background cast, but there's another memory from school that stayed with me over the years. And it's when we used to play football during the break time, right?
And football teams would get picked, uh, during this time. Now, I wasn't sporty back then. I wasn't really fit, and I definitely was not gonna be the person you pick first. Because I was not that great at football. In fact, I was often one of the last. And so I developed a strategy. I would kind of wander away when they were picking, you know, uh, picking the teams and I'd pretend things like I wasn't feeling very well.
Making sure. I was never standing there waiting to be last. 'cause who would want that? Right? It felt clever at the time. I call it preemptive rejection. If I move myself before they can reject me, I can stay in control. But what I didn't realize was. That by never playing. I never actually got better, and it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I was so busy protecting myself from rejection that I guaranteed I'd never actually get picked or belong. And as I got older, I found other solutions to this problem of rejection as well as avoiding situations. I'd maybe I would start lying. I became the king of it. Um, if people thought I was better than I was, more successful, more sorted, more impressive.
There. Maybe just maybe they would accept me. And you know what? Sometimes it worked, but only for a little bit because here's the thing and here's the truth. I'm not friends with any of those people now. Because you can't build real relationships on a lie. You just can't do it. The acceptance was never for the real me.
It was for a version of me that never existed. And sometimes this sort of preemptive rejection happens in our faith as well. So maybe you go to church but you don't know anyone and they don't really know you. So you sit at the back ready to make a quick exit. It avoids, you know, all the complications of nobody speaking to you.
It protects you from that sort of awkward moment of standing alone with your coffee, but it also means you'll always be an outsider. You've pre decided your own rejection, and I think many of us live with this No Room at the end Theology. You know, we've absorbed the rejection version of the nativity so deeply that we apply it to ourselves.
There's no room for people like me. God might tolerate me, but he doesn't really want me. So I'll tell you what, I'll stay on the edges 'cause it's safer out there. Right? But what if the story is just as wrong? As the heartless inkeeper, what if being the person standing outside a door that's open, what does that look like?
So, when I first started, uh, gonna church, I visited a place called North Carolina. Well, I lived in North Carolina. I visited a church called Grace Family Church. And you know what? Some of those people went out of their way to welcome me. I was the guy who was different. I was the guy who was from the outside, from a different country.
I didn't know the songs. I didn't know when to sit. I didn't know when to stand. I didn't even really know what the appropriate wearing. A tie was, should I wear a suit and a tie jeans and a t-shirt? I didn't know, but you know what? They opened their homes to me and they made room for me at their tables and they were pivotal in my coming to faith, and they did that because they understood something about God.
The same thing, the Nativity actually tells us when we read it in context that there is a God who makes room for us. And here's the question that goes a little bit deeper. Why? Why would God make room for us? Because that baby in the manger grew up and he didn't just offer hospitality. Oh no. He, according to.
The Christians, we all say he paid for it. The welcome we'd received isn't free. It cost him everything. Jesus made room for us by taking our place, and the cross is where rejection landed on him and not on us. And because of that, he says something that is utterly extraordinary In John's gospel, he says, Jesus, tell, uh, John 15 tells us, um, I no longer call you servants.
I call you friends. That is remarkable friends, right? Not tolerated guests, not barely welcome visitors, but friends and Jesus said, knock on the door will be open to you. The shepherds didn't wait in the fields. They kind of went and they knocked and the door was open. So maybe you're like the shepherds you've heard or you've had a moment where you realize God is real and awesome things are happening.
Uh, and now you just need to respond. You just need to knock on the door. Or maybe you're a little bit more like the wise men who. Take a much longer journey following the star through the twists and the turns, the doubts and the questions. It's taken time, but you're getting closer and closer every day.
Either way, the invitation is the same and the door is open. And if you're not sure what knocking looks like, start simple. Just tell God, you know what God. I'm curious. Ask him to show you if any of this is real, because I think that's enough that's knocking. Right? Both the shepherds and the wise men went away, changed forever because Jesus, that's what he does, right?
He changes us, and then in the Nativity story, we learn from. Tea towel, nativities and Christmas cards. The cold, stable, the heartless innkeeper, the rejected family, and it makes good drama, but it's not the full story. The real story is messier and more crowded and more human. And maybe just maybe a little bit more hopeful because the real story says when God came into the world.
There was room, not perfect room, not palatial room, but real human squeeze up and will make it work somehow kind of room. And if that was true in Bethlehem 2000 years ago, I think it's true now, and I think there's room for you when you knock on that door. Not because you've earned it, not because you've got it all together, none of us have, but because Jesus paid the price to open.
The door. The door is open. So maybe this Christmas, maybe it's time to stop standing in the fields. Maybe it's time to end the journey and maybe just, maybe it's time to knock. Thanks for being with us. Looking forward to being with you again in a couple of weeks. Make sure you check out the website, www dot Crowd Church, find out all the good stuff that's going on there.
We'd love to meet you. Come connect with us. But that's it from me. That's it from the team. God bless you. Have a very, very merry Christmas. I'll see you next time. Bye for now.

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