An abridged version of an undated Christmas Eve sermon (c. 1890)[1]
by the Rt. Rev. Phillips Brooks, D.D.
Late Episcopal Bishop of the Diocese of Massachusetts
edited and delivered by Gregory Kaurin, pastor
for Messiah Lutheran Church, Auburn WA
Christmas Eve, 2009
Be Born in Us Today
“Because there was no room for them in the inn.” –Luke 2:7.
Before I begin, I want to thank Pastor Olson for allowing me to preach, and all of you for your indulgence. Many of my friends know how much I enjoy traveling, and I was delighted that several of my acquaintances moved here from New York to your town, and then thought to invite me. Congratulations are due first to your state for joining the Union last year, and to your town of Slaughter for your very recent incorporation. I must say, for a town of just over 400 people, you have made for yourselves a beautiful sanctuary.
Thank you also to the Neely family for housing me. At the risk of stepping on toes, I have to admit I was disconcerted when I got off the train and heard that the alternative was to stay at the Slaughter House Inn. In any case, allow me to bring greetings in the name of Christ from the Churches in the State of Massachusetts, and blessings to all of you in this frontier mission field.[2]
[Let me begin this Christmas Eve by lifting up the incredible brilliance of our gospel writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.] We believe in the inspiration under whose guidance the [gospel writers,] the evangelists wrote, not least because of their great wisdom of selection…to put the finger accurately upon [Christ’s life] so as to say, “This and this and this were important.”
…As we read their [gospel] stor[ies] we find ourselves attaining a real knowledge of their subject such as no other writers give. The things they tell are just the very things we need to know. Even the slightest items they relate are all significant; the faintest touches bring out effects and meanings in the picture, and help us to catch the idea of Christ and of His mission which the inspiring Spirit intended to convey.
Yes, when the poor carpenter of Nazareth brought his wife up to the inn at Bethlehem, and they were turned away because the house was crowded with more favored guests, and her Son[, instead,] found His birthplace among “the beasts of the stall” and His cradle in a manger, the crowded house and the rejected applicant take their place in the narrative… There was “no room in the inn.”
…[This is] a significant foreshadowing of the future of His gospel, which has with such difficulty found for itself a place in th[is] overcrowded world[, including our world and lives today].
…What is the aspect of our busy and unbelieving world as you stand and look across it but the repeated picture of that Jewish inn in which there was no room for Jesus? …The gospel…is simply crowded out [of our lives]… We cannot find a time when the great deadweight, the mere brute force, of a sheer overcrowded life has been so immense in keeping out the personal presence of the Saviour from the intimacies of our hearts and homes. This, it seems to me, is the form that our irreligious life is more and more assuming—just a great inert overfullness. [Our lives are too full.]
…Thus daily is the scene of Bethlehem repeated. He comes to His own; His own receive Him not. The world is too full for Christ, and the heart is too crowded for its Saviour… We [Christians] must direct what care we have for the advancement of Christ’s kingdom to this special difficulty, and ask in much anxiety, How can a way be made for the Saviour to penetrate this crowded life?
First of all, [those who hear us] must no doubt be made to feel that it will in some way be of advantage to them to receive Christ into the plan and operation of their lives. Is not this the tone of everything to-day: “Whatever can help us, welcome! Whatever cannot help us, stand aside!”? …The great design of life to-day is to make things run light and run quick. Every heavy impediment that does not help the motion must be cast off into space.
But this same great principle which teaches us to tolerate nothing that is useless teaches us by a parallel lesson that nothing really useful must be despised… Once prove to [someone] that your new invention has in it the seeds of new and genuine and profitable use, and you need have no fear. [They] will find room for it, no matter how crowded this great engine-room of a world appears already… Self-interest.
…Now I believe this principle will help us… [Life] is full, very full—…but yet…it never refuses to receive another applicant if it can once be made to feel that it needs Him, that He can be of use… If ever, close and hot about the world’s great heart, that great feeling shall be brought home—the feeling that she needs a Saviour, and that the Christ whose gentle application is at her doors is the only power that can save her from sin and sorrow; if ever humanity shall deeply see what Christ can do for her, then, in spite of all her crowded fullness, the great doors shall find abundant room to be swung back, and Jesus Christ, the long-rejected, shall be welcomed in to take His place of honor and do His saving work.
So that, after all, don’t you see that this plea of over-fullness is a false one? …You tell me, “Yes, I know the importance of the matter [of faith], but I am too busy, my life is too full—too many cares, too many interests. I have not room for [this, too], but yet I know its importance and I feel its use.” That is not true. You do not feel its use. If you did, no matter how full your life was you would find room for [your faith] just as you would for any other new expedient which offered you a help you really needed [or had to have.] …If you saw and felt how Christianity was to help you, your own principles, which spur you on to zeal in every other helpful [or new] enterprise, would turn you into a zealous servant in the work of God. [And you would share it with any other friend that you found could benefit, as you have.]
…Fill a cup with water so that it seems as if it could not hold another drop. Drop a bullet in it and it makes the cup overflow. But you can add an amount of water double the bullet’s bulk and it mingles itself with the other water and clings particle to particle, and the cup will hold all. So, if religion were a mere dead-weight to be dropped in like a bit of lead into the full soul…then you might say, perhaps, that there “was no room”; but…a living principle…[can] pervade and leaven and infuse all the life into which it is cast, to give it all new consistency and strength. Then, there is room; and if you can make [others] feel this, they will make room to receive the gospel.
Who do you suppose were gathered in that village inn where Joseph and Mary and the new-born child were crowded out? …Stout Jewish farmers come up to Bethlehem…a petty governor or two…half a dozen Roman soldiers…a few traveling priests; a rabbi. …Little they cared where the poor [pregnant girl] met her…pain. But do you think if they had dreamed whose the birth was that they excluded; if they had known what the new-born might do for them; if they could have looked down the fields of prophecy and seen what He should do for the world; if they could have seen this Church of ours to-day and have known that it was the Child of the manger whom we have worshiped as the Lord of life—…They would have found room enough if they had known it was the only Saviour of Jew or Gentile that was being born.
And you would find room, dear brother [and sister], for Christ to be born in your over-crowded heart if you really felt that in His birth there lay your only chance of goodness here and joy hereafter.
…[True,] there is in [Jesus] an immensity of grandeur and holiness before which you grow ashamed. And when this perfect ideal, this full divinity of character, comes and demands admission into your life[…?] …What? take the pure Jesus into a dwelling so impure, take …faith…into so small a soul [as mine]? In the humility of shame we feel that Christianity, with its grand motives, its divine means, its stupendous issues, is on too large a scale for our little, trivial, frivolous[, crowded] lives to harbor, and so we shut our doors and cry, “No room! no room!”
…In contrast with that [pretended] littleness…God built [our] lives [with] the great capacity God meant for them to have. “You have cramped your life,” [the story] seems to say. “You have made it small and narrow.” …You have made its rooms so mean that great truths cannot live in them. But never dare to think that this was God’s plan for your life. He drew its architecture on a lordly scale… He built you to be ‘temples of the Holy Ghost.’ There are chambers in your nature, walled up by long obstinancy or rubbished by long neglect, which were shaped and garnished for His…holy occupancy.
…God made [you] roomy; and there is room for His holy Son to find a nativity within… God made your heart and knows it better far than you do. Christ knows whether there be room or not. Once let Him in and He shall find Him room where you have never dreamed of.
…I appeal to any one who ever watched the process. Have you ever seen [someone] thoroughly taken possession of by Christ? Was it not wonderful to watch…the new birth…spreading with each new demand into new grandeur, till what had been so narrow…by nature grew to a broad, sweet, open, glorious new man [or woman] in the power and regeneration of the Lord Jesus? Have you ever seen a little [somebody] rise to a great Christian…? If you have…[then] yield…when Jesus comes and asks to unfold your life and work the same miracle on you.
…No room! And is your heart so full, my brother [and sister]? No room for Jesus, when Jesus is your only hope? …I warn you, if it be so, make Him room. Fling out your choicest treasures [and past-times], if need be.[3]
O my friends, is not this the Christ we need? Is not this the Christ the world needs everywhere? [So,] let Him [be born] to the world [through us]… Let Him come to the young, and He will make them know how [truly free they are in] the world… Let Him come to the old, and the world which has begun to grow stale and weary shall clothe itself anew with radiant freshness… Let this Christ we have described [be born] to the rich, and they grow humble. Let Him come to the poor, and they grow brave. Let Him come to the tempted, and they become strong by a strength which is not their own… Let Him come to the sorrowful, and sorrow itself [remains] sorrow [but…] is filled with solemn and mysterious joy. Let Him come to the dying—yes, let this birth come to death—and it must change death or reveal death to itself as what it is—not an end, but a beginning, not death, but birth itself![4]
Can Christ, the Christ of Christmas [Eve], so [be born] to us? Ah! my dear friends, that is not the question. He has come! He is here now! …The question is not whether he can [be born anew]. He has come! Now, …can we break down or overleap whatever barrier stands between His soul of love and us? Can we sweep off the little petty skepticism which we have nursed, of which perhaps we have been proud, and which has kept us from the great richness of [true] faith which lies waiting? …Can we repent anew the sin which has made this past year tragic and terrible, and take Christ’s forgiveness just as freely as He gives it?[5]
…It is possible on this [night], when Christ is born anew [in] us, for us to be born anew [in] Him. The Christmases come and go, and each one brings us nearer to the day when we shall see Him face to face[6] [, that day when the King of kings salvation brings, and loving hearts shall enthrone him].
[1] ending with excerpts from a Christmas Day sermon near the same time period.
[2] the prior two paragraphs are for a fictional setting. Auburn, WA was incorporated as Slaughter, WA for less than two years, from 1891-1893. As far as I know, Brooks never visited the Pacific Northwest.
[3] Everything prior to this point is an abridgment of Phillips Brooks’ Christmas Eve sermon: from Sermons for the Principle Festivals and Fasts of the Church Year by the Rt. Rev. Phillips Brooks, D.D., Late Bishop of the Diocese of Massachusetts, ed. the Rev. John Cotton Brooks, Seventh Series, New York, E.P. Dutton & Co., ©1895, pp. 72-84.
[4] The Spiritual Man and Other Sermons, “Lessons from the Life of Jesus,” a Christmas Day sermon by Phillips Brooks, Rector of Trinity Church, Boston., London, R.D. Dickinson, ©1895, pp. 85-86.
[5] ibid., pp. 86-87.
[6] ibid., p. 87.
