Introduction
There is very little new under the sun when it comes to Christmas Eve sermons. We know this intellectually. Congregations feel it too. But still, each time we sit down to write, we try to convince ourselves to dream up something completely different. The preaching ego is real. So, if you need some permission this year, it’s okay to return to familiar.
The story is deeply familiar, the sanctuary is full, the candles are waiting, and expectations (spoken or unspoken) can be heavy. On this night, Luke does not ask us to preach the greatest Christmas Eve sermon that has ever been preached. Luke invites us to proclaim, with the angels, that the Savior has come. Sometimes that is more than enough.
Christmas Eve preaching does not need novelty to be faithful. It needs clarity. It needs courage. And it needs joy. “To you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.” That sentence can carry the whole night.
No Room Or No Welcome?
If you are preaching from the NRSVUE, hearers may notice a small but potentially jarring translation choice in verse 7: not “no room at the inn,” but “no place for them in the guest room.” The change in meaning is subtle, but the implications are worth lingering on.
“Inn” has long allowed us to imagine a crowded commercial establishment, an overbooked Bethlehem overwhelmed by census travelers. If you’ve ever traveled late at night and searched desperately for a hotel, you know this version of the story. You pull off the highway, stop at one place, then another, only to be told the same thing again and again: No vacancy. Maybe you’ve even done this by accident in a ski town in Colorado on your way to Los Angeles, discovering far too late that every single room is taken. So you get back in the car and drive another hour, hoping the next town has a bed.
That’s the emotional logic of an inn. The issue is space or availability, maybe money, but not relationship. It’s inconvenient and exhausting, but it isn’t personal. No one is judging you. No one is deciding whether or not you belong. There simply isn’t room.
“Guest room,” however, broadens the picture. Luke’s word καταλύματι (katalumati) can mean a spare room in a home, space typically reserved for family or honored guests. This raises uncomfortable but fruitful questions.
Joseph is descended from the house of David. Bethlehem is not a random town for him. Would he truly have no distant relatives there? No family connections at all? And if there were people who could have made room for them, why didn’t they?
The text does not say. But the translation opens the door to a faithful implication: perhaps Mary and Joseph were not welcomed. Perhaps the scandal of her pregnancy made them improper guests. Perhaps they were tolerated, but only at the margins, outside the main living space, relegated to the place where animals stayed. Not violently rejected, but quietly displaced.
If this is so, then Jesus is not merely born poor, he is born unwanted. Not because there was no space, but because there was no willingness.
That possibility resonates deeply with Luke’s Gospel as a whole. From the beginning, this is a story about God entering places where dignity is withheld, where people are pushed aside, where belonging is conditional.
This interpretation is not new, but it may be new to our hearers. Inn has a way of softening the blow here. And so, if you are using the NRSVUE, explaining the implications of this change could be important.
Shepherds and the Gospel of the Margins
It is telling, then, who responds to the announcement. Not relatives. Not townspeople. Not the respectable or the powerful. It is shepherds, keeping watch over their flocks by night, who say to one another, “Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place” (v. 15).
Shepherds are not romantic figures in Luke’s world. They live outdoors. They work nights. They are unreliable witnesses by social standards. And yet, they are the first evangelists of the incarnation. The first ones to receive the good news. The first to glorify and praise God for what they have heard and seen.
Those who had no room for Mary and Joseph miss the miracle entirely. Those who had no status are drawn straight to it.
This is not incidental. Luke is already preaching his Gospel. The Savior of the world does not wait to be welcomed by the powerful before arriving. God does not require ideal conditions, moral perfection, or social approval. God goes where God is needed most.
Preaching Possibilities
Proclaiming, Not Perfecting
On Christmas Eve, we may feel pressure to resolve everything: darkness and light, grief and joy, heaven and earth. Luke does not resolve it all. The world is still under empire. The shepherds still return to their fields. Mary still treasures and ponders rather than understands.
But something has changed. God is here.
That is the proclamation entrusted to the church on this night. Not a clever turn of phrase. Not a fresh angle for its own sake. But the ancient, disruptive, joyful announcement: Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom God favors.
Sometimes the most faithful Christmas Eve sermon is just hearing the story:
The Savior has come. There was no room, but God came anyway. No one wanted them, but heaven rejoiced. And the ones on the margins were the first to see it.
That is more than enough light to carry us through this night.
Micah Krey 
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