No Velvet Rope

No Velvet Rope Luke 2: 1-14 During the late 1970’s, when disco music’s sun shone at its biggest and brightest, an exclusive dance club made the scene in New York City. Named Studio 54, the club hit upon the marketing genius of having world-famous celebrities mingle elbow to elbow with everyday folk who were lucky enough—or interesting enough—or attractive enough--to gain admission. Celebrity regulars in the Studio 54 crowd included Bianca Jagger, Liza Minnelli, Andy Warhol and Truman Capote. Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Jackson sometimes made the scene. But the nightly scene outside the club was as significant as inside. Hopefuls massed on the sidewalk, jockeying to get in, or at least to catch a glimpse of arriving celebrities. Clubowner Steve Rubell would perch atop a fire hydrant, scan the crowd, and hand-pick who would be waved past the club’s velvet rope and who would be left on the outside looking in. One old youtube documentary I watched follows two women from Kansas City, a homemaker and her friend who is a “Mom and Pop” restaurant owner, as they wait in the hopeful crowd outside the club.1 It is clear from their attire and their actions that the big city scene is new to them. The homemaker reassures the restauranteur, “They’ll never let me in, I’m a nobody, but you’ll be certain to get in, honey—as soon as you talk to the manager, they’ll let you in in a minute.” And the restaurant owner replies confidently, “That Dale Carnegie Course will come in real handy, won’t it?” But Dale Carnegie or no, the conversation with the manager goes nowhere. Humiliated, 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RW0FM9ELhAk the restaurant owner runs away in tears wailing, “They didn’t let us in!” She had been so sure she’d be seen as good enough. In Kansas City she’s somebody, with her small restaurant and her success seminar diploma…but to the glitterati of Studio 54, she’s nothing more than nobody. You’d better be somebody or know somebody…be connected or be one of the beautiful people….or the velvet rope stays up for you. Now Studio 54’s famed velvet rope may be among the most celebrated, but there are certainly other velvet ropes in this world, and we recognize them when we encounter them. I think of the privileged donor dinners universally hosted on behalf of politicians. I know political campaigns need to raise funds somehow, but at $40,000 a plate, you and I aren’t going to get into that dinner—if you ain’t got the do-re-mi, to quote the Woody Guthrie song, there’s no seat at the power broker’s table for you. The velvet rope stays up. And while most of us might not care overmuch about being excluded from a trendy dance club or from a donor dinner, one of the most painful places that people feel they encounter a velvet rope is in the church. It is an often-invisible velvet rope—most church members would insist that it is not there, saying things like “Everyone is welcome here!” But for all manner of reasons, people don’t always feel welcome in the church, or the welcome feels very conditional, as though they are second-class citizens. Years ago, I was asked by a school teacher if I could meet with one of her students about whom she was very concerned. After a few minutes of conversation, the hurt came to the surface. The young man was a gay teenager from a quite conservative denomination. He said, “I go to my parents’ church every week and every week I have to sit and hear what they say about….me…and people like me. And how we’re going to hell. I don’t want to go to hell!” Does that sound like a church where everyone receives the same welcome? The teenager was a child of that church, a member of that church—but he felt the velvet rope’s presence every Sunday—notice what he said: My parents’ church. Others describe their church experience as feeling judged by parishioners, by preachers, by themselves, by GOD, for some lingering hurt or shame in their lives. Perhaps they feel guilty for something that has happened to them over which they had little or no control. For whatever reason, they hear the message, spoken or unspoken: You’ve been weighed in the balance and found wanting. You’re damaged goods. There’s something wrong with you. That’s not a velvet rope, that’s velvet razor wire. In short, velvet ropes are symbols of “exclusivity”— and you can’t have exclusivity without intentional exclusion. In the examples we have heard, you might be excluded because you aren’t beautiful enough or fabulous enough, because you aren’t wealthy enough, or because you aren’t religiously acceptable enough. I’m betting most of us have felt on the wrong side of a velvet rope at some point and it hurts because the message is—you are an outsider. Not an insider. At best, you are insignificant and at worst—you are unacceptable. All of this is why the Christmas story is such amazing, wonderful news! This story, in its elegant simplicity, reminds and reassures us that God has no velvet rope. No exclusion! No barriers! Only love without limit! Do you think it is by coincidence that the very first recipients of the birth announcement for Jesus Christ—Emmanuel—God with us—are shepherds? Perhaps you’ve never thought of it in this way. Perhaps when you hear “shepherds,” you think of rosy-cheeked youngsters in bathrobes at the church Christmas pageant. But in first century Israel, shepherds would have been on the wrong side, on the OUTSIDE of every velvet rope they encountered. Certainly, shepherds were not the beautiful people of studio 54. Think about it: have you ever welcomed a group of girl scouts or boy scouts home from just a weekend camping trip? Every garment smells like sour wood smoke. Clothes are dirty, hair is matted, they haven’t applied deodorant, it’s as if they’ve applied—odorant. If you come home from camping clean, you haven’t camped. Imagine, therefore, shepherds, not returning from a short weekend camping trip but abiding in the fields, living among, wrangling and tending wet sheep. Not, I assure you, the beautiful people. Nor would shepherds pass the privilege test of a fat cat donor dinner—shepherds were among the poorest of the poorest of the poorest of the poor. Most often the youngest sons of peasant families, they had no land, because that went to the older sons. They had little education, and they earned their wages living out in the open as nomads and tending other people’s sheep. The closest analogy to these shepherds we might have in our culture would be migrant farm workers or carnival roadies—dirt poor, often lacking a permanent home, moving from job to job. Shepherds were also constantly under suspicion for dishonesty—falsely or not. A sheep disappears from time to time. Did a wild animal get it? Or did the shepherds line their pockets by making a little sale on the side? Here’s one of history’s truisms--when things go missing, “the help” always gets blamed, often without any direct evidence. So, you get the point: dirty, poor, often suspected of dishonesty. The shepherds might not have known what a velvet rope was, but they knew well enough what one felt like. And then there was the temple—the house of God. And for shepherds, a place of exclusion. Shepherds were as unwelcome as any leper or any gentile because they were unclean, not in the sense of being physically dirty but in the sense of being ritually impure. They had daily contact with the sheep. There’s not a pleasant way to say that lambs don’t simply show up under cabbage leaves soft and fluffy, so shepherds knew their sheep inside and out, so to speak. They came into contact with the carcasses of dead sheep. So, they were deemed unclean and therefore unwelcome in the inner courts of the temple, and I imagine it was no less painful in that day than this to be considered UNFIT TO ENTER GOD’SPRESENCE—UNCLEAN. You know the problem with being named unclean and unworthy? You start to believe it is true. So, you get the point—every velvet rope known to humanity would have made these people the very last people on earth who would expect an in-person angelic visitation to announce—UNTO YOU…UNTO YOU…UNTO YOU, personally and unconditionally, is born a savior. How utterly fitting that a messiah who would base his entire ministry upon outreach to the lowly, the lonely, the lost, the hurting, the hopeless, the tax collectors, the sinners—would be born in a place where there is no VIP entourage and velvet rope and that he would first be witnessed and worshipped by the ultimate outsiders. It is God’s way of saying—that which society has named unworthy, those whom the world calls outcast, I call my own, my beloved, my children. That’s the message of the manger. And the message to each one of us tonight—neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers nor height nor depth nor anything else in all of creation…nor anything in you…will be able to separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

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