The House of Bread: A story for Christmas Day

As usual, I told a story at our Christmas morning communion service instead of preaching a sermon. Here it is...

Terraced fields near Bethlehem.
https://www.wmf.org/project/ancient-irrigated-terraces-battir

Audio version

There was once a baker who lived in Bethlehem. It was a good place to be a baker, because Bethlehem was surrounded by terraced fields stretching down the high hill on which it stood, which grew good wheat and barley. The grain made fine flour for baking into bread. The town’s name even reflected that. People said that Bethlehem, in Hebrew Beit Lehem, meant “The House of Bread”.

The baker had done well for himself in this House of Bread. He was married and had two young daughters, Ruth and Naomi, and he’d been able to build a good house for them all to live in. At first it was just one room, like most of the houses in Bethlehem, with a section at one end down a few steps where the animals were brought in at night, with a feeding trough on the raised platform. But as the baker prospered, he was able to build a store room for his jars of flour, and a guest room for visitors, and even a shelter on the roof where the family could sleep out on hot summer nights.

All was well until the Emperor Augustus, in far-off Rome, decided that everyone in his empire should return to the place where their families came from to be counted, and taxed…

The baker and his wife didn’t have to go anywhere. Their families had always lived in Bethlehem. But soon the town was full of those who’d moved elsewhere, coming back home, and needing somewhere to stay, relatives who would put them up. Soon there were aunts in the guest room, uncles in the store room, cousins in the roof shelter. Then the baker’s wife’s mother’s nephew turned up with his family. The only place left to put them was in the baker’s family room. Still, never mind, said the baker’s wife. “If we all budge up, I’m sure we’ll fit in. We can sleep down at the animals’ end of the room – it’s a bit smelly, but it’ll be warm!”  

“Alright” said the baker, “but really, after this, we have no more room, and even if we had room,” he whispered to his wife, “we have no food left to feed all these people. I looked in the store room just now, and I am down to the last handful of flour in the last jar. There isn’t even enough to feed our guests, never mind to have any to sell to the people of Bethlehem. I don’t know what we’ll do when that is gone, because I know that all of Bethlehem is the same!”

“God will provide”, said his wife, “He has told us we should welcome people. And we must never forget, after all, why we gave our children the names we did.”

The children pricked up their ears. “Why did you give us these names? Why did you call us Ruth and Naomi, mother?”

“Dear me! Have I never told you the story?”

“No – tell it now”

“Well, I suppose it is bed-time, so perhaps I should!

Many years ago, in the time of your great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, grandparents…a woman lived in Bethlehem called Naomi”

“That’s me!” said the older girl.

“That’s right! She lived here with her husband and two young sons. But there was a famine. The food ran out. Naomi and her family had to leave or they’d starve. But they had to go all the way to the land of Moab before they found food.”

“Moab – but they are our enemies!”, said the girls.

“It’s true, we have often fought with them, but on this occasion they were kind. They welcomed Naomi and her family, and there her two boys grew up, and, in time, married Moabite girls. But then tragedy struck again. Her husband and two sons got very sick and they died. Naomi was left all alone in a foreign land. She decided to go home to Bethlehem where, surely, her own family would take her in – it was the custom of their people that they should!”

“So Naomi said goodbye to her son’s wives – they could marry again in Moab. But one of them, called Ruth…”

“That’s me” said the younger girl.

“…Ruth insisted on coming with Naomi. She said ‘where you go, I will go. Your people will be my people and your God my God’.

So, off they went together, but when they got to Bethlehem, no one would take them in or look after them. They had no money, no food, no friends. Fortunately, it was the time of the barley harvest, and Naomi remembered another custom of her people – she hoped this one hadn’t been forgotten like the law of hospitality!  

‘Go out into the fields,’ she said to Ruth. ‘It is a law here that farmers mustn’t cut the crops right up to the edge of the fields or go back for what they have missed. So you should be able to gather a little barley for us to eat.’

So that’s what Ruth did. She worked all day long in the hot sunshine, and at the end of the day had gathered enough to feed them for a day or two. But she hadn’t realised that the owner of the fields, a man called Boaz, had come by and had noticed her working hard. He’d asked his farmhands who she was, and they had told him that she was Ruth, a Moabite scrounger, who had come back with a woman called Naomi, who claimed she was from round here. They were dismissive, but Boaz saw how hard she worked, and how kind she was, and realised how much she must love her mother-in-law. He called her over and gave her a whole bag full of grain to take home, and…to cut a long story short… he very soon fell in love with her, and she with him, and he married her…!”

“Ahh! That’s a lovely story, “said the girls.

“But it’s not just a lovely story,” said their mother. “It is also an important story, because Ruth and Boaz had a son, called Obed, and when Obed grew up he had a son called Jesse, and when Jesse grew up, he had lots of sons, and the youngest of them was a little shepherd boy who became a king.”

“Not David, King David, the one who killed Goliath!” said the girls.

“The very same!  But he wouldn’t have been born if Ruth hadn’t been kind and generous to Naomi, and Boaz hadn’t been kind and generous to Ruth and Naomi! So when we welcome people we never know what will come of it. We might be welcoming a king!”

“It is a wonderful story,” said the baker, “ but it doesn’t change the fact that we have no room for anyone else – so the next time someone knocks at our door, the answer has to be “no!”.

And just at that moment – you’ve guessed it – there was a knock at the door.

The baker’s wife went to the door, and she opened it. Outside was a worried looking man, and a very tired, very pregnant woman. “Please could you help us? We have nowhere to stay,” said the man “and my wife, Mary, is about to have a child. Please can we stay with you!”

From behind the door the baker mouthed “NO!” silently at his wife, shaking his head. “Yes! Of course you can come in!” said the baker’s wife. “It’s very crowded, and you’ll have to sleep next to the animals, like us, but our home is your home, and you’re welcome! And in they came. And everyone budged up a bit more. And there was just enough room. And it was not a moment too soon, because that very night the baby was born. But it was now so crowded in that little house, that the only place to put him where he wouldn’t be trodden on was in the manger, the animals’ feeding trough.

What a night it was! The baker’s children should have been asleep, of course, but who could sleep with all the excitement of a new baby. So they were still wide awake when a bunch of shepherds came in from the neighbouring fields, saying they’d heard from angels in the sky that the child had been born. They’d been sent to find him.

“Who is this child” said Ruth and Naomi “that all this fuss should be made of him?”

“The angels told us he was the Messiah,” said the shepherds, “the great leader God said he would send us.”

“What? Like King David?”

“Hmm,” said one of the shepherds. “The way the angels talked about him, it sounded as if he’d be an even greater king than David but if God sent him to start life in a manger, maybe he isn’t going to be the kind of king who rules from a throne with a golden crown on his head, but someone who rules in our hearts, and shows God’s love for everyone, however humble and ordinary they are. And that’s the best kind of king, I reckon.”

The baker’s wife looked at the baker, and smiled. Just as she’d said, you never knew who you might be welcoming when you took in a stranger!

Eventually the shepherds left, and everyone fell asleep, except the baker, because, for all the wonderful things that had happened, he still knew that in the morning, he’d have nothing to feed his guests, or the rest of Bethlehem. What was he going to do?

As dawn broke, he decided that the only thing he could do was to do what he always did, get up and start baking. He might only have a handful of flour, but it would at least make bread for this new mother and her husband, who needed it most of all.

So he crept into the storeroom, picking his way over the sleeping uncles. He lifted the lid of the flour jar. Sure enough, there was just a handful left. He scooped it out, and went out into the courtyard to mix it. He fired up the bread oven till it was good and hot, and shaped the dough into a flat circle, then put it in the oven to bake. While it baked he went back to the storeroom to put the lid back on the jar. As he did so, he peered inside. How strange! There was still a handful of flour left in the bottom. “I’m sure I emptied it!” He thought to himself. “Still, if there’s some more, I might get another flatbread out of it.” So he scooped that out, and mixed it and put it in to bake.

Back he went to the store room. And – what was this? – there was still a handful left. Again he scooped it out, making sure he’d got every last speck this time, and went to mix it up and bake it. But when he came back, there was yet another handful there. To and fro he went, again and again, but though he emptied the jar every time, there was always more when he came back.

Soon he’d made enough bread to feed his household, then enough to feed his whole street, then enough to feed the whole of Bethlehem. And so it continued, until the little family left Bethlehem for the next part of their journey, the next part of their story.

And it’s said that when that baby grew up there were other times when people found themselves miraculously fed on bread, and fishes, and even wine, when there should have been none.  And still today, people find that they when they welcome others and share their food - not just bread, but also the food of love, hope, joy and peace -  however little they feel they have, somehow it always turns out that there’s enough and more to spare, for themselves and for everyone else as well.

Amen 

Acknowledgements: There's no such thing as a "new" story, and this, like all stories contains recycled bits and pieces pinched from all over the place. I am indebted to Paula Gooder for some very helpful insights into the likely background to Luke's statement that there was "no room in the inn". The ever renewing handful of flour is drawn from the story of Elijah and the Widow of Zarephath. (1 Kings 17). The story of Ruth and Naomi can be found in the book of Ruth.

Excavations at the traditional site of the Shepherd's Fields, near Bethlehem. Taken on our trip to Israel earlier this year.

A reminder of the significance of Bethlehem before the birth of Jesus. I couldn't resist taking this photo, just opposite the entrance to the "Shepherds' Fields".