Jer.31:7-14
Ps.84
Eph.l:3-6,15-19a
Matt.2:1-12

Christmas 2 ABC
HE 2B 10:00 RCL

Credit: The Living Church 1/4/87 p.21;
Our Church Times 1/4/87 p.l
Previous: 87,93

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BEYOND THE MAGI

Well, it's almost over. Mangers are being mothballed, Kings and Shepherds are being wrapped up and put away. The children of America have lifted their siege, having gotten many of the gifts they were clamoring fer. The schools have had their pageants - though many of the children who acted in those pageants still prize the crowns they wore, and in their memory they may still wish for the gilded boxes they carried in procession, filled with imitation gold and frankincense and myrrh. The moment of their offering is over. As though the Christ Child had finally fallen asleep, the world has stopped telling the story of His birth, and has gotten on with winter, with relief.

Or have we stopped? In spite of ourselves, we really cannot. After all, we celebrate Epiphany, the day of the Wise Men, well after all the parties have died down. And as if this weren't enough out of place, we carry the name of Epiphany through a season of as many as nine long weeks, with the ordinary color of green. Should we be embarrassed? Or is there something about the story of the wise men and their three gifts, that we are in danger of losing during the public celebrations? I think there is, and I think that it is something best revealed in the dreary gray of January.

You probably know that the Epiphany has to do with the showing forth of Jesus as the Messiah, to the Gentiles, by the coming of the wise men to Bethlehem. Jesus was born a Jew and came to Israel which had been prepared to expect the Messiah and understand His mission. But the mission was to the whole world, and the coming of the wise men from the East is a symbol of this world-wide mission.

They are also called Magi, which was the name of a Persian tribe with priestly functions; they were learned in astrology and interpretation of the stars and planets as those bodies moved about the skies. So they were men of wisdom, or Wise Men. Latter tradition calls them Kings and makes them three in number, one black, one yellow and one white, to symbolize the peoples of the world. So much for the history and the tradition. Now, what do we have that we should learn from this?

The gifts that the Wise Men brought to the Child Jesus were gold, frankincense and myrrh. Their meaning is given in the hymn "We three Kings" that we sing later in the service. The gold was to honor the kingship of the Son of David, the Messiah. The incense celebrated His divinity, while the myrrh foreshadowed His sufferings. Like all gifts, these gifts were symbols of a relationship. Each gift silently spoke both of the giver and of the One who received.

In giving gold, the giver did not just say, "You are a King," but "you are my King." The incense, for the one who brought it, was a prayer uniting the giver to God as the smoke rises before the throne of God - in this case the Manger. The myrrh was the visible sign of a sad wisdom, and giving myrrh was an act of compassion by the giver, a way of sharing in the Child's coming suffering, and in foresight taking on the sorrow of the Mother.

And so the myrrh, the frankincense and the gold, become not so much gifts in themselves, as they tell of the way that three pilgrim Kings gave their respect, their worship and their sorrow to the majesty, the Spirit, and the suffering of Christ.

You and I, who probably have no gold, who may not care for incense, and have never tasted myrrh, yet have it within our means to make the precious and ordinary offering which is signified by these things.

Now that the pageants are over, and the whole world is settling again into the practice of life without holidays, the plain green of the next few weeks, if we let it do so, may draw our attention to the routine magnificence, and the magnificent routine, of faith - to the daily task and occasional triumph of doing what the Wise Men did.

We can, without benefit of gold, still give ourselves to the sovereignty, the Kingship, of God - recognizing that Christ presides over every moment of our study, our friendship and our work, and ask God's protection and help to accomplish what we have started for the sake of Christ our Saviour.

Without benefit of incense, we can turn into the praise of God, all the ordinary time between our obligations, with a word or a thought offered in a moment to God. At those times we remember that in praising God, we fill ourselves with the life of the One to Whom we owe life, and we prefer glory to worry, and thus make incense out of nothing. And those praises rise up before the throne of God just as surely as clouds of incense.

Finally, without owning any myrrh, without ever having tasted it, we can offer our sorrows, our sins and our grief. We can refuse to believe that great lie, that failure must be made to look like success, or we will surely die. Better than we do, the Lord knows that myrrh is bitter beyond any sweetening, that no amount of camouflage will make our broken parts less broken, and that the Cross needs no excuse and no cover-up. In this He goes beyond the Wise Men and comes to us, and asks without another word, that we offer our wounds to His, our wrongs to His forgiveness, and our fears to His risen hope. In all this God will make of one more winter a ceremony of peculiar joy.

That is the sort of thing that the season of Epiphany can teach us. But it is a season, and not just a day - for what we have to learn from the Wise Men is not simply a one-shot offering, but an offering again and again, as each new day brings us opportunity. Opportunity there will surely be, at deeper and deeper levels, for acknowledging God's Lordship, for offering Him praise, and for offering our sins, our sorrows and our griefs. That is our place for growing, and our peculiar joy, in he next few weeks.