Sermon:  "Spiritual Re-Gifting"
Date:   January 8, 2012
Minister:  The Rev. Susan Bjork

Lesson:  Matthew 2:1-12

 

Guide us, God of wondrous stars, fresh revelations, and new beginnings, so we may follow your lead like the Magi once did to see your face and heed your call to us, as your people and your church.  Amen.

_________________________________________________________

Our culture tells us that “re-gifting” is funny and perhaps a little uncouth… like when you take that gift that was given to you (the one you never really wanted… perhaps a Justin Bieber singing toothbrush like the one I got for Christmas) and you give it to someone else.  Or maybe you just have a little fun with it and take it to a “white elephant” gift exchange.  Personally, I think it is loads of fun and sometimes hilarious to re-gift!

But this week I have been thinking of the ritual of worship, the weekly practice of liturgy itself, as an act of re-gifting, in a more serious and spiritual sense.  Each Sunday, churches across the world seek to re-gift the Good News to all who gather through the reading of scripture, prayer, music, sacraments, visual art, and spoken word.

Nothing said from the pulpit is really ever radically new.  Instead, we preachers seek to re-gift ancient wisdom and theological insight and apply it to modern life.  We take familiar stories and share them once again, along with our own insights, scholarship, and other illustrations, aiming to re-incite wonder, re-inspire the path of discipleship, and reinvigorate hope.

That is the goal every Sunday, including this Epiphany Sunday when we celebrate the joyous revealing of Jesus Christ to all peoples and nations.  The story of the Epiphany is a story of wonder and awe, new revelation and divine self-disclosure, but it is also so familiar that it might be easy to miss the element of surprise and freshness that is central to the experience of Epiphany.

So, for now, let us imagine that this story is new to us and open ourselves to the gifts that the tale of the Magi might bring us.

From the start, Matthew’s gospel sets up an important conflict that will carry through the whole book.  This is the struggle between earthly kingdoms (particularly Roman imperial rule) and the Kingdom of God.  These two sources of power are contrasted throughout the whole story, culminating, of course, in Jesus’ passion and the victory of Easter.

In today’s story, Herod, the Roman-backed ruler of Judea, who used military might to conquer and oppress his own people, embodies earthly kingship.  And it doesn’t take long for us to see that the gospel writer doesn’t think very highly of him. 

Herod’s hypocrisy is especially highlighted and critiqued in this story when he tells the Magi he wants to go and worship this new born king, when really he wants to murder him.  And not long after the wise men depart from the land without returning to his court, he follows through on his true intentions and slaughters the innocent babies of Bethlehem, in hopes of eliminating the threat.

But the Magi, the wise ones, don’t have any interest in Herod’s earthly kingdom.  Instead they seek the Kingdom of God and God’s new born king.  They’ve followed God’s light (a star in the sky) from who knows where all the way to Jerusalem and then on down to Bethlehem to find this special child.

Part of the purpose of Matthew’s Epiphany story is to illustrate that Jesus came for everyone, not just for the Jewish people of Judea.  And the Magi are about as Gentile as you can get.  They were wise men (not actually kings, even though we sing about them as such) and probably part of a priestly class of Persian or Babylonian experts in astrology, dream interpretation, and other non-Judean, non-Jewish things.

And, in this story, it was not Jesus’ own people, but these wise men who were seen as foreigners from another land and culture, who responded to God’s grace, God’s call, and God’s star.  It was these “others” who took a leap of faith and went in search of a king… not a king with earthly power, as it turns out, but a king who would bring about God’s Reign on earth.

And all of the gifts they brought were gifts for a king: precious gold and expensive medicinal resins.  And, by the way, it actually wasn’t until a few centuries later that the symbolic meaning of these three gifts was emphasized by interpreters: gold for royalty, frankincense for divinity, and myrrh for sacrifice.  Matthew seems more intent on emphasizing the direct message that Jesus is King, not Herod, not Rome, not anyone else.  Jesus is God’s Anointed One, the Messiah, the Beloved Son. 

And Jesus, as an infant or the man he would grow up to be, didn’t look much like any king these wise men had seen before.

Commentator Mark Allen Powell states that this story encourages “humble admission that God’s glory may be manifested where we least expect it.  Sometimes people become light for others [like the wise men].  Sometimes they appear blind to the light others can see [like Herod].  But always, the light is there, as God graciously, mysteriously, and defiantly breaks into human lives.”

That is one of the gifts the wise men bring us, even today.  They invite us to take a risk, to follow the light, to seek out the source of our calling and life, and to serve a greater good and work for God’s Kingdom of justice, peace, and compassion, rather than simply upholding an earthly kingdom as Herod tried and ultimately failed to do.

The journey of the wise men that ended as they knelt down in awe and presented gifts to Jesus, reminds us once more that the revelation of God’s Kingdom, was lying there in a manger in Bethlehem, not sitting on a throne in Jerusalem…that God’s Anointed One was not a conquering hero, an earthly king, or a priest in the temple, but a baby, just like we all once were, born to a young peasant woman who, along with her husband, was simply trying to live their calling and seek God’s will.

And this baby grew up to become a man who would gift others and us with an experience of God’s grace, reminding us who we are and whose we are.

Jesus gifted the world with healing.

Jesus gifted the world with lessons on the nature of true compassion and love of God and neighbor. 

Jesus gifted the world with forgiveness and fresh starts. 

Jesus gifted us with an example of how to cross the social divisions that hold us apart and disallow us from building a better world for all. 

Jesus gifted us with the encouragement to always look to the least and the left out and to build one another up rather than tear one another down.

And we are called, as individuals and a community of faith, to re-gift these important spiritual gifts to others in our own world.  We read these familiar stories year after year because we need to be reminded of what we have to pass on from generation to generation. 

Part of discipleship is sharing the gifts we receive with others.  It is passing on the compassion we encountered when we needed it.  It is being the listening ear that someone was to us.  It is reaching out to others as Jesus reached out to his contemporaries and to us.  And it is kneeling in awe and wonder as the wise men once did when we remember the beauty and mystery of God’s revelation of God’s very self to the world.

The Epiphany story calls for a response and that response is discipleship.

And since discipleship is really a journey, as long as life itself, I’d like to leave you this morning with an Epiphany Blessing for Those Who Have Far to Travel by one of my favorite artists, poets, and liturgists, Jan Richardson:

If you could see the journey whole you might never undertake it;

might never dare the first step that propels you from the place

you have known toward the place you know not.

Call it one of the mercies of the road: that we see it only by stages as it

opens before us, as it comes into our keeping step by single step.

There is nothing for it but to go and by our going

take the vows the pilgrim takes:

to be faithful to the next step; to rely on more than the map;

to heed the signposts of intuition and dream;

to follow the star that only you will recognize;

to keep an open eye for the wonders that attend the path;

to press on beyond distractions beyond fatigue

beyond what would tempt you from the way.

There are vows that only you will know; the secret promises for your

particular path and the new ones you will need to make when the road

is revealed by turns you could not have foreseen.

Keep them, break them, make them again: each promise becomes part

of the path; each choice creates the road that will take you to the place

where at last you will kneel to offer the gift most needed - the gift that

only you can give - before turning to go home by another way.

Amen.