The St. Andrew's Pulpit

Rev. Ross Smillie

January 2, 2011 - Epiphany Sunday

Wise Gifts

The wise men entered the house where the child and his mother, Mary, were, and they fell down before him and worshiped him. Then they opened their treasure chests and gave him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. - Matthew 2:1-21

I remember reading some reflections by a wise and experienced minister. He wrote of the experience of most pastors, that we can never really seem to get a lot of concrete stuff done, because we keep getting interrupted: a phone call here, visitor popping by to say hello and talk about a family problem, an unexpected death, it seems that you cannot plan a day without having something disrupt it. And this wise old minister said that the most important learning of his ministry was that his ministry was not in the things he planned; his ministry was precisely in the interruptions.

God can be quite aggravating sometimes. And I think the most aggravating thing about him is that God keeps interrupting. Just when I think I've got it all figured out, and have got my life nicely planned, God steps into it and says, Uh - Uh I've got other plans for you. You think too big my boy. Stop dreaming about saving the world, and here, burb this baby for me.

Did you ever think about these wise men, these magi, who left their homes, their comfortable jobs, and travelled hundreds of miles across some of the most barren landscape this planet has to offer because of a star? It must have taken them weeks! And cost them a lot of money to boot! And why? Perhaps only because they knew that sometimes the most important things in this life come not by our plans but because we are open to being interrupted. Quite an interruption to journey across a desert on a camel, but an interruption nevertheless. And what happened to the magi after this magnificent interruption? The story tells us nothing except that they went home a different way. A different way.

Perhaps that is what it means to be wise, to be open to the possibilities to meet Christ, even when it is inconvenient, and to be open to being transformed by that encounter, so that we can never walk quite the same path again. TO be wise perhaps is to be open to something new. As Herbert O'Driscoll writes:

To be truly wise is to search for what is coming to birth in an age of death, to search for what is beginning anew in an age when much seems to be ending. TO do this [disturbs] people. It disturbed] Herod and indeed the whole of Jerusalem. Why? - Because people easily become [used] to death. They regard as normal many attitudes which are abnormal and spiritually malignant. It was normal in that long-ago world to see life as brutal and oppressive, to feel that history was static and imprisoned, just as it is normal to see our age as the prisoner of dark giants which stalk our consciousness and fill us with despair. In such a time it takes wise men and women to seek the child, the new life, the fresh possibility which God labours to bring to birth in the womb of the world.

Our month of January is named after the Roman god Janus. Janus was the god of gates and had two faces, one looking back the other looking forward. There is a rather profound symbolism to that. For New Years are always times for both looking back and looking forward. There is a sense both of anticipation and loss in the air. We remember the old as we look to the new.

But sometimes the old and the new are not easy to recognize. The magi encountered a smiling friendly character named Herod; he is interested in the new, but only because he is afraid of it and wants to stamp it out. He deceives himself with the notion that he is the Christ, and that any threat to him is a threat to God's way. In fact, he is enraged by the disclosure that it is not to his family and in his city that the new king will be born, but in the provincial backwater of Bethlehem.

And so too it is for us, if we want to be wise, we must look to the unexpected and desolate places of our lives for the new birth: to "the employee we always take for granted, the child we think of as slow, the marriage partner we find dull", the friend who seems to walk to the beat of a different drummer. Those are the Bethlehems we must look to for the promise to be fulfilled.

We will find then, that the deserts we have cross are those shut up in the poverty of our own imaginations and the wilderness of our own egos. When we have found our way through those treacherous climes, then we will be open, in each moment of our existence, to encounter the Christ child and to offer him our gifts. When we have learned this, then we will truly be wise. As Herbert O'Driscoll suggests:

True wisdom sees life as a search for God, a search for the divine who waits to be born in each of us. And when we find him, and are found by him, we lay ourselves at the feet of God as a gift, because the offering of ourselves is the only real gift within our giving. (A Certain Life, p. 21)