Epiphany Carols: Gifts and Anxiety
Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
We had a total fail this Christmas. Didn’t send Christmas cards, except to the PCC. Didn’t send gifts, except to the Churchwardens. Somewhere, between absences at work, more pandemic drama, Rhiannon setting up a business, services, talks and sermons, the bells chimed for Christmas and the few things we had organised were gathering dust in a sad ghost-of-Christmas-past pile in the bedroom. So well done PCC, you got more of a Christmas greeting than my parents. I did get a pair of candlesticks for Nick that look like trees. Sadly they arrived broken. Probably because of Brexit. They’re still sitting in our dining room, where actually they look rather nice.
Gifts is the one aspect of Christmas I dread. I’m not very good at giving or receiving them. I’m just awkward with gifts. Epiphany is all about gifts. The main event is the wisemen with their mixed bag of Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh. There’s no vowels in the word Myrrh – either in how you spell it or say it, and it’s almost impossible to remember whether it has two rs or two hs. It’s very difficult to say it without sounding like you’re from Northern Ireland. Myrhh.
One wonders how the holy family felt at this intrusion. One of the difficulties I have with gifts is knowing how much to spend. Do you spend £10 or £100? Are you valuing your friendship? What if you spend ten and they a hundred? How do you respond to the stranger who turns up on Boxing Day with a box of gold? There’s an old Scandanavian proverb that ‘It is better not to bring an offering than to spend too much on it’ But also that ‘The miser always fears presents’. I fear presents but it’s just part of a horror of mine over social anxiety. Will I be appropriately enthusiastic? Should I have done better myself? The answer – usually yes. Time to take myself off to hide in my Father’s house.
In all cultures gifts demand reciprocation – often to the level of honour – in some cases as taboo. Anthropologists tell stories of families and villages bankrupting themselves to return hospitality or match gifts in order to exceed what has been given. Like a giant game of poker meets keeping up with the Joneses.
The wisemen offer gifts appropriate to a king. Gold, frankincense, myrrh. Jesus reciprocates with his own gifts of kingship, priesthood and sacrifice. The hints begin immediately with the prophetic words of Simeon at the Temple. But we see this also at the baptism. Christ is proclaimed a king by the wisemen, but is himself baptized by John, showing the humility proper to a king. And as the Christmas Gospel proclaims him Emmanuel, ‘God with us’, we see the value of his gift as, to quote St Paul, Christ took the form of a slave, humbling himself even to the point of death’. Truly bankrupting himself with this gift.
So the question for us is how we respond to the gift? Each of us will feel this as a different sort of gift. The gift of creation; The gift of art and music and all that makes life meaningful and beautiful; The gift of knowing you are loved; The gift of eternity, waiting for you.
The gift of everything is a hard gift to emulate; We can look forward to Lent for an opportunity to reflect on what it means to give more in discipline and charity. But in the last few years we have perhaps also learned that most of the gifts we receive are only loaned to us anyway, except for the one surpassing gift we receive from God; So it may well be that it is as well for us to bankrupt ourselves in giving, if we are to follow in the footsteps of Christ. If we look within ourselves, we will discover we have already received more than all we have to give. Amen.