January 3, 2021 “Gifts” – Matthew 2:1-12

Matthew 2:1-12
“Gifts”
January 3, 2021 – Epiphany Sunday

Wednesday I drove to the UPS store and dropped off some Christmas gift items to be returned. One was damaged in shipping and a couple others didn’t fit. Like so much of Christmas shopping shifted to on-line mail order this year, the returns are happening the same way. Instead of standing in a line at a customer service counter, you print a label or even just flash a barcode on your phone and away goes that unwanted item.

Mary and Joseph of course had no real options for returning the gifts which showed up at their door on the day we are remembering this week. Those magi from the east brought odd gifts and they came more than a little late for Christmas. Notice that verse 11 says they entered the house where “they saw the child with Mary his mother.” By the time they got there, it was months, if not a couple of years, later than the day the Baby was born in a place that stabled animals.

Humorist Dave Barry assumes the traditional impression given by Nativity scenes and imagines the wise men arrived on Christmas. He explains the strange gifts like this,

Now, gold is always a nice gift, but frankincense and myrrh—at least according to my dictionary—are gum resins. Who gives gum resins to a baby? The answer is: men. The Wise Men, being men, didn’t even START shopping for gifts until the last minute, when most of the stores in the greater Bethlehem area were closed for Christmas Eve. The only place still open was Big Stu’s House of Myrrh.

Since we celebrate Epiphany, which officially is January 6, and read this text every year, I’m fairly sure most of you all know well that our traditional Nativity scenes are misleading in placing the wise men alongside the shepherds. If we pay attention at all to the actual Bible texts, we see plainly that the magi weren’t there on Christmas. The gifts they brought could hardly be called Christmas gifts. There is a lesson in that, a lesson about gifts.

There are other lessons in the magi’s visit. They were, for instance, the last people on earth you might expect to appear in a little Jewish village kneeling down before the infant son of a peasant woman. These were scholars, scientists, if you will, possibly Persian. Most of us scoff at astrology, but study of the movements of the stars was part of the best learning of that time. These were men who not only looked at the skies but read widely. They were familiar even with the holy books of foreigners to the west. The Hebrew scriptures promised a Messiah and the magi were led to interpret the rising of an unusual star as a sign of His birth. God used their learning to draw the magi to Jesus.

It’s especially noteworthy that these were non-Jewish people from foreign lands. Even as a toddler, Jesus began to reach beyond the boundaries of His own Jewishness and to become the Lord of all people, of all nations.

Then there’s much that could be said about the star. Endless speculation has been made about what sort of astronomical phenomenon it might have been and the date it appeared in the sky. We all just heard the news a couple weeks ago about the rare, every-eight-hundred-years conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter they were calling the “Christmas Star.” But the timing doesn’t fit, nor am I convinced by all the comets, supernova stars, etc., etc. that have been proposed. It was a miracle.

And we could talk for quite a while about evil king Herod and his reaction to the news that there was another king born in his country. Herod is a reminder that the coming of Jesus was not all sweetness and light, but the beginning of God’s greatest attack on the forces of evil in our world. And that evil fought back. It reminds us of what to expect when God’s people confront evil in the world today.

This Epiphany, though, I’d like to let’s focus on those gifts the magi brought, unusual gifts opened and presented to an unusual Child in that little house in Bethlehem. Those gifts, in fact, are responsible for most of what we think we know about the magi—that there were three of them, for instance. Nowhere in Scripture are we told there were exactly three wise men, only that they brought three gifts. In fact, earlier tradition varied on the number. The eastern church favored twelve as the number of the magi. A couple of early Christian paintings show two, while one shows four of them. It was in the seventh century that we in the west settled on the tradition that there were three.

It’s also part of the legend of the magi to call them kings. We sang “We Three Kings” this morning. But that is also about the gifts. Early on, the eastern visitors were associated with our text from Isaiah 60:1 today, “Nations will come to your light and kings to the brightness of your dawn” and verse 6 there about camels bearing gold and incense. And in particular the psalm we read, Psalm 72 verse 10, “The kings of Tarshish and of distant shores will bring tribute to him; the kings of Sheba and Seba will present him gifts.” Tarshish was in the west, but Sheba and Seba were in the east, either southern Arabia or possibly northern Africa.

Those three “kings” were given names as early as the fifth century. You may know them: white-haired Melchior who brought gold, Balthasar a middle-aged dark-bearded man who brought myrrh, and Gaspar or Caspar a beardless youth who carried frankincense. There are endless variations on those names and even who brought which gift, as well as various speculations about their countries of origin.

We might assume they were all Persian, since magi is a Persian word, but over the centuries they came to be assigned to other lands, like Melchior to Tarsus where Paul was from, Gaspar to India, and Balthasar to Ethiopia. In any case, Balthasar came to be represented almost always as a black man.

Yet it all goes back to those three gifts. Dave Barry was certainly not the first to wonder about how practical those gifts were. Some have remarked that if these wise men had been wise women, they would have brought something sensible like diapers and extra swaddling clothes. So what was the significance of those odd gifts, precious metal and smelly resins? That question too has given rise to all sorts of fascinating conjectures.

Early on, in the third century, Origen set forth an understanding that has lasted down through Christian history. He wrote that the magi gave Jesus “gold, as to a king; myrrh, as to one who was mortal; and incense, as to a God.”[1] That’s exactly the understanding we sang in the verses of “We Three Kings.”

As Barry says, gold is always nice. It’s a fitting gift for a king, and it is the most practical of the three. One pragmatic notion is that the gold financed the holy family’s escape to and sojourn in Egypt. But gold is a royal gift. Part of the description of king Solomon’s glory is all the gold he amassed there in Israel.

It’s harder to see the point of frankincense. I’ve read one suggestion that it might have been burnt as air freshener there in the stable. But of course, remember, the magi did not go to the stable. They brought their gifts to a house in Bethlehem. More seriously, frankincense can represent the great priesthood of Jesus, the offering up of worship in the temple by the burning of incense. And since incense is offered up to God, this gift also symbolizes the divinity of Christ, that this child is God.

Myrrh is the oddest of the gifts. It was an ingredient in medicines. It might have had some use for Mary as the first century equivalent of a bottle of Triaminic in the medicine cabinet. More often, myrrh was associated with death. On the Cross, Jesus was offered a mixture of wine and myrrh to drink. When Joseph of Arimathea buried Jesus, Nicodemus brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes to anoint His body. Myrrh was a prophetic sign of what was coming, the sacrificial death of Christ. Given the myriad sufferings of people with black skin, it’s perhaps also significant that the carrying of the myrrh, like the carrying of Jesus’ Cross, was assigned to a black man.

Seen as symbols, the gifts of the magi tell us not so much about them, but about the One they came to worship. They honored a Child who was King, who was God, who was the holy Sacrifice for our sins. And He was King, Priest and also Prophet. The gifts foretold His mission on earth as our Savior.

The symbolism of the magi’s gifts turns the whole act of giving them upside down. In the ancient east when gifts were brought to royalty, they were usually reciprocated. The king in turn gave even greater gifts to those who paid him homage. So if you move from the beginning of Matthew to the end, from chapter 2 to chapter 28, you find Jesus saying to His disciples, “Go and make disciples of all nations.” To those countries from which these strange figures came with gifts, Jesus in the end sent out His own gifts of salvation and grace. The Child who received gifts became the greatest Giver of gifts which has ever been.

You and I are here today because of this great story of reciprocal gift giving. The magi brought their gifts to Bethlehem, but they speak to us of how, long after that first Christmas, Jesus Christ gave His gifts to the whole world. That, together with the wise and proper placement of Epiphany well after Christmas in the church calendar, teaches us that Christian giving of gifts is not something to do just once a year.

If you parents would like to give small gifts to children on Epiphany, as in the story I read them for this worship time, that’s fine. But the lesson is for us all. Christian giving is not meant to be limited to one day or one season of the year. It extends out into every day and year of our lives.

Some of us like the wise men bring steady, patient service, going the long distance in the journey of life, day in and day out seeking to follow Christ. Some of you offer leadership like they must have exercised back in their own lands, whether they were actually kings or not. Many of you give to the Lord a diversity of talents and skills, like those magi put their astrology and scholarship to use.

One of the greatest gifts you bring to Christ after Christmas is your continuing worship, coming back again to bow down and worship Him as those men did long, long ago. It’s not a little thing to take time every week for worship. Not everyone does it. That faithful offering of yourself is a gift worthy of a king, because your devotion in worship demonstrates more than anything that Jesus really is your King.

This past year has shown us that the giving of gifts as Christians will be even more important for us in days to come. The social cost of the pandemic and other events is huge. You’ve seen news images of people lined up at food banks. You’ve driven by the tents lined up along streets around town. You’ve heard the stories of those who are counting on unemployment checks to barely scrape together food and rent. If we want to be wise ourselves in 2021, you and I will need to be ready to give gifts, both privately as individuals and corporately as a community and nation in supporting measures which give children, women and men what they need to survive hard months still to come.

The giving of gifts is baked into our Christian story. God’s creation of us is a gift and the salvation He sent us in Jesus is a gift. And right there at the beginning of that story of salvation we find these wise people demonstrating that giving back to God is the proper response, and the best and truest way to receive His gift to us.

That’s what we’re doing at His Table now. You bring bread or crackers from your shelf and pour wine or grape juice into a glass. It’s an inexpensive offering, not really much of a gift. You probably set out and ate richer food and drink over the holidays. Yet Jesus takes these simple gifts from our hands and blesses them and gives them back to us as the Sacrament of His gifts, His own body and blood given for us. We give and He gives even more. Over and over, always. His giving never ends.

You have gifts to bring to Jesus. Each of us, man, woman or child, has something to offer Him. Our time, our talents and our treasures are all gifts to give our Lord and Savior, our King. Yet we always remember that His giving is first and last. Like the magi we wisely kneel down and present our gifts so that we may receive what He wants to give us. Let us do that now and throughout this coming year.

Amen.

[1] Contra Celsum Book 1, Chapter 60.