Sung Eucharist Sermon by The Dean

Being married to a teacher, there are occasional classroom anecdotes that can feed into sermons. I remember Clare asking her early years children to imagine going to Bethlehem, into the stable, and what they’d like to give Jesus. She had answers ranging from ‘a crown’ to ‘some milk’ and ‘a woolly hat’.

I guess the suggestion of the crown is unsurprising. Our starting point for thinking about gifts is the magi, and their gold, frankincense and myrrh. The significance of each is much rehearsed in the Christian tradition; gold for kingship, frankincense for worship of the divine, myrrh for humanity and mortality, life and death.

But it’s intriguing to contrast those familiar gifts with something more unexpected. The children’s ideas around milk and a woolly hat remind me of a fifteenth century mystery play first performed in Wakefield. Here the shepherds bring unlikely presents to add to those of the wise men: some cherries, a pet bird and a tennis ball.

Yes, a tennis ball! The shepherd says this: ‘Hail! Put forth thy hand. I bring thee but a ball: Have and play thee withal, and go to tennis.’ It’s hard to find allegorical meaning in gifts like these! They are touching, rather useless presents, but in their own way just as eloquent. Here are the words of the shepherd who offers the bird:

Hail sovereign saviour, for thou hast us sought!

Hail, fresh root and flower, that all things hast wrought!

Hail, I kneel and cower. A bird have I brought to my bairn.

When the maker of all, born at Bethlehem, reaches to accept the gift of a Wakefield shepherd, there is no adequate response we can make. God had no need to give of himself like this – The gift of the Christchild is pure, and overwhelming; too great for any response to do justice to it. In that sense we can do no better than the shepherds offering little gifts of fruit, a bird in a cage, or something that bounces.

This is what it comes down to; all our worship, however beautiful, our private and public struggles, our efforts at living faithful lives – they all come down to a few cherries and a tennis ball. All we can do is offer God gifts God doesn’t need, but with which He is well pleased. For God does wish hearts that rejoice in his generosity. God does wish the response of those inspired to journey, like the magi, in search of the Christchild and the new life found in him.

‘Mercifully grant that we, who know you now by faith, may at last behold your glory face to face’. So runs the collect for Epiphany, inviting us to see in the journey of the magi a reflection of our own lives and our journey’s end: ‘Grant that we, who know you now by faith, may at last behold your glory face to face’: there is faith now, but in the end there will be sight. It is the image St Paul uses in the thirteenth chapter of his first epistle to the Corinthians: ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known’. The wise men saw something, dimly, in the mirror of the stars; but they hoped for more; They knew something – in part – but they came to know more fully when they saw the glory of God in the face of the infant Christ.

St Paul speaks of our present experience of Christ as both sight and knowledge, but it is sight dimly, in a mirror; and it is knowledge only in part. The wise men were not wholly without sight or knowledge; they saw their stars, they knew something of what they meant. But they were not satisfied with this; they knew there was more. And the only way to find the ‘more’ was to make the journey. They were ready to stake their lives on what they had dimly seen, and bravely set off to find where their partial knowledge might lead them.

As we know from Matthew’s telling of the story, they did not find what they expected. They expected a king, and so made for the king’s palace. But they found something better, and were in no doubt that their journey had been rewarded. In T.S. Eliot’s well known poem on this subject, his description of the journey itself begins with words borrowed from a sermon by Lancelot Andrewes, sometime Bishop of Winchester: ‘A cold coming we had of it, Just the worst time of the year For a journey, and such a long journey.’ As for the journey’s end, the tone is deliberately different: ‘Not a moment too soon, finding the place. It was, you may say, satisfactory’. It is an understated ending, for Eliot leaves it to us, his readers, to complete the story.

This year, and the years to come, stretch ahead of us. Like the magi, if we allow ourselves to be guided by God, however gloomy we may feel at times about the state of the world, or our own lives, or indeed the church, however tentative and fragmentary we feel our knowledge of God to be, what we will find on our life’s journey will be more and better than we can imagine.

Paul tells us that in the end, we shall fully know the one, who fully knows us. St John, in a comparable passage in his first letter, tells that it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that at our journey’s end, we shall be like him, that is, like Jesus. Whatever the joys and sorrows along the way, God will bring us to fruition and completion, to life in all its fullness, to the kind of relationship he has with his Son. The end of our journey will be more than satisfactory; it will be glorious. But for now, let us offer to God our gifts, as best we can: our equivalent of cherries and a tennis ball; our worship, and our hearts. AMEN