Vicar’s sermon: Epiphany 2025 Matthew 2.1-12

I have only once ridden on a camel. It wasn’t the most comfortable of rides. I was on a Christian Pilgrimage/holiday in Israel and Egypt in the summer of 1986. We were by the pyramids and I paid for a ride: for my pains I found out some years later that a picture of me on said camel had been advertising similar holidays on the back of Christian magazines for many years. Anyhow, to get on a camel you need it to be knelt down. This is fine, except it then needs to get up. Front legs first, then back. The result is a lot of tipping backwards and forwards. And then, when they move, it is hard to look elegant, to keep any sense of balance…unless you are Omar Shariff appearing out of the desert in ‘Lawrence of Arabia’.
Today, we have camels. Or rather, we might assume there were camels. They don’t get a mention in Matthew chapter 2 but there are whole herds of them in our first reading. The magi, (those whose wisdom was so deep people thought they were magic), the ‘kings’ make their entry, and following in their wake, so do we.
This feast of the Epiphany is where ‘the nations’ find their way into the gospel story. Luke had welcomed the Messiah and placed him in his manger throne, low enough for the poor of the earth (the rough and ready shepherds) to kneel before him. Matthew takes us to the king’s court – albeit to the wrong king at first – and the ambassadors of the nations bow down before the Christ, paying him homage.
We project a lot onto the wise men. Note how easily I have slipped into speaking of them as kings or ambassadors. Western artists love them – they love the chance to gild their paintings and to indulge their skills in painting fine clothes, silks and broidery. Little boys, elbowed out of angel costumes by flocks of ‘fairy angels’, get the chance to don a crown and wear a cloak in nativity plays. It wouldn’t be quite the same if we just left them as being ‘star gazers’: white coated PhD students from Joddrel Bank, or astrophysicists working on the ELT (the extremely large telescope) out in Chile. No, we want bling, exotica!
Apparently, the further east you go you will find Christian communities also indulging heir imaginations as to who these wise men were. They are always ‘the other’: people who are different, who look and speak differently from us. So, I read this week, some see them as being from the Uighur people in China. They aren’t kings there but ‘khans’ (as in Genghis Khan and his ilk). Whereas at the end of Matthew’s gospel Jesus gives the Great Commission: to go out into all the world to proclaim the gospel, to baptise and teach the faith – here, the nations come, bringing their gifts – gold, frankincense and myrrh. Two of these three find their Old Testament precedent in Isaiah: ‘All from Sheba shall come, bearing gold and incense’. Myrrh is the odd one out – more of that later. But the mention of Sheba recalls the famous Queen, bringing her gifts to the wise King Solomon: perhaps, with these arrivals, we see here the final fruition of a seed of faith sown way back in a different age, (centuries before Isaiah, a millennia before Christ) And, (here’s a thought), for Isaiah, the salvation that God’s people will experience is not possible or complete without this same salvation being available to all the nations of the earth. These strange people with whom we have so little in common are also shown to be part of God’s plan to reconcile the whole world to Himself: indeed, without them, salvation is incomplete.
Where does that thought take you? There’s a challenge here. A challenge to recognise the image of God in all people. A challenge to recognise the gifts of God in all people. A challenge to realise that our way of expressing faith in Jesus is only one way amongst many. A challenge to recognise that the church of England doesn’t have a monopoly on truth: that we need others’ insights and gifts. Heavens! What hope for the world to be reconciled if Christians cannot find common ground? The Christmas edition of ‘Call the midwife’ included Miss Millicent Higgin’s grandson from India saying ‘we have always been family: we just didn’t know it’. This ‘epiphany’ business is for the whole world.
And the gifts the wise men bring? Christian tradition has wondered a lot about them down the years. We’ll be singing ‘We three Kings’ at the end of our service but with a bit of a nudge you might easily recall it: Gold to ‘crown a king’; Incense ‘owns a deity nigh’; Myrrh – again the hardest – speaking of ‘gathering gloom’, the passion and ‘the stone-cold tomb’. The gifts speak of the one to whom they are given. The Messiah, the King. Jesus: our great high priest who unites heaven and earth. Jesus: the one whose death brings hope of resurrection. But what if we turn these gifts around to speak of our discipleship? How might our discipleship reflect that of these foreign visitors?
Gold: There’s no escaping it. In chapter 6 of this gospel Jesus tells us: 19 ‘Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; 20 but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. 21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. Alongside the pages of scripture, our prayer books and hymns it is our bank statements that speak most honestly about our faith because they reveal our priorities: they show how we spend our money – who we spend it on, how much of it we give away for the work of the kingdom. If you think that what we are doing here at St Mary’s reflects the kingdom’s priorities then you might consider starting to give to the parish or revisiting your giving: I can give you some pointers as to how to do this. Or you might make it a New Year task to reassess how much you give to other charities. Imagine the difference if the ‘wealth of the nations’ were to be directed towards God’s purposes. So you know: The Church of England’s advice is to encourage 5% of our income to be given to the local church and a further 5% to other charities.
Then Frankincense: Simply the smell of incense speaks of worship. An article in the church press the other day highlighted just how, as traditional expressions of faith have declined, society seems to have become ever more open to embracing the non-rational: conspiracy theories, untested health cures, modern day witch craft and spells, druidism and the like. The writer wasn’t surprised: human beings seek meaning, they are innately religious. The test is ‘by their fruits you will know them’. So, how does our faith, our worship, change our action? How does it show itself in the way we live? In our relationships, our parenting. Our service for the community? At the end of the service we say: ‘Go in peace to love and serve the Lord’ – how does our worship in church follow through in service beyond the church doors?
And then the tricky one: myrrh? What are we to do with this? Most commentators tell us that myrrh speaks of Christ’s death: that is true. But might it not also speak of our own? TS Eliot’s ‘Cold coming’ poem ends with one of the wise men asking ‘were we led all that way for birth or for death?’ In his imagination, the way the travellers have come has been hard, uncomfortable in the extreme, and they will return to a world in which (having come face to face with God) they feel ill at ease. I wonder then, whose death is taking place in the poem. I wonder about Matthew’s insistence that they returned to their home ‘by another way’. Christian discipleship must involve death, a renunciation of a self centred way of living, taking up a cross and following. It involves seeing the world differently, becoming a pilgrim in the world rather than a resident: no longer ‘at home’ with a world that does not recognise the Christ but looking forward to something more. No surprise then that this feast of epiphany will be followed next week by that of the baptism of Christ with its symbolism of death and resurrection.
They saw the child, bowed down and worshipped and presented him with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. May we, with the whole people of God through time and in all places find ourselves united in the worship and service of the child born as Lord of all.