Sermon 1/2/2022 “Unexpected gifts”
Preacher: Jo J. Belser
Location: Church of the Resurrection, Alexandria, Virginia
Text: Matthew 2:1-12
Day: Epiphany Sunday, Year C
About 12 years ago, on Epiphany Sunday, I became focused on the gifts brought to the very young Christ Jesus: costly gifts, unexpected gifts.
Back then, I told you a few stories about receiving unexpected gifts, such as when an old, holy woman came to my office and handed me a fistful of $100 bills. “God told me to give this to you,” she said, “and now I want you to tell me why.”
I had to confess to the woman that I was to begin seminary the next month and the recent market crash had made me worried about money. That’s how I learned that God really does provide us with everything needed to do what God calls us to do. AND I learned that when people show up with costly, unexpected gifts, God has a mission in mind for us. God seems to always provision us to do his task before revealing what that task will be.
Take, for example, the case of our gospel lesson today. Strangers from afar came to worship the holy child. These strangers hadn’t been visited by an angel to announce Christ’s birth—not exactly. Instead, they had a more understandable miracle: They used their God-given skills, abilities, and experience to recognize that God was coming into our world in a new way, that God was entering his creation.
Having recognized that God was up to something new, they decided to go find this God-child and worship him. The magi were not Jewish. They were astronomers, the Persian or Midian counterparts to the Levite priests of the Jewish people. In other words, the magi were Gentiles, outsiders, others. And what they did was gather up costly gifts and set out in search of Jesus.
Guided by the light of Christ from the star that they recognized as highly significant, they rummaged through their stockpile of treasures to find something suitable for a child who would redefine greatness.
The nature of the gifts themselves were not what was important. Sure, much has been made ever since about the symbolic nature of the gifts the magi presented to Jesus:
- Gold as wealth for a king
- Frankincense and its medicinal qualities for a priest and healer
- Myrrh, for anointing dead bodies and healing live ones, was the most costly of all
But what catches my attention today is the actual cash value of their gifts. How else could the literally poor but holy family have afforded to flee to Egypt for the safety of the child?
That’s the thing about costly, unexpected gifts: They should call us to question what God’s up to, what God is going to ask us to do that needs so much provision. Because God always provides a way to do what calls us to do, and usually God provides that way before he calls. Most often, the gifts come in advance of our Epiphany, our insight, about what God wants us to do.
In our own Church of the Resurrection’s history, we should have known something major would be required of us when two people—neither of them members of this church—died and left us some $500,000. These two benefactors were members of other churches who had seen God’s light in us and gifted us with the wonder of new possibilities.
You know our story: We left our property for “Egypt,” if Virginia Theological Seminary could be called “Egypt.” Our 29 months there while our God-given new church was being built was a time of incredible hospitality—so much generous hospitality that we now have both a new church and the gifts that Mr. Shifflebeam and others gave us now years ago, compounded with interest. It seems like every time we spend some of it, we get what we spent and more back, somehow.
I’d say this means God has something more for us to do before he releases us to a new phase of eternal life. And, if we have discerned accurately, God’s next mission for us is to build community here on the hilltop and beyond in this corner of Northern Virginia called Alexandria’s West End.
