Guilsborough  6th January 2002:  Feast of the Epiphany
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be always acceptable to you, O Lord, our strength and our Redeemer. 
“And when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto him gifts : gold and frankincense and myrrh”
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We are in the home straight.  I confess that as I get older Christmas holds fewer attractions.  It seems to have got out of hand with the publicity starting immediately after Halloween and carols playing on the musak for weeks and weeks. How shop assistants stand it I can’t imagine.  But I have to confess also that I have added my share to the nation’s 3 trillion odd pound credit debt racking my brains to find presents for all the family.  After fighting my way round Tesco’s on Saturday looking for Christmas tree lights I have much sympathy with the parishoners of Penwortham near Preston who have banned Christmas, with all its overtones of materialism, in favour of the Feast of the Nativity.   
But before I get carried away in a cloud of Meldrewism I hope you have a good one and that looking back  at New Year you will agree that all the effort and expense of preparation for the great day was worth it.  
I thought that I’d talk this morning about some of the symbolism of Christmas - the arrival of the Three Wise Men in Bethlehem with their gifts for Jesus is the most exotic event of the Christmas story.  And ever resourceful in my quest for knowledge, I decided first to consult that great cascading fountain of wisdom,  the Internet.   
Into the search engine went the word “Magi” and up they came, a dozen or so websites bearing that name.   High on the list Magi Consulting Inc –  “solutions matching clients needs”.  Now that’s something that might go down well from the pulpit, I thought.   Everyone is looking for answers in their lives.   We need a businesslike approach. As the church advertisement proclaimed,  “For Best Results, follow the Maker’s Instructions”.  But on closer examination I realised that Magi Inc was not really going to be much help in defining things spiritual.
Click again – it’s a bit like rubbing Aladdin’s Lamp – next is a website called “Realm of the Magi”  - described as a  “Dragonlance Fantasy Adventure , Realm of the Magi in real time with on-line role playing”.   No thanks.
What next?   Getting warmer.  The Magi the Artificial Intelligence Super Computer reflecting the three personalities of its inventor, Naoko Akagi: three personalities that are named –you’ve guessed it  Melchior, Balthasar and Caspar.  At that point I decided not to pursue the mysterious personalities of that mechanical marvel either. 
So, failing to get much inspiration from Magi websites I entered the words  “Three Wise Men.” – 
Hey presto! - another dozen or so websites at my command.  How about “Mystical revelations about what goes on in my mind and my head”?  Now that might work for a television evangelist in the wilds of Montana or North Dakota, but is not, I think,  a suitable theme to pursue before a congregation in Cottesbrooke
I confess I lingered over the Smithsonian Institution’s website advertising the fascinating Three Wise Men nutcrackers, made in Germany and  reduced to $119.99. That’s what I call making religion pay.
Even if the genie did not produce much guidance for what I might say to-day,  rubbing that  Aladdin’s Lamp did, however, have one useful outcome. It made me realise what a lot of froth, advertising gimmick, myth and old fashioned confusion surrounds the story.  
But I don’t want to be too critical: for without the story of the Three Wise Men, a large chunk of inspiring Christian art would not exist. One only has to look at the Christmas cards.  There they are, on horseback or camel following the star, through usually romantic scenery, to the manger in Bethlehem, bearing their gifts.  
Actually St. Matthew only talks of  “ Wise Men from the East”. He does not say how many and does not say what their mode of transport was.  It is generally assumed that there were three of  them because Matthew mentions three gifts.  But the number of Wise Men is not mentioned elsewhere in the Bible and some Eastern Religious apparently talk of 12.  
The names of the three Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar did not appear in Christian literature until the middle of the first millennium.  And despite that old favourite  carol “We Three Kings”, no biblical source depicts the Three Wise Men as being royal. 
And did they arrive just after the birth and find Jesus lying in a manager? Some confusion there.  Matthew says :  “And when they were come into the house, they saw the young child with Mary his mother, and fell down, and worshipped him…”  So they came into a house, not a stable and they saw a young child not an infant.
Does  all this contradiction and confusion  matter?  I think not. History is full of colourful events involving well known people that in all probability never occurred.  I doubt whether Alfred burned the cakes, or Canute sat on the shore trying to turn back the waves. Did Queen Victoria really say “We are not amused” or George V make an unrepeatable comment about Bognor.  
It seems to me, then, that rather than dissecting the Christmas story and looking for inconsistencies, it is far more productive that we should look behind the embellishments  and into the heart of the season.  As Christians we know that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, dwelt among us and gave us the promise of eternal life, and a set of teachings to follow here on earth.  The gifts of the Magi, as subsequently interpreted,  were designed to say something about Jesus and his future: symbolising royalty through gold, divinity in frankincense and death in the gift of myrrh. 
We know what we have to do to follow Christ’s teachings: love God with all our heart and love our neighbour as ourselves.  The most important thing in Christian life is to make those main things the main thing.   So, if we make a New Year’s  resolution in a couple of weeks time, we have  a couple of  tried and true ones on the table to follow. 
We don’t have to be on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho to find a neighbour. A cursory glance around  shows that there are a whole lot around us needing our attention: struggling single mothers, men and women  whose lives are dominated by drugs and alcohol; teenagers who drift and cannot find jobs; young people who are in out and out of the prison system and many others who are lonely and desperate for a variety of reasons.  
That’s enough of general exhortation. But I hope you won’t mind if I put a few  cards from a game of Unhappy Families on the table.  
Christine, at 62, and has been through mill: a broken family, drug addiction, mental breakdown and six years in St. Crispin’s Hospital. She’s a nice person, talkative, very talkative, but desperately lonely. Her mother is still around in her 90s. So may be Christine has many more years to go before she meets the Maker. 
What she wants is a woman of her own age to talk to her, listen to her and go out from time to time, to get her out of herself and the dreary block of flats where she lives in Northampton.  She needs a sympathetic ear.
At the other end of the age scale is Gary: 23 and starting to feel old.  He left school in 1997 , and has been in a variety of dead end jobs. On the dole for months, he is now desperate to find a job that will give him a future to look forward to, not stacking shelves in factories in the middle of the night. He needs to train, but has to make money to keep himself afloat. So, no time for training. It’s a vicious circle: no training, no experience equals dead end job.  Gary needs inspiration. 
Or Glenn, 23, just gone back to prison for breaking into a house in a drunken, unhappy, state this very week.  His parents had made it clear they did not want him to spoil their Christmas celebrations.  So he was facing a lonely Christmas.  Drink yourself into oblivion and then get locked up. It’s one way to celebrate the Feast of the Nativity. Glenn needs treatment and love.
Card number four : James. 38. A self described former  “hard man” from the Corby underworld, 16 years in prison. These days he’s lost his self respect.  He takes drugs to blot out  the depression which put him into hospital.  James is worried. He does not want to go to a Council flat in Spring Boroughs – being desperate to get away from drugs and violence.  He knows he is heading for the gutter and does not k now where to turn to avoid it.  James needs love. 
“At this festive season of the year , Mr Scrooge, it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the poor and destitute…..many thousands are in want of common necessaries, hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir”
“Are there no prisons?”,  asked Scrooge
“And the Union Workhouses?  Are they still in operation?  The treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then? 
“They are”,  rejoined the gentleman. 
 
Fast forward to  2005.  
“ Am I not funding the welfare state from my taxes? Are the social services not in operation?  What about the Job Centres and the dole -  are they in full vigour? Is not the YMCA  there to help? 
They are.
“ Oh, I was afraid from what you said that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course”, said Scrooge.  “I am very glad to hear it.”
We all know that the Christmas Carol had a happy ending.  But I have drawn on Charles Dickens’ message only to show how the welfare institutions of the state can divert our attention or be an excuse for inertia.   
I hope that we can, then, think of the bleak midwinter time as the moment when we bring our own gifts to Jesus.   As Christina’s Rosetti’s carol says : “What can I give him, poor as I am?”  Our gifts to Jesus do not have to be expensive just practical - like resolving, for example, to change the course of someone’s life for the better in 2005. 
How about coming back next Advent to report to Him on our efforts and say – to go back to the carol - with more sincerity that I can  now   “Yet what I could I gave him –  I gave him my heart.”      
Holy Spirit think through us till your ideas are our ideas.  - Amen
