"The Gifts That Flow to Christ"

Sermon preached by John C. Hall on January 6, 2008

Text — Matthew 2:11-12

On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure-chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road.

The story of the wise men bringing gifts to the baby Jesus is the fulfillment of a prophecy from Isaiah, chapter 60.  This was written back in the 6^th century B.C.  The idea was that, when the Messiah comes, people — not just Jews in Judea, but people from all over the world — will know it.  And they will bring gifts to this Messiah, this Christ. Christ is simply the Greek word for Messiah.  Gifts will flow to Christ. Christ is a magnet for these gifts. That’s the basic idea.  How do we apply it in our lives?

We also believe that Christ lives in all people, in different ways. In some people, this Christ is very awakened and visible.  In others, Christ is more hidden, or covered up. But just as gifts flowed from the world to Jesus, gifts from the world flow to the Christ in us. The world is always blessing us.  Many gifts come to us if our eyes are open, if we are paying attention. 

And I’ve concluded that that’s what the spiritual life is really about — paying attention, learning to see that gifts that come to us in our own lives. God wants to bless us.  God is blessing us.  God wants us to see that we’re being blessed. And even when we don’t see it, there are still blessings all around. The question is always, are we awake to those blessings? Do we pay attention so we can see them?

This is Epiphay Sunday, the start of the season of Epiphany. Epiphany means “appearance” or “showing.” God shows us things we couldn’t see before.

The example I have comes from Brian Fay — a member of our church who teaches philosophy at Wesleyan and who thinks about these things in a powerful, illuminating way. He wrote about this experience and let me share it with you this morning. I find it powerful and illuminating in part because it involves something so ordinary, something that all of us have done.  Here is Brian’s story.

My friends Bill and Penny, and my then-wife Ingrid and I, went on a walking holiday in Wales. We came to the town of Aberdaron, at the tip of the Lleyn Peninsula that juts out into the Irish Sea. It was early spring, and so, while the sunlight was quite bright in the cloudless sky, the air had a little chill to it. The colors of the landscape still bore the browns and grays of winter. But looking outward from the beach towards the sea, the overwhelming color was blue: the light blue of the sky stretching upwards. The darker, greenish gray-blue of the sea stretched all the way to the horizon. The vast blues enveloped the shock of land, barren of life.

The beach was not particularly long--just a swath of land cut between the low hills … the water slowly lapping the sand and then receding rhythmically. There were vestiges of life—broken shells, brownish seaweed, old logs—strewn about, but the place was completely devoid of human presence or trace.

What dominated the beach were the thousands upon thousands of small stones. At first they appeared an undifferentiated mass of rocks and nothing more, a rabble of stones littered everywhere, all alike, all insignificant, all indistinguishable parts of a heap. They lay in no particular pattern of size or shape; their colors blended into a motley mixture of grayish green. They were silent, mere wastage thrown up by the sea, useless.

The water fell on some of them and not others, but they were all equally indifferent to their fate; to them it made no difference whether they were wet or dry, in sun or shade, pushed in one direction or another. They were nothing but a jumble of mere things scattered about on a lifeless shore.

Penny suggested that we "look for pretty stones." [We were] tired after a day's hike, but we all acquiesced in what seemed a pointless exercise. Pick up one stone, pick up another: it made little difference.

But after a while studying them produced a rather startling effect. I began to notice that there were crude differences among that vast assemblage: stones that were wet, stones that were dry. Some were smooth-edged, others rough; some multi-colored, some monochrome. "Pretty stones"—that was what we were after, and gradually such a search began to make some sense to me.

I found myself drawn to a certain sort of stone, say, those wet, smooth-edged, multi-colored ones that could fit into the palm of my hand. "Look, there's a nice green and white one;"  "See how the purple and gray contrast in that one?” "I've found a blue one!" These and similar remarks could be heard now and again as each of us began to stuff our pockets.

But then something completely unexpected and quite odd happened. Walking along the beach, head down absorbed in exploring the rocks, eyes focused now on this one, now on that, I began to lose, not the capacity to pick out the pretty ones and to leave the others behind, but the desire to do so. For gradually each single stone seemed to have its own, instrinsic beauty.

It was as if the comparative aspect of the search dropped away, and I was left simply studying, even contemplating, individual stones. Each one of them held my attention. I really saw the stones for the first time then. The patterns on their surfaces, the subtle shifts in their colors, their hardness, the veins of minerals running through them: picking any stone at random, I was mesmerized by it.

But there was more to it than this. I felt a kind of fellow feeling for the thing —this stone here in my hand, a thing on the beach, on the earth, in the universe here and now at this moment. I felt in my hand its wholeness, its density, its ability to cohere and to survive, and yet its fragility, its dependency, its relation to everything else: and then nothing but a sense that it was, that I was, and that we were so together...”

That’s Brian’s experience.  What an example of “paying attention.” The story really speaks for itself and doesn’t need any further commentary. 

But I’ll just say this. If it’s possible to experience that “fellow feeling” with a stone on a lifeless beach, how much more “fellow-feeling” must be possible by paying attention to our connection with all the other forms of life around us, including the other “forms of life” who are here with us in this sanctuary, and in this universe, right now.

These, and so much more, are the gifts that flow to the Christ in us.  To realize that is to experience epiphany.