January 8, 2012 – Matthew 2:1-12
Matthew 2:1-12
The Gift
Epiphany of our Lord [transferred] – January 8, 2012
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
As a person who does – relatively speaking – a lot of funerals,
I can say without hesitation that every single life is significant.
I’ve done about 200 funerals in my time as pastor here,
and when you’re let in on people’s lives in such intimacy as a
funeral allows, you discover that every single life is significant,
and full of meaning and grace,
some of it realized, some of it not.
Fathers and mothers, children and grandparents,
professors and warehousers: every single life is sacred.
Every single life is a gift.
This is something that Christianity insists upon,
and is something that is close to the heart of Christianity.
It insists on the meaningfulness, the importance and the significance of the everyday.
Like I said on Christmas Eve, the Christmas story returns the biblical narrative to
ordinary, domestic life after a long period of stories that dwelt upon
the dealings of nations and kings and empires.
Here, in the Christmas story, we are returned to a very ordinary scene:
a mother, a father, a son.
In this story God is revealed in a vulnerable child.
Here God is revealed in an out of the way backwater.
Here, God will be fully revealed in one who completely identifies himself with,
as he will say, “the least of these”: the poor, the sick, the dying.
Here, God is fully revealed in one who humbles himself to serve and to heal,
in one whose mission is simply to fix that which – and those who – are broken.
My wife Sue and my boy Theo and I went to see the film Hugo over the holidays.
Hugo is an ordinary boy – a very ordinary boy, orphaned, alone, despised – who
discovers that his gift for fixing things – clocks and toys –
can also be used for fixing a human life.
The person he fixes is an elderly film-maker, Georges Melies,
who has lost his purpose in life because he thinks all his films were destroyed in
the Great War and that he has been completely forgotten.
Hugo sees that he is broken because he has no purpose,
tike an old writing robot that Hugo fixes.
Hugo ultimately manages to give back to Georges Melies a sense of purpose,
a sense that his life still means something, is still significant.
Near the end of the film, Georges Melies addresses a large audience that has
assembled to see a retrospective of his films that could be found and salvaged.
Ladies and Gentlemen, he says, I . . . I am standing before you tonight because of one very brave young man, who saw a broken machine and against all odds, he fixed it.
Looking straight at Hugo, he says: It was the kindest magic trick I’ve ever seen.
I recently read an article by the novelist Marilynne Robinson.
She thinks that one of the great reasons that a story – such as Hugo’s, I suppose –
a very ordinary story about ordinary people can be filled with such
significance is because of the influence of the Bible in Western culture.
In the Bible, she says, Moments of the highest import pass among people who are so marginal that conventional history would not have noticed them: aliens, the enslaved, people themselves unaware that that their lives would have consequence.
As she notes, later on in Matthew, in chapter 25, at the very moment when
Jesus is revealed in all his grandeur as the great judge of all,
his will completely identify himself with the “very least”:
I was hungry and you fed me, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was in jail and you visited me . . . Insofar as you did it to the least of these, you did it to me.
As she says, the Bible insists that “the burden of meaning is shared in every life.”
And so the Gospel story this morning is a strange, strange spectacle.
Let us look at it afresh and see how odd it must have seemed to those who first heard it.
The wise have come from afar to offer great gifts – gifts fit for a king! – to an ordinary,
humble child born to lowly peasants in a backwater of the Roman Empire.
And it’s not like what would happen with our Tibetan Buddhist friends who,
looking for the incarnation of a Dalai Lama, would immediately remove the child and have him raised in a palace.
On the contrary, this child will grow to identify himself more and more and more with
“the least of these”: outsiders, tax collectors, women, children, foreigners,
sinners, criminals, the hungry, the executed.
Strange kind of king.
In a theological sense, this story of the magi is an acknowledgement of
the divine being really present in the ordinary and the everyday.
An acknowledgment that we worship one whose life identified with
ordinary people in all their ordinary sufferings and pains and difficulties.
They bring their riches to this one!
Not to Herod. Not to Herod’s son. Not to Caesar. Not to Caesar’s son. But to Jesus.
The magi are wise because they sense the ultimate significance of this humble life,
and so of every life.
We share their wisdom when we too recognize the ultimate significance of this life,
and so of every life, including our own.
The Christian insistence on the ultimate significance of every life is surely rooted here,
in this action of the magi, who bring the best they have to this humble child.
No life, in this view, is unimportant.
No life, in this view, is devoid of meaning and purpose and dignity – including yours.
Like Hugo, who gets a great deal of help from his friend Isabelle,
we may all need some help from our friends in discovering what that purpose is
within God’s larger purpose to bless this world and every person in it.
You may need some help from your friends figuring out exactly what your place is
in this congregation.
And I can confidently say that if you try, you will, because God has brought you here.
But you have sensed that this congregation,
this rather ordinary congregation, in its very humble and ordinary location,
is a place filled with God,
is place to come and bring your gifts and
Lay them here at the feet of the one who completely identifies with all that is ordinary,
with all who are humbled by life, with all who bear heavy crosses.
I mean, why else would he come to us so dependably in
very humble and ordinary bread and wine?
You have brought your gifts here in the last year, in great quantities I hasten to add,
to him – musical ones, dramatic ones, administrative ones, caring ones,
and financial ones to a very significant degree.
You have invested this space and this neighbourhood with your lives and
have uncovered a deep truth about this place and about one another:
God is present here.
In the ordinary sacrifices made, in the forgiveness extended, in the food shared,
in the grace made manifest, in the talk you have cared enough to walk.
You have invested your riches in this place and discovered that Jesus is
alive and well and at work in you.
You have discovered that his Holy Spirit is working through you to
fix and mend one another’s brokenness and a neighbourhood
broken by poverty and hunger and addiction.
You have discovered God at work in you – humble, ordinary you – and
you have discovered Christ alive and well in those you serve.
We have discovered together that at this table,
Christ brings his riches – the riches of love – to us,
riches that fill our life together with ultimate significance, with purpose:
the purpose of love.
At one point in the film Hugo, Hugo says to his friend Isabelle:
Everything has a purpose, even machines. Clocks tell the time, trains take you places. They do what they’re meant to do. . . . Maybe that’s why broken machines made me so sad, they can’t do what they’re meant to do. Maybe it’s the same with people. If you lose your purpose, it’s like you’re broken.
So come. Come and bring your gifts to the one whose purpose is to make all things new,
to mend with mercy what sin has torn, to fix that which is broken.
Then come to the table and receive what he has to give you.
Come and be healed. Come and be fixed.
Then bear this divine treasure into all the ordinary places and all the ordinary people of
this world.
And invest them with the divine.
So together let us say, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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