Gifts, givers and the cost

I am hoping to post many of the sermons preached at Ridley Hall this term, so here is the first Thursday Communion sermon, preached by our Director of Pastoral Studies, Ali Walton:

Matthew 2:1-12 The Gifts of the Wise Men

Introduction

Steve and I had to change our plans for Christmas because of my shoulder injury. We had to cancel our trip to my brother in S Wales because of my shoulder – I wasn’t able to sit in the car that long and it would have been a lot of driving for Steve on his own.

However, that left us with the problem of what we were going to do for presents for them all.

I spoke to my brother on the phone who gave me a list of suggestions of what to get for him, my sister-in-law, nephew and 2 nieces. It took me 40 minutes on Amazon to find and buy everything and I was able to have everything delivered direct to them. It was easy, straightforward, and required very little thought or effort. It was just what we needed at the time.

The story of wise men visiting Jesus and their giving of gifts is a similar story – but these are gifts with hidden costs both to the givers and the recipients.

The Givers

The word that Matthew uses for ‘Wise men’ is the Greek word from which we get ‘Magi’ – those who possess secret wisdom – astronomers/astrologers – two were inseparable in that culture. They were men who gained spiritual insight into world affairs from their observations of planets and stars.

They were prompted by what a ‘star’ they saw in the sky to go on journey to seek out new born king. The ‘star’ was probably a natural phenomenon. Possibly:

• conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn (that happened 3 times in year 7-6 BC)
• a comet (Halley’s comet passed over in 12-11 BC)
• a supernova – an exploding star

Whatever the star was these men associated it with the Jewish expectation of the coming king and so they set off to find this king.

They did the obvious. They went to the capital city of Israel – to Jerusalem and to the King’s palace,  to see King Herod to enquire where the child was who was born king of the Jews.

In doing that they stirred up a hornets nest. Herod was paranoid, with a reputation for cruelty and violence. He was threatened by the thought of a rival king. That made the whole of Jerusalem afraid. They knew he’d already killed his favourite wife and two sons from feeling  threatened. What would he do in response to this new threat?

He couldn’t just send wise men on their way. He needed to know where this child king was so he could remove the threat.

So he pretended to be helpful, using the excuse that he too wanted to pay homage to this king. He gathered together the religious leaders who would know where to seek this long expected Christ. With this we see emerging a strand that runs through so much of Matthew: the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy about the life and death of the Messiah. In this instance the prophecies showed that Bethlehem was the birth place of the child born king of the Jews.

The star continued to lead the wise men to Bethlehem, to the place where Jesus was.

Matthew describes their reaction on seeing Jesus emphatically. He says, literally, ‘they rejoiced with a great joy exceedingly’. The depth of their joy is typical in the context of Messianic fulfilment.

This deep joy prompts the wise men to bow down and pay homage to Jesus. They knelt on the ground, leaning forward with their foreheads touching the ground. The homage that they gave to Jesus was that due to a king.

The wise men themselves may not have recognised Jesus’ divinity but Matthew intends his readers to understand that the wise men worshipped better than they knew. The worship and homage of the wise men was to be a pointer to the worship to be offered by those who grasp not only Jesus’ kingship, but also his divinity.

Then they opened their treasure chests and gave Jesus gifts. Gold, frankincense and myrrh. These gift were very expensive. They had to be wealthy men to give these gifts because they were so valuable. This is probably where idea of them being kings comes from – the value of the gifts.

Matthew doesn’t draw out the significance of the gifts. The wise men were wealthy men who would have travelled with treasure chests to finance their trip. They didn’t have credit cards or foreign exchange bureaus etc from which to draw cash. So they carried assets of universal value in chests so they could liquidise these assets for cash as required to provide finance. We can imagine them rootling around in their chests, looking at what they had and then thinking ‘Ah – that would be good’ and presenting it to Mary and Joseph.

In those ways the gifts of the wise men were perhaps similar to my Amazon shopping for my brother’s family: the gifts were easily to hand, they didn’t take that much prior thought, and  the monetary value of them was negligible to these men.

But there were the hidden costs for these wise men in giving  these gifts to Jesus: costs they would not have anticipated when they first saw the star, realised its significance and started to follow it:

• the cost (not financial) of the journey itself: the discomfort – heat in the day, cold at night; the difficulties of finding food and water; the  physical dangers of accidents in travelling through rough terrain; the dangers of attack by wild animals; the even greater danger of attack by robbers.
• there was the cost of their visit to King Herod which they didn’t realise – the potential danger they’d put themselves in by bringing the birth of a rival king to the attention of a paranoid, cruel despot. Fortunately this was averted by God’s warning to them through a dream, not to go back to Herod, but to take a different way home.
• but then that produced the cost of them having to stay out of Herod’s attention by going a much longer route home.

If they had known about these hidden costs in advance would they still have decided to follow the star? We don’t know. What we do know is that we’re often in similar positions. We commit ourselves to stepping out in faith and doing what we feel God is asking us to do – and once we’re on the way, we discover the cost and sometimes wonder why we ever set out on the journey in the first place. We think that if we’d known what it was going to cost maybe we wouldn’t have set out. It may well be that some of you here tonight think that about preparation for ministry – it’s proving costly in ways you could never have imagined and you wonder why on earth you started out on it.

May be, on the journey home, when the wise men felt like that, they remembered the great joy they had experienced on seeing Jesus and reminded themselves that the hidden costs of the journey were nothing compared to the joy of seeing Jesus.

Perhaps when we too feel like that – that the costs of the journey are too much and are greater than we can bear, we need to look again to Jesus and the joy of being in his presence and worshiping him.

The Recipients

What would Mary and Joseph have made of arrival of the wise men and the gifts they gave? They understood more than the wise men, about who Jesus was and why he was special. I think it’s possible that Mary understood even more than Joseph.

We’ve already discovered that Matthew attached no significance to the gifts. It was Origen in the 3^rd century who was first to give the significance of the gold as a gift to a king, the frankincense as a reminder of worship and suffering, and the myrrh as a symbol of death, used in embalming dead bodies.

It’s possible that Mary, understanding more of who Jesus was and what he would do – realised the significance of these gifts for Jesus, and the suffering for him that these gifts indicated. They were quite possibly not the gifts that she would have chosen for her precious son.

The very presence of the wise men created an even greater cost. It was their visit to Herod and the revealing to him of presence of the one born to be king of the Jews that triggered his plot to kill all the children under the age of 2 in Bethlehem.

It was bad enough for Mary, a young mother in a strange place without her family – but now she has to escape as a refugee into a completely foreign and unknown country.

Maybe the gifts of the wise men financed Mary a nd Joseph’s escape to Egypt with Jesus, and their survival there but given the choice of receiving the wise men’s visit and their gifts and thereby having to flee to Egypt, or not having the wise men visit, not receiving their gifts, but at least being able to stay in her own country, maybe Mary would rather not have received them.

But at the same time, holding the Christ child, keeping him safe, remembering what the Lord told her about him, nothing could take those things away. Luke tells us that she treasured all these things in her heart.

This is clearly speculation, but knowing what we do of human nature, it makes sense.

Maybe there are times when we feel the same. We’re grateful for the gift of God’s love and grace in Jesus, but sometimes the cost of that gift, in the sacrifices we have to make, the discipline and self-control we have to exercise to live as God wants us to, what we deem to be our rights that we have to surrender, sometimes even the cost and burden of exercising the gifts for ministry that God has given us (I remember all those Saturdays of sermon preparation when I’ve said ‘Lord, I just can’t do this’, or those unjustified criticisms when I’ve said “Lord – that’s just not fair’).

But at those times we hold on to how great a gift to us is the love of God in Jesus, and we allow that to strengthen and encourage us.

Conclusion

The story of the wise men journeying to find Jesus, the new born king of the Jews and giving him gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh involves a giving of gifts with joys for both the givers and receivers, but more importantly, huge costs for both givers and receivers.

We know the gift that we receive in Jesus of his love and reconciliation with our heavenly father.

Just as he gave himself as a gift for us, we so give ourselves as a gift for him. We know that giving ourselves to him will bring joy – but we know too that it will have a cost for us.

At the start of this new year, as we think again about the joys and costs in the giving and receiving of the gifts of the wise men, we’re going to pause and think and pray as we give ourselves again to Christ for this year.

Look at the copies you have of the Methodist covenant prayer. This is a costly prayer.

In silence, read it and think about it. Think about the hidden costs as well as the obvious ones. After a short silence I’ll lead us in praying it out loud. Please join me if you want to make a gift of yourself to Jesus for this year, whatever the hidden costs might be. If it feels like too hard a prayer to pray then pray quietly for strength for yourself for whatever this year will bring. The words will be on the screen or you can use the copy you have in front of you. Then take it away and put it up somewhere you can see it every day to remind you and encourage you to keep going on the journey. 

The Methodist Covenant Prayer

I am no longer my own but yours.

Put me to what you will,

rank me with whom you will;

put me to doing, put me to suffering;

let me be employed for you or laid aside for you,

exalted for you or brought low for you.

Let me be full, let me be empty,

let me have all things, let me have nothing.

I freely and wholeheartedly yield all things

 to your pleasure and disposal.

And now, glorious and blessed God,

Father, Son and Holy Spirit,

you are mine and I am yours.

So be it.

And the covenant made on earth,

let it be ratified in heaven.

Amen.

The Simeon Centre and its vision

The energy of a centre for prayer comes from a listening ear, an obedient heart, and a driving passion to rediscover daily what it means to be friends with God  and to help others who cross our threshold to do the same. Over the past five years, since our launch, this has been our constant focus.

Based uniquely in an Anglican theological college, the Simeon Centre for Prayer and the Spiritual Life has had a fourfold role:

1.      in caring for the personal and spiritual formation of the Ridley Hall community. This is a ministry gladly undertaken by all, students and staff, for each other. Discipleship is the responsibility of all, and the Centre is the catalyst for this work.

2.      in the academic teaching of spirituality and prayer within the Cambridge Theological Federation, and more widely. Undergraduate modules, dissertation and thesis supervision, invitational events and periodic conferences all contribute towards this part of our ministry.

3.      in resourcing the wider church through offering spiritual direction, particularly to church leaders; through responding to requests for training and consultancy; and by leading, chaplaining and speaking at conferences, retreats and other events.

4.      in working with others across a range of networks, raising the profile of Christian perspectives in the public square and in the churches. Two years ago, we held a conference on ‘Dying Well’. More recently, we have been working with partner organizations and individuals on marriage, singleness and gender imbalance in our churches; on the ethics of human enhancement; on men’s spirituality; and next year (28th June 2013) we plan a day conference on Spirituality and Dementia.

The last item hints at the underlying questions which will remain at the heart of our vocation and our spiritual quest. We are creaturely beings, made in the image and likeness of a sovereign God, who calls us in love to stand before his majesty, to sit and feast with him, and to work towards the coming of his Kingdom.

In order to do this faithfully and well, we need to understand and engage with what it means to be human. In our contemporary contexts, how do we balance our understanding of disability with our hunger for drug and genetic enhancement? How, too, can we learn to value individuals as they are, while believing that God longs for them to be redeemed, more fulfilled in themselves and in life, and complete in Christ? And in relation to the way in which we do church, can we resist the temptation to gather like with like, so that the diversity and complexity of God’s created order is not compromised?

Strangely, then, we have found ourselves – as a Centre for Prayer – spending much time in busy thought (or doing theology!), reflecting on our humanity, believing that it is when we know ourselves fully as we are known by God, the relationship that we enjoy with him is restored, strengthened and nurtured.

To be human in a proper sense is, first and foremost, about gift, the gift of life, if you will. We believe that life is given by God who breathes life into us; and we are born again – redeemed – through the self-giving son of God. As inheritors of the Kingdom of heaven, we are given the Holy Spirit as a guarantee, another kind of gift. Even the worlds that we inhabit are gifted to us for our care and stewardship. 

Solidarity comes a close second. There are as many theories about being made in God’s image and likeness as there are theologians, but my take on it depends on the implicit ‘we’ in Genesis 1. The nature of God is not plural but relational. The three persons of the one God dwell in mutual love, harmony and interdependent purpose. And it is ‘we’ who are made in that image, and reflect it in community, in relationship with one another, only fully as ‘one people’, only in mutuality and sharing.

It naturally flows from this that the virtues proper to being human, apart from the cardinal virtue of love, are those of companionship, hospitality, compassion, humility, vulnerability and reconciliation. If we live life in gratitude for its giftedness and in communion with one another, all relationships flourish, most notably our relationship with God. And since prayer is not a task, a duty or a work, but the language of a primary relationship, our praying will find its tongue when we are true to our common humanity under God.

Amos 4: A mini-Bible study

For busy lives, here's something you can do in five minutes. If you do, may it bless your whole day. At the end of Amos 4, the prophet says of God:


For lo, the one who forms the mountains, creates the wind,
   reveals his thoughts to mortals,
makes the morning darkness,
   and treads on the heights of the earth—
   the Lord, the God of hosts, is his name! 

There are three remarkable things to note:

1.  Amos, like all the eighth-century prophets, has woken up to a much bigger vision of God than the one in circulation. He paints a picture of a majestic, all-powerful, terrifying yet immensely appealing God. This God is no wimp. Our God is an awesome God! Imagine him treading on the heights of the earth, dancing across the Alps, standing over the Himalayas!
2. Remarkably, this God communicates with us, revealing his thoughts to mortals! This is not what we expect to hear in the middle of this spectacular picture. It doesn't cut God down to size. Rather, it causes us who know and love this God to lift up our heads, and almost to bask in his glory. He has chosen to share the mystery of his plan with us, as Paul makes clear in Ephesians.
3. We all know that names matter. God's name is no idle giving of a title. This God is the Lord of hosts, the Lord of heavenly armies. This is no pacific God, but a jealous, a zealous God who is so troubled by his people's unfaithfulness and neglect that he goes to war. The unpopular flipside of God's love, his wrath, which is the major theme of this prophet's speaking, must never be neglected if we are to relate to God as he really is.

Why must cyclists take drugs? What's the fun in that?

I don't often get very angry, and Lance Armstrong's alleged involvement in 'the most sophisticated, professional and successful doping programme that sport has ever seen' has left me more bemused, disappointed and saddened than angry. After all, when those of us who do sport for the sheer enjoyment of overcoming (in part only) our own limitations, without chemical enhancement, I wonder where Armstrong's enjoyment of the sport, sense of humanity and personal pride went to. Can you win a race and be proud when the drug won, really?

I did get angry, however, when I heard Alex Dowsett's response on the news. The 24 year old British cyclist said that he believed that Lance Armstrong remains 'a legend of the sport' despite the doping accusations against the American.

What's worse, his remarks were made not because he doesn't believe the accusations. And I suspect that those accusations are fairly accurate. The US Drug Authority responsible said that it was as strong a case as any they had ever brought. Dowsett went on to say: 'He is still a legend of the sport. A guy who had cancer came back and won the Tour de France. It's not really important and I really don't think it matters what I think.'

Not important? Not his call? Of course it is. He is being listened to, watched and admired by a whole new generation of budding cyclists in this country, and as a role model he can't be neutral. What is it about this celebrity culture of ours that so craves victory that nothing else matters?

Over the past year, in my feeble 63 year old way, I have enjoyed discovering that I can run, just. 8.5 minute miles are about as much as I can realistically manage. But I have found myself childishly delighted, and running has brought me such joy - no fame though. In running, the bonus has been the discovery that it gives me the quietest and most solitary place in the universe, a place I've been looking for unconsciously for years.

And now, to cap it all, I have a distinct sense that running is a gift that I have to offer God. I can't explain it any better than that, but it has come to me that when I run, I am being truly myself, and that can't but delight God. So, please, please, don't let's allow hubris (overweening pride) to overwhelm us. It is our humanity and our pain that we celebrate when we run the race, not some fictive superhuman image.

Rowan Atkinson for Archbishop

My attention has just been drawn to an apparently unconscious comment on the BBC's news about the Crown Appointments Commission, in which the writer said "By trying to please everyone, Rowan Atkinson has pleased no-one. Religion must remain a matter of faith and principle, uncompromised by trendines."

Joking apart, it is briefly amusing that we can bet on the appointment at any bookie's in the country, and it is contrary to our Anglican understanding of episcopacy that we should put all the weight of future hope or distress about the Anglican Communion on the shoulders of the new archbishop. He is not going to make the difference, though he could be influential. The Cambridge historian EH Carr in 'What is History' years ago reminded us of the heresy of assuming that history is about a few important people.

++Rowan (Williams, not Atkinson) was right to observe that we need to replace him with two people. Not that he's arrogant, but the issues at stake for the Church of England are not the same as the issues at stake in the Anglican Communion. For what it's worth, I might as well join the fray, praying that it won't decline into affray when the announcement is finally made.

The Anglican Communion has over my lifetime turned from a family of churches into an unwieldy monster of an institution which has become far too self-important. To be Anglican is to be a Christian in a particular way, which I need not here define. The irony of the various Anglican schisms around the world is that if I find myself meeting parties or churches on either side of the great disruption, I feel at home, regardless of their institutional status. Hear me well, I do not find myself agreeing with everyone. How could I? But I do recognize that they are all family, and our quarrels, disputes and downright bitterness are the internecine wars of a family. 

So there is a significant part of me that is not worried whether the Anglican Communion falls apart or not. It has become a little too dependent on its organizational centre. We need instead to fall back on the centre of our own provisional status as church and our own human sinfulness. We also need Jesus Christ far more than we need a solution-solving communion-redeeming Primate. I also think that this is the moment for the leader of the communion to be chosen globally, from among the Primates, by the Primates... After all, we are not papalists. And though we come much closer to being conciliarists in our philosophy, we know that councils may err. Really we do!

So do pray for the new appointment. We need a wise, godly, thoughtful man. But above all, pray for the renewal and reformation of Anglican Christianity. Where it has grown cold, may the Holy Spirit warm it with fire Where it has strayed, may our Saviour recover it. Where it has lost faith, may the Father discipline and challenge it. And in all this, pray that we won't miss the beam in our own eye when we are too quick to jump to judgements about 'all those other wretches out there'.

The gates of hell will not prevail against Christ's Church.

 

Pray thankfully, passionately, with anguish and with perseverance

This morning, I was working on the prayer diary for the Fresh Expressions team, and found myself drawing from 1 Thessalonians for the opening passage of scripture. I used 1.2-3 'We always give thanks to God for all of you and mention you in our prayers, constantly ³remembering before our God and Father your work of faith and labour of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.' 

From there, I found myself wanting to encourage those who pray for the church to pray like Paul, and facebooked  'Pray for the church like Paul did, with thanksgiving, passion, anguish and perseverance.' Several people 'liked' it, and I thought that it might be helpful to unpack it a little.

For Paul, to pray with thanksgiving is to acknowledge what God has already done, in this case in the church at Thessalonika; to rejoice that the ministry that we share with God in Christ is bound to bear some kind of fruit (even if it's sometimes hard to see); to recognize that he and they are bound together for eternity; and to allow himself a little pat on the shoulder. We're not very good at this last one as Christians, feeling that it's somehow arrogant. I think that God gives us encouragements in our ministry precisely so that we can feel our hearts lift. All we have to avoid is being puffed up! He actually says in 2.20 that these Christians are his 'glory and joy'!

To pray with passion is to pray knowing that it makes a difference. And what a difference Paul prays for. In this letter, apart from praying that he will be united with them, he prays in Chapter 3 ¹²And may the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all, just as we abound in love for you. ¹³And may he so strengthen your hearts in holiness that you may be blameless before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints. Fancy praying for your own congregation or assembly, that they be so holy that they appear blameless on the great Day of Christ's coming. Passion is coupled with expectation, faith in boundless possibility and a great enthusiasm, therefore, to ask.

To pray with anguish is to carry the burdens of those for whom we have a care or a responsibility. I found myself asking when was the last time that I wept in prayer, and I'm not sure that I know the answer. Last year, I led worship with a group who had just had a gruelling study day on the abuse of children. I was 'warned' that they might be vulnerable, but didn't know what I was letting myself in for. The intercessions passed quietly enough, but at the end of the service, a young woman started to sob. I sat with her and her friend for a while as she sobbed and railed at heaven and screamed at God to stop the injustice of it all. So it was for Paul to pray with anguish.

To pray with perseverance to to do what Paul is talking about when he enjoins us to pray without ceasing. This text has been much misused in some contexts to pile one liturgical action on another. Nothing could have been further from Paul's mind. He simply calls us not to let go of the issues while they are still in front of us, to pray on our knees and throughout the day, to hammer like the importunate widow on the doors of heaven, to wrestle with issues until they are resolved. Why? Because God has amazingly invited us to share in his pain, his plan and his care for the world, as fully as he does, and calls us to be dissatisfied - as he is - until all the weeping and tears are over.

I write this not because I have achieved it, but because I haven't, as an encouragement, not as a condemnation, to kindle a fire that will not go out, because God first burned with love for you.

Praying for the conflict to continue? An alternative

The current political cocktail in South Africa is a potentially deadly one, and I find myself growing helplessly frustrated with the miners, with the dreadful demagoguery of Julius Malema and with the apparent inability of the police and the military to maintain the rule of law without resorting to terrible levels of violence. As so often, the less-badly paid act as a vanguard in political and economic unrest. The miners have more money, more health and more organization than their even less well-paid compatriots, and are able to demonstrate – and to resist – more effectively. Others follow in their train.

I know too that at the heart of this is the economics of inequity, coupled with the political savoir faire of a generation schooled in the conflicts of apartheid. Of all peoples, South Africans know how to storm the citadels of power.

Inside me, a voice shouts ‘Why can’t they just pay them more?’ The platinum, gold and other precious metals that they mine make many rich, but not the miners. Of course I would have to pay a price, in the cars that  I buy, the jewellery that I purchase, a soaring cost of living in the West and falling standards of life. No more cheap ride on the back of Africa and Asia, then?

I can’t quite get my head round it all. There’s no point in inducing liberal guilt, nor in simply reducing my own standard of living in protest. That feels too small. I know we are all in this together, and that the well-being of the world depends on cooperative action. That too feels like a distant joke.

So what shall I do? Well, I think I will pray that the problem doesn’t go away for South Africa, and that it has deep global political repercussions for us all. I shall pray that the simple economics of less platinum, higher price, begins to have the weight  of a global lesson in the ethics of cause and effect. God never meant us to live beyond our means, and I will prepare myself for a more realistic emerging lifestyle. It’s beginning to happen. May God’s kingdom of justice  and righteousness come, and may we be blessed by it when it does.