Exchanging Gifts?: Epiphany, 2012,B

Click here for audio homily. Be honest.  How many Christmas presents have you exchanged or re-gifted?  One year, my sister got a new digital TV for Christmas and while we were watching it, on Christmas night, there was a commercial with a happy face with a frown and the caption with something about 60% off the things you really wanted for Christmas.  Do we ever really get what we truly want for Christmas?  Only someone who really knows you, can give you a present that you really like.  God gives us the best present of all.  Jesus is our Christmas present from God.  Jesus came to free us from our sins.  Jesus came to bring us eternal life.  Jesus came to reveal the love of God the Father for us.  Sitting around the dinner table, somebody may ask, “Does anybody need anything?”  I sometimes respond, “Salvation?”   That is really the only gift we really need.  And salvation is just that it is a gift.  We do nothing to earn it or deserve it.  I was talking to someone recently and they were commenting that if the Three Wise Men, had been women, the gifts that they brought would have been more practical—a sack of diapers, a casserole, and offer to babysit.  The three wise men, however, may have known the ancient Hebrew prophecies of the coming Messiah from the time that the Israelites had spent in exile in Babylon.  The prophet Daniel held a high position in the court of the Babylonian king and prophesied the coming of the Messiah.  So, the wise men were wise enough to bring gifts that signified their knowledge of who Jesus was.  A gift is simply that; something we do not have a right to; something that is given to us out of generosity and kindness of someone else.  In that respect then, when the Gospel says the Magi “opened their treasures and offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.”  They were not really gifts since, as God, everything belongs by right to God.  The Magi were only giving to God what was His due.  They gave Him gold in homage because Jesus is the King of Kings, and the Lord of Lords.  They gave Him frankincense in adoration because Jesus is God from God, Light from Light and true God from True God.  They gave Him myrrh for His burial because Jesus who was born of the Virgin Mary, would suffer, die, and be buried, and on the third day rise again.  What if Mary and Joseph decided to exchange the gifts they received from the wise men?  Maybe we would like to exchange some of the gifts that that wise men brought.  Gold is fit for a king but we don’t really want Jesus to be the king of our life.  We would rather have a Jesus who is elected to govern us and if we don’t like His laws, we can simply vote Him out of office.  If Jesus is not the Absolute ruler of our mind and body, they we deny He is our king and try to exchange the gift of gold.  Frankincense is the symbol of Jesus being true God.  We don’t use incense enough.  It takes to long, it makes people cough.  Do we want to exchange Frankincense for something a little more human.  If Jesus is only a good moral teacher than we may not have to listen to Him, but if we accept that Jesus is True God from True God, then we will be obligated to listen to Him.  Do we recognize Jesus as simply a holy man?  C. S. Lewis in his book, Mere Christianity wrote: "A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic - on the level with a man who says he is a poached egg - or he would be the devil of hell. You must take your choice. Either this was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us."  Perhaps we would like to exchange the myrrh?  I like the little baby Jesus in the crib.  HE is cute and cuddly a real kind of warm fuzzy feeling.  Don’t start talking about sin and salvation and dieing on the cross.  That’s a real downer.  Jesus loves everybody.  If we don’t want to face the reality of our death, and our final judgment, if we don’t want to face the reality of Hell and the promise of Heaven and of eternal life sharing in the Divine life of Jesus.  Well then, yeah, exchange the myrrh for something else, but we can’t be certain that everybody who dies goes to heaven.    If in the myrrh, we could recognize our own mortality and sinfulness, the true value of the other two gifts, gold and frankincense, would become much clearer. Our destiny, our true home, is to share in the divine life of the Trinity.  That is the gift Jesus came to bring us; unless we decide to exchange it for something that will not satisfy us for eternity.