In the Chapel Royal in St. James’s Palace, London, during the Eucharist, today,   there will be an offering of Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh by the Sovereign.  The custom dates back to the 15th century. Until the reign of King George III, the sovereign always attended in person but today the offering will be made on the Queen’s behalf by two Gentlemen Ushers to the Queen.  The Frankincense and Myrrh will be provided by the Queen’s Apothecary and the Gold, five gold sovereigns come from the Bank of England.

The three gifts are those  given by the Wise Men.  Because there were three of them it is assumed that there were 3 Wise Men though Matthew doesn’t actually say so.  Later tradition gave them the names of Balthazar, Gaspar, Melchior but that didn’t happen until the 6th century.  The Venerable Bede writing in the 7th century tells us something  about the Wise Men and the meaning of their gifts.

The first was called Melchior. He was an old man, with white hair and a long beard; he offered gold to the Lord as to his King. The second, Gaspar by name, young, beardless, of ruddy hue, offered to Jesus his gift of incense, the homage due to Divinity. The third, of black complexion, with heavy beard, was middle-aged and called Balthasar. The myrrh he held in his hand prefigured the death of the son of Man

The visit of the Wise Men and the Epiphany story has inspired legends, art, literature and even cinema .

Amongst the legends is one about a Fourth Wise Man who didn’t quite make it to the Holy Land, re-told by the writer Henry van Dyke and published in 1903.  In the story, the Fourth Wise Man was called Arteban.  He came from Persia and he travelled to meet the other 3 bearing his own gift of  precious jewels – a sapphire, a ruby and a pearl.  On his journey he met an old Jew who was sick with a fever and moved with pity he used his healing powers to nurse the man back to health.  As a result he missed the other Wise Men at their chosen meeting place but they had left him a message to go to Bethlehem.

The journey was costly and he needed to buy a camel and other equipment so he used one of his jewels – the sapphire.  When he arrived in Bethlehem he found that the others had left as had the Holy Family who had fled to Egypt to avoid King Herod’s death sentence.  The person who told him this was a young mother and whilst Arteban was with her, soldiers arrived to carry out Herod’s orders. They seized her child but Areteban bribed them to spare the boy. He used his Ruby jewel to do this. 

All Arteban had left to give Jesus now was a pearl but he still went in search of him.  After years of wandering he arrived in  Jerusalem at the time of the Passover at a time when the city was buzzing with talk about the trial of a man called Jesus who had claimed to be the Son of God.  Following the crowd, he moved through the city towards Calvary. He thought that perhaps he could give his Pearl to the soldiers and bribe them to release Jesus. However, on the way he met a young girl who was about to be sold into slavery to pay her father’s debts. Moved to pity he gave her the Pearl. 

When he reached the foot of the Cross he looked up at Jesus and knew him to be the one he had searched for.  He apologised that he no gift to offer him and Jesus looked tenderly down at him and said that he had already received the gifts. What could be more precious than the care of a dying man; the life of a baby and the freedom of a young girl?  What he had done for the least of God’s children he had done it for the Lord.  He was to go home blessed.

It’s a lovely story and, like all good religious stories it has a message for us about our own offering to God.  It reminds us, perhaps more forcefully than gifts of Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh that the Epiphany story of the Wise Men is about giving gifts to God which come from our heart. 

Now in all probability there wasn’t a 4th Wise man but if, say you were him, what might you offer Jesus ?  Remembering the gifts of the Wise Men in today’s Gospel we can, of course offer God our Worship.  That is why we gather in church this morning for worship is at the heart of all we do here. We offer to God the praise and thanksgiving and glory that is due to Him.  We offer him our gold – the money we give for the work, ministry and mission of the Church in order  to do the work as our Lord’s disciples in the world today – and that gift isn’t just for what we do in this building but also the support we give to charity and such projects as The Box.

We offer him, too, the gift of myrrh in that we are concerned to be alongside others in their pain and suffering and pray for those with need and who are facing life in all its hardship and perplexity.  And, bearing in mind the offering in the story of the 4th King, we offer care to others in our Lord’s name.

All of these are special gifts which, offered, will gladden and delight the heart of God.  Behind these gifts is  the Gift of ourselves.  Each of us has something to offer if we are to fulfil our vocation to be Christians laid upon us through our Baptism through which we are called to be the people of God.

One of the hopes of the Lenten Sabbatical we are planning, and about which I have written in my Epiphany Letter to the Team, is that we will find space to consider what God is asking us to do and be and the part we are being called to play in the mission and ministry of the Church here in the immediate future.  Not all of that will be what we might consider ‘front-line’ ministry. The work of the Church cannot be sustained by just doing things – it can only be sustained through prayer and through support of those in active service.  There is a role and a task for everyone and I hope that  we might sit with the Lord and be attentive to His Word for each one of us taking the opportunity to develop our personal spirituality, prayerful study of scripture and deepening of our faith.

Only when we are personally in tune with God will we be in tune with what he wants from us as a Church.  But maybe there is something else that we can do that is of equal importance.  In the story of the Wise Men, we are told of a journey  that is made to meet with God which changes their outlook completely.  So much in the Church today seems to be about holding entrenched positions rather than journeying towards things that are new.

Sometimes this is because we are scared of change and want things to always be the same – including wanting our own particular stance on things to be held as immoveable and unchallenged.  At the moment the Church is facing huge upheavals and I don’t just mean in the areas of gender, sexuality and authority.

Out there in the world there is a godlessness that needs to be confronted – not just in our own community but globally and there are  threats to the stability of our fragile earth which come in all sorts of guises – ecology – the way we exploit and treat the natural God-given gifts of our planet; stewardship – how we care for the creatures of the earth who are vulnerable to our whims; Issues of justice for all – the oppressed, the poor, the unloved, the enslaved and exploited; And the challenge of violence that is to be found in troubled places like Kenya, Pakistan, the Middle East – and increasingly in our own society where  children are stabbing each other to death.

These are real challenges and how we act as Christians and how much we are prepared to risk for a Gospel which cost God everything – will determine the future of life on earth.  It seems to me that at the moment God is asking us to go to new places and to offer our people new ways of discovering how much God loves them. We need to re-present the Gospel in such a way that makes it possible to re-claim hearts that have gone cold to the joy and salvation Jesus Christ offers – an offering he makes through us.

So we must be renewed too and I want to suggest that we might learn something very important from the visit of the Wise Men to Jesus.  We are told that, having seen Jesus,  they  left for their own country by another road. The reference is to their physical journey but it is also about a spiritual one.

They had journeyed because of a Vision and when that Vision was fulfilled in their meeting with Jesus they were changed people. Life would never be the same for them again and this change is symbolised by the different way they returned home.  Because of Jesus our lives are changed too and we need to be courageous and take a different journey – a new road.

That might mean that we re-examine our entrenched positions and embrace not only new ways of doing things but also renew our reasons for doing them.  As the Wise men could not rest content with the old way neither can we.

One of the greatest gifts we can offer to God is to become open to change and to the promptings of the Holy Spirit and the Lenten Sabbatical will help us to do this.  Christianity is never static. It is always about Pilgrimage and being on the move – the early Christians were called Followers of the way.  If we are to be a Church with a message to our perplexed world then we must be prepared to travel by another road – to new places in our belief, spirituality, theology and Christian living.

This is God’s call to the Church and it can only be fulfilled if we, personally, are prepared to change and allow God, rather than our own agenda, to shape our lives.  As Cardinal John Henry Newman once said:

To live is to change and to be perfect is to have changed often.