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Epiphany Communion Meditation            Matt. 2: 1-12             January 7, 2007

The short span of time between Christmas and today, Epiphany Sunday, has come to an end.  Lights and trees will now come down, if they haven’t already, and we will leave behind the anticipation and planning of Advent and get back to our normal routines. 

This period – known historically as the “twelve days of Christmas” – has, at different times in history, and in different cultures, taken on a whole variety of different meanings. All of them festive.

In 17^th Century England, the Twelfth Night – the evening before Epiphany – marked the end of a winter festival that started, believe it or not, on Halloween. A King or Lord of Misrule would be appointed to run the Christmas festivities, which were also called the “feast of fools,” and the Twelfth Night was the end of his reign. The common theme was that the normal order of things was reversed.  Eating and drinking to excess was the order of the day.

Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night – written to be performed during a Twelfth Night Celebration – makes much of this reversal of roles.  It has women dressing as men, peasants becoming noblemen; stuff like that.

In Europe and in some Scandinavian cultures, at around that same time, the Twelve Days of Christmas was combined with festivals celebrating the changing of the year. These were usually associated with driving away evil spirits for the start of the New Year. 

Today, it is rare to find people, in this country at least, who celebrate Twelve Days of Christmas, much less the Twelfth Night Feast.   The phrase “the twelve days of Christmas,” if anything, brings to mind the old children’s song about three French hens, two turtledoves and a partridge in a pear tree. 

By the way, that song, some suggest, was originally a teaching tool that conveys Biblical concepts.   Each of the numbers, one through twelve, represents a corresponding number from the Bible – 10 Lords a’ leaping represents the 10 Commandments; five gold rings represents the five books of the Torah, and so forth.  Seems a little contrived to me.

But whether the author of the carol was trying to convey religious teachings or not, he certainly makes the point that the twelve days of Christmas is about giving.  Big-time giving, if you do the math in today’s dollars.  The Philadelphia investment firm PNC, publishes an annual “Christmas Price Index” that calculates the present cost of all the goods and services. One partridge, one pear tree, two turtledoves, three French hens, etc., etc.  The number is pretty staggering – for 2006 it was $18, 920.59!

We Moravians do not tend to become involved in such Twelve-Day frivolity.  We focus our attention, this time of the year, on Epiphany.  Not on the Twelve days of Christmas, and certainly not on the Feast of Fools.  We celebrate, today, with Epiphany Holy Communion, the festival that reminds us of the visitation of the Magi.

The Epiphany story is one of the more familiar passages in all of scripture.  Recorded only by Matthew, it is set among royalty and wealthy foreigners from the East.  Quite a difference from the humble shepherds and the poor young couple who delivered the Christ Child in a manger. 

The Magi come to visit Jesus, who by this time is living with his parents in a house in Jerusalem, in order to present him with gifts.  Gifts of great price.  Gifts such as were customarily offered to kings.

• Gold. Then, as now, a symbol of prestige.
• Frankincense. A costly and fragrant gum distilled from a tree in India and Arabia.
• Myrrh. A particularly valuable aromatic gum – literally worth its weight in gold –produced from a thorn-bush that grew in Arabia and Ethiopia.

The point is this.  No matter how you look at it, this time of year is all about giving.  The Twelve Days of Christmas reminds us of this fact, and certainly Matthew’s account of the visitation of the Magi reminds us of it as well.

All of us have gifts to give.   Lots of them.  The gifts are part of who we are as individuals.  Some of us can sing, some of us can work with our hands, some of us can write, some of us can work with numbers.  Some of us can lead, some of us can teach, and some of us are particularly good at working in the background.  Some of us are organized and efficient and some of us are creative and scattered. 

The message of Epiphany is that God is the source of our gifts and that God calls on us to use those gifts we’ve been given to glorify God.  All of them.  All of the time.

Today, as we prepare to celebrate Holy Communion – the ultimate reminder of the greatest gift ever given, the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus, I’d like to suggest that we reflect on the gifts we’ve been given, and the ways we can use our gifts to glorify God. 

God has been enormously generous to each one of us. We all have gifts of great price.  May we find new ways to present these gifts to the Christ Child. 

                                                                                                            AMEN