I think many of us have had this experience: we are reading the Bible and it suddenly seems like the passage was written just for you, or we are listening to a sermon and it seems that the preacher is talking about you and your life.  That is often how God speaks to us in our day.  The Holy Spirit takes a passage of scripture written thousands of years ago and makes it God’s Word to us today.  This is what happened to Jesus one day in the synagogue.

In ancient Judaism, the Jerusalem Temple was the primary place of worship for all the people, but every community had a synagogue, which was more like a Sunday School class than a formal worship experience.  Members of the class would participate in the teaching of the class, much like we call on students to read a verse of scripture in our classes.  Jesus was handed the rolled up scroll of the prophet Isaiah to read, and He read these words: “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Isaiah 61:1-2a).  As Jesus read that passage, it seemed as if Isaiah had written those words just for Him.  Jesus had just been baptized by John and then He had gone into the wilderness to wrestle with Satan as He worked to define the nature of His ministry.  It would be more than political power.  It would be more than just filling hungry stomachs.  He would not compromise His principles.  Now here in the synagogue God was giving Jesus further confirmation and direction.  After He read the passage, Jesus sat back down and simply said, “My life will fulfill those words.”  Jesus’ ministry fulfilled that passage, and in that passage, Jesus found the fulfillment He desired for His life.

Finding fulfillment in life is one of our goals, isn’t it?  Life can be very unfulfilling, unmeaningful at times.  How was it that Jesus found fulfillment in life?  First, Jesus was fulfilled when He was fulfilling God’s will for His life.  Jesus knew that Isaiah 61 was God’s mandate for Him, and Jesus felt fulfilled when He was doing God’s will.  What is your mandate?  What is God’s will for your life?   A person cannot find fulfillment outside of God’s will for their lives.  The One that made us, who put us together on the microscopic, chromosomal level, knows what we would be good at, and He knows that His moral ways are for our benefit.

Certainly it is God’s will for us to know Him as our Father and Christ as Savior, having the Holy Spirit rest upon us.  It is God’s will to give ourselves and our possessions to Christ and His cause, to read His Word so that the Holy Spirit might speak to us.  It is God’s will that we discover our unique gifts and talents and how God can use them.  And surely it is God’s will that we leave His Church and His world better and stronger than we found them.  Like Jesus said, “Lord, we will fulfill those things!” Finding God’s will is the first way to fulfillment.

Secondly, Jesus was fulfilled when He cared for the forgotten, the poor, the people held in captivity by their mistakes, the blind, the oppressed, the lost.  At age 30 Jesus was far ahead of most of us at that age.  Most of us are consumed by concerns for career advancement and starting our families when we are that age.  And by age 50, many of us discover that our earthly goals are hollow and that what ultimately matters is what you have done for others.  Thirty years ago, I used to get together with my peers to look jealously and to work zealously on the subject of which pastors were getting ahead of us.  Who is going to become a district superintendent first?  It is funny how that just doesn’t matter much to us any longer.  I can’t even tell you who all of our district superintendent are right now.  I find myself thinking ahead about 100 years from now, when from eternity all that will be worth remembering is who we helped find faith in Christ.  Hopefully someone will be in heaven because of something we said and did when we were alive on earth.  I really don’t think that in 100 years I will care about which of my peers made it to the top of our appointment chain.

I heard about a preacher who really impressed himself with his sermon one Sunday.  At Sunday dinner, he said to his wife, “Have you ever heard such eloquent elocution?  Wasn’t that some provocative preaching?”  And then he asked her, “I wonder how many great preachers there are today?”  His wife quietly answered, “One less than you think…”

Jesus already knew this by age thirty.  He knew that earthly successes don’t endure but eternal triumphs do.  So Jesus turned His attentions to the needy, the outcasts of society, knowing that His life would make a huge difference when seen in the light of eternity.  He gave the poor real riches and He gave them hope.  He proclaimed God’s love to those who were held captive by the power of sin and sickness.  He liberated those oppressed by life, and He gave sight and insight to the blind.  Jesus fulfilled the scripture and He felt fulfilled in life when He cared for the forgotten.

A third way Jesus feels fulfilled is when we, His body, carry on His work today.  If it wasn’t for the church and the civic groups inspired by our message, there would be no one to care about the poor, the imprisoned, the blind, the uneducated, the oppressed, and the lost.  Most cultures practiced a form of  “social Darwinism” where the able in body and mind abandoned the disabled, allowing them to die.  Aging parents were left to die, as were the malformed and the disabled.  Social Darwinism is still practiced in our world today, and you can hear echoes of this philosophy all around us every day as we hear people who resent having to take care of the poor.  Companies would rather fire workers who are suffering from

alcoholism than to get them help.  A pastor friend of mine, Tom Evatt, was appointed to a textile community in South Carolina back in the 1960′s.  A member of his United Methodist Church was having family troubles, and this led to alcohol abuse.  In spite of Tom’s intervention, the worker’s boss fired the troubled worker.  Tom never was one to lose without a fight, and so he went over the boss’ head to the mill superintendent, asking for help for the troubled man instead of dismissal.  The superintendent agreed and rehired the man on the condition that he get treatment, which he did.  Soon the troubled worker was no longer troubled and he became a very productive employee.  But that worker’s boss was mad at Tom for going over his head, and he came to church one day to complain.  Tom chopped the boss’ legs right out from under him when he said, “I went over your head because everybody knows you won’t ever do one thing to help your workers!”  That is the way that the Body of Christ can defeat Social Darwinism!  If we don’t care for the down and out, who will?

Please remember that Jesus’ work was not popular among the religious people of His day.  They were glad to be rid of the riffraff.  But Jesus was going out to these outcasts and bringing them back into society and the church.  Jesus was tampering with the fabric of society, and He was constantly having to explain His work.  “A doctor tends to the sick,” He said.  “A shepherd leaves the safe sheep to go look for one lost sheep.”  “You hypocrites! Doesn’t each of you on the Sabbath untie his ox or donkey from the stall and lead it out to give it water?  Then should not this woman, a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has kept bound for eighteen long years, be set free on the Sabbath day from what bound her?”  Rather than getting praise, we just might get criticized when we follow Jesus in caring for the forgotten.

William Booth was a Methodist pastor in England in the 1800′s.  He organized the poor into units like the army did.  He used their love for loud and unrefined music to bring more poor people into his army.  He took his new friends into his Methodist Church where he was invited to never bring those people back to church again.  So he and his friends left the Methodist Church to form the Salvation Army, and the Methodist Church has always been the poorer for losing Booth and his friends.  When Jesus feels fulfilled, and when the Body of Christ is fulfilling Jesus’ mission to the poor, somebody just might get upset at us.  But then again, Jesus’ ministry led to His crucifixion.

Finally, Jesus finds fulfilled in us because He cares about us, and sometimes each one of us is poor in some way or blind to the truth.  Sometimes we are captives of our raw emotions and our hurts.  We are oppressed by illnesses and our mistakes.  We each need to be reminded of God’s day of acceptance.  The Spirit of God is

upon Jesus because God has anointed Jesus to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.  Amen.

Arthur H. Holt

I have been reminded that today is not a funeral and so I am not to give a eulogy!  But I am sure that I will need to help to clean out Lynn’s closet in the choir room…  dust to dust, ashes to ashes, in the sure and certain hope of the resurrection, for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.  That describes my closet fairly well also!

For these past thirty-five years, Lynn Duval Clark has directed the music of Memorial Church, setting the tone for our worship, choosing anthems which reflect the dignity of worship that has come to define us here at Memorial.  If you have come to Memorial during these years,  you always received something to take back home with you, even when the sermon was sub-par (and many during my time have been).  You had something to take home with you because the music was always well prepared and well presented!  There is no way you will ever go home “empty-handed” from this place, not as long as there are dedicated singers, musicians, and director here.  It has often been said that Lynn has had a way of bringing out the very best in our chancel choir, getting better sound from our singers that one would expect.  As the Parable of the Talents teaches, when we use the gifts that God has given us, God multiplies them and they become ever greater and more numerous!

I have always appreciated the quiet dignity that Lynn brings to our worship services.  But let me tell you, there is another side to Lynn.  On the last night of our cruise to Alaska, I knew that I would find Penny Holt down on the dance floor boogieing to the music, but I was a bit taken back to see Carol Bomar, Linda Nicholson, and Lynn Clark also swinging and swaying (Oops!  I forgot!  “What happens in Alaska stays in Alaska.”).  There is also a stern side to Lynn.  She was a school teacher once upon a time, and she hasn’t lost her ability to call down a misbehaving student, like she did me when I was about to tease Ann Mayfield about a bat I had just found near the choir room.  I had to go sit in the corner, and Coach Phil came over to make sure I didn’t get back up.  “We decided not to tell Ann because she will get so upset that she won’t be able to play,” the Coach told me.  During these four and a half years that I have been here at Memorial, it has been a perfect delight to work with Lynn.

Lynn has given her life to music, and that causes me to want to spend a few minutes reflecting on the importance of music to our lives and to our worship.  Every aspect of our worship is equal in importance.  The reading of the Bible, responsive reading, singing of hymns, the offering, special music, and sermons are each important.  One of my seminary professors used to remind us preachers that people learn their beliefs from the hymns that they sing, not from the sermons they hear.  That is why I am very hesitant to leave out some of the verses of a hymn.  By so doing, we sometimes miss the hymn writer’s main message.  I still laugh at the time that I heard it announced that we would sing only the first verse of the closing hymn, “Take Time to Be Holy.”  Apparently there wasn’t adequate time to be holy that day.

In the Old Covenant Community, King Jehosaphat had to defend the Kingdom against a vast army of foreign invaders.  There was no human way his army could defeat the huge, multinational army, and so they had called upon the Lord to defend them.  Because their faith was in God, Jehosaphat called – not his bravest, best equipped soldiers – but  his church choir to lead the army into battle, to sing praises to God Almighty as the people of Judah faced their troubles.  The result of their singing was that the invading armies were thrown into confusion and disarray.  They turned on each other and destroyed each other, and Jehosaphat’s army didn’t have to raise one sword.  Now, I’ve heard church choirs that could throw a church into that kind of confusion, but never here!  But I have also noticed that when we gather in our saddest times, to remember someone who has just left us to join the church in heaven, we want familiar hymns played and sung because we know that nothing will defeat our enemies of sorrow and death like the music of our faith!  “The night becomes as day when from the heart we say ‘May Jesus Christ be praised.’” When we feel overcome by our failures and our guilt, we often turn to the great hymns of faith that remind us that there is available to us “Amazing Grace” to save a wretch like me!  And when we find ourselves in the presence of our Savior, something within us wants to sing.  I am reminded of the words by Andrew Lloyd Webber in Jesus Christ Superstar, when the religious leaders told Jesus to make His followers stop singing “Hosanna,” and Jesus replied,

Why waste your breath moaning at the crowd?

Nothing can be done to stop the shouting.

If every tongue were stilled

The noise would still continue.

The rocks and stone themselves would start to sing: Hosanna!

Such is the power of music, and that is why the angels in heaven sing instead of preach as they proclaim, “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!”

Seven of us pastors have been blessed to have Lynn to work with as the director of music, and I know I speak for all seven of us when I say thanks to Lynn Clark and thanks to God for calling Lynn into the ministry of church music!

Arthur H. Holt

You are aware, I suppose, that I had to go two states away – all the way to the mountains of Virginia – to find someone who would marry me.  For the most part, those folks in Virginia are fairly normal folks, except for pronunciation of certain words like “hoose” where we say “house” and “air” where we say “our.”  So now you know what it means if a Virginian invites you over to “air hoose.”  A few years ago, we went up to Penny’s cousin’s wedding at a little church way back up in the hills near Penny’s hometown.  I was a little curious about their beliefs and so I asked several questions.  “Do you baptize by sprinkling?” I asked and almost got laughed out of the place.  “Well, then,” I continued, “where is your baptismal pool?”  “We don’t have one here in air hoose of God.  We go out back to the creek,” they told me.  “What do you do in winter?” I asked.  “Nobody repents until spring,” they replied.  That made sense to me!

I saw a woman comedian on late night TV who was explaining to the host why she was a Methodist.  “The Baptists teach that you must be immersed in order to go to heaven.  The Methodists just need a covered dish!”

My former boss Dr. James Nates had a quick answer wherever he was asked if he believed in infant baptism: “Believe in it?  I’ve seen one!”  Sometimes a little humor goes a long way in promoting understanding and defusing tensions.

Baptism is a rich symbol of our faith, the other Protestant sacrament.  Yet, do any of us really understand its significance?  In churches that practice adult believers’ baptism, the sacrament speaks primarily about the commitment of a person to Christ.  In churches that practice infant baptism, the sacrament speaks primarily about the commitment of God to the child.  God claims us in baptism.  The second Sunday in Epiphany is known as “The Baptism of our Lord” Sunday and it gives us an annual reason to look at the meaning of this beautiful sacrament.

In studying the scripture lessons this week, I noticed something that I had overlooked before.  That is one thing that makes Bible study so interesting!  There is always more to see there.  What I saw was this: the baptism that John performed was not the same as Christian Baptism!  The two baptisms didn’t mean the same thing.  So often when we have debated baptism, the right way to do it, the amount of water necessary, we have pointed to John’s baptism as the starting point of our debate.  But while Christian Baptism has its roots in John’s baptism, it is not identical to it. No where is this more clearly seen than in Paul’s encounter with some disciples of John the Baptizer in Ephesus. After talking with them, Paul inquired about their baptism and learned that they had not received baptism in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. They had not even heard about the Holy Spirit. They had only received John’s baptism of repentance, and Paul said that this was inadequate, so he gave them Christian Baptism.  Now, please notice that there is no mention of water at all.  We don’t know whether it was a river, a basin, or a mud puddle. Why was John’s baptism inadequate?  It was inadequate because its purpose was repentance, remission of sins, and preparation for the coming of Christ.  It did not contain the power to remove the guilt of sins and to produce real change.

If John’s baptism had the purpose of preparing people for the coming Savior and for repentance, what is the purpose of Christian baptism and in what ways does it differ from the baptism of John?  To answer this question and see the significance of Christian baptism, we must ask ourselves “What did baptism mean to Jesus?”  After all, everyone else was coming to John because they were sinners needing to be forgiven. But then, why did Jesus go for baptism if He was perfect and had no need of repentance?  The only hint we have is found  in Matthew when  Jesus indicates that He viewed baptism as being linked with the fulfillment of all righteousness. That saying has puzzled scholars.  Just what did He mean?

Some scholars believe that Jesus meant that His work of fulfilling righteousness was beginning already because here Jesus was, identifying Himself with sinners, already associating Himself ‑ identifying Himself – making Himself one with sinners!  We are used to thinking of Jesus as taking our sins upon Himself on the cross.  Perhaps He was at the Jordan ‑ where people were laboring in vain to clean themselves of sin and He went into that water to embrace all those sins that had been deposited there.  By identifying with our sin, he was fulfilling righteousness.  He was beginning His work of making people righteous.

So for Jesus, baptism meant identifying Himself with us. Christian baptism is where we identify ourselves with Christ and His mission to our world!  We use the phrase “those receiving this sacrament are thereby marked as Christian disciples.”  Baptized Christians are identified as disciples, identified with Christ. There is an old adage: “You are known by the company you keep.” Baptism says we are a part of Jesus’ company.

But those words “fulfill all righteousness” perhaps meant something more to Jesus. We have come to understand righteousness as the condition of being in correct relationship with God, and we have come to understand that it is impossible for us on our own to achieve this righteousness.  If we are to be righteous, it is only by a gift from God to us. Righteousness is a condition we receive from God.  Jesus understood this also, and that He knew that He could not trust in His own goodness but must come trusting God to put Him in right relationship with Himself.  To fulfill all righteousness is to realize our need for God’s grace and His bestowal of righteousness upon us.  This could well have been what Jesus meant by fulfilling all righteousness  for we are told by Paul in Philippians 2 that although Christ was equal with God, He didn’t flaunt that or grasp for this equality. Instead, He took upon Himself the form of a servant. He didn’t presume to stand before God, claiming equality. Instead, He trusted in God’s goodness. This is at the heart of Christian baptism.  We present ourselves or our parents present us, not claiming our own goodness but claiming our need for God’s grace. Baptism, John Wesley said, it a place where grace is channeled into our lives, making us aware of God’s unconditional acceptance!  Under John’s baptism, you were still expected to do better next time and thereby become righteous.  Under Christian Baptism, we are declared righteous because of God’s amazing grace.

But there is still another way that Christian Baptism differs from John’s. When Jesus was baptized, the heavens opened and a God spoke to assure Jesus that He was on the right course. “You are my beloved Son!” the voice said. When we were baptized, maybe we didn’t hear the voice, but God spoke, nevertheless to us saying, “You are my beloved child!”  You see, John’s baptism offered repentance; Christian baptism offers adoption and assurance!  John’s baptism offered hope that God might accept us if we change. Christian Baptism offers absolute assurance that God had already accepted us!  The scripture tells us that “while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.”  Before we knew of our lost condition, before we knew of our need for grace, before we were aware of God, Jesus died for us.  Nowhere is this more clearly demonstrated that in infant baptism.

Still another difference is seen in that John could only offer water; Jesus baptizes us with His Holy Spirit!  John tried to wash away the stain of sin in our lives with water from the Jordan.  Jesus washed away sin with His blood and empowered us to change with the Spirit from God.  John must have baptized hundreds and thousands in the Jordan, but only one received the Holy Spirit and that was Jesus.  Christian baptism promises that the same Spirit that dwelled in Jesus, that raised Him from death, lives in us now, indwelling us with Christ’s presence, empowering us to live a Christian life.

Scholars also say that Jesus came to John to make a public dedication of Himself to the mission to which God was calling Him.  It was His way of dedicating Himself to God.  Christian Baptism is still that for us today.  It is a way that we dedicate our children and ourselves to God’s will for our lives.

Baptism identifies us with Christ and Christ with us, reminds us that it is by grace that we are saved, assures us of God’s acceptance of us as His children, imparts God’s Spirit to us, and expresses our dedication to God.  Let us remember our baptism and be glad!  Amen.

Arthur H. Holt

Someone sent me copies of a series of letters from Miss Emily Wilbraham of Devonshire, England, to a suitor named Edmund Turnbridge, dated December 26, 1846 through January 5, 1847.  The first letter is very congenial: “My dearest Edmund: Two turtledoves, so refined in color and marking, and ever so magnificent in song, arrived only this morning, and have already joined the partridge, cooing away in the pear tree.  I am ever so warmly touched and forever grateful.  With, as always, my undying love toward you, Emily.”  But her undying love seemed to be on life-support by the Sixth Day of Christmas when she wrote, “Whatever I expected to find this morning, it wasn’t six sopping geese laying eggs all over our service porch.  I rather hoped you had gotten birds out of your system.  Let’s call a halt to this feathered holiday frivolity, shall we?”  This letter was followed by another one from the eighth day: “What am I to do with eight milking maids and their filthy, stinking cows?  Is this some kind of sick, demented joke on your part?”  The last letter is sent from the offices of Learvant, Hemmsdale, Willow, and Tweed, Attorneys at Law, and says, “Our client, Miss Emily Wilbraham (of the Lockesbury Circle Wilbrahams), has instructed our office to inform you that with the arrival upon her parent’s premises this morning of the percussion section of the London Symphony Orchestra, she has no path left open to her but to seek injunction preventing you importuning her further.  Our office is currently making arrangements for the immediate return of much assorted livestock, answering several advertisements from many zoological gardens as well as local and international animal organizations.”  So much for the 12 Days of Christmas!

Tuesday will be the 12^th day of Christmas, Epiphany Day, the day that the Wise Men visited the baby Jesus.  They also brought gifts, but not of the feathered kind.  As one child said, “The Wise Men brought gifts of gold, Frankenstein, and myrrh.”  These gifts are just as confusing as two turtledoves and a partridge in a pear tree.  Perhaps gold makes sense.  Joseph and Mary could use gold to purchase supplies for their journey to Egypt, but frankincense and myrrh are strange gifts, it seems to me.  But in a day when goods were bartered as well as purchased by money, these are not strange gifts at all.  These gifts represented the best, most precious gifts that the Wise Men had to offer to the new King.  I doubt that these Zoroastrian priests were aware of Jesus’ divinity or His mission.  They just brought the best that their country had to offer the new king.  Their gifts invite to give our best to the King.

But having said that, we are still left with the mystery of how these gifts symbolize Jesus’ role in our lives as our King, our God, and our sacrificing Savior.  It was the Middle Ages that gave rise to the interpretation of the gifts of the Magi that is reflected in the hymn, “We Three Kings.”  In that era, all scripture was interpreted allegorically, meaning that everything had a double meaning.  Gold was representative of Jesus’ kingly power.  Frankincense could be allegorically understood as representing Jesus’ divinity, while myrrh, an embalming fluid, could be symbolic of Jesus’ suffering and death.  Hindsight, always clearer than foresight, lends itself to such interpretation.  I doubt that the Magi really intended for their gifts to be prophetic, but it is helpful to use those gifts as reminders of Jesus’ work on our behalf.  In those gifts we are reminded that Jesus is our sovereign King, the divine Son in human flesh, and our suffering Savior.

The gifts of the Magi also call us to subordinate our possessions to God, to see possessions as less important than God.  Unless a person sees God as more important than gold, that person in likely to use people to gain more gold.  Wars are often fought because of possessions – land, gold, or oil.  Until we put our gold at the feet of Jesus, we cannot be good stewards.  The church often calls us to give, but even more the church calls us to put God ahead of our desires for wealth.

Frankincense is a fragrance, a substance thought of as spiritual, often used in worship.  It could represent our inner treasure of thought and influence, or so says George Buttrick.  Perhaps the Magi were not just calling us to worship Christ but also to make our thoughts clean, captives of the mind of Christ.

Perhaps the gift of myrrh not only calls attention to the suffering sacrifice made by Jesus to secure our pardon but also to call attention to the fact that God invites us to enter into the sufferings and sorrows of others, even as God has taken upon Himself our suffering and sorrows.  Of all the things we give to Christ, our sorrows and our suffering are the most difficult things for us to offer up to God so that He might use our suffering for our betterment.  Of all the gifts we give to each other, being with each other in our times of suffering is the most meaningful gift we have to give.  The gifts of the Magi, the best that their country had to offer, and in retrospect gifts that tell us about the work of Christ our King, our God, and our sacrifice, call us to give God our wealth, our worship, and our pain.

But there are other gifts we receive from the Magi.  For one thing, the Wise Men call attention to the Bible.  The Magi had been following a star but they had lost sight of it.  Knowing that the new king was a Hebrew, they assumed that He would be born in Jerusalem.  King Herod, an evil politician if ever there was one, a man who killed family members that he perceived as threats to his power, summoned religious leaders who consulted the scripture for the answer, that Bethlehem would be the birthplace of the Messiah.  The Wise Men acted on the words of the Hebrew Testament, and as they followed the instructions of scripture, they found the star again and then they found the Christ-child.

It is quite easy for us to lose our sense of direction in life.  Two friends from thirty years ago came to the Praise Band’s Christmas Concert because they couldn’t believe that Ronnie and Cindy Towery’s daughter Kelly could have taught me to sing anything on key!  Last week they brought me a recording of a Christian rock and roll group we used to like, and I once again heard an old song that said,

Well, there’s been times when your will and your way escaped me.

I’ve gone my way and forgotten about my Lord.

But that just when you’ve opened up my eyes so I can see.

All those times you loved me more.

When we get lost, we can turn to the Bible and it will help us find our way home.

The importance of scripture for guidance is another gift of the Magi to the world.

Yet another gift of the Magi was their ability to join faith and science together.  They were priests, men of faith in God, but they were also scientists of their day who studied the stars.  Their example calls us to be people of faith who also value education and who accept the challenges of incorporating new insights with established beliefs.  Too often in history, faith and science have been mutual enemies, but not so with the Magi.

Perhaps yet another gift of the Magi is the respect that people of differing religions can give to each other.  Magi, being Zoroastrian, believed in one God but they did not worship Yahweh, the God of the Israelites.  But they showed great respect to Mary, Joseph, Jesus, and others who did worship the God of Moses.  They were respected by the Hebrews also.  Perhaps this mutual respect came from a shared history, when the Israelites had been taken off to Babylon in the 6^th Century B.C.   In the day in which we live, when our neighbors are Catholic, Baptist, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, and also Hindu, Jewish, and Muslim, one gift of the Magi for us is that we learn to have mutual respect for one another.

The last gift of the magi that I see in this story is the hunger that the Wise Men had for Christ, a hunger that caused them to persevere, to continue the search even after they had gotten lost, even when they had to stop to ask for directions.  How delighted God must be when one of His children hungers and searches for Him!  O God, make us hungry to know you!  Make us as hungry for Christ as the Wise Men were!  Their hunger is perhaps the best gift that the Magi have for us, and our hunger is our best gift we can give to God.  Amen.

Arthur H. Holt