Practical, Illustrative, and Prophetic: The Gifts They Brought
Preached at Blue Ocean Faith Columbus on Sunday, January 4, 2026
Reminder: I never stick completely to my written sermon. This isn’t a transcript, but the written sermon I was using when I preached.
Practical, Illustrative, and Prophetic: The Gifts They Brought
Friends, listen for a word from God in the Gospel according to Matthew, the second chapter, verses 1-12.
In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, magi from the east came to Jerusalem, 2 asking, “Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star in the east and have come to pay him homage.” 3 When King Herod heard this, he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him, 4 and calling together all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Messiah was to be born. 5 They told him, “In Bethlehem of Judea, for so it has been written by the prophet:
6 “And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah,
are by no means least among the rulers of Judah,
for from you shall come a ruler
who is to shepherd my people Israel.”
7 Then Herod secretly called for the magi and learned from them the exact time when the star had appeared. 8 Then he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, “Go and search diligently for the child, and when you have found him, bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage.” 9 When they had heard the king, they set out, and there, ahead of them, went the star that they had seen in the east, until it stopped over the place where the child was. 10 When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy. 11 On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother, and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. 12 And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road.
This is the word of God for the people of God.
Friends, tonight as we return from our winter holidays, we’ve entered the strange in-between time, a gray area from New Year’s Day until approximately Ash Wednesday. While the decorations are coming down and the magic of Christmas is fading, the Bible begins to accelerate. Baby Jesus will soon be a man, and we will journey with him to his death and resurrection.
Traditionally, the end of the Christmas season is Epiphany on January 6, the feast of the visit of three wise men or kings from the East who follow a star to the birth of a great king who will be called the King of the Jews. Today we celebrate that feast.
We need to be clear about who these people were and who they weren’t. They more than likely weren’t kings. The original text never calls them kings. That’s a later tradition influenced by Psalm 72 and Isaiah 60, where kings bring gifts to God’s chosen one. Matthew calls them “magi,” a Persian word that referred to a class of priests and scholars who studied the stars, interpreted dreams, and sought wisdom in the movements of the heavens. Their study placed somewhere between astronomers and astrologers (much in the same way that medieval alchemists were both early chemists and still magicians). The magi were likely Zoroastrians, one of the earliest monotheistic religions.
That said, the magi arrived from a different culture, speaking a different native language, and practicing rituals that would have seemed strange, even troubling, to faithful Jews in Jerusalem. They were different, strange, foreign.
Yet they’re the ones who show up. The text implies that none of the chief priests or the elders are getting ready to go to Bethlehem. No one is advising Herod to travel. Even though these leaders can quote from Micah 5 from memory when they reply to Herod’s inquiry, the people traveling to meet Jesus are Gentiles from a different country. These Persian Zoroastrians followed wisdom that came through their own tradition, their own study, and their own seeking. And it led them to Jesus.
The gifts the magi bring have long been under scrutiny. The internet has not been kind to them. Memes have highlighted the impractical nature of the gifts, particularly the frankincense and myrrh. But each of the gifts has a meaning for us.
First, gold. In the twenty-first century we rarely use gold as a currency and few of us ever interact with more than a few gold coins. But in the first century a chest of gold was practical. It was also a tribute gift that one would give to a king or other powerful person. Rather than think about a chest of glittery gold, we should think about it as cash. Regardless of the amount or its buying power, the first gift is about practicality. Jesus might be God incarnate, but he’s still a human child whose earthly parents are very human. In Matthew 8:20, Jesus reminds the crowds that “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” Even Jesus requires practical gifts. As we’ll explore next week, the family will soon be forced to flee into exile in Egypt. That journey will require money as will getting on their feet in a different country.
The second gift is frankincense. This is the illustrative gift, the one that shows us who Jesus is in his very nature. Frankincense was used in temple worship. It was the scent of prayer rising to God. It was what the priests burned when they entered the Holy of Holies. It was the smell of the sacred, the aroma of the divine presence.
When the magi brought frankincense, they were saying something profound: this child is not just a king, he is a priest. More than even that he is the presence of God with us. Emmanuel. The sacred made flesh. The holy dwelling among the ordinary.
These Zoroastrian priests from Persia somehow recognized the divine presence in a Jewish baby in a small town in Judea. They practiced different rituals. They spoke and prayed in a different language. They understood God through different texts and traditions. And yet they knew holiness when they encountered it.
They didn’t need to convert to Judaism first. They didn’t need to abandon their own wisdom tradition. They followed the knowledge they had: the movements of the stars, the stirrings of the spirit in their own hearts, and it led them to worship the true God in human form.
What might they teach us about recognizing the holy in unexpected places? About finding God’s truth in traditions different from our own?
We’ve been doing this through our recent Book and Bible Studies, both with Cosmas and now with Living Buddha, Living Christ. We’ve been finding common truths with people from different parts of our tradition and other traditions.
The third gift is myrrh. This is the forward-looking gift, the one that sees what’s coming. Myrrh was used in burial preparations. It was what you rubbed on a body to preserve it, to honor it, to prepare it for the tomb. It’s a strange gift for a baby. Dark. Ominous. Prophetic.
The magi brought myrrh because somehow, they understood that this child’s life would lead to death. That this king would not overthrow Rome with armies. That this priest would not offer the blood of bulls and goats but would pour out his own blood. They saw, even at the beginning, that the path of this life led to a cross.
What in the stars or in their studies or in their seeking told them that this baby would die young, would be executed as a criminal, would be wrapped in burial cloths and laid in a tomb? We don’t know. More than likely this part of the text is allegorical. Whether or not the magi brought myrrh with them is less important than the signal that Jesus came into the world as a liberator and savior.
These outsiders saw the whole arc of Jesus’ life. The glory and the suffering. The worship and the rejection. The crown and the cross. They brought gifts that honored all of it: the royalty, the divinity, and the liberation.
This passage demands a question of us: Whose wisdom are we willing to receive?
It’s easy to listen to people who sound like us, who share our background, who were raised in our tradition. It’s comfortable to stay with the familiar voices, the accepted interpretations, the teachers who confirm what we already believe. We know all about echo chambers and Christianity’s echo chambers are significant.
But what if God’s truth is bigger than our tradition? What if wisdom comes from unexpected places? What if the people we’ve dismissed as “other” or “outsider” or “not one of us” have something essential to teach us about who God is and what God is doing in the world?
The religious leaders in Jerusalem had all the right credentials. They knew the Scriptures. They held the positions of authority. And they missed it. They stayed home.
The magi had none of those credentials. They came from the wrong country, followed the wrong religion, and studied the wrong texts. And they were the ones who worshiped Jesus. They were the ones who brought gifts.
The author Haruki Murakami wrote that “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” What might we be missing because we’re only listening to voices that sound like ours? What wisdom might God be offering through people whose faith looks different, whose culture is unfamiliar, whose traditions we don’t understand?
The magi didn’t have to stop being Persian and Zoroastrian to worship Jesus. They didn’t have to abandon their own wisdom to recognize God’s truth. They brought who they were—their knowledge, their gifts, their perspective—and they laid it all before the Christ child.
That’s what God’s inviting us into. Not to abandon our own tradition, but to expand it. Not to pretend that all paths are the same, but to recognize that God’s truth is bigger than any single path can contain. To be humble enough to learn from those who are different from us. To be open enough to receive wisdom from unexpected sources. To recognize that all paths lead to God.
The question is: Are we paying attention? Are we watching for the ways God might be speaking through voices we haven’t traditionally listened to? Are we willing to be taught by people whose journeys look different from ours?
Or are we like religious leaders in every century, including our own, who are so blindly confident in what they already know or believe they know that they miss what God is doing right in front of us?
The magi came from the afar. They followed a star. They brought gifts that named the truth about Jesus: his humanity, his divinity, and the liberation he would bring. They saw what the insiders missed.
And then, after they worshiped, the text tells us something crucial: “They left for their own country by another road.”
They didn’t go back the way they came. The encounter with Jesus changed their path. They had to find a new way home. They had no allegiance to Herod, the genocidal king. They were forever changed and they followed other more powerful instructions.
Perhaps that’s the invitation for us too. To let our encounter with Christ open us up to new paths, new wisdom, new voices. To trust that God is bigger than our categories, wider than our traditions, more generous than our theologies sometimes allow.
The wise men from the East brought gold, frankincense, and myrrh. They brought wisdom from outside the walls. They brought gifts that revealed the truth.
What might we receive if we’re willing to learn from those we’ve kept at a distance?
What gifts might God be offering through the strangers we haven’t welcomed yet?
The magi came seeking. They came offering. They came worshiping.
And they went home by another road.
May we have the courage to do the same.
Amen.