Today's reading is from Matthew 2. Now, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, and the days of Herod the King, behold, wise men from the east came to Jerusalem saying, where is he who has been born King of the Jews? For we saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him. When Herod the King heard this, he was troubled and all Jerusalem with him. And assembling all the chief priests and scribes of people, he inquired of them where the Christ was to be born. They told him, in Bethlehem of Judea, for so it is written by the prophet. And you, O Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah, for whom you shall come a ruler who will shepherd my people Israel. Then, Herod summoned the wise men secretly and ascertained from them what time the star had appeared. And he sent them to Bethlehem saying, go and search diligently for the child. And when you have found him, bring me word, that I too may come and worship him. After listening to the King, they went on their way and behold, the star that they had seen when it rose went before them until it came to the place, until it came to rest of the place where the child was. When they saw the star, they rejoiced exceedingly with great joy. And going into the house, they saw the child with Mary, his mother, and they fell down and worshiped him. Then, opening their treasures, they offered him gifts, gold, and frankincense, and more. And being warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they departed to their own country by another way. The word of the Lord. Thanks be to you, Lord, our God for you are the author of the word and the creator of our hearts. And we pray you would bring the two together by your Holy Spirit. Our hearts and your word that we might know you, live in you with you and through you. We pray in Christening, amen. Well, you may think that I've sort of got a little time warp or something going on. This is not exactly the passage that we usually read in February. In fact, we would be more according to the seasons, I suppose, if we read it about a month ago in early January. But I will tell you why I'm preaching to you. It's really a couple of reasons. But a couple of weeks ago, I preached in Austin in a wonderful Anglican church there, just amazing church that's growing and thriving and has a great deal of love for us in a lot of ways. They know of us and they care for us. And they're involved in our seminary extension, Redeemer Seminary in Austin. But the director asked me to preach on the subject of generosity. He just gave me the title, just generosity. You know, preachers with a subject in search of a text. That's kind of dangerous sometimes. It's not usually the way it's supposed to be. But I did. I was in a meeting shortly after I talked to this director and Chad Scruggs, one of our other pastors, was in the meeting. And I texted Chad in the meeting. I said, Chad, I got a preach on generosity this week in Austin. What passage would you use? And I mean, it was just like a second. It didn't take him any time. He went back, you said, Matthew 2, one through 12. And I thought, that's strange. That's the Magi, that's Christmas, you know. But I thought about it and I thought, you know, I don't know if Chad has ever preached on this passage, but he really had something there. The idea that generosity would come out of this. There's a one or two obvious ways in which you see that, I suppose, even just on the face of it. But there's some more to learn from this passage as I dug into it. And so that's what we're going to talk about this morning. Now, one of the things that is appropriate though, is that we are still in the season of epiphany. And that is the season marked by the so-called wise men or the Magi that came from the east to the Christ child. In fact, this is the fifth Sunday in epiphany. The church calendar, you know, it starts with Advent, which is the four weeks before Christmas, then Christmas tied itself, and then epiphany, which is the begun by the Magi coming, and then lasts for several weeks. In the Christmas calendar, excuse me, in the Christian calendar, it's become the 12th night or 12 days after Christ's birth, and it's become a fixed day on our calendars. Therefore, it's January 6th, 12 days after Christmas. So let's see what we can learn from the Magi about generosity of all kinds. Generosity of our hearts, most of all, perhaps. Now, we don't know how many Magi there were. We always think of three, don't we? Because there's three gifts, and that's the way they're depicted in art and in other ways we might have observed them in Christmas pageants and so forth. But we really don't know how many. It could have been two, could have been four, could have been ten. We really don't know. The Magi themselves are surrounded in a bit of mystery. It says they appear from the east, which means from Persia, or Iraq, or Iran, we might say today, and we really don't know exactly how to understand. And we call them wise men as this passage, we read this morning, translates it. Other translations go directly for the word Magi, is actually more accurate. A Magi singular was a combination of scientist, astronomer, astrologist, philosopher, mathematician. He was a reader, in other words, of the signs of the times. He looked at the stars, he looked at the cosmos, and he tried to make certain assessments about what was going on in the world. One thing they were not, these Magi was particularly religious. They were from the east, they were not Hebrew. They were certainly not professionally religious, like the rabbis, or the scribes in Israel itself. Perhaps a contemporary comparison might help. The Magi were the astrophysicists of their day. In other words, they did what astrophysicists do today. They look into the cosmos for signs of the meaning of the universe, its origins, and its meaning, and its end, I suppose. But these Magi were at it so long that they became kind of philosopher astrophysicists. If you know what I mean, perhaps like Einstein or David Hawkins. These were people, excuse me, Stephen Hawkins. People who understood so much about the cosmos that they began to wax philosophical about what the meaning really was. This is to say that when these astrophysicists, these Magi, looked at the sky, they didn't just ask what they saw. They asked why it was there. And that is a very important distinction upon which a lot of what we're going to say here in the next few minutes really turns, as you'll see in a minute. The real question is why, not what? Now, their coming is an unexpected revelation, isn't it? It's out of nowhere. I mean, literally in our Bibles, if you think about it, you're reading Matthew 1 and then you jump into Matthew 2 and all of a sudden these people that you don't recognize, we don't know anything about, they just appear. And that is what we call an epiphany, isn't it? Something that just happens, it just appears dramatically and perhaps unexpectedly. We use the word epiphany in everyday language to mean this, a sudden intuitive perception or insight into the real meaning or the real essence of something. And as the astrophysicists of their time, they see a star. And the star is described as from the east or in the east. And it itself is a kind of unexpected revelation, an inexplainable epiphany. It all of a sudden appears. And it means something, and these watchers of the stars, these philosophers, they understood that this star meant something. And they bring their gifts in response to what they see in the star. Gold, frankincense, and mer. There's a kind of symbolical significance to the gifts, and we'll get to that in a minute. But one thing we know about these gifts is that they were a great value. They were very, very lavish. Gold, frankincense, and mer were very, very expensive, very costly. And some speculate that this is the way that the funds were to be provided for the holy family to escape Herod's clutches and flee to Israel, flee to Egypt. They needed money for that flight, and perhaps this is where that money came from. You would say, I think, that the Magi came bearing gifts above what would seem appropriate. In other words, they were amazingly generous in what they brought. This is no baby shower with little bonnets and little cute booties. These were gifts of fabulous, fabulous, outrageous value in human terms. And the meaning, of course, is that these Magi, wealthy as they were, brought the best that they had. But they also bring something else, don't they? They bring something that in many ways is much more valuable than just the gifts. They bring themselves because they are not Hebrews, you see. They're bringing themselves to Jesus is a hugely important act in the history of redemption. Because they, as non Jews, are Gentiles. And therefore, what do they represent? They represent the coming of the Gentile world to Christ. It's as if they're foreshadowing the huge development of the church of which all of us are errors. Just about every one of us in the room is a Gentile, that is to say a non Jew. And we, as it were, are brought to Christ in the person of these Magi. So it's a truth, really, that the Magi are themselves a kind of epiphany, a revelation of what God's purposes were for the world, that He was going to bring people from every land and every nation to His Son. So let me put it this way. There's at least three different forms in which very generous gifts are being given here. The first is the material gifts of gold, frankincense, and mer. Remember, no currency, no bank accounts, no investments in those days. The wealth was held in gold, as we might today, but also in very costly spices and ointments and perfumes. Second, the gift here is the gift of the Gentile world to Christ. Represented by these Magi, themselves coming, giving up their time, giving up their wealth, coming to worship, and showing to us that the mystery of the gospel, right from the very beginning, is that it is the gospel for the world. And then third is the gift of the child. You may not have thought of it this way, but the third gift that's really given here is Jesus Himself in the incarnation. And I want you to think of the incarnation of Jesus Christ as the greatest gift that God could ever give to the world. For that's exactly what it is. So the generosity of the Magi's gifts, the generosity of the Magi giving themselves, and the generosity of the Lord to the world in the incarnation. Now, these three gifts are so interwoven in this story. It's actually hard to separate them and pull them out, but let's look at them just in a little bit more detail. First we talk about the gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. What compelled the Magi's generosity? We've already asked that question, but it's a very important question. Why were they so generous? And surely they saw in the epiphany of the star that they had to bring gifts. And by the way, it's interesting that the epiphany came to them in their own language, so to speak, in the language of astronomy. In other words, the message to take gifts to someone came to them in the stars, a language that was familiar to them that they understood. But the epiphany was startling because, though it was clear to them, they did not know exactly what it meant except that they were to follow that star. It was unlike any star they had ever seen. It was clearly out of place in the heavens. Apparently it was much brighter than any star in the sky. It did not fit their expectations of what the heavens should look like. It was a completely new thing. The star was an epiphany itself, right? And that meant they discerned that they had to go somewhere, and as yet to an unknown place, and they had to bring gifts. The way I said that is curious. They had to go. They had to bring gifts. You know, you could cut that one of two ways. It's ambiguous. Did they have to go because they ought to go? Or did they have to go because they were overwhelmed with desire to go? They wanted to. Was their generosity compelled by duty or by desire? Again, that is another hinge of this whole account, this whole narrative involving these magi. You see, you can understand generosity in the form of the questions that I've already mentioned, the what and the why and then the how question. We can understand almost anything in our lives using that triad, what why and how. So the question here is not just what they brought. It is why they brought it. It is what was going on in their heads and hearts, what was compelling them from deep inside. Something more internal, something more that they genuinely wanted to give. Now the distinction between what and why is I think you can illustrate it by Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs said, when asked, why is Apple the best computer company in the world? And if you don't think so, you want to hold on to your HP or your Dell, that's fine. But just go with me on this. Why is Apple the best computer company in the world? And Jobs answer was, most computer companies ask the question, what and then how? What are we trying to make the best computer in the world? How are we going to do it? We're going to manufacture it and then we're going to market it as broadly as we can all over. Do you know that Jobs didn't ask that question? That wasn't the question he asked. He didn't ask the what question or the how question. He asked the why question. Why are we doing this? Why are we making these amazing instruments of communication? And his answer was this, instantaneous universal connectivity. And that phrase sounds a little abstract perhaps to us, but it didn't to him. It was a driving force in all that he did. In other words, by answering the why question first, we add torque and power and meaning to the what question. Do that in any area of your life, I challenge you, any area of your life, ask the why question first, and you'll see the what of what you're supposed to do in a new and clearer way. Now, this is why they came, probably not with odds, although they were compelled, but they came with a desire. There's something drawing them. Now, in Scripture, there's repeated warnings to the wealthy. I think we know that. The problem with the rich man in the Bible is not that he's rich. It's that he doesn't know why he's rich. And when I say he doesn't know why he's rich, it doesn't mean he doesn't know how he got there. It means he doesn't know what his riches are for. That's not every rich man, of course. But in the Bible, frequently we find wealthy people who don't know why they're really wealthy. And in the Psalms, particularly, I think it's arguable that you see three, the three most discussed ideas in the Psalms are this. The loving kindness of God, who are the people who receive the loving kindness of God or don't? And the third most talked about subject in the Psalms is wealth. So, the problem with wealthy people in the Psalms is that they evaluate their life by what they possess, what they got for themselves. Others, some wealthy, some not-so-wealthy, evaluate their lives by what they give. So in Psalm 37, verse 22, one of the many examples says, the righteous is generous and gives the Bible commends generosity. In fact, it commands it. It commands it to the poor. Generosity to the poor is much, much more a sign of being a Christian than wearing a cross around your neck. It is a living sign that we are following after our Lord. It's a living sign that we understand what it means to bring very extravagant gifts to him and through him as it were to others. In Deuteronomy 15, there will never cease to be the poor in your land. Therefore, I command you, you shall open wide your hand to your brother, to the needy and to the poor in your land. You shall give to him freely and your heart shall not be grudging when you give to him as perceptive, isn't it? Sometimes when we give to the poor, we do it grudgingly. We've got to do this. We feel like we have to do it. Someone's asked us to do it maybe. It's a sense of awe. But verse 7 in Deuteronomy 15 says, you shall not harden your heart or shut your hand against your poor brother. So, you shall not harden your heart. What's that? That's the why. In other words, open your heart. That's the why you give. And then you open your hand. That's the what? And really what Moses is saying there and what Jesus repeats in a number of different ways is you can't open your hand if you don't open your heart. It really, really won't quite, quite work. But here's the problem. If you're honest, if you're honest like I try and be honest about this, my heart is filled with so much self-care and self-preservation and fear of losing what I may have, that I don't know how I can change my heart to make it a heart willing to be generous, eager to be generous, happy to be generous. We need an epiphany. We need an epiphany to be able to give freely and not grudgingly. And where does this epiphany come from? Deuteronomy 15 again, by remembering that you were once poor. The key to epiphany-like generosity is to recognize how much has been given to you by Jesus. And what it means to be a Christian that he has given you so much in himself, that you become a little bit overwhelmed and a little bit almost disbelieving, that he's given you so much. And that's a problem for us. We're so used to just taking it for granted. David Martin Lloyd Jones, famous preacher of the last century in England, used to talk about this little dialogue. One person asks another, are you a Christian? And the other person says, well, yes, of course, I'm a Christian. And another person says to someone else, are you a Christian? And he says, yes, I am a Christian. And can you believe it? Can you see the difference, of course. Can you really believe that you and I have received the riches from God that we've received? Can we really begin to understand the overwhelming nature of all that he has given to us in Christ and in the gospel? We need to see how poor we are and this takes an epiphany. And only that will change our hearts so that we give freely and none out of obligation. And we need therefore to see how poor Jesus became for us. It's in understanding his poverty, particularly at the cross, that we see the riches that he made available to us. Though he was rich, he became poor for our sakes, Paul says. And how poor was that? How poor was it? Remember I said that the man I came bringing gifts, gold symbolizing wealth, no doubt. Frankincense symbolizing incense used in worship probably that the child was going to be worshiped. But what was Mer? Mer was a very, very strong, pungent spice. And it was used where in burials. It was used in burials in those days because of the smell. They didn't have embomming like we do today. They would use this very pungent spice, Mer. As a person was laid in the tomb or in the grave. And so what is going on here? Curiously, whether the magi realize it or not, they were making a connection that we must make. It's a direct connection between the cradle and the cross, an absolute direct connection. He was born into poverty. He would live a life of poverty and he would die a poor man's death. And he would do it as he gave up the riches of heaven. He didn't have to do it. He chose to do it in cooperation with his father to execute the grand plan of all the ages that the Gentiles and eventually the whole world, Jew and Gentile, will come to this cradle and to this cross. And that becomes the motivation. How do you actually work that into your life? We have to stand before the cradle too. Be with the wise men as they come. Especially the cross. And see what it is he has done for you there. Gaze at him in the eyes of your imagination. Read scripture about the cross and know how great that sacrifice was. You know, we've all seen people on the street all the time. Sometimes every day holding the corners holding the cardboard signs. You know, I'll work for food or please I'm hungry. And I always felt like I ought to give. And that's a big problem, ought. Because you know when one ought is there, another ought comes up. And the other ought is why I ought not to give. And I have all the rationales for not giving. They're going to use it to just buy whiskey. They're, you know, they need to stop standing on the street corner and getting a job. I have all the excuses, all the reasons I bet some of you do too. But about December 1st this last year, I just felt convicted that I should skip my odds and I should try and open my heart and then my hand. So I went to the bank and I got a hundred dollars in one dollar bills, a few five dollar bills, but mostly 100s. And I said I'm going to give them away at all the street corners. Well, guess what happened? For the next month, all the way through Christmas, I saw not one person on a street corner. Not one. And as I thought about this, I said, this is really strange. Why is this happening? And I became convinced that the Lord was waiting for my generosity not to be an ought, but rather to come from a heart that had been changed by the love of Jesus at the cross. And I'm not saying I do that perfectly. But do you see what generosity really is? And of course it's not just generosity of our money. It's generosity of the whole of our lives. And this is really in keeping with the morality of the New Testament. We always are required to do the right thing, but we're really required to do the right thing for the right reason. In other words, not the what but the why. And that's why we need to do it. The incarnation of Christ means that Jesus became a body. Flesh can die and only Jesus flesh could die for us. Jesus wasn't just a spirit. If he was, he couldn't have died for us because spirits don't die. The incarnation means our generosity must be physical. It must be present. It must be if you will bodily generosity. Our bodies are the sacrifice in generosity as the tangible evidence that we understand the sacrifice bodily that Jesus made for us in the incarnation. And especially, of course, at the cross. This is the logic of the incarnation, my friends. We do not become expressions of the incarnation. We become extensions of it. What are we called? What is this? What are we? The church? But what is the church called? The body of Christ. Now, I don't think that's metaphorical. I used to, but I don't think so. We are the living body of Jesus in the world today. Where we go, he goes. What we hold back, it's as if he's holding it back. Where we open our hearts and our hands, it's Jesus opening his for us. The Magi didn't just wonder. They didn't just pray. They came. They came bottled. They brought themselves at great cost. Time. That's sometimes more valuable than what we possess. Energy. Giving up whatever they were leaving. Back home. They came. Now look, just about done. Just a quick summary. The generosity of the Magi's gifts, gold, frankincense, and the generosity of our giving is to be extravagant. It's to be ridiculous generosity. And often it's to be spontaneous against logic if you will. Of course we're to plan. Of course we're to pay our tithe and do the logical things that we should do. But the kind of bodily generosity I'm talking about is you just do it. You just see a need and you go after it. You do it. And what we give of our wealth and of our bodies comes from an epiphany realizing what Jesus gave to us. These wise men, Barbara reminded me or told me this the other day she was thinking with me about this. These wise men came as it came to the Christ child as astrophysicists, astrologers, but they left his worshipers, didn't they? So come to Jesus with whatever you've got, whoever you are, and be before him at the cradle and at the cross. And then you will leave more as worshipers. But also there's the generosity, not just of the Magi's gifts, but the Magi's giving of themselves and our giving of ourselves, our bodies are given as spiritual worship, our time, our energy, our physical presence. What if next week I could give this as a little assignment? You came to church next week and you brought your offering. You're going to put that in the offering plate. But you also had put down on a three by five card, one way in which you were going to give your body to the poor or to the needy or to someone in distress the following week. And you folded that up and you put that in the offering plate. That's what I'm talking about. It's an offering to Jesus who has offered what? Everything, everything to you and to me. And then, supremely, we see here the generosity of the incarnation of Jesus, giving the life that we could not live, giving the death that we could not die, taking our sin upon himself and dying for it and giving us his life so that we live because of it. We see the giving of the flesh of the Son of God for the life of the world, the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.