Sunday 8th January 2006The Epiphany of the Lord

Fr David Cherry

Isaiah  60  :  1 – 6;  Ephesians  3  :  1 – 12; Matthew   2  :  1 – 12

“The Kings of Tharsis and the Isles shall give presents; the Kings of Arabia and Saba shall bring gifts”, words from psalm 72 and today’s offertory sentence.

+  In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen

The way that we begin to perceive God’s invitation naturally varies from one person to another.  Some of us take circuitous routes for various reasons, in coming to the discovery of God’s loving kindness towards us.  We respond and then lose our way; we find ourselves lost, and then found; drawn sometimes by curiosity; sometimes out of desperate need.  God moves in each of us so uniquely that it is infinitely precious and frail.  But always God is calling us and you and I are guided by some sort of star of hope, some deep longing, an incling that there is more, a desire.

We all have gifts to bring, the gift of who we are, our experience and insights, to the aid of one another and to the enhancement of worship to the glory of God.

So the Magi come, not knowing what to expect, but faithful to the voice that calls them and the star that beckons them; eastern sages, ancient diviners, unware and outside the prophetic tradition that foretold the coming of the Prince of Peace, hardly knowing who they will meet, or what they will find or why they have come.  

Something new is made known to them.  Epiphany means ‘make manifest’ or ‘showing forth’.  Something beginning to become clearer as the Truth of who God is begins to ‘come home to us’.  I’ve got rather stuck on that phrase this Christmas – something ‘coming homing home to us’, some new realisation.  Aha, I now see.  Aha, I now understand. These Magi are the recipients – those who receive, those who are coming to an awareness.  

They find themselves offering him, in return, gifts of mystic meaning; not fully aware of their prophetic meaning; taken over by a mystery, whose depths they are only beginning to fathom.  They find themselves wanting to participate in some sort of exchange:  give beauty back to God…beauty’s self and beauty’s giver (Hopkins: The Golden Echo)   

And notice giving is because we are receiving something.  WE talk of giving and receiving, but actually it’s the other way round: receiving and giving.

Such is worship: a response to what is given, creating a mutual exchange; a response to something which is only beginning to be experienced, partly known, whose depth of meaning cannot be fathomed, explained or resolved – thus TS Eliot’s poem which I hope you’ll enjoy.  

Men’s curiosity searches past and future
And clings to that dimension, But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint.
No occupation either, but something given,
And taken, in a lifetime’s death in love,
Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.
For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment. The moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts.  These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.             TS Eliot

So I thought it was fitting on Epiphany to offer some thoughts about worship… not complete thoughts, but something of what has begun to come home to me in a new way since being here among you at St Cyprian’s.  I’ve written about some of this in my little green booklet.  You might want to have a discussion and improve on my thoughts in a community meeting.

The most formative experience of being trained at the College of the Resurrection, Mirfield, was the worship in the vast Community Church.  The only way round the church was to use the ambulatories – the passageways around the outside of the space against the wall.  You never crossed the line of vision of others if you could help it. How pedantic we thought at first.  But it eventually came home to me that here was sacred space; here one did not intrude on the vision or prayer of others.   There were set hours in the day when you could rehearse or clean the church, but otherwise the church was simply filled with a silence, a vacant holy space which we didn’t impinge on; a silence out of which worship arose - an audible voice was given to the presence of God among us.

In the Liturgy which we experience and undergo we are all participants. The word Liturgy means the ‘work of the people’.  In a strange way, we are all recipients of what we do.  What crazy language is that?

It is easy to be a recipient when you are listening.  That is obvious.   But when you read in church from the scriptures, you, the reader, are also being addressed by the words of scripture – you are also a recipient of that which you are giving voice to.  Reading as a recipient gives the reading an altogether different voice – you aren’t declaiming it like a Shakespearean actor of the early 20th century, actor, you are not using the force of personality to make a point.  A priest I know used to say: “Don’t read as if you’ve just written it.”  We read as recipient of it, in humility and with love, cherishing the words.  

When you have an active or audible voice in worship you are giving expression or voice to the unutterable wisdom of God, a mystery that cannot be grasped. Often when I’m reading the gospel allowed here, I think, gosh, I never heard that before, why don’t I preach on that instead? Something new comes home to me.

In music and singing none of us imposes our personalities and moods on others.  Rather we seek to create a ‘reflective atmosphere of reverence for God and one another’ so that each person can find what he or she needs to find – so that God can speak to us and reach out to us as his Body the Church and also as individual persons.  So the liturgy becomes a place where we learn to restrain the impetuous ego in reverence for one another.

Similarly, the priest is not there to conduct his own floor-show.  Liturgy is not about the priest taking a nice service. Liturgy helps the priest to know his place.  It is good to sit to the side, out of the main line of vision.  He is presiding over what we do, as a recipient himself of that which he proclaims: the Mystery of God among us. In my experience facing the same way as the congregation at the altar also enables me to be in the position of a recipient, a recipient of the loving kindness of God. I find this so moving that I have to try keep back the tears on occasion.

Reading, offering prayers, music and singing is giving voice to what cannot be mentioned adequately.  I sense Comper must have known this in designing this beautiful space. Worship needs to be a reflective experience, nothing intrusive, nothing imposing, nothing fussy or distracting. We are giving voice to that which is given to us, hallowing time and space.

And yet it is also about offering something to God in exchange.  In my booklet I wrote about the mutual exchange between us and God.  We offer, like the Magi, gifts: Bread and Wine.  They are set apart, transformed and consecrated and given back to us in Holy Communion: Bread, given to us from God as wheat in the field, transformed by human labour into unleavened bread and offered back to God.  Bread, representing our labour, our lives of participating in God’s project in bringing wholeness and meaning to others, justice and peace for his world, respect for creation.  

Wine may represent our leisure.  Again, grapes the fruit of the earth, God’s gift, transformed by human labour into wine – which I think most of us are not impartial to.  We bring wine to offer to God, so that it may be filled with his divine life to invigorate our own as we receive it.  And of course, wine may also represent the cup of suffering, sharing in the suffering of Jesus, as we try to bring about his kingdom among us, offered in thanksgiving and in solidarity with all who suffer for the cause of righteousness.

We are saying in effect:  You sustain our lives by giving us food – we offer what you have given us so that in receiving them again from you, we may be sustained in communion with you.  These gifts, Bread and Wine, represent ourselves. We wish to offer nothing less than all we are – ourselves as living sacrifices.

So today, I have asked that we make more of the Offertory Procession.  During the Offertory sentence, the gifts of Bread and Wine for the eucharist are to be brought forward by members of the congregation.  And when those bringing the offering of Bread and Wine forward have reached the front and the verse is over, we will say together:

Bless, O Lord, we beseech thee, these thy gifts, and sanctify them unto this holy use; that by them, we may be fed unto everlasting life of soul and body; through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

It is my hope – firstly, that you will like this addition and see the point of it; and that different people will wish to represent us all in bringing the offertory forward from the offertory table and taking part in this way.

After the prayer, the Hymn begins and the gifts are taken up to the altar; more prayers are used in placing them on the altar and preparing the altar (Blessed are you Lord God of all Creation etc.); and after the hymn the priest invites you to unite yourself with the offering to God about to be made in the Eucharistic prayer:  “Pray, brothers and sisters, that my sacrifice and yours may be acceptable to God the almighty Father.” And we reply willing that it may be so ‘for our good and the good of all his church’.  So it is here that we are offering ourselves as living sacrifices to God, in bread and wine, in the offering of Christ to the Father which we plead – and not after Holy Communion which is an option in Anglican prayer books.  Our offering is united with the offering of Jesus and not separate from it.

Here on Epiphany Sunday we are brought with the Magi into reflecting on worship; allowing ourselves to be drawn into it; discovering perhaps more of its meaning.  

What is coming home to us is not either right or wrong; but uniquely our own experience.  In discussion we may find what others experience illuminates our own experience; and what we discover helps others.  We all have gifts to bring, the gift of who we are, our experience and insights, to the aid of one another and to the enhancement of worship to the glory of God.


“The Kings of Tharsis and the Isles shall give presents; the Kings of Arabia and Saba shall bring gifts”.