Joel Snider's Sermons from FBC Rome

December 2, 2007

Myrrh: A Gift for Dying

Matthew 2:7-11

One of the things that, I think, gives us a sense of peace and reassurance, something that gives us a sense of comfort at this time of year, are the prophecies about Christ's birth. Not only do we enjoy the season, and not only do we enjoy the message of the angels and the wonder of the shepherds and the worship of the Wise Men, but I think we find ourselves pleased and comforted by the fact that the birth of Christ was foretold centuries before he was born.

We know about how Isaiah was trying to get the king to trust in God and not in foreign powers and goes out where the king was inspecting an aqueduct and says, "Trust in God, and just to prove that you trust in God, ask for a sign."

The king said, "I won't ask for a sign. I won't try God."

Isaiah said, "Therefore, a sign will be given to you. Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son and his name shall be called Immanuel."

When we read that in the Old Testament and then we recognize that Christ fulfills it, it does our souls well.

Or that great passage later in Isaiah where he says, "Arise, shine, for your light has come and the glory of the Lord rises upon you. See, darkness covers the earth and thick darkness is over the people but the Lord rises upon you and his glory appears over you. Nations will come to your light and kings to the brightness of your rising."

When we hear the story about the Wise Men, we think there was darkness and there was this light. There was this star. The Wise Men from far off, nations came to worship. And again, this sense that it was foretold and now is fulfilled gives us just a little extra boost to our faith.

There are also prophecies that, if you pay attention, are occurring within the story of Jesus' birth. It is very interesting, something I had not noticed before, but just before the verses that we read just a few moments ago when the Wise Men first come to Jerusalem and they are consulting with Herod and Herod is greatly upset, it says, "He called together the chief priests," and the language that Matthew uses to tell that will not be used again until Jesus is on trial. It says that they called together the chief priests for the purpose of trying him. It seems that Jesus troubles people in Jerusalem and somebody has to decide what to do about Jesus so they call together the chief priests. There is this inspired choice of words by Matthew where already birth and Jesus' death are linked together.

Then, of course, there are the gifts of the Wise Men and the one that we think about today, the gift of myrrh. I have kidded with a few people and said this is a little bit of a scratch and sniff sermon. Several people thought that there was something wrong with their bulletin when they noticed a spot in the upper left corner of the front. That's supposed to be there. That's myrrh. I tried several of them this morning. I might have smelled your bulletin earlier, but I finally found one that I could smell it on. That's myrrh. And I believe that after we handed out all the bulletins this morning, when I walked in, having recognized it, I could just detect the faint smell of myrrh within the sanctuary.

Myrrh is taken from a plant that is commonly called a rock rose. I am not sure I have ever seen a rock rose, but it is very expensive and very potent. If I told you we had a bottle that was about that big around and that tall and we only used about that much out of the whole bottle to put a dab on each bulletin this morning. It's very, very potent, so potent that you could not use a lot of it, but it was used for several things in the time of Jesus, but one of the primary things that it was used for was to embalm the dead. We know this because we have sung, We Three Kings. "We three kings of Orient are," and that one verse that says, "Myrrh is mine; it's bitter perfume breathes a life of gathering gloom; sorrowing, sighing. . ." We remember that and we recognize that the gift of myrrh, while we don't know exactly what the Wise Man or Wise Men who brought this particular gift had in mind for it, surely there had to be someone there in that stable who thought, "This is a gift for dying." It seems a little inappropriate. It would almost be like if someone sent out a birth announcement and people sent sympathy cards. Why would you link death to something as joyous, something as wonderful, as birth? I thought about it and thought they could have used it in that stable there. That might have been very helpful, but really it's inappropriate. It's really inappropriate unless, unless in an inspiration whoever brought this gift, however many Wise Men there were, we think three because there were three gifts but there is really nothing that tells us how many, or how many people brought this particular gift, but maybe in this inspired choice of gifts there is a reminder to us that the birth of Jesus came about to save us from our sins.

If anytime during the course of the year we do not want to think about sin, and anytime we want to come to church and not hear about sin, the one time we think we are safe, "Ah, this will be a safe time to come to church," Christmas is about peace, light, hope, and joy. This will be a time when we won't have to think about sin, but why did Jesus come except to save us from our sins.

The message of Christmas is about birth and birth always makes us think about joy and it is a story about a baby and we think about all these gifts. We even have these pretty boxes around the Advent wreath reminding us of the beauty of the gifts that were brought to the Christ child. We think about peace and hope, but all of these things that give us such comfort, all these things that give us such assurance, all the reasons why we like this season and we are drawn to it, all of them are given because of our sin.

Sometimes it is considered impolite, and I know that most ministers of my generation struggle to try to find a way to describe sin that either doesn't immediately make a person turn away and say, "I am tired of hearing about that" or "They are not talking to me" or something that bores people because they have heard it a hundred times or something that can help us each recognize that the word is about us. And I don't know that I could ever find it, but I want to say this. I think that most of us, even if we don't like the word sin, most of us recognize that there is something that is incomplete in our lives, that there is something lacking, or there is something that is missing, and because of this, we need to be made whole. There is something in our life that feels broken. There is something that doesn't quite fit together the way we think our lives ought to fit together and we know that we need healing. We know that there is something that is wrong or something that weighs us down and something is a burden to us that we need to be released from. All of these are the different ways that we experience sin. All of these are ways that we can try to find different explanations and we can try to be psychological and we can try to be scientific and we can try to put everything in a different category, but the truth is there is something in this heart that is missing. There is something in this heart that is broken. There is something in this heart that weighs me down, and it is my sin.

The prophecies are not about that God wants to give us gifts and not simply that God wants us to be generous one time a year or kinder one time a year or that Scrooge can turn into a really nice guy. The prophecies are that God will deliver his people. God will deliver his people from their sins. The one that is born is the one that has come to die, to die for our sins so that we might have the gift of life.

I think there is a tendency among us to want to separate the Christmas season from the rest of the year. We always say, "Isn't it a shame we can't have this spirit all year long? Isn't it a shame we can't all feel like this all year long? That we can't be as generous, as kind, all year long." But the truth is we really do want to separate this and somehow keep it over by itself. The desire is not all that bad. I think it is a desire to kind of keep it clean, to keep it preserved.

You get a new tablecloth and you think, "Oh, it's going to look so good. Oh, I don't want to get it messed up."

Or you get some kind of new piece of clothing and you wear it once and you think, "I'm going to save it." Then finally you realize, "I've saved it and saved it, and now I have had it so long because I didn't want it to get messed up. It was special." I think Christmas is kind of like that. We want to save it because we don't want it to be tarnished. We don't want it to be ruined. We don't want the rest of the world to get their hands on it and to make it just like everything else.

This is why we don't like commercialization, and I am not going to go off on a tangent about that. But sometimes we wish that Christmas wouldn't be confused with buying, selling, and the GDP, that Christmas was just something pure, holy, and spiritual in and of itself. We want to just pull it over here and keep it by itself. We would sure like to separate Christmas from words like sin, but it's not that neat. Whether it be the gathering of authorities in Jerusalem to try to figure out what to do with Jesus or whether it be this gift for dying, this gift of myrrh, that the Wise Men bring to the stable where Jesus has been born, whether it be anyone of these things, we are reminded that somewhere in this story of babies and birth and life that there is a hint of death of Jesus Christ because Christ came to die for our sins that we might have life. If there is hope, joy, and peace in this story, it is because of what comes eventually—not just now, but what comes eventually—in the ministry of Jesus.

We make these false choices in life. Do you like fall better or spring better? We say things like, "I like them both. I don't know why I have to choose."

Do you like Christmas better or do you like Easter better? "I don't know. That's hard." Which do you like? Do you like Christmas better or do you like Easter better?

They are celebrated differently, but they really have the same message that God has come in Jesus Christ, that God has come to deliver his people from their sins and his people are anyone, anyone, who would respond to the Gospel.

We all like the Christmas carols a lot, but there are some of the hymns that we sing sometimes that don't seem quite as happy and joyful. O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, that always seems just a little minor key to me, but the songs like that are in the Christmas season to remind us that Christmas is about our opportunity to repent, the opportunity to receive the Christ child into our lives because if the Christ child comes into our life, surely, surely, that will cast sin out.

Christmas and Easter are tied together by authorities meeting in Jerusalem and by the reminders of death even in the life and birth of Jesus. Christmas, the great joy, the great peace, the wondrous hope, is that God has come in Jesus Christ to deliver each one of us from our sins. No greater gift could ever be given. No greater gift could ever be received.

Copyright 2007. P. Joel Snider. All rights reserved.

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