Theme:  giving all your gifts to God.

Every January we approach the story of the three Wise men, bringing gifts for Jesus. What gifts do we have to bring the Christ child?

What are the gifts that God has given to you?  They are your talents, abilities, aptitudes, events that have happened to you.  These have shaped you, your family, your health, your everything.  Your gifts are the sum total of all the resources that God has given to you.  Your gifts are not just genetic abilities and natural aptitudes, although these are part of your gifts.  Many of your most precious gifts are qualities and resources that have been developed in you over time. 

God has given everyone in this room an abundance of gifts.  Here in my hand, I have a bare stem from a grapevine; it has three grapes on it.  You know when you see this stem that it is an anomaly.  You know something is wrong with it;  that someone has taken the grapes off of it.  But here in my other hand, is a large cluster of grapes and there must be a hundred, more than hundred grapes on this stem. You know that this is the way that God makes grapes, in large abundant clusters.  That is the same way that God makes all human beings, with large clusters of talents, abilities, aptitudes, and resources.  God is enormously generous with each one of us.

For more of this theme, see picture and sermon by Rev. Ed Markquart, Pentecost 26 A.