Bearing Gifts
The Rev’d Devin McLachlan
Epiphany Sunday 2026
St Bene’t’s, Cambridge
One of the essential texts when I was reading for my degree in Folklore was Bronislaw Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific. (1) With groundbreaking, if imperfect, field-work, Malinowski opened up to his early 20 th century readers the cultures and traditions of the Trobriand people in Papua.
He focused on the Kula exchange — a complex system of gift-giving, red shell necklaces being given in a sunwise circuit around the archipelago, white shell armbands given in a widdershins circuit.
Attached to this gift-giving were complex rules of kinship and authority, as well as long, dangerous journeys by sea.
For Malinowski, the moral was clear: Gift giving is never simple.
(1) As an aside: Malinowski’s personal journals are full of self-flagellation over his obsessive novel reading when he should have been doing field work – Dostoyevski, the Brontë sisters, Conrad, but, Malinowski wrote, “my narcotic is a trashy novel.” See Sams, Henry W. ‘Malinowski and the Novel’ The Journal of General Education Vol. 26, No. 2 (SUMMER 1974), pp. 125-138 (14 pages) https://www.jstor.org/stable/27796420
The kula exchange had very little to do with the red and white shell ornaments. Kula tied distant islands together, made possible other types of trade and barter, reinforced aristocratic lineages and tied gift-bearing men into matrilineal systems of ownership.
On its own, gift giving is remarkably inefficient. Christmas presents drive economists up the wall.
They note that the expensive cashmere pullover you gave a loved one is, being in a colour they wouldn’t have chosen for themselves, valued by your recipient about 20% less than what you paid.
Economists call this “the deadweight loss of Christmas,” which tells you all you need to know about the dismal science (2) .
Herod knew all about the power and danger of gift-giving. When wise men from the East came bearing gifts to pay homage to this unknown child born King of the Jews, like tyrants before and after him, Herod was frightened.
And like tyrants before and after him, the violence of the state offered easy solutions. 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… Homage indeed.
We heard about Herod’s homage, his deeds of fear and violence, last week in Ed’s sermon on The Festival of The Holy Innocents.
I feel like Herod has been in the news a lot of late. Herod’s violent grasp on power. Herod’s jealousy and paranoia. Herod’s fear. Herod’s murders. Herod’s … inability to receive and rejoice?
I bet Herod was impossible to shop for. What do you get the tyrant who has everything, including his brother’s ex-wife?
Choosing gifts isn’t too bad, most of the time. Perhaps its a little intimidating, but it can be a blessing to think about what the people you love might like to be given.
For many of us, receiving presents is the most difficult part. Even the risk of asymmetry aside, receiving a gift is a vulnerable thing.
(2) A less than flattering name for Economics, coined by Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle in 1849
A gift is an expression of affection, of intimacy and self-revelation — receiving a gift lets us see how others see us; it creates a debt which cannot ever be perfectly repaid.
Receiving gifts is difficult. We resist. We resist especially when we know we cannot repay in kind.
Which makes God so … annoying! Receiving God’s gifts is deeply bruising to our pride. (I suspect God knows that.) And yet I am certain that the gifts we receive from God are exactly the gifts we need.
We live in an age of broken relationships and broken understanding, of wars and kidnappings of heads of state, tyrant preying upon tyrant, and woe to those caught between.
And still we gather here every day, when so much else feels lost and broken, to celebrate the good news, that God has given us an amazing gift.
A child to teach us love; a brother to teach us to be one family; a friend, to teach us compassion; a leader, to teach us to serve; a teacher, to show us the way; a saviour, to bring us to the salvation which God has always dreamed for us.
God has given us this gift, that we might share God’s love with one another. God has given us this gift, that we might learn to receive God’s love.
The wise ones came from the east bearing gold for a king, frankincense for God incarnate, the bitter perfume of myrrh for the one who would give, to all of us, his life.