Epiphany 1
Or: three wise men and their associated camel.
Sunday last was the first Sunday after Epiphany, but as Epiphany fell on a Saturday this year, our church celebrated the festival a day late.
Sunday’s Eucharist, being the first of the month was also a family service. Things are slightly more informal at these services. We use a smaller, portable altar in the nave; the sermon is a little freer, there is no sung psalm and generally things can be a little unpredictable, especially when the children are involved. Family services have seen all kinds of unusual roles for the server – more of those at the appropriate times. Anyway, all in all, Epiphany 1 looked set to be fairly normal.
We had the usual hiccups needless to say, we nearly sang the psalm, a reading was skipped, but then we had to get the wise men to the crib. Done properly, a crib should not have any wise men in it until Epiphany. In my father’s church, they make a stately progress from window sill to window sill in the days between Christmas and Epiphany. At our church, they lurk in the vestry. The wise men and the camel had been the subject of much merriment prior to the service. In common with most church crib figures, they are pretty bashed up – not as badly as the cow with the missing ear though – and decidedly wobbly. The less said about the camel and how it would proceed up the aisle the better.
Well, during the gradual hymn (before the Gospel) the children were instructed to bring the ‘three wise men and their associated camel’ to the crib. This was delievered in the most dead pan of tones with a totally straight expression and was enough to cause a small collapse in myself and the other server. The figures duly arrived, delivered in the way only 12 year olds who are just starting to think that they are too cool for this sort of thing can. With the Holy Family, four shepherds, four sheep, an ox and an ass, the crib was pretty crowded. We just about squeezed in the wise men, but the camel was out in the cold.
Mercifully, the rest of the service passed off with little else in the way of incidents (almost forgetting the sanctus bell, or rather, chime bar, aside). However, I did notice a large bin in the vestry that had been used for one of the Christmas services. It was filled with straw and contained small parcels with instructions like ‘decorate the organist with tinsel’. I wonder what happened to the servers that day.
