When I wrote this piece, my oldest grandson (shown in his beloved John Deere tractor on Christmas Day) was in first grade. He graduated from high school last May. Except for the acknowledgement that Luc has grown older and I have grown older still (12 years on functions differently for those under-20 from those over-50) the piece rings true. Jesus is a king. King Tut was a king. Helping a small boy learn what it's taking me a lifetime to learn, that the promise of everlasting life is not the same as the promise of everlasting toys, continues.
The King Tut Exhibition is in Denver. My grandson’s first grade class is learning about the boy king, who was entombed in a solid gold coffin weighing nearly 250 pounds. Forget the gold. Luc likes the scarabs found near the coffin because he likes saying “dung beetle.” Poop and bugs; it doesn’t get any better than that.
Besides the jasper and carnelian “dung beetles,” Luc is hoping to see the toy boat his teacher told him archaeologists found in Tut’s tomb. It is a toy boat for a boy king; a royal toy for a royal child, the trappings of a life that would continue, in station and rank, unchanged into the next.
Luc tells me, “MaMaw, he has a toy boat because they believe in the afterlife.”
Luc is enchanted by the promise of not just everlasting life, but everlasting toys. Me, too.
I think of the ironically pronounced, but deeply held, creed, “He who dies with the most toys wins,” and I think of my own faithfulness in its service.
Still, I feel the need to state what I believe, if not necessarily practice. I say, “We believe in the afterlife, too. We call it heaven. But we don’t believe that kings here will be kings in heaven. We believe that a person can be very poor on earth, can have no house or car or food, and be so filled with God’s love, so filled with faith in God, that in heaven her true wealth will be revealed. She will be like a queen, but a queen because of how much she loved, not how much she had.”
I cannot promise celestial Legos. I see the disappointment on Luc’s face. He’s thinking of King Tut, who, though he had to die, still got to keep the toy boat.
I am a veteran of these conversations. I know that Luc, like all the small children who are ever in my care, has not mastered the playbook. He speaks simply of what he wants and loves, and, in first grade, they are mostly the same thing.
I have as many desires as Luc, but, unlike Luc, I am fluent in pious talk. I know how to turn the fully-equipped candy-apple red SUV into a “safe car for driving my grandchildren around.” Airbags and back-up monitors, not leather seats with built-in heaters, get it?
I think of how we delight in Matthew’s account of the magi kneeling before the child king, Jesus. But it isn’t the kneeling; really, it’s the gifts, and the way our own excess has been grandfathered in by the helpful astronomers. They come bringing royal gifts for a royal child.
In our family crèche, the porcelain gold, frankincense and myrrh are glued into the porcelain hands of the visitors. Try to knock off one of the gifts and a hand would likely follow. They’re inseparable.
I stand at the crèche and wonder if anyone brought a gift for a human child, a little boy. Because I hope Jesus did love his toys. I hope he delighted in a spinning top or a toy boat.
Still, however much the child Jesus loved his toys, he leaves them behind. He leaves behind every material possession, even his clothes. And there is nothing in the gospels to suggest Jesus notices that he is naked on the cross, and should, like Adam hiding from God, be ashamed. The gamblers playing for his cloak take notice of the clothing, but Jesus does not.
It is clear that Jesus neither needs nor desires a Tut-like solid gold coffin or gold sandals for his dead feet. He sees, and seeks, something else, something beyond money, beyond position, beyond caste and class.
I want that something, too. Or, at least, I want to want it. I suspect the “childish things” Saint Paul says he learned to put away are all the toys we want to carry around with us through this life and the next.
It is January. The needles on the tree are drying. The magi have almost reached reached their places next to the little family. The freshly chalked Epiphany blessing will soon be above the front door. We sense — and the church knows — that it is time to move forward. It is time to move from the crib, towards the cross.
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