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House guests are like fish, so the saying goes, if they stay around for more than three days they go off. That may have been your experience over Christmas and New Year. So you might sympathise with Charles Dickens and his experience of Hans Christian Anderson. Anderson worshiped the ground that Dickens walked on and invited himself to Dickens’ family home in Kent, staying in the end for five weeks. Dickens came to hate Anderson and his obsequiousness towards him, and some believe that the creepy character Uriah Heep, from David Copperfield, was based on Anderson himself. “ever so umble”. Last Sunday we celebrated the feast of the epiphany, where the three kings or wise men are led by a star to Bethlehem to worship the baby in a manger. It’s a feast day when I am often moved to reflect upon the nature of worship – what it is and why we do it. Because there is sometimes a little voice inside my head that challenges the way we/I approach the divine, suggesting there can be a little of the Uriah Heep about it. Take the prayer of humble access: “we are not worthy to gather up the crumbs underneath thy table” we pray. And all those “these” and “thous” when referring to God – it can look to some like we are creeping up to some Stuart monarch. And when I feel that way I remember that old anarchist slogan: “No Kings, no Masters” or sometimes “No Gods, no Masters.” But I really don’t think worship is like that at all. And, in fact, as that supremely gifted American novelist David Forster Wallace once wrote: everybody “worships something”. And, he warned, if you worship the wrong thing, it can eat you alive. “If you worship money or things, then you will never have enough. Worship your body and you will always feel ugly. Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid.” But the story of the Epiphany is, of course, the very opposite of us pathetic humans grovelling before kings. If anything, it’s the other way round. These great kings travel to take the knee before a small, powerless child, born into poverty. It’s an inversion of the typical power dynamic. And why do they do this? Because, I think, they see in this child a manifestation of such enormous love and truth and beauty. God’s love made present in our midst. Real worship isn’t some creeping obsequiousness to power, be it temporal or divine. Real worship is when you find something outside of yourself that can be a worthy focus for absolute concern. And then to celebrate it, and to give thanks for it.