The Spirit of the Lord is upon you. And when I say “you” I mean “all y’all.”
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon [you], because the Lord has anointed [you] to bring good news to the poor. God has sent [you] to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor…Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” You have been anointed—set apart, consecrated, commissioned—by God’s Holy Spirit in baptism to “proclaim to all people the Good News.”
What Good News? The Good News that by God’s grace, shown to us—offered to us—in Jesus Christ, a different way of being human is possible. This world is caught in the throws of poverty and oppression, death and division. But the Good News is that Christ is pouring out his abundant grace through water and the Spirit to bring into being a new kind of world—a new kind of human community—one founded on justice and unity.
By now, many of you will have heard that Bp. Mariann Budde of Washington gave quite a bold sermon last week at the prayer service after Inauguration Day. It made headlines because of her direct remarks to President Trump, but the bulk of the sermon was a plea for unity—an exhortation to turn away from division and strife and instead seek that “more perfect union” at the heart of the American experiment.
Bishop Budde grounded her call for unity in universal human values: humility, honesty, and the dignity of every human being. This foundation for unity is certainly true—I don’t want to dispute that. And I think it was the most appropriate framing in an interfaith context with a national audience. But today we hear the voice of Christ speaking through the words of Holy Scripture and calling us into an even deeper unity than that. Today we hear a call to a radically specific (and even more challenging) kind of unity, grounded not in the generic values of American civil religion but in the Good News of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
The Lord has anointed you to bring good news…
Jesus begins his ministry in Galilee by reading from the book of the prophet Isaiah, announcing boldly what his ministry (and thus this whole Christianity thing) would be all about. Proclaiming the Good News—calling the world into freedom and wholeness—restoring all people to unity with God and each other. Jesus the Christ—literally “Jesus the Anointed One”—was anointed with the Spirit and commissioned to bring about the unity of God’s justice in the world. That was his mission.
And because we share in the same Spirit that anointed him, that is our mission too. Through our baptism (as Paul reminds the Corinthians) we are united with Christ at the deepest possible level. We are anointed with Christ’s Spirit and entrusted with his mission as his Body in the world—his hands and feet, his eyes and mouth. We have been sent out to serve the world as witnesses to the unity and justice that are possible by God’s grace.
But this work starts here with us. We—the Church—can only carry out our mission in the world when we are seeking the same Good News of justice and unity that we are out there proclaiming to others. We can only do the work that we have been commissioned—anointed—to do when we endeavor to act like what we are: members of the one Body of Jesus Christ and thus members of one another. We can wring our hands over injustice or campaign against corruption all we want. But we can only proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor to this world of polarization, hatred, and division, if we truly embody the alternative.
Change—true freedom and wholeness—does not begin with good liberal values or affirmations of human dignity in the abstract. It starts with embracing the fact that, because of what Jesus has accomplished and given us in the waters of baptism, you and I are members of the same Body, anointed by the same Spirit. It starts with inhabiting our proper place among the various different members of the Body of Christ. It starts with living with the same care for one another that your hand and your foot ought to have for each other—acknowledging each other’s unique gifts and roles, bearing each other’s burdens; rejoicing when another member rejoices; and weeping when another member weeps.
As Paul notes rather pointedly, our mission to proclaim the Good News—our status as fellow members of one Body of Christ—means that we embrace new ways of living and acting and leave other habits and patterns behind. We cannot disown another member of the Body of Christ or opt out of the ties that bind us to each other. We cannot show or harbor contempt for a fellow Christian—or (as is more likely in our context) resort to passive aggression or malicious gossip. We cannot disregard our proper roles and accountability in our relationships with one another, erasing God-given differences or blurring lines and boundaries.
By virtue of our baptism into the one Body of Christ, we have been anointed and commissioned as representatives of humanity renewed by God’s Spirit. We have been called to proclaim to all people the glory of God’s marvelous works—the Good News that God has inaugurated a kingdom of unity—a kingdom of mutual responsibility, accountability, and care. Our vocation is to embody this alternative—this new way of being—the fullness of our new life in Christ. And we turn away from that path of new life whenever we deny or undermine the reality of our unity as living members of the one Body of Christ.
We will fall short of our vocation as Christians to embody this radical kind of unity in the world. I mean, obviously, the Church is far from the beacon of unity that she is called to be. Because sin is real and we are fallible human beings, we will inevitably lapse into living as though “those Christians” are somehow separate from ourselves. We will inevitably fail to be forthright in our words or to presume good intentions on fellow Christians’ part. We will inevitably cross boundaries in our relationships with each other and confuse our roles. We have and will fail collectively. I have failed and will fail. You have failed and will fail.
But when you fail, remember the Good News at the heart of it all. It is by God’s grace that this new way of being is possible. The unity that the world so desperately needs is not ultimately something we achieve for ourselves. Nor is our vocation to proclaim the Good News something we’ve earned because we’re the “good guys.” We have this vocation because God has anointed us with the grace of the Holy Spirit in the waters of baptism. And it is by the daily renewal of that anointing through the means of grace that we are conformed day by day into the likeness of Christ and learn to proclaim the Good News of God’s unity in our life together as the Body of Christ.
The Spirit of the Lord is upon you, because the Lord has anointed you to bring good news to the poor. Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing. It is being fulfilled among us, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. By the grace of God it will be brought to completion.