The Spirit of the Lord is upon me!
Wow. There’s something to shout about. That’s not a whisper kind of statement. That is a shout it from the housetops kind of statement.
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me.
Who wouldn’t want to be able to say that?
I imagine any number of people, actually. It’s a lot to take in. It sounds scary.
What does it mean for the Spirit to be upon me, to be anointed? What do I have to do? Who will I have to become?
Really, I’d rather have my ordinary life.
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me.
The Spirit of the Lord is upon you.
Every baptized Christian has received the Holy Spirit. You are sealed and marked as Christ’s own forever.
You have been received into the body of Christ.
And well might you ask what this means for your life. We make promises at baptism, or promises are made for us. If we are confirmed, we have made those promises again. It takes a lifetime to live into them. But you are already in, regardless of how well or how poorly you fulfill these promises. The Spirit of the Lord is on you. You have been anointed and received into the body.
Paul tries to tell the Corinthians what that means. The Church in Corinth was seething with dissension and division, much of it along lines of class and status. Paul wants them to know that they belong together, they need each other. To do this, he uses a metaphor that was well known to his audience. Other thinkers had compared the community to a body - indeed, the phrase “body politic” reflects that. But those other writers had used the image to keep the lower classes in their place, deferring to the well off and educated. So the elite were compared to the brain, and the servants and manual workers were the hands that carried out the instructions of the brain.
Paul turns that upside down. Well, Jesus does it first. Jesus does not come to proclaim good news to the rich or ease for the already privileged. He comes to proclaim release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, good news to the poor. He comes to announce Jubilee, the year in which inequalities are eased, debts are canceled, and everyone starts fresh. The body he is inaugurating does not sanction privilege and status, but actively works against them.
So Paul follows Jesus. His image of the body makes clear that all parts belong. The weakest actually need greater honor, as a balance. Those who have more, those who are more “respectable” as our translation puts it, are to let go of their privilege and learn humility.
The image of the body points to our diversity of gifts as well as our need of each other. “Community” is derived from the Latin for “with gifts.” Community is where our gifts are shared. The passage we heard last week is precisely about the diversity of gifts. But diversity is not enough. We need to really get also that we need each other to manifest our gifts.
This may be especially hard for the well-off, the talented, the smart ones to get. They are most likely to believe that they have all that they need, and so to try to go it alone. Even in worshipping, they may still be relying on their own efforts. They are the spiritually poor, cut off from the abundance of God’s love. They - we - can become captives in prisons of our own making, even in church. We may say, “I have no need of you.” In so doing, I fool myself. I cannot cut myself off from the body in fact, but I can cut myself off from the sunlight of the Spirit. I can languish in a self-made prison.
Those who know their need of God and of one another are open to the Spirit working in and among them. That means seeing that these others with whom I am planted are really, truly, also anointed by God and members of the body. And in seeing that, I am empowered in a way very different from our common ideas of power.
In 2000 I left my job in New Mexico. I told people I wanted to become the left little toe of Christ. Later I cut that down to the toenail. I just wanted to be part of that great body, to know myself part of it. I entered an Episcopal convent, where I learned that I had not the least idea how to be part of a diverse community. I could be polite, but I could not truly respect those who seemed to me to be just wrong, or slow, or whatever I didn’t like. I learned that it is hard work being part of that body. I’m still learning how to do it. I expect to spend the rest of my life trying. But, like Paul, I press on for the prize. I want to know Christ, and the only way to do that now is by encountering the body of Christ here.
Jesus was baptized, and received the Holy Spirit. Then, Luke tells us, he went to the desert to face the devil. He brings this message to Nazareth after that encounter. This sequence is important. It’s in the desert that he learns that his anointing doesn’t bring privilege but responsibility, not worldly power but the capacity to endure and stand for something bigger than himself.
Like him, we are baptized and then we go into the world of temptation. Through adversity and defeat we learn that our membership in the body is a costly gift. But it is a gift. It is our precious inheritance, the promise of full humanity. It is, as the letter to the Colossians says, “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” And, like all gifts, it is best when it is shared.
The power of the Holy Spirit, the power received at baptism, is not something to brag about. It’s not something to rest in. As Jesus’ life and death show, God’s power is uncomfortable and costly, appearing as weakness and foolishness. It calls us to let go of our privilege, our self-importance, our comparisons. As we do, we find the glory all around us, shining through the cracks and holes of our lives. That is something to celebrate.
The Spirit of the Lord is upon you.
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