An Anointed Reality

Confessing faith is incomplete unless it becomes a form of life. Living faith in the God of
Jesus Christ means being formed and transformed by the life of grace of God’s economy:
becoming persons fully in communion with all; becoming Christ to one another;
becoming by the power of the Holy Spirit what God is: love unbounded, glory
uncontained.

Christ = means “anointed”

Jacob left Beersheba and set out for Haran. When he had reached a certain place he
passed the night there, since the sun had set. Taking one of the stones to be found at
that place, he made it his pillow and lay down where he was. He had a dream: a
ladder was there, standing on the ground with its top reaching to heaven; and there
were angels of God going up it and coming down. And YHWH was there, standing
over him, saying, 

“I am YHWH, the God of Abraham your father, and the God of Isaac. I will give to you
and your descendants the land on which you are lying. . . . Be sure that I am with you;
I will keep you safe wherever you go, and bring you back to this land, for I will not
desert you before I have done all that I have promised you.” 

Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, “Truly, God is in this place and I, I did not
know.” He was afraid and said, “How awe-inspiring this place is! This is nothing less
than a house of God, this is the gate of heaven!” 

Rising early in the morning, Jacob took the stone he had used for his pillow, and set it
up as a monument, pouring oil over the top of it. He named the place Bethel. —Genesis
28:10-19

I believe the Scriptures say that reality was christened or anointed from the very
beginning, from the first moment of its inception. The Hebrew text describes the ritual
of anointing, pouring oil over something to reveal its sacredness, starting with the Stone
of Jacob, Beth El: “This is the house of God; this is the gate of heaven.” Throughout the
Bible we see a growing recognition of God’s all- pervasive, ever-invading Presence.
Reality is soaked with Presence from the first meeting of Spirit and matter in the first
line of the Bible (Genesis 1:1). The anointing oil doesn't make anything sacred as such; it
simply reminds both the anointer and the anointed of what was already the case.

This entire world is soaked through and through with Christ, with divinity, like an
electron planted in every atom. As Paul writes, “Creation retains the hope of being
freed . . . to enjoy the same freedom and glory as the children of God. . . . We are all
groaning in one great act of giving birth” (Romans 8:21-22).

We all know respect when we see it (re-spect = to see a second time). We all know
reverence because it softens our gaze. Any object that calls forth respect or reverence is
the “Christ” or the anointed one for us at that moment, even though the conduit might
just look like a committed research scientist, an old man cleaning up the beach, a
woman going the extra mile for her neighbor, an earnest, eager dog licking your face, or
an ascent of pigeons across the plaza.

All people who see with that second kind of contemplative gaze, all who look at the
world with respect, even if they are not formally religious, are en Cristo, or in Christ. For
them, as Thomas Merton says, “the gate of heaven is everywhere” [1] because of their
freedom to respect what is right in front of them—all the time.

The Christ Mystery anoints all physical matter with eternal purpose from the very
beginning. We should not be surprised that the word translated from the Greek as
“Christ” comes from the Hebrew word mesach, meaning “the anointed” one or Messiah.
Christ reveals that all is anointed, not just him.

As Reverend Jacqui Lewis asks:

What if every human being is anointed, Messiahed, Christ? What if the most
fundamental aspect of our identity is that we are each anointed and appointed by The
Holy One, by Spirit—to preach good news to the poor, liberty to the captive, and sight to
the blind? What if we take seriously being the Body of the Christ—that we are the hands,
feet, and heartbeat of the Living God? What if we are Word made flesh, Love made flesh,
Light made flesh? [2]
 Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Doubleday:1966), 142.

[2] Jacqui Lewis, The Universal Christ conference description, https://cac.org/another-name-for-

every-thing-the-universal-christ/.

What is this Paschal journey from a wisdom standpoint? In the common understanding,

Christianity has tended to view the resurrection as Jesus’s triumph over physical death.
But for Christians in the wisdom tradition (who include among their ranks the very
earliest witnesses to the resurrection) its meaning lies in something far deeper than
merely the resuscitation of a corpse. Jesus’s real purpose in this sacrifice was to wager
his own life against his core conviction that love is stronger than death, and that the
laying down of self which is the essence of this love leads not to death, but to life. . . .
Thus, the real domain of the Paschal Mystery is not dying but dying-to-self. It serves as
the archetype for all of our personal experiences of dying and rising to new life along the
pathway of kenotic transformation, reminding us that it is not only possible
but imperative to fall through fear into love because that is the only way we will ever
truly know what it means to be alive.

Within the context of the resurrection, then, anointing becomes the ritual most closely
associated with the passage from death of self to fullness of life, from egoic alienation to
“union on a higher plane.” As such, it conveys the very essence of Christianity’s
transformative wisdom.

The fact that Jesus was born to a poor couple in a cow stall tells us something
about the way God meant to reach the world.

And when he entered his ministry he did two things: he declared with his
mouth that he was sent to the poor; and he declared with his life that he would
be among the poor. In Luke 4:18 he said, "The spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor." And in Matthew
8:20 he said, "The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but
the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head." 
 There are many more texts—literally hundreds more in the Bible—that make
an incarnational proclamation of the gospel to the poor a high priority. But
these are enough this morning to shed God's light on Fresh Initiative #5. We
will do it, God helping us, by

1. personal involvement;
2. a more welcoming atmosphere;
3. local missionary strategies of urban disciple making; and
4. equipping missionaries for unreached urban peoples
May God give us a mind to dream and a heart to love—so that we spread a
passion for the supremacy of God in all things for the joy of all peoples—
especially the poor.

Our mission and Spiritual Dynamic declare that the all-satisfying supremacy

of God shines most brightly through sacrificial deeds of joyful love. The cry of
the Holy Spirit in the hearts of our people is for a fresh, decisive emphasis
on relationships of love.