Lent 4
15 March 2026
Vineville Baptist Church
Macon, Georgia
Gregory Pope
LIVING OUR BAPTISM #5: ANOINTING AND CALLING
Luke 3.21-23a, 4:14-21. John 20:19-22
This Lenten season we are learning what it means to Live Into Our Baptism. So far we have said it means: Letting God Love Us With Water, Accepting Ourselves as God’s Beloved, Turning or Returning to God, A Washing Away of our Sins, A commitment to Following Jesus, Naming Him “Lord” and Pledging Our Allegiance to the Kingdom of God. Today we see how baptism brings an Anointing of God’s Holy Spirit and a Calling from God upon our lives.
At Jesus’ baptism, when he came up out of the water, the Holy Spirit descended upon him like a dove, Anointing him for his Calling in the world. In ancient Israel the king was anointed with oil to be God’s son, God’s kingly representative in the nation. In some Christian traditions Anointing with oil has been and still is part of the sacred ceremony of baptism.
Awhile back there was a movie, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, where a handsome young man falls in love with a Greek girl and agrees, as part of his marriage commitment, to convert to her Greek Orthodox faith and be baptized. The Orthodox priest at her church is used to baptizing infants in a baptismal font that is way too small for a grown man. So the priest drags a plastic backyard kiddie pool into the sanctuary for the baptismal service. The groom-to-be stands naked except for his bathing suit ankle deep in the pool. Usually in the ceremony the godmother anoints the infant with oil. In this case, the sister-in-law gladly volunteers to be the godmother and anoints her new brother-in-law with oil. Starting with his chest she rubs oil all over his body, and one gets the impression she is enjoying this ceremony just a little too much!
In the New Testament church the laying on of hands at baptism was used to signify the anointing of the Spirit. In early Baptist life the laying on of hands accompanied baptism, and in my ministry, I have engaged in a form of this practice.
Baptism is a type of Anointing ritual symbolizing the presence of the Holy Spirit in the life of the one being baptized. In the kingdom of God Jesus preached, all the baptized are Anointed, Called and Spirit-empowered to be God’s daughters and sons in the world. Baptism is the ordination of all believers to be ministers of the gospel of Christ. Ordination is not just for clergy and deacons. The Apostle Peter writes in his first letter that we are a royal priesthood to each other. We the baptized are all Called, Anointed and ordained to be priests to one another, ministers of the grace of God to all people.
Following Jesus’ baptism where he was Anointed by the Spirit he was led into the wilderness to discern his Calling, his vocation. What kind of Messiah would he be? Then following his 40 days in the wilderness praying and fasting, Jesus began the ministry of his Calling. Luke tells us he entered his hometown synagogue and announced the mission of his Calling. He took the scroll of the prophet Isaiah and read words he claimed as his Anointing and Calling: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. And then announced that Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.
Some three years later, at the conclusion of his ministry on Easter evening, the Risen Christ appears to his disciples huddled in fear behind locked doors. And he says to them: Peace be with you. And then he says, As the Father has sent me, so send I you. Following this blessing of peace and commission to be sent John tells us that Jesus “breathed on them” and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit”.
As Jesus was Anointed, Called, and sent into the world as God’s son, so we, daughters and sons of God, like the disciples are Anointed by the Spirit and Called and sent by God to be part of God’s mission of love in the world. And what God sends and Calls us to do, God gifts and empowers us to do.
Inherent in the Anointing of the Spirit is a Calling from God on our lives. Living your baptism, then, means to be attentive to what the Spirit of God is Calling and gifting you to do. Like Jesus we may need some wilderness time to ponder the meaning of our baptism and the nature of our vocation.
But this is not a search for what many of us have been taught as “God’s perfect plan for your life.” Though God from time to time may call us to certain tasks or may call certain people to certain vocations, nowhere in the Bible are we told that God has a perfect plan for each person’s life and that if we fail to recognize that singular plan then our lives can never be in God’s perfect will. The good news is that God has no such perfect plan for your life! There is no blueprint that includes what job you should have, whom you should marry, and where you should live. So we can live free of that anxiety.
We all, however, have the primary Calling of living in partnership with God and God’s purposes in the world, loving God with all that we are and all that we have. And it seems God gives us the freedom based on our gifts and our circumstances to live out that Calling.
In the sixteenth century the only ones considered to have a specific Calling or vocation were the priests, nuns and monks. But about that time as the Protestant Reformation was building momentum a priest named Martin Luther gave us a revolutionary new way to understand vocation. Luther said we all have a vocation. He said that a cobbler making shoes serves God as much as a monk saying his prayers.
The Holy Spirit can call anyone to any vocation: male or female, rich or poor, high school drop out or Ph.D. The Spirit can also call us to different places of ministry and mission at different seasons in our lives. It’s not as if God calls us to do one thing all our lives, and if we miss it, we have missed it forever. God is more creative and life is more dynamic than that.
And your calling isn’t just about what you do but how you do it. It isn’t just about doing a certain thing but also about being a certain way.1 Wherever we are, whatever we do, we are called to live lives of goodness, truth, and beauty. Our deepest calling is to become the kind of person God created us to be.
Your Calling will most likely be a combination of DNA, life experience and the Spirit of God. Frederick Buechner and Parker Palmer both say that the quest for our Calling begins by listening to your life. Buechner says that God often calls us to the meeting place of our great joy and the world’s great need.2 In search of our Calling, our vocation, we look deeply at our own joys and hungers, and we look closely at the needs of the world around us. And where they meet may just be the place where God is Calling us. Our Calling is almost always connected to the needs of the world around us.
Calling and vocation transcend profession and pay.3 The kind of baptismal Calling we are talking about comes as a divine invitation, a call from outside ourselves, an urging from God’s Holy Spirit. And just as Jesus announced his Calling that day in the synagogue, so the Spirit anoints and sends us to continue his mission comforting the broken-hearted, bringing good new of justice to the poor, and setting free those in one kind of prison or another.
Your calling, then, is more than your job, though it may include your job. Your calling is the unique way you offer your best gifts to the world. Whether it be through art, mothering and fathering, teaching, hammering, writing, serving, helping. These are the beautiful things you do, paid or unpaid, which live at the heart of who you are.
To discern our calling: We go deep into ourselves and discover our gifts. We look closely at the world around us and where it needs healing and help and hope. For “the ultimate test of whether we are being called to something is to ask: ‘How does my calling serve my neighbor?’”4 Calling is not about self-fulfillment. We listen for a calling beyond ourselves.
And we seek help from the community of faith. We’ll talk more about this next week, but I want to note here that: In community we learn more deeply who we are. In community people see our gifts in ways we may not yet see and they encourage us along our path.
Rachel Greco is leading our youth to understand God’s Calling by inviting members of our church to share with our youth how they live their faith in their everyday jobs and/or hobbies. If you’re interested in sharing with our youth your sense of Calling, let Rachel know. Think about it: Who in your life planted the seed that became your vocation, your Calling? It is a fundamental purpose of the church, then, to help each other identify our gifts and then encourage each other in the use and development of these gifts.
And the beauty of life with God is that it’s never too late, in the words of Paul, to “rekindle the gift of the Spirit in your life,” to discover your Calling for this season of your life. Then he adds, “For God has not given you a spirit of timidity, but of power and love and a wise mind.” (II Timothy 1:6-7). So: Don’t shrink back. Be brave! Go forth with power and love to be and to do what God is, even now, calling you to be and to do.
My friend Steve Shoemaker has said: “The heart of our Calling is to live our lives with God and then see where that love takes us.”
It is also the Calling of the church to go into the world baptizing in the name of the Trinity and teaching the way of Jesus.
As I baptize people, they go under the water then up again. (Every time, so far!) They stand there dripping wet. Then as we look at each other, I lay my hands on their shoulders, speak their name, and offer this blessing and commissioning: You are God’s beloved, called by the Spirit to be a minister of Christ. May the Lord bless and keep you, may God’s face shine upon you, be gracious unto you, and through you give the world peace.
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- Karen Swallow Prior, You Have a Calling, Brazos Press, 2025, 2
- Buechner says this in various writings. One of them is Wishful Thinking,
Harper & Row, 1973, 95
- Prior 51
- Edward Veith, God at Work, Crossway, 2002, 40