The Oil Was Poured on the Work

The gravel lot empties slow after a gospel sing. Truck doors, a dog going off two fields over, somebody's grandmother walked down the church steps one riser at a time with a hand under each elbow. Inside, the folding chairs are still out in their crooked rows and the coffee urn is ticking as it cools, and a man in his fifties is winding a microphone cable around his elbow the way he has wound it for twenty-two years. Over and under, over and under, so it lies flat when somebody opens the case next Friday.

Through the propped door he hears it. Two women out by the cars, still lit up from the last song. That man is anointed. They mean the singer. The singer was good, and the singer is already pulling onto the road.

The man with the cable in his hands agrees with them completely, without one flicker of resentment, and files himself out of the sentence in the same breath. Anointed is a word for the front of a room. He is the back of it. He is the extension cord taped under the rubber mat so nobody catches a toe, and the heat switched on at four so the sanctuary is warm by seven, and the chairs, always the chairs. Twenty-two years of chairs. If you told him the word had his name in it he would laugh and look at the floor and ask if you wanted the last of the coffee.

You know that arithmetic, because you have run it yourself. Somebody in your world got called anointed and you did the sum instantly and came out on the wrong side of it. Not bitter. Just filed. You put the word up on a high shelf where the gifted people keep their things, and you went back to what was in your hands, and going back to what is in your hands is what you have done ever since.

The shelf, and what is not on it

Let me name the low place first, because it is real and pretending otherwise would be no kindness to anybody. Twenty-two years is a long time to be quietly certain that the good word belongs to other people. It does not feel like a wound. It feels like realism, which is exactly why nobody ever comes forward to pray about it. There is no ache to point at. There is only a shelf, and a man who stopped reaching toward it a long while back, and a Friday that goes the same way every week.

And the shelf is not in the book. That is very nearly the whole of what I have to tell you tonight, and the rest is me walking us both around the same fact until it settles. So watch where Paul puts the oil when he writes to a church in Corinth stuffed with ordinary, argumentative, unfamous people.

And it is God who establishes us with you in Christ, and has anointed us, and who has also put his seal on us and given us his Spirit in our hearts as a guarantee.2 Corinthians 1:21-22

Us. Not him. Not the one with the good voice. Us, and the us takes in the people who were going to read the letter, which tonight means the person holding this. You are anointed already, sitting exactly where you are sitting, and I am not saying it to be kind to you. That is what is written, and it was His Spirit who set the seal there, not any performance of yours.

Now, the word does not mean what a modern room has made it mean, and the shelf comes down a great deal faster once a person sees what oil was actually for.

What the oil was actually for

Oil went on three kinds of people in the old covenant, and every last one of them was being handed a job. The priest was anointed and then he stood at an altar doing repetitive, physical, unglamorous work with his hands, day after day, most of it watched by nobody. The king was anointed and then he governed, which is disputes and long afternoons and the same three problems coming back around. The prophet was anointed and then he carried a word to people who mostly did not want it. Nobody in Scripture was ever anointed and then sat down.

Samuel poured a horn of oil over the youngest son in a field of older brothers, and then the boy went back out to the sheep and stayed there for years. Read it slowly and notice how little changed on the outside. The oil did not promote him out of the field. It marked him and it supplied him right where he was standing. You have that same shape on you tonight, and it is not my idea: 1 Samuel 16 is where the oil runs down over a boy nobody had thought to send for, and the text says plainly that the Spirit came on him from that day forward.

So when Scripture says God has anointed you, hear what it is saying and what it is not. It is not saying a bar was cleared. It is not ranking you above the woman two pews back or below the man with the microphone. It is saying He assigned you something, and that He fully intends to supply it.

Which is why the difference between a rank and an assignment matters so much on a Tuesday morning. A rank is a thing a person failed to reach and can only feel bad about. An assignment is a thing already in front of them with supply attached to it. You were marked for the work that is in your hands, not for the work you imagine you would have been handed if you were somebody else, and the same Spirit who sealed you is the one who carries it through. His word does not go out and come back with nothing in its hands.

And the assignment is nearly always smaller than the word sounds. That is the part that trips good people up. We hear anointed and picture a platform, when the oil in a life is far more likely to be resting on a shift, a hallway, a phone call nobody wants to make, a son who is not talking yet, a Friday with chairs in it. The size of the room was never the measure of anything. The oil goes where God sends the person, and He sends most of us into ordinary weeks on purpose.

I want to set a picture beside all of that, because a thing like this lands better seen than argued.