The Third Sunday after the Epiphany, Year C, Church of the Epiphany, Lebanon, January 26, 2025

“Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee”(Lk. 4:14).

Most Christians have no trouble believing that Jesus was filled with the power of the Holy Spirit; after all, we’re Christians! We’re people who, by and large, believe that Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate, and rose from the dead on the third day. Every Christmas and Easter the media interviews some prominent academic who doubts the virgin birth or the resurrection from the dead, but that’s just a ploy to get attention. Scholars like that have forgotten that the main reason people bother to read or listen to these interviews is because they are people of faith. Most of us in the Church believe the Creed because we are (that’s right) believers. We believe in the resurrection and the life everlasting. We’re people who have faith in Jesus Christ.

What most Christians have trouble believing is not that Jesus was filled with the power of the Holy Spirit, but that the Church is filled with that same power! We have trouble believing that when the Spirit came upon Jesus at his baptism, and when that same Spirit inspired him in the synagogue, as we heard in our Gospel today, it did so in order to fill the hearts and minds of those who believed in him. Most of us can believe that Jesus was exceptional and unique; that he was the beloved Son of God (as the voice says at his baptism). In short, what we have a hard time taking on board is that we too are the beloved children of God. We too are filled with the Spirit.

Our reading from the first Letter of St. Paul to the Church in Corinth is a handy corrective. Paul begins our reading with the ringing affirmation that Christians share in the gift of the Holy Spirit. “Just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body–Jews or Greeks, slaves or free–and we were all made to drink of one Spirit” (1 Cor. 12:12-13). The members of the Church are part of a body that has been baptized in the one Spirit; there are many members but one body. Whatever our circumstances we have all drunk of the one Spirit.

The Spirit makes us one; but what might it mean to be filled with the Holy Spirit? Imagine this: in the fourth century, hundreds of years ago, in the city of Milan, crowds of theological adversaries would gather outside the church and try to drown each other out with competing lyrics. St. Ambrose, the bishop, who was a great composer of popular jingles, wrote a hymn for his rowdy parishioners who were processing through the streets proclaiming the Gospel. “May Christ be to us our food, may faith be our drink, may we joyfully partake of the sober inebriation of the Holy Spirit” (Splendor paternae gloriae). There’s an answer to what it means to be filled with the Spirit. “Sober inebriation”: who says that Christians don’t know how to have fun?

I think St. Ambrose and his enthusiastic parishioners were on to something. In the Book of Acts, on the Day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit came upon the disciples, and the onlookers thought that they were drunk. Peter corrects them: “these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning” (Acts 2:15). (Hardly conclusive: I think Peter had limited experience of public intoxication!) Peter’s point is that the disciples are filled with the Spirit. Their minds are not clouded, their sense diminished; in fact, they are in their right minds and focused in a new way. Peter reminds them of Joel’s prophecy: “I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and daughters shall prophesy, and young men shall see visions, and your old men will dream dreams. Even upon my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour forth my Spirit; and they shall prophesy” (Acts 2:17-18). That is the “sober inebriation” of the Spirit.

When Acts talks about the early Christians, it says they had a spirit of “boldness” as they proclaimed the Gospel. It tells us that when St. Paul lived in Rome, he proclaimed the kingdom of God and taught about the Lord with boldness (Acts. 28:31). Boldness is that unclouded mind and full conviction, focused intently upon the person of Jesus Christ and his power in our lives.

This is the Spirit we share in the Church: a Spirit that propels us forward and makes it possible for us to share the good news of Jesus’ death and resurrection. It is the same Spirit that filled Jesus in the synagogue. “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 let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Lk. 4:18-19). That Spirit made him bold, and it makes us bold as well.

The world is in need of the good news of Jesus Christ. It’s in need of people who have drunk deeply of the Spirit. It’s in need of people of faith. It’s in need of people who believe and who will share this Gospel with boldness and full conviction.

  • The Rt. Rev’d John Bauerschmidt, Bishop of Tennesse