Sermon:  “Green Cards of Grace  Available Here!”

Prayer:   “May the words of my mouth, and the meditations of our hearts and minds here together be acceptable to you, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.”

“Our citizenship is in heaven,” writes the Apostle Paul to the church he started in Philippi, in northern Greece, from what we believe was an imprisonment in Ephesus, on the coast of what is today Turkey.  Your old Revised Standard Bibles in the pews say, “our commonwealth is in heaven,” and the King James had an even stranger translation: “our conversation is in heaven.”  Most literally the Greek politeuma en ouranois might read, “Our political status is in heaven.”  That’s a powerful statement for a political prisoner like Paul to make, you know.  What you may not know is that the Apostle Paul had a very rare status for a Jew in those days.  He was not only, as he says here at the outset in this passage, “a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee” – he was a Roman citizen as well.  In Acts 22:27-28, in when a Roman tribune asks about his nationality, we learn that Paul was born a Roman citizen – a much-coveted political status that the tribune had to pay “a large sum of money” to obtain. [1]

And yet, Paul’s Roman citizenship was no “get out of jail free” card.  Throughout his ministry, Paul was locked up repeatedly, even though his supporters had likely paid the jailers enough bribes to buy him the privilege of writing to the various churches he had planted across the Mediterranean world.  And as we know, Paul eventually was executed by Caesar during his final imprisonment in Rome. So in many ways, when Paul became a Christian, he became a refugee – on the run from those who were paid to enforce the laws of the Empire. So why would he so joyfully RENOUNCE his perfectly good Roman citizenship for this other kind? “Citizenship in Heaven.” He did it for love, because Christ had set him free to a new life and he was full of the joy of that new relationship.  He rejoiced in his new freedom from the law of the Pharisees.

Paul’s heavenly citizenship came about through “knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.”  In that phrase, “knowing Christ,” is an intimacy not usual for Jews of his day in relationship to God.  Paul’s quest, the goal he strives for, has a passion that our English translation might miss.  According to David E. Fredrickson, Professor of New Testament at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, “With these terms for pursuing, fleeing, and capturing... Philippians reads far more erotically than one might expect of the Bible.”  When Paul writes, “forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, ¹⁴I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus,” he uses Greek words like pheugein (to flee) and diôkein (to pursue) that were commonly used by ancient romantic poets to illustrate those scenes we most often associate with classical Greek art – you know the ones with the lover pursuing the beloved around the outside of a vase?

That’s very different from the stick figure cartoon I remember from the old “Good News” Bible I had in high school.  It illustrated this line about “press on toward the goal for the prize” with a runner about to break through a track meet tape at the finish line, but this image is much more about relationship than about competition.  Jesus is the one being chased, and he very much wants us to catch him.  That image reminds me of my daughter when she was just about 2 years old.  We used to go to the park near our house, where they had a special, fenced-in “tot lot,” but her favorite game there wasn’t the swings or the slide – it was the gate!  She was the park’s jailbreak champion, as she learned very early how to open and close the gate.  She loved nothing more than running outside the fence, leading the charge of her fellow toddlers, but she’d run only so far but then turn back to be sure I was chasing her.  She wanted to be caught, so very much.  Doesn’t this ring true about our relationship to Christ, this pursuit that leads to us following in his way?  We always are approaching him, but never can quite catch him – and that’s OK.  It helps him lead us where we need to go.

So here’s where the green cards of grace come in – green cards can be granted by marriage to a citizen.  This metaphor makes sense, I hope, because we can understand how our heavenly citizenship could be granted by our relationship to Christ as members of his church, his bride.  Many of you will remember that the first refugee our church helped IRIS resettle in the US was Lloyd Johnson, and many of you will remember how we celebrated with him just this past year when he finally got his U.S. citizenship.  It was an enormous milestone in his life – on his refugee journey from West Africa, and it made it possible for him to bring to the U.S. his new wife, La.  Citizenship in our country is something all refugees and immigrants have to work very hard to earn, unless you take another path – you can be born into citizenship (as Paul was, and as many of us have been), or you can marry into citizenship.  For Paul, who throughout his ministry develops a theology of the church as “the bride of Christ,” the language of love and marriage works well as a metaphor for how we come to obtain “citizenship in heaven.” 

Of course, you could just read “citizenship in heaven” as some vague hope for the future, but I believe it names the reality that Paul proclaimed every day – new life in “Christ Jesus [who] made me his own.”  You know that for people who knew Paul as Saul, in the old days, it must have seemed a miracle that this former crusader against Christianity could have found “the peace of Christ”! That he no longer boasted of his credentials as a Jew or as a Roman citizen, but instead claimed heavenly citizenship would have been mind-boggling to those who once knew him as the angry persecutor of Christians who had been happy to stand by and watch them get stoned to death.  Could the power of God’s love really have transformed this man Paul into a citizen of heaven?  And what if the whole world could be transformed like that?  Could the prayer of Jesus really come true, that God’s will might be done “on earth as it is in heaven”?

I believe it can – as long as we are running toward relationship with God in Christ and not away.  What if then we all lived as if we were already citizens of Heaven as Paul proclaims?  What if we could step back from our identity in family, clan, ethnicity, race, national heritage – our own US pride, and could look at ourselves from a God’s eye view – as brothers and sisters living the Psalmist’s dream of peace for the world, in harmony?

I have green cards of grace at the door for everyone.  I invite you to take one and share it with someone you know who needs to be set free with the knowledge that they are loved.  “Jesus Loves Me” has to be much more than a sentimental song for children.  The love the Lord has for us is much more like the greatest love stories of all time – think “Casablanca” or “Avatar.”  Our beloved gave his life for us, that we might have freedom and new life with him.  Thanks be to God for this Good News.  Amen.

 

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Call to Worship: Psalm 133

¹How very good and pleasant it is
when brothers and sisters live together in harmony!

²It is like precious oil ...
³It is like the dew ... which falls on the mountains ...

 

Our New Testament lesson is from Philippians, the Letter of the Apostle Paul to the church he planted at Philippi, in northern Greece.  (Phil. 3:4b-21)

If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: ⁵circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; ⁶as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless. ⁷Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. ⁸More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ ⁹and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith.

¹⁰I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, ¹¹if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead. ¹²Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. ¹³Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, ¹⁴I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.

¹⁵Let those of us then who are mature be of the same mind; and if you think differently about anything, this too God will reveal to you. ¹⁶Only let us hold fast to what we have attained. ¹⁷Brothers and sisters, join in imitating me, and observe those who live according to the example you have in us. ¹⁸For many live as enemies of the cross of Christ; I have often told you of them, and now I tell you even with tears. ¹⁹Their end is destruction; their god is the belly; and their glory is in their shame; their minds are set on earthly things. ²⁰But our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. ²¹He will transform our humble body, that it may be conformed to the body of his glory, by the power that also enables him to make all things subject to himself.