Citizenship in the Heavenlies

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Philippians 3:17-4:1

Let’s all act like we are in High School again and talk about Citizenship.  I have no idea whether “Government” or “Civics” is covered in the High School curriculum anymore.  If not, it would explain a lot.  But I’ll spare the rant and cut to the chase.   The IRCC (Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada formerly known as the CIC or Citizenship and Immigration Canada) basically defines citizenship as being entitled to certain rights and freedoms and having certain responsibilities while living within the borders of Canada.  The rights are to justice, equality, and mobility and the freedoms are of speech, thought, religion, and assembly.  Some of our responsibilities are to obey the law, express our opinions and respect the right of others to do so, to help others in the community, to care for and protect Canadian heritage and the environment, and to eliminate discrimination and injustice.  

Those rights, freedoms, and responsibilities actually pertain to anyone living in Canada legally even if you’re not a citizen.  Citizenship then adds the additional rights of applying for a passport so that you can leave and re-enter the nation at will as well as voting and holding office, and one should emphasize actually voting.  Thus, in Canada citizenship boils down to being a legal resident entitlement to certain rights, freedoms, and responsibilities within the boundaries of the nation especially the rights and freedoms to leave and enter that country (i.e., the passport), to vote in elections, and to hold office; and the particular responsibility of voting.  

Moreover, the rights, freedoms, and responsibilities that citizenship entails vary from nation to nation.  Thus, when talking about citizenship one must not only say what it entails but also in what land.  In our passage, when Paul speaks of “Citizenship in the Heavenlies”, “citizenship” does not mean what it means in Canada or any other nation.  So, we need to define citizenship and Heaven as they would have been understood by Paul and let’s start with heaven.  

Let me say something briefly about heaven.  The Greek word for heaven is actually plural and would be better translated as “the Heavenlies”.  Paul did not think of the heavenlies as the place where immortal souls go after death to a pearly, golden city where they are given angel’s wings and a harp to spend eternity lounging on a cloud strumming away.  That’s Medieval fiction.  Paul was a Jew and they believed the dead went to a place called Sheol and it was under the earth and what went there wasn’t an immortal soul.  That’s what Greeks believed.  It was everything a person is except for the dead body.  What we ought to mean by going to Heaven when we die is what Paul described early in Philippians as going to be with Jesus wherever he is in the heavenlies without this physical body that died because of Sin and there we await the resurrection of the body.  If the Book of Revelation is peek into that world, worship will be primarily what we will be doing along with the angels, the whole creation, and the saints of all times and places.

The heavenlies were actually a part of the creation.  Paul likely believed that the part of Creation we know was like a big bubble within the heavenlies.  If you go stand somewhere where you can see all around, it looks like we’re in a bubble.  The heavenlies were behind the dome formed by the sky.  They believed the heavenlies to be the home of God where the will of God is done unhindered by Sin and from the heavenlies God rules the earth.  It is from there that salvation was begun and the Lordship of Jesus Christ is being extended to earth.  

In the Heavenlies was a Temple from which God ruled.  To the Old Testament Jews, the Jerusalem Temple was a/the place where the Heavenlies and earth were open to each other.  The Jerusalem Temple was like a shadow of the Temple in the Heavenlies and thus God could come and dwell in the Jerusalem Temple provided Sin was dealt with in the way God prescribed – the sacrifices.  And, it was at the Temple that Israel’s/humanity’s relationship with God was maintained by worship and sacrifice.  God’s will being done on Earth flowed forth from the Temple like a River of Living Water.

To say that our citizenship is in the Heavenlies is to say that we have rights in the land where God lives, where his will is done, and from where his rule and salvation are extended to earth, a room in the mansion so to speak.  When a Christian congregation gathers for worship, we are the new temple, a replica of the temple in the heavenlies like the Jerusalem Temple was.  This one will blow your mind…we, right now, are presently occupying time and space in the heavenlies here on earth.  Don’t think of the Heavenlies as simply being somewhere up there.  Think of the Heavenlies as the kingdom of God, the loving reign of God, breaking forth or opening up right here, right now as the Holy Spirit is in our midst.  Indeed, God is in our midst.  

We are in the Heavenlies right now gathered around God’s throne with angels, the Creation, and the saints from all times and places worshipping.  It might be like looking through a mirror dimly but here as we are gathered together by the Holy Spirit into the body of Christ to worship God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, here is heaven on earth.  God is here so therefore let his will be done on earth as it is in the Heavenlies.  So, let’s talk about citizenship in the Heavenlies.

            The Greek word for citizenship is politeuma which gets its root from the word polis meaning city.  A polis was a fortified settlement.  The city walls and military presence provided a sense of security and freedom which allowed for the development of arts, education, trades, and a middle class.  In Paul’s day, cities were also sacred places.  There was a god whom everyone believed had decreed the law upon which the city was established and who was the ultimate protector of the city and therefore everyone worshipped that god not only out of devotion but out of civic duty.  So, citizenship in a city was a very religious matter.  Citizenship in a particular city usually involved being protected in a privileged way by the god, laws, and government of that city even beyond the bounds of the city.  

Now, for our citizenship to be in the Heavenlies means very much that we have the Father’s favour upon us because of Christ Jesus’ faithfulness on our behalf, God’s presence with us as the Holy Spirit indwelling us and our fellowship, and God’s acting for our benefit as Paul says to transform us, to transform our bodies of humiliation to conform to the glorious body of Christ Jesus.  Every Christian congregation is in essence a city, the New Jerusalem, a fortified settlement of God among his people, and, moreover, we have God’s grace and protection wherever we are.  

Our responsibility as citizens in the Heavenlies is to be fellow imitators of Christ Jesus.  Our understanding of what it is to be an imitator is a bit different from what the word means in biblical Greek.  We tend to think of the act of imitating as something inauthentic, a copy, not the real thing.  Imitation sweetener though sweet is not the same thing as sugar.  Quite often, imitation takes the form of mockery.  We call that aping.  

The biblical idea of imitating is more like the phrase “like father, like son”.  Many children try to be just like one of their parents because they share a special relationship and they are blood related.  To be an imitator of Jesus means we share a special relationship with him by means of the bond of his blood in the Holy Spirit who is dwelling in us and therefore we are becoming like Jesus.  We are not just following Jesus’ example by simply imitating him, we are bound to him by his Spirit so that as he is so are we becoming because he lives in us.

So, as citizens of the Heavenlies we are ambassadors called to live in this world the way Jesus lived in it – the Way of the Cross, the way of unconditional and sacrificial love.  As we worship God alongside the Creation, we must be careful not to exploit it but rather to give voice to it.  We are the one’s through whom God is making obvious what it says in the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy kingdom come.  Thy will be done.  On earth as it is in heaven.”  For a century and more (169 years) the River of Life has flown forth from the Temple in the Heavenlies through this congregation (Latona) as we have gathered for worship and shared a meal and loved our neighbours.  Our citizenship here precedes any claim to citizenship we have elsewhere.  Here around this Table national boundaries do not exist, only the loving reign of God.  Let it flow.  Amen.

The Remedy for When Life Becomes a Prison

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Philippians 4:1-9

I’m sure we all remember a few times when we were children being sent to our rooms or made to stand in a corner as punishment for being bad.  The idea was to restrict our freedom of playing wherever and however we wanted and to give us some time to ponder what we had done and whether we would do it again.  Thus, we have the rudimentary reasons for the incarceration of criminals: retribution or punishment, incapacitation or removal of freedom, to deter criminal behaviour, and rehabilitation.  

The temporary removal or restriction of a child’s freedoms usually works for the typical kid from a stable family to get them back on track.  When my kids were young, “timeouts” were popular.  All they needed to get back on track was a short break of sitting alone for one minute per year of age and they checked back in.  Too bad it’s not that easy in the adult world.  When we look at mass incarceration being used as a society’s means of dealing with criminals, we find it doesn’t work so well.  If rehabilitation is the ultimate goal, which is our society’s claim, mass incarceration is a miserable failure.  

Please don’t read into what I’m saying that I think criminals don’t need to suffer the consequences of their actions.  There will be crimes committed because we humans have a disease of the mind called Sin.  But high crime rates are an indicator that something is wrong with society in general that if dealt with would likely reduce the crime rate.  Things like wealth disparity, poverty, racism, childhood trauma, etc., feed crime.  Reduce or eliminate them and crime will drastically disappear.    

Sending people to prison doesn’t solve much.  More than often, it makes things worse because life in prison is a game that is soul destructive - dehumanizing.  The majority of people who leave incarceration have a high likelihood of suffering anxiety, panic, depression, hypervigilance, PTSD, and a loss of identity and sense of autonomy.  While in prison, they have likely been assaulted, manipulated by fear, humiliated by other inmates and even by the guards and have found that the only way to survive the game is to play it – Do or threaten to do onto others what that evil SOB did to me or enlist yourself in helping an evil SOB bully the populace.  When released, inmates usually do not have a support network and have a difficult time trusting others.  They face stigma and barriers to employment.  Because life outside is so stacked against them, they are likely to return to crime.  If this is rehabilitation, we fail miserably.  

I had some exposure to prison ministry when I was in seminary.  I was a chaplain intern in the prison unit at a hospital.  I visited the prisoners twice a week inside their little caged ward.  I saw the game firsthand.  The only prisoners that I met that truly seemed to be surviving the game without playing it were men who had come to faith in Jesus.  Unlike most convicts, they admitted and accepted what they had done and when possible sought forgiveness, attended church and prayer meetings, read their Bibles, and sought to be faithful disciples.  They stuck together with other Christians.

Paul was such a man.  He regularly suffered brief jailing and being stoned or whipped for proclaiming that Jesus was Lord and Saviour and would be returning to establish the Kingdom of God and that the Holy Spirit is present now as a foretaste and the evidence.  His message was proved through healings and exorcisms, and a couple of times he raised the dead.  But there were at least two times that he suffered an extended long-term incarceration.  There is a strong likelihood that Paul wrote Philippians while he was briefly imprisoned in the early ‘50’s in Ephesus and he may have fought a lion there.  But that is anecdotal, undocumented.  Regardless, he did spend most of the last ten years of his life unjustly imprisoned because of Jesus and never got a fair trial.  

If I were to venture a guess, our passage today sounds a whole lot like how Paul dealt with the dehumanizing effects of prison, especially wrongful incarceration.  At the center of it was his awareness that the Lord is near.  He was not alone there in the cold, damp, hungry, solitary, darkness.  He felt the peaceful presence of the Lord.  Even there in prison, the threat of execution looming, he found the joy of the Lord in his heart and instead of bitterness and grumbling, he rejoiced.  He found reason to praise.  He tapped into that song that the whole creation sings in praise of God.  He found within himself that instead of being grumpy and snippy with others, he was able to be gentle and gracious with others, even the jailors.  He says “with everyone”.  He also had learned that worry was not necessary because God hears and answers our prayers.  Instead of worrying about things, pray about them.  He wraps up by guiding us that we need to focus our minds on good things.  Choose to dwell on the good.  When you find yourself “Stinking Thinking”, choose to rejoice, pray, be gentle, dwell on the good.  Do these things and the peaceful presence of God will be evidently with you.  This was his remedy for life in prison.  

None of us is likely to go prison, but there are times when life can become like a prison – living paycheck to paycheck, a meaningless job with a bad boss but you have no choice but to work it, unemployment, debt, a chronic illness, chronic pain, mental illness, a detached if not abusive partner, an addiction, having to live with someone with an addiction.  Some would say that old age is the one prison we all have to endure.  Grief tops the list of the worst prison of all.  There are so many situations that just come up in life that make us feel like we’ve been imprisoned, that rob us of our vitality, that make us feel punished for no reason, that make us feel alone and isolated, that can make us become and be a person we don’t want to be.  

Life can become a prison.  In that prison it is very easy to lose faith and get bitter, anxious, and depressed; hopeless.   Paul’s remedy is the cure.  It’s during these times that it’s most important that we just sit in the presence of the Lord for he is indeed present with us with peace to give.  Pray and pray and pray some more.  What we need the most, God will provide.  Choose to dwell on good things rather than ruminating on the bad.  Make it a point to be gentle and gracious with others.  Above all, stop ruminating on our situation.  Many people would see a life of prison as pointless and dehumanizing, but for a beloved child of God it is a time to grow closer to him and grow more human.  It won’t last forever.  Amen.

 

I Want to Know Christ and the Power of His Resurrection

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Philippians 3:4-14

“I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection.”  Every time I come across that sentence it just rips into everything about me.  As a disciple of Jesus Christ – and I should say that in a way that’s inclusive of all of us – as disciples of Jesus Christ, this sentence is the one sentence in the entire Bible that sums up what our lives should be about – knowing Jesus Christ and the power of his resurrection.  It forces us to ask ourselves that one question in which we find salvation: do I want to know Jesus and the power of his resurrection?  Do I want to know the person, the man, my Lord Jesus and the new life he has to give me through the presence and working of the Holy Spirit.  Do I really want to know Jesus and be changed by him?

If I am honest with myself, my answer to that question is “Yes”.  But then, I have an immediate inner voice response that arises.  I’m pretty sure it’s my conscience.  It’s not God speaking.  God is like an AA meeting.  AA knows that guilt and shame won’t bring a person to sobriety.  Instead, AA says “Keep coming back”.  We are invited to keep coming back, sober or not.  Keep coming back and the unconditional acceptance works a miracle.  That’s God.  That voice inside me says, “Really Randy? Is knowing Jesus and being healed by him really your primary pursuit in life?”  I hear that.  I hear that and I’m cut to heart.  I do want knowing Jesus to be my primary pursuit in life but I am so distracted by so many things.  There’s so much I just need to let go off and find my rest in him.   Though I’m cut to the heart, I also feel that familiar, gentle, peaceful pull that’s found in those familiar lyrics: “Be still and know that I am God.  Be still and know that I am God.  Be still and know that I am God.”   Seeking to know Jesus changes us in a healing way.

Thinking about Paul here, he is writing to attest to the change he was going through since encountering the resurrected Jesus on the Damascus Road.  He was once an up-and-coming Pharisee in the Jerusalem establishment.  His birth lineage was a cut above.  He was very zealous in his keeping the Law of Moses.  You see, the Pharisees believed that the more observant people of Israel could be in keeping the Law of Moses, the sooner the Messiah would return and put the world to right.  He was so zealous that he chose to climb that ladder of what we would call professional recognition feigning as faithful devotion by trying to squash a big change that was happening among his people as the result of what Paul believed to be a lie, that God had raised Jesus of Nazareth from the dead.  

Paul believed that Jesus was a treasonous false Messiah and a blasphemer who claimed to be the Son of God.  Paul believed Jesus deserved to die by crucifixion and those who followed him needed to clam up or face the consequences.  But when he found himself in the presence of Jesus resurrected on the Damascus Road, he had come to realize that all that arrogant zeal for status and recognition, that fake faithfulness was just a bunch of dung (the S-word would be the most accurate translation).  His heart was now set on knowing Jesus and the change Jesus was working in him and so many others.

This personal encounter changed Paul.  Jesus confronted Paul with the fact that even though Paul thought himself to be a superbly faithful Jew, he was really working against what God was doing and what God had for him to do.  We’re all like that quite a bit, we good church people who do what churches have always do resisting change as if it’s the Plague.  Paul’s goal was suddenly no longer to rise to power in the midst of the Jerusalem Pharisees by Law observance and persecuting the followers of Jesus, but rather to know Jesus, to personally know Jesus, and the power of his resurrection – a power that changes people – a change that is nothing short of being born into a new life in which you know yourself to be a beloved child of God.

If you take Paul’s letters and suss out his metaphors for salvation, his images for what salvation is, (there are about twelve) at the top of the list of what he might call personal salvation as he experienced it is adoption – I was once an estranged God-hater, but through what God has done in, thru, and as Jesus the Christ in the power and presence of the Holy Spirit, I now know myself to be a beloved child of God, adopted and loved by the Father as He loves Jesus.  

In Christ, we each are a beloved member of God’s family here on earth.  The power of Jesus’ resurrection – powerful enough to create this Creation, raise the dead, heal the sick, and cast out demons – now works powerfully in us by bringing us to want to know Jesus more and more in order to grow to be more like him in his selfless love which is the family resemblance. 

Well, winding this down in a way that might make some sense; “I want to know Jesus and the power of his resurrection” also makes me think of people in my life whom I’ve known, who had a great impact on me, and whom I wish I took the time to know better.  My grandfather tops the list.  He was the son of a farm worker.  I don’t know if he finished high school.  Born in 1917 he came of age during the Great Depression.  He was a machine gunner in WWII and somehow, he came home while so many of brothers in arms did not.  He had to take human life to free the world from an evil man and his deluded regime.  He came home and became a police officer, first as a patrol cop and then he became Chief of police in a city the size of Owen Sound.  In his day, in police work you either had to talk people down or knock ‘em down and drag ‘em out.  I don’t want to brag and I’m not at all biased, but everyone who had anything to say to me about my grandfather as a law enforcement officer…well, he was probably the most respected Chief of Police Waynesboro, VA ever had for his peaceableness, wisdom, bravery, honesty, approachability, fairness.  To me, Granddaddy was a quiet man who put his family first, generous, over the top when it came to hospitality (especially considering some of the men one of my aunts in particular brought to Thanksgiving Dinner) everyone was welcome at his table.  He listened more than he talked.  He was always there for us.

With Granddaddy being so quiet he was difficult to get to know.  What you got to know of Granddaddy was a sense of his presence.  Because of that I have spent quite a bit of time wondering what it was like to be him.  I think about his character, what the war did to him, the courage and prudence it took to make a career of policing, the way he was with us, his family.  The last thing we did together, just the two of us, was we to sit in his car not saying anything as we watched heavy equipment at work replacing a historic old railroad bridge that he probably saw built.  What was he thinking?  What was he remembering?  Though nothing was said, it was priceless time together.  What an honour to sit with that man.  I’ll never be the man he was, but there is a bit of him that lives in me and I try to honour that by being a servant of others, with generosity, hospitality, and trying to understand people rather than judge them.

So it goes with getting to know Jesus.  We have to take the time to sit and be aware that even though we can’t see him, he’s present.  We know his presence in his absence.  The Holy Spirit is present.  If it helps, put an empty chair in front of you for him to sit.  Today is World Communion Sunday.  We come to his table where he is the host.  We come as followers from several different traditions to be with him at this meal.  He is here as the one who gives himself for us that we might be nourished and live.  He selflessly gives his very life to us.  How he is present with us in this meal is probably the greatest theological debate of Church history.  My tradition just says that it is a mystery.  Regardless, through this meal Jesus in selfless love gives himself to us.  This is who we are.  This is his life and way of living.  When we go and do likewise, we come to know him more and the seed of the power of his resurrection that he has planted in us changes us to be more like him.  We will never be the person that he is but there is a bit of him that lives in each of us.  Honour him.  Love one another as has loved us each.  Amen.