2 Lent C February 21, 2016
Gen.15:1-12,17-18 Ps. 27
Phil.3:17-4:1 Luke 13:22-35
St. Paul was a Jew who lived in Tarsus and he was a Roman Citizen. In the time of Paul there were confusion about situations of multiple citizenships. Paul was a cultural and religious Jew, but he also was a citizen of Tarsus from Cilicia. When Paul travelled to Jerusalem, he obviously was subject to the local laws of those who governed in Jerusalem. His status in Tarsus carried no weight in Jerusalem. But there was a trump card which he played when he was seized by the Roman army in Jerusalem; he told the commander that he was a Roman citizen and as such he had the right of appeal to a more supreme tribunal, one in Rome. And because of this appeal, Paul began his escorted trip to Rome.
Roman citizenship carried some special privileges in the Roman Empire and St. Paul used the citizenship metaphor when he wrote to the Philippian church, "Our citizenship is in heaven." So Paul was a Jew, he was a citizen of Tarsus under their laws, he was a Roman citizen which gave him rights and privileges throughout the empire, but he did not believe the cultural and religious citizenship as a Jew to be final, he did not believe the local citizenship status in Tarsus to be final, he did not regard citizenship in the world Empire, the Roman Empire to be final, because finally he wrote, "Our citizenship is in heaven."
Lots of people interpret heaven as a place which will be known at the end of one's life or at the end of time. People who conceived the world spatially thought of heaven as being located above the domed sky which was above the flat earth. It is hard for us to spatially locate heaven today but we do understand "inner" space. It is easy for us to understand heaven as metaphor for an interior quality of life which is accessible to us now and in our deaths.
People who are skeptical of religion criticize the way in which religious people use the notion of heaven. They think that heaven is used as a method of escape. They think it is used by oppressors to keep the oppressed tolerant of their oppression because they are promised eternal life and gold on the streets of a future heavenly Jerusalem. This is why Marx called religion the opiate of the people.
So how does heaven function as a metaphor for you and me? Do you and I feel like we are carrying a passport of heaven? And what is the worth of this heavenly passport? Are we using it as passive Christians who tolerate injustice because we feel we can wait for some future time when justice will finally be rendered?
What is the function for you and me of this metaphor of heavenly citizenship?
The first function has to do with knowing that we have a heavenly citizenship. By this I mean that it is important that we recognize our primary identity and our primary nature. This follows from our belief that we were made in God's image. We feel like we have been made in the image of the eternal because even while our bodies are aging we feel like there is something in us or about us which will never die or pass away. We often try to replace that native sense of eternal life with the desire for fame, glory and recognition. Once I've written or sung a line or two, then perhaps I will be immortal and famous and remembered. The quest for fame may be but the lack of belief in the eternal image of God upon our lives; so we seek to prove that we are everlasting and immortal in other ways.
The entire point of the Bible is about salvation history, the history of what is truly healthy in human experience, namely the recognition of our spiritual and heavenly identity.
The events in salvation history are presented as God's covenants with humanity. These covenants appear in all ages and in all times and some of the details of the ancient covenants don't make much sense to us. When is the last time God made a covenant with you and required you to bisect some animals and make a promise to be so "bisected" if you did not keep your promise with God? The important thing about the covenant with Abram is that he accessed the eternal promise of God through his faith. And faith is the important issue not the ancient details of animal sacrificial covenantal rites.
How does having and knowing heavenly citizenship function for us now? If we can believe ourselves to live and move and have our being in the most expansive realm of all, then we will have the most global identity of all to help us in the conflicts which arise in the other realms of citizenship.
St. Paul had potentially conflicting citizenship identities, as a Jew, as a Cilician of Tarsus and as a Roman citizen. The conflicts between these realms ultimately brought about his death.
In the Gospel lesson, we read about the pain and the suffering which occurred because of conflicting citizenship claims. The prophets came to remind people that their first citizenship was in heaven. But others denied the primacy of the kingdom of heaven. Many people thought that being a Roman citizen was the most important identity. Being a Roman citizen gave one rights and privileges. Many Jews believed that the identity which they received from the Hebraic and Judaic tradition was the most important identity. People like King Herod had identity conflicts. He was a local ruler for the Roman Emperor who also tried claim a heritage as a Jew but when it came to prophets he believed it was most important to uphold the power of the Roman government in Palestine and so Jesus was crucified. The books of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles were written as books to be read in sequence. The book of the Acts of the Apostle records how Stephen was stoned in Jerusalem and James was killed there as well. So the conflict between the requirements of citizenship of different group identities figured into the violence in Palestine at the time of Jesus in the early Christian eras. In the case of prophets and Jesus it seemed as though one paid the price of being a heavenly citizen with one's life.
I think we need to recognize our heavenly citizenship as something like climbing to the top of the mountain and looking on the landscape below. From the highest view one can see how things can be negotiated and how things can be fit together and where resistance needs to be applied when competing citizenship requirements happen.
You and I have many citizenship claims on our lives today, political, national, local and in our family. We are citizens of our parish; we are citizens of all of the different civic, business and community organizations. Since we have so many different citizen situations, we need to have the wisdom to be able to live and regulate all of the citizenship claims upon our lives.
This is why we need our heavenly citizenship. Like St. Paul we need to acknowledge that ultimately we live and move and have our being in God, that is, we are citizens of the widest and highest and most encompassing realm. And if we can learn to live and think from this expanded perspective, then we can receive wisdom to make the practical decisions which we have to make in all our citizenship situations.
Let us be honest though; there is always going to be conflicts in various citizenship requirements of the various identity groups of our lives. Some conflicts are going to be severe. Foxes like Herod do not protect the hens in the henhouse. They will attack the hen, even as she tries to hide her brood under her wings to protect their lives.
Jesus got caught in the conflicting requirement between citizenship realms in Jerusalem. And he became like the hen who sacrifices her life for the lives of her brood.
But Jesus as the Son of God was the ultimate citizen of heaven. And heaven gave Jesus back heavenly life after his death as a proof of his divine status. But the heavenly afterlife of Jesus also means for you and me that heavenly life is greater than earthly death and pain. Heavenly life co-exists as a parallel reality for us to know now within all of the agony and ecstasy of earthly life; and heavenly life is the life which is stronger than our own deaths.
Today as we try to be good citizens of so many human identity groups today, let us not forget our primary citizenship, our citizenship in heaven. And remember we have the example of the ultimate citizen of heaven, even Jesus Himself. Amen.
