A Sermon
Presented by Rev. Merlin T. Batt
Intentional Interim Pastor
St. Matthew’s United Church of Christ
Maiden, North Carolina
Second Sunday in Lent
March 4, 2007

Scripture Lessons: Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18; Philippians 3:17-4:1; Luke 13:31-35
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I count it all blessing that I have had the opportunity to travel abroad several times over the course of my ministry, each time leading a church group – in 1988 to Jordan and Israel, in ’89 to Greece and Turkey, in 96 a return trip to Israel, and in the year 2000 a journey to Germany to see the Passion Play in the village of Oberammergau.

Each time I traveled I had a similar experience. I realized anew how glad and proud I am to be a citizen of the United States of America. I’ve never been outwardly what you might call a “super-patriot,” but I must tell you this. On each of these journeys abroad, in spite of seeing and doing wonderful things, I found myself at times feeling a little homesick; and at those times I would reach down to my pocket where I kept my passport and touch this physical expression of American citizenship, and thereby I reminded myself of who I am and where I belong.

Then, each time when the wheels of our jet touched down at Kennedy International Airport in New York, I felt tears welling up in my eyes because of the joy and relief I felt at being back safely on American soil, to my homeland, to the place where I am a citizen. And upon reflection, I feel sure that Israelis, Jordanians, Greeks, Turks, Germans, and citizens of other nations have similar feelings about returning to their homeland after traveling abroad. This sense of being deeply connected to one’s homeland is by no means unique to us Americans.

In this regard I am reminded of a hymn entitled “This Is My Song,” the words set to Sibelius’ beautiful tune, “Finlandia.” I’ll spare you my singing and simply read the first two verses:

 This is my song, O God of all the nations,
 a song of peace for lands afar and mine.
 This is my home, the country where my heart is;
 here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine,
 But other hearts in other lands are beating
 with hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.

 My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean,
 and sunlight beams on clover leaf and pine;
 but other lands have sunlight too, and clover,
 and skies are everywhere as blue as mine.
 O hear my song, thou God of all the nations,
 a song of peace for their and for mine.

The love for one’s homeland and the pride in one’s citizenship are common feelings to all of us.

Each of our three Scripture readings this morning, in one way or another, has to do with homeland and citizenship, but in a way that may surprise you. If I had time, I would have us look at all three, but given the limits, let’s take a closer look at the first two readings, first from Genesis. The text begins with the patriarch Abraham complaining to God. He’s frustrated with God because it seems to Abraham that the promises God had made to him three chapters earlier were not being fulfilled. From Abraham’s perspective, God was not keeping his promises!

Abraham remembered God saying to him, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth will be blessed.” There was the problem. Abraham had not fathered any children, and now he was an old man, far beyond the season when a man might become a daddy! But God reassured him that he would, indeed, father children; and that they and their descendants would number as many as the stars in the heavens, and that through them God would bring great blessing to the world.

Another aspect of God’s promises troubled old Abraham, the matter of the land that was to be his. Abraham was a wily old businessman, you see, and he wanted some proof that he would get the real estate he was promised by God. So he said to God in his most lawyer-like way, “O Lord God, how am I to know that I shall possess (this land you promised)?”

Following this pointed question posed to God by the patriarch, there is a report of an ancient, Near Eastern covenant-making ritual in which God orders Abraham to cut up some animals and lay the parts to either side making a path between. A deep sleep then falls upon Abraham, and he dreams that a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch pass between the pieces.

What is meant by this odd, bloody dream? Well, according to one interpretation, it means that the parties to the covenant invite dismemberment if they fail to keep the terms of the covenant. In other words, it was as if God were saying, figuratively, “You can trust me to give you the land I promised, Abraham, and if I don’t keep the terms of this covenant, you can cut me in half!”

It’s a story about the gift of a homeland, a place where God’s covenant people are at home, where they are citizens. Can anyone understand what’s going on the Middle East today without dealing with this story? You see, throughout the centuries and even until today, Jews have interpreted this story of God’s gift of land to be about a strip of real estate variously called Israel, Palestine, or the Holy Land. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, have fought and died trying to defend, take, settle, or reclaim this small piece of property. This very struggle is going on as I speak today. It is at the heart of the crisis which the world faces in the Middle East.

Christianity, in contrast to Judaism, doesn’t make this piece of real estate central to faith or critical for our identity as Christians. That we don’t regard the land of Israel in this way is a problem for Jewish-Christian relations. Of course, Israel is important to Christians as a place of sacred memory, the land our spiritual ancestors lived in, the soil on which our Lord Jesus walked. But for us as Christians, the Holy Land is not a strip of real estate in the Middle East. Rather, the Holy Land is the whole earth, the world which, according to our Bible, will be renewed when God acts to fully establish his Kingdom, when the prayer Jesus taught us is fully answered, the part that says, “Thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.”

You might put it this way: the promise of land to Abraham ultimately was a metaphor, a figurative way of pointing to God’s final plan of giving to his covenant people the whole renewed earth! As God’s people, you see, our true homeland is God’s realm, heaven, and someday that will be joined with the new earth.
 
This brings me to our second scripture. Paul is writing to his favorite congregation, the church in the Greek city of Philippi. While serving time in prison because of the Gospel, Paul has received disturbing news about this church which he founded, which supported his ongoing ministry, and of which he was so very fond.

Apparently, there were some church members in Philippi who were misinterpreting their new freedom in Christ. They thought that, because they were saved only by faith in Christ, it didn’t matter any longer what they did with their bodies. As a result, they felt free to indulge their appetites for food and sex, as if their bodily behavior was unrelated to their commitment to follow Jesus. Their motto was: “If it tastes good, eat it! And if it feels good, do it!” They lived by their appetites, because they believed that what they did to and with their bodies didn’t ultimately matter! Their spiritual descendents are with us still today!

But Paul would have none of it! He called such people “enemies of the cross of Christ. He went on to say about them, “Their end is destruction; their god is the belly, and their glory is in their shame; their minds are set on earthly things.”

In contrast to their behavior, Paul wanted the Christians in Philippi to imitate him and those who took their cues from his example on how to live the Christian life. To ground his moral claim in Christian faith, Paul said, “Our citizenship is in heaven.” You see, he wanted them to know that they were called to be different, to behave differently, because they were citizens of another realm. Their allegiance was to another place with a Ruler different from the rulers of their present world. And Paul insisted that different citizenship makes a great deal of difference to how one behaves, even in matters of food and sex.
 
Paul knew very well what he was doing when he referred to being citizens of another realm. He knew the history of Philippi, that it was established as a colony of Rome. A hundred years before Paul ever came to Philippi, it was the setting for one of the great battles in the war that broke out after the assassination of Julius Caesar. Afterward, the victors in the civil war found themselves with a dilemma – they had thousand of armed soldiers in northern Greece with nothing more for them to do. Politically it would be too dangerous to bring them back to Rome where they cause trouble in the capital city, so they gave these soldiers plots of land in and around Philippi, making it a colony of Rome. Then, once the colony was established, other vets from other battles joined them.

So, by the time Paul arrived in Philippi, many of the people were descended from those original Roman colonists, and even though they lived all their lives in Philippi, they had a strong attachment to Rome, which they saw as their true homeland, the place where they held their citizenship. They were, in a sense, still colonists. And so their task as Roman colonists was not to return to Rome, but to bring the life of Rome – its values, its practices, its language, its customs, its holidays, to this little Greek outpost in Philippi. And that they did.

So, you see, when Paul wrote to the Philippian Christians, “Our citizenship is in heaven,” he knew they would understand exactly what he meant: that even though they lived in Philippi, their real homeland, their true citizenship, was elsewhere –  in heaven, in God’s realm. As Christians, they were to see themselves as a colony of heaven set in the midst of pagan, Roman Philippi. Their responsibility as colonists was not to long to leave and go to heaven, but to bring the life of heaven, the values of God’s realm, to bear on the issues and practices of life in Philippi. In the political sense, these Christians remained citizens of Rome, but in the deeper, spiritual sense, they were citizens of heaven, and expected to live every aspect of their lives as citizens of another realm while still living in Philippi.

So where does all this bring us? From the Genesis reading we hear of God’s intention to give his people a homeland, and we Christians understand that promise to involve, not a measly little strip of land in the Middle East no bigger than the state of Vermont, but the whole world transformed into God’s new creation and ruled over by Christ. Of course, that hasn’t happened yet. We still await the final drama of God’s making all things new, but even now our citizenship is in God’s realm, our true homeland.
 
And from Paul’s letter to the Philippians we hear that we Christians, citizens of another realm, are meant to see ourselves and to act as a colony of heaven, a community of faith that brings the values and ways of our true homeland to bear upon the place where we now live. And in our case that isn’t Philippi, but Maiden and Lincolnton, in the Piedmont of North Carolina. Here we are called to live our lives as citizens of another realm – that is, to live by God-defined perspectives and Christ-commanded ethics.

Friends, this is very hard to do! To live as citizens of another realm while participating in the political and social aspects of our place and time is a huge challenge. To be a Christian here, today, is to live in the terribly awkward situation of living and working here, yet having our real citizenship elsewhere. Of course, we are called to be loyal to the earthly government under which we live, but at the same to know that our true home and our true Sovereign are elsewhere. That puts us in an awkward position, to say the least.
 
Listen to Methodist Bishop William Willimon as he describes our situation, and see if it doesn’t ring true:

I hear increasing numbers of American Christians saying that something is amiss in our land, that there is a disjunction between our loyalties to the North American, consumerist, capitalist culture and our Christian commitment. That world (the world in which we live and work) wants to label us as “consumers.” Jesus wants to make us disciples. That world has certain images of success, power, and fulfillment that are at odds with the images we receive (in worship) on a Sunday. That world encourages us to sacrifice all, to bow down to what? The almighty dollar? sexual fulfillment? power and prestige? Here (in worship) we gather to rally around a very different image of what it’s all about – a cross. 

Day after day, you and I are immersed in the life of our society, in our homeland, in our role as American citizens, and then on Sundays we come together here to worship God. We stand before the cross, which reminds us that there is a higher claim upon our lives than our national homeland and citizenship. Gathering here each week before the cross is like being in a foreign country and reaching for your “passport,” and so being reminded that, as a Christian, you and I are a citizens of another realm, the kingdom of heaven, and that being citizens of God’s realm makes all the difference to how we live in this one!

Let us pray:
Our Father in heaven, today renew our citizenship in your realm to the exclusion of every other loyalty that might distract us from doing your will and walking in your way. Give us strength day by day to meet this awesome challenge; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.