Second Sunday in Lent, rcl yr c, 2022
Philippians 3:17-4:1; Psalm 27; Luke 13:31-35

our citizenship is in heaven

It certainly sounds like one of the most pompous and self-righteous things a person might say. “Imitate me.” “Imitate me”? In my case, if I told you to do that, you’d end up sleeping too much, swearing too much, and getting massive speeding tickets. But this is exactly what St. Paul says in his letter to the Philippians, from which we just read. “Brothers and sisters, join in imitating me.”

But what Paul is saying in our reading from Philippians isn’t quite  “be just like me, in all ways.” Instead, Paul is encouraging the Christian Roman citizens of Philippi to be like him, not in all ways, but in a particular sort of way. Paul has just written that he is “a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.”

What Paul is saying is that he has every reason in the world to be confident in his own religious bona fides. Not simply a member of the people of Israel, but “of the tribe of Benjamin,” and “a Pharisee” to boot, and “blameless under the law.”

We can imagine something similar, perhaps, among Anglicans? If one were to boast about who is the most Anglican of the Anglicans? “An Englishman born in England; as for education, Trinity College, Cambridge; as for sherry, medium dry, if you would.” Or perhaps in this diocese? “Born in London, into a clerical family; as to education, Huron University College; as to church, the Cathedral, to be sure; as to zeal, a member of the Brotherhood of Anglican Churchmen.”

This is sort of what Paul is getting at. He’s saying “I had a whole lot of [what we might call] religious credibility. I had a whole lot of cultural privilege.” And what Paul says about all that, all that religious credibility and cultural privilege, is this: “whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ.”

And so when Paul says “Brothers and sisters, join in imitating me,” he’s suggesting that the Philippians do something similar: there may be some things that you thought of as gains, but be careful how closely and tightly you hold on to them; in the light of Christ, much of that credibility, many of those privileges, a good deal of all that standing that comes with Roman citizenship might not be worth much at all.

And Paul will sum this up by saying, our citizenship is not in Jerusalem, nor is it in Rome; “[o]ur citizenship is in heaven.”

There are a number of different ways that the Bible speaks about worldly authority. In the Old Testament earthly rule runs from a compromise God makes with his people; to good, but corruptible; to corrupt, but redeemable. In the New Testament we see one perspective in Luke, and we get a glimpse of it in our reading today where Jesus calls Herod a “fox.”  This is not a compliment; he’s calling Herod a man of low cunning. We saw it more clearly last week; it was the devil, after all, who claimed to have authority enough over all the kingdoms of the world, that he could pass that authority on to Jesus. For Luke, Jesus, the one whose birth is heralded by the angels of heaven, is born into a dark timeline where the kingdoms of the world and their leaders are almost demonic powers fighting against heavenly ones.

But Paul doesn’t really take that sort of view. For Paul, authority is granted to earthly leaders and governments, by God. Now, earthly authorities can overstep, and act unjustly, and followers of Jesus are right to resist such injustice. But even as Paul might speak  relatively positively of worldly powers, he still won’t say to the Philippians, “your citizenship is in Rome.”For Paul, his citizenship (despite being a Roman citizen himself), and the citizenship of other Roman Christians, is citizenship in heaven. “Join in imitating me,”

Paul says, just as I gave up all my religious credibility for the sake of Christ, just as I gave up my cultural privilege for the sake of Christ, so ought you. Yeah sure, you’re Roman citizens. But don’t look at the world in those terms. Look at your world from the perspective of the gospel first, and your credibility, and your privilege, second.

Look at your credibility, and your privilege, from the perspective of the gospel of a Christ Jesus who “did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And [who] being found in human form … humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross,” As Paul had put it earlier in this same letter.

And so in this way, for Paul to say, “our citizenship is in heaven,” is not to say simply that we go to heaven when we die; but much like the Christ who empties himself for the sake of the world, so too would we empty ourselves for the sake of others. And so we, as citizens of heaven, would-be agents of that heavenly citizenship, the citizenship of self-emptying, wherever we find ourselves: Rome, London, or Kitchener-Waterloo.

Which brings me round to my final point. Maybe we are just as Anglican as that sherry-drinking Englishman or the bishop’s nephew. Maybe we are coming to Anglicanism from the outside. Maybe we are indigenous Anglicans, and part of an Anglican tradition that pre-dates English Anglicanism in Huron. Maybe we are just here, and searching.

Paul would challenge each of us to make an honest appraisal of our traditions as we inherit them here, where we are together, sifting through our past for what is good and Godly; for what is neither here-nor-there; and for the ways we most certainly have gone wrong—especially when it comes to much of the church’s worldly privilege, especially when it comes to what we once might’ve thought to be civic virtues.

Perhaps to put the question a bit more clearly: is this a good time to communicate the church’s close alliance with worldly authority, the sort of close alliance that leads to Christian-led, but government funded and regulated residential schools? Or is it a good time to communicate the church’s dis-ease with those sorts of alliance with worldly authority? How would we show that our citizenship is first of all a citizenship in heaven?

I would suggest that when we say, as Paul would have us do, that “our citizenship is in heaven,” that this is an opportunity to take advantage of real, Christian, this-worldly critical purchase on the not-so-godly aspects of our citizenships. And that some ritual distance from worldly citizenships is entirely appropriate for us, all as part of an effort to sift through those things that may have once been considered as part of civic virtue, or part of religious credibility and cultural privilege, but not actually founded on the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Or at least, not founded on the gospel of the Jesus Christ who “did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.” The gospel of the Jesus Christ who, “being found in human form, … humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.”

The Reverend Dr. Preston Parsons