But our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. [Philippians 3:20]
Every great American city has neighborhoods. And usually at least some of them have ethnic roots. They were gathering places as immigrants from a common origin settled in a place, outposts of the old country making the new one feel like home. In Cleveland near where I grew up, you had Little Italy, and a whole variety of Eastern European neighborhoods, where Polish, Hungarian, or German immigrants had come and settled. In Columbus where I went to seminary, you could tell when you had entered German Village because they still had brick paved streets that really made you feel you had entered another time and another country, if not a whole other world. They had a huge Somali population in the city, too, and there were all sorts of other ethnic enclaves if you knew where to look. Lots of other cities have neighborhoods like that, too—a Chinatown, a Little Havana, or some other neighborhoods of one culture or another. I think experiencing those different neighborhoods, different tastes and smells, different music and fashion, and different languages is one of the best glimpses of heaven we can get in this life, honestly. Even if, in a lot of cities today, those nationally-defined neighborhoods are changing and losing some of their distinctive flair, you can still get a sense of what it would have been like to live in this country as an immigrant longing for home but seeking to make a new life in the new place. They still bring cadences of home, even for people who have never been to the old country.
That may be the closest parallel we have for what it would have been like to live in Philippi back in Paul’s day, and for the way he describes the Christian life for all of us. Philippi was a Roman colony—a city given special status, with a large population of people who had come there from Rome or from imperial service to Rome. They had special ties back to the capital, and it gave them a sense of identity. And yet, people who lived in Philippi weren’t all planning one day to move back to Rome; Philippi was their home, but they would always have a fondness for the “old country” so to speak. Living in a colony wasn’t so much about wanting to go back to where you came from, so much as it was about expanding the reign of the mother country or city. To live in Philippi was to have at least a little bit of Rome itself brought out into the farther reaches of the empire.
You could also say that knowing they were a Roman colony gave them a sense of who they were in an empire where they lived alongside people from all sorts of other nationalities, ethnic groups, and realms. The Roman Empire was a hodge-podge of all the conquered peoples brought under Roman rule, which meant that you had different nationalities and cultures right next door, or at least just outside the bounds of the neighborhood. Philippi as a city took a good bit of pride in the fact that it was an outpost of the city of Rome itself, a colony with an allegiance to a mother country.
Now, we can certainly raise questions about how "great" that mother country actually was in the case of the Roman Empire, since all of its art, architecture, and philosophy came with a heavy dose of oppression, cruelty, taxation, conquest, brutality, and good-ol'-fashioned-imperial-propaganda to prop up Caesar's ego. But at least you can understand how living in a Roman colony, like Philippi was, would have felt like living in an outpost of home--something like living in the old Italian or Polish or Hungarian neighborhoods of a big city in America. It had the feel of home, even if that was a home you had never been to.
Well, you can also see why Paul latches onto the imagery of “citizenship” (or others translate the word “commonwealth”) for Christians. We, too, are living in an outpost of a mother country. We are citizens of the Reign of God, the Kingdom of the heavens. Or, alternatively, we are like immigrants living in an American city, finding our niche alongside others who know and love our homeland. Like immigrant neighborhoods throughout American history, it’s not so much that we are looking to leave where we are right now, so much as we are bringing the flavors and sights of home here, to this place, to this life. We are seeking to live as Jesus-people alongside an empire that places us alongside folks from all sorts of other backgrounds, allegiances, and loves.
This is what Paul means by saying our citizenship is in heaven. It’s not saying, “Let’s get out of this awful place called earth and abandon it for heaven,” so much as he is saying, “This is a place to bring the flavor and the feel of the Kingdom—our lives now can be outposts of our home country.” But we are making this place, this life, our neighborhood. If you lived as a Roman citizen in Philippi, your life-plan wasn’t to get out of Philippi as fast as possible so you could get back to Rome (you might not have ever been to Rome, just as plenty of Polish or German families had children here in the United States who were of Polish or German heritage but had never lived in the old country). It was to be an outpost of what Rome was all about, holding onto that heritage and living into it, where you were. This is how Christians are called to live: as immigrants making a life where we are. This day, this life, this place where you sleep and work and have your daily routines—this is where we live our lives, but we do it as immigrants who have the old songs, the old connections, the old allegiances of the mother country. We see the world as people who live in the world around us, but whose deepest identity comes from our belonging to the Reign of God. And because we are citizens of that Reign, that Kingdom, we are in effect bringing that Kingdom’s presence to the world in which we live. You are an outpost of Home—even if it is a home you have never been to yet, but which still defines and claims you. It is the home we have been given in the love of God that makes us strangers and refugees everywhere, but able to make a home wherever we find ourselves. Like Jon Foreman sings, "Love is our language--love is our native tongue." You are a flash of difference, a taste of the homeland--like pierogi and haluski, like great-grandmother's gnocchi, like fresh made samosas or biryani, like salt for the earth. You will represent the savior who says you belong to him today, and you don’t have to go anywhere else to do it. Bring the cadences of that mother country--the Reign of God--wherever you go today.
Lord Jesus, let us be so confident of our belonging to your Kingdom that we can live boldly in the places where you have sent us to live. Let us bring the presence of Home right where we are.
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