Good morning, Friends! I hope you’re all doing well this week.
Last week, our family grew just a little bit. Both our personal family, but also the family of all the people who live here in this country.
On Monday, our son-in-law became a citizen of the United States of America. This was a very big deal for him. He’s been working toward this for several years.
It took a huge amount of paperwork, and a lot of studying for the citizenship exam. He had to be interviewed, and fingerprinted, and the whole process was very expensive. There were application fees and lawyer’s fees.
If anything went wrong, at any stage, he could have been rejected. This would have meant huge unhappiness – for him, for our daughter, and for our whole family.
One of the reasons for the delay was it used to be, if you became a citizen of the U.S., you had to give up your citizenship in your native country. This was a legal issue, both for the U.S. and also for Germany.
Our son-in-law still has parents back in Germany. He loves them, and he loves many things about his birth country. But he also loves our daughter, and he loves a LOT of things about the United States.
Last summer, the final piece fell into place, when Germany passed a law allowing for dual citizenship. Our son-in-law’s dream was within reach. He could be a citizen of both.
And then Tuesday last week, after searching for a job for over a year, he was offered a great job by a major company. Not being a citizen may have been a big barrier to him getting a decent job again.
Anyway, our family’s been celebrating, all week long. And this got me to thinking about something Paul wrote, about what it means to be a citizen of two countries.
Remember that formerly you who are Gentiles by birth and called “uncircumcised” by those who call themselves “the circumcision” – remember that at one time you were separated from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world.
But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ.
For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations.Christ’s purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, making peace and reconciling both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility.
He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit.
You are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone.
In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.
Ephesians 2:11-22
Belonging is something we mostly take for granted. We don’t even think about it, most of the time. We were born here. We grew up here. We belong here.
We have rights. We have privileges. We didn’t have to fight for most of them. We didn’t suffer to obtain most of the freedoms we enjoy.
Not everybody’s like that. Millions of people here in this country live their whole lives, without those freedoms. They live in fear. Their children live in fear. They know, their whole lives, that they can never belong, never get ahead, never climb that next step. Because they’re not citizens.
I have deep compassion for people like that. Not one member of my family came here with any kind of papers. My family came here before papers were even thought about. But they came, and they made good lives, and their families grew and prospered.
Paul lived in a different time. But many of the issues in Paul’s day were similar. There were different countries, different nationalities, and there was hostility between them.
Paul was lucky. He was blessed. He was a citizen of Rome. He was a Jew. But he was also something new and different: Paul was a Christian.
During his lifetime, the Romans had conquered the entire world surrounding the Mediterranean. They were masters of the world they knew. But just living in the Roman Empire wasn’t the same as being a citizen.
Most people under Roman rule were not citizens. They were foreigners, even if they were living in their own native countries.
Only Roman citizens could make legal contracts which were enforceable. Roman citizens couldn’t be tortured by the police to make them confess. You had the right to be tried in a Roman court, not a local one. If you felt the judge wasn’t right, you could appeal to Caesar in person, back in Rome.
Jews were a different group within the Empire. The Jews never forgot that they had once been a proud and independent country, even if it was almost a thousand years before.
Jews knew that they were set apart by God from the rest of humanity. They were God’s chosen people, even if their country was occupied, even though most of them were scattered to live in other lands.
Every male Jew was circumcised. And every Jew was a descendant of Abraham, a child of God’s promise. The rest of the world were outsiders, strangers to God’s covenant. Jews had their own laws, which were more demanding than the Roman ones. But they knew that God’s laws were perfect, and fulfilling even one of God’s laws was a blessing.
The Jews were a tiny percentage of the population in the Roman Empire. They were neighbors, but they were a minority. Most Jews were not citizens. And there was always an uneasy peace between them.
Paul himself was a Jew – a Jew of the old school, brought up to follow every one of the laws laid down in the Old Testament.
But Paul was also a Roman citizen, because he’d been born in a city where all the inhabitants had been granted this special distinction, with all of these rights and privileges.
So, Paul was a citizen of two worlds, two countries. And then, Paul became a Christian. This was something completely new in the world he lived in.
Christians were rejected by Jews. And Christians were rejected and suspected by Rome.
Paul had the insight and inspiration to tell Christians that they were actually citizens of both worlds. If you were a Jewish Christian, you were set free from the Old Testament laws.
And if you were a Roman citizen, or if you belonged to any other country, you didn’t have to become a Jew in order to be one of these new Christians. You had dual citizenship. You belonged to both worlds.
This is still a strange idea to many people. Even now, when you become a citizen of the United States, you have to swear an oath.
It says that you “absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic. . .”
Dual citizenship is allowed, but only with countries which are our clear allies, and the U.S. always claims first place.
Christians are citizens of two countries, too – the country where they live, and the kingdom of God.
Many people act as though their citizenship is honorary, that it has privileges, but doesn’t have any requirements. In other words, we don’t always take our citizenship seriously.
In many churches which practice baptism, they spell out what it means to be a citizen of Christ’s kingdom. It isn’t just getting dipped or sprinkled with water. There are promises the person being baptized makes.
They ask if you really do believe in God Almighty, the maker of heaven and earth, in Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit. They ask if you really know that you need God’s forgiveness, and whether you put your complete trust in Jesus.
In places where they go back all the way to the early church, they ask, “Do you renounce Satan and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God?”
They ask, “Do you renounce the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God?”
They ask, “Do you renounce all sinful desires that draw you from the love of God? Do you turn to Jesus Christ and accept him as your Savior?”
There are good reasons why Quakers don’t administer this or any other kind of oath. But it’s still pretty serious.
You may still be a citizen of the country where you’re living, and you still have to live in this world. But when you become a Christian, you give up and completely turn your back on that other invisible kingdom – the kingdom of evil, the kingdom of wickedness and injustice, the kingdom of lies and untruth.
As a Christian, you utterly abandon whatever owes allegiance to anything unclean and violent, to anything which holds you a prisoner and forces you into the kind of person you no longer want to be.
You may be a citizen of this world, but you no longer want to be a citizen of the kingdom of evil, ever again.
As I said at the beginning, most of the time we don’t think too much about our citizenship. I encourage you to think about it.
And there’s more. As a citizen, you can live in peace with yourself and your neighbors. You can be a citizen of this country, or any country, and you can also be a citizen of Christ’s kingdom.
But as a citizen of the kingdom of Christ, you can never be nobody. You can be homeless, or without papers of any kind. Many, many of the early Christians were slaves. But they were no longer strangers. They weren’t outsiders any more.
They were “fellow citizens with all of God’s people and members of God’s household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone.”
For people at the bottom, the idea that they were actual citizens of God’s kingdom came like a thunderbolt.
They had hope. They could hold their heads up high. They weren’t just slaves any more. They were free in Christ. In the Christian church, they didn’t care if you were a slave or not. They didn’t care if you were rich or poor, or what country you came from. All that mattered was that Christ accepted you.
In the early days, just like today, many Christians tried to keep their heads down. They didn’t want to stand out. They just planned to get by.
But that isn’t really possible. Because never just ordinary citizens. As Paul said in one of his other letters, we are ambassadors of Christ. We are personal representatives of Jesus. People can’t see Jesus, but they can see us. In fact, we may be the only glimpse of Jesus that some people ever see.
We are citizens of two worlds. We are servants of Christ – we do what Jesus told us to do – but we are also ambassadors of Christ. We share what Jesus said. If we’re brave, we try to do what Jesus did. We can be diplomatic – but if we see something that Jesus wouldn’t like, it’s up to us to speak up.
When we leave here, remember that you belong to two nations, not just one. The country we live in, and the kingdom of Christ.
As a citizen of the United States, I hope you’ll be peaceful, a good neighbor, and respect the law unless it conflicts with your conscience. I hope you’ll vote for whoever you think will do a good job for our community, our state and our country.
And as a citizen of the kingdom of Christ, I hope you’ll read and remember all the things that Jesus talked about – to love your neighbor as you love yourself, to reach out to people who are lost or cast out, to disregard the barriers that human beings have erected.
To be an active force for healing and for peace. To move mountains. To discover that God’s kingdom is very near to you. And to pray for the day when God’s kingdom will be here on earth, as it is in heaven.