Philippians 3:17 – 4:1
“Citizenship”
March 13, 2022 – Second Sunday of Lent
We hope that our grandson will have a passport soon. His parents have applied for it. Before long the little guy will have a document to prove he is a citizen of Canada, like his father and mother.
Beth and I renewed our own passports in December. They would have expired last month and we want to make sure we are able to travel back to England to see that Canadian toddler or even to make another trek to Butchart Gardens in British Columbia.
Passports are proof of identity, of citizenship. In our text today, Paul continues a discussion from the beginning of chapter 3 in which he chastises seeming Christians who were finding their identity, their citizenship, in the wrong things.
Until he is an adult, our grandson’s citizenship will be based on that of his parents. His identity will largely imitate theirs for many years. Our text opens with Paul calling upon his readers in Philippi to identify with him, to imitate him in verse 17. He uses a word that means something like “imitate together.” It’s not just an individual replication of Paul as a follower of Jesus, but a community working together to be like the apostle.
That verse 17 also goes on with Paul asking Christians not only to imitate him, but to also “observe those who live according to the example you have in us.” Yes, the first example for Christians is Jesus Himself. You might rightly ask “What would Jesus do?” as a guiding principle of life. In chapter 2 verse 3 of this letter, Paul said, “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.” Let’s imitate Jesus, says Paul, but let’s also imitate good, Christ-minded people who are close to hand.
Think of those who have been examples of following Christ for you. I think of my pastor friend Bob, who always had something good to say about anyone he knew. I think of my grandfather who gave people in his town credit at his store during the Depression without ever expecting to be repaid. I remember a saintly old hunchbacked woman in my first church who was always joyful despite her disability. She spent her days making crafts for disabled children her daughter taught in special education classes. They were all examples worth imitating, because they imitated others who imitated Jesus.
Yet Paul also worried about people he did not want the Philippians to imitate. He wanted them to follow his and other good examples, but to beware of bad examples. My friend Bob was good to look for the good in people, but sometimes it is also good, as Paul does here, to call it out when someone is a bad example, especially a bad example of a Christian. So in verse 18 the apostle turns to warning them—again, “I have told you often of them,” he says—about “many” who “live as enemies of the cross of Christ.”
Paul is not some talk show host or politician, gleefully excoriating those with whom he finds fault, gladly building up his own popularity by giving his followers someone to hate. No, Paul is dismal because he has to give this warning yet again, “now I tell you even with tears.” The shame and the terrible fate of those he opposes fills him with sadness. Here is one way to imitate Paul ourselves, an example of how to regard wrongdoers, people like Putin or the Capitol insurrectionists or those who commit hate crimes.
Corrie Ten Book wrote in The Hiding Place how, unlike herself at the time, her sister Betsie was able feel sympathy for the young man who betrayed them to the Gestapo, to see a woman Nazi guard as experiencing her own pain in the situation of the concentration camp. And Ukrainians last week in Kyiv set up a hot-line for Russian families trying to learn any information at all about what was happening to soldier sons who went off to the war and have not been heard from. One Ukrainian hot-line answerer broke down in tears as she remembered a Russian father telling her how his missing son had not wanted to go, and that he was forced to fight for Putin.
So Paul gives us the model, remembering his enemies with tears. Yet he was also not afraid at all to name their wrongdoing, their errors in the harshest way. So we come to verse 19, “Their end is destruction; their god is the belly; and their glory is in their shame; their minds are set on earthly things.” Who is he talking about? They have to be people in the church, people claiming to be Christians. The countless pagans around them could not have made Paul so angry and so sad. These had to be people who were right there among them, leading others astray.
The answer to who they were is in even stronger words at the beginning of chapter 3, verse 2, “Beware of the dogs, beware of the evil workers, beware of those who mutilate the flesh!” With incredibly harsh terms, Paul is warning, like he did in his letter to the Galatians, against Jewish and other Christians who thought Gentiles had to become Jewish, had to be circumcised in order to follow Jesus, in order to be saved.
I used to think Paul was talking about a different group of people in our text, in verse 19. Several years ago I preached a sermon based on the thought that those whose “god is the belly” here were gluttons, people given too much to sensual pleasure. But I was wrong. Gluttony is a sin, a dangerous one, but it’s not what Paul was worried about here. I now think Karl Barth gets it right when he says, “Their god the belly and their glory in their shame” is “a further allusion to circumcision which for concreteness leaves nothing to be desired.”[1] In other words, the “belly” is that region of the body which they are giving the most importance. Their private parts, which they should be ashamed to put on display, are what they are glorying in.
Surrounding that graphic allusion which Barth points out, is “Their end is destruction… their minds are set on earthly things.” The people who bring Paul to tears are doomed because of what their minds are focused on, their errors about what it means to follow and belong to Jesus. It’s a destructive confusion about their salvation. Paul called them “enemies of the cross of Christ” because they were trusting something else to save them. They were trusting an act, an operation which they could perform themselves, instead of trusting in the work of Christ on the Cross and in His resurrection.
Ultimately, the confusion of those Judaizers, as Bible scholars typically name them, was one of identity. They were counting on the wrong thing, the wrong passport, to mark them as belonging to Jesus. That’s why in verse 20 Paul brings up citizenship. The Greek word there is related to our word, “politics.” An alternative might be “commonwealth,” the shared system of government under which people of city or a country live. Christians are not governed by “earthly things,” not by what we do to our bodies, nor by the bits of paper and cardboard we carry around when we travel. We possess a different sort of passport. We have a different political allegiance.
In this time of fraught politics and millions of refugees and wars not just in Ukraine but in Syria and Afghanistan and Africa, you and I may be tempted to make a priority of our own national identity. Earthly citizenships can be important and good. The Bible does not deny them, as our other Scripture readings this morning show. But our priority is the citizenship Paul comes down on here, a citizenship based in heaven, “and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.”
Just that word “Savior” is significant as Paul talks about our citizenship. As a Roman citizen himself, Paul would have been taught that Caesar Augustus, the first emperor, was “savior.” Augustus delivered Rome from war and brought them peace. Paul deliberately called Jesus “Savior” here to distinguish belonging to Christ and being a citizen of His country from belonging to that earthly nation of Rome. Christian identity and citizenship come from the heavenly Savior, not from an earthly political savior.
As I said, the Bible and our Lord Himself do not entirely discount earthly citizenships. We heard that glorious promise this morning in Genesis 15, how God would give Abraham countless descendants and a land that stretched all the way between the great rivers of the Mideast. It was a promise to make a nation from one man. And in our Gospel reading from Luke 13, we saw Jesus’ sorrowful love for the capital of His nation as He lamented over what was going to happen to Jerusalem.
National identities can be blessed and wonderful gifts. Paul sometimes proudly claimed his own Roman citizenship. But he is teaching us here that all those earthly citizenships are merely secondary, inferior, and subordinate to our primary citizenship, which comes to us from heaven in the person of Jesus. And he points to our expectation and hope that Jesus is coming again from heaven to one day make that heavenly citizenship the only one on earth which matters.
Patriarch Kirill of Moscow is the head of the Russian Orthodox Church. He is a good example of what happens when heavenly citizenship and worldly citizenship become confused. He has been a long-time supporter and ally of Vladimir Putin. Last Sunday he preached a sermon in which he focused almost completely on condemning supposed Ukrainian sins and their action against Russian loyalists in Donbas in the east of Ukraine. He said absolutely nothing about the atrocities being committed by Putin’s army in the rest of Ukraine.
So last week 275 Russian Orthodx priests and deacons from all over the world, including from Russia, signed a letter opposing their Patriarch’s tacit endorsement of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. They included words that are good for any of us to hear if we are getting too enamored of earthly power. Similar to how Paul predicts destruction of those who claim to be Christian but are trusting in an earth-based identity, an earthly citizenship, the letter warns those who come to Lord’s Table while committing evil against brothers and sisters in Christ:
The Last Judgment awaits every person. No earthly authority, no doctors, no guards will protect from this judgment. … We remind you that the Blood of Christ, shed by the Savior for the life of the world, will be received in the sacrament of Communion by those people who give murderous orders, not unto life, but unto eternal torment.
The only hope for a person, says the letter, is to cease the war and to beg forgiveness “from those humiliated, insulted, despised, or from those who were killed by his hands or by his order. There is no other way but forgiveness and mutual reconciliation.” And they clearly mean that forgiveness and reconciliation to happen in and through the work of Jesus.
Their letter ended with the same brief phrase thousands of brave protestors have tried to express in Russian while being arrested or even beaten for it: “Stop the war.” Yet the war goes on. Ukrainian civilians, including children, are being killed and driven into the humiliation of fleeing as refugees to countries not their own. Jesus mourned over Jerusalem because he knew the same sort of thing would happen there in just forty years after His time on earth.
We desperately need today the hope that Paul expressed in verse 21 about the second coming of Jesus. “He will transform the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory, by the power that also enables him to make all things subject to himself.” When Jesus comes He will make “all things subject to himself.” That’s the real power over this world. Ukraine or Russia, America or Mexico, China or India, DR Congo or Nigeria. They are not the powers that matter most to Christians, to followers of Jesus. Citizenship or passports from those nations always, always matter less than our citizenship in heaven. Jesus makes all those other authorities subject to Himself.
That’s why, as important as may be national security and borders and passports and all those things we do to maintain a country and a national identity on earth, our identity, our passport in Jesus constantly takes precedence. Like I said to the children, God wants to be a stronghold and a refuge for everyone. Like He did for Abraham and his children, God wants each and every child of earth to have a place. So let us help and welcome refugees equally, whether they are Ukrainians who look so much like many of us, or whether they are darker skinned folks fleeing from terror in Guatemala or Syria or Afghanistan or Ethiopia. Let us weep, like Jesus wept over Jerusalem, over all the cities of the world where God’s children have yet to be gathered under His wings.
Paul had dire words of warning for the Philippians about folks who get Christian identity and citizenship all mixed up with other sorts of identity and citizenship. So, yes, like Paul, let us call out enemies of the Cross, not just in places like Russia but in our own country. Let us name the Kirills and Putins among us who want to make Christian faith into an instrument of their own power. But let us not give in to hating them or trying to destroy them with the same violence they employ. Instead, let us stand firm, willing to suffer humiliation like Jesus did Himself, trusting that He is making all things subject to himself and that our present humiliation will be transformed into glory.
Rats. I know this sermon is kind of bleak again. It just kind of went that way as the Spirit moved and I typed. Yet I don’t want to leave you in a bleak spirit. And neither did those who chose these verses from Philippians for this Sunday. So our text goes on with the first verse of chapter 4, “Therefore, my brothers and sisters, whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, stand firm in the Lord in this way, my beloved.”
Let us embrace then the closing words of hope and love and encouragement for those who know who they are in Jesus. Much of this letter is full of joy. Paul says here that the Philippians themselves are his “joy and crown.” If Paul were to wear any sort of earthly symbol of political power, like a crown, it would be a crown of his brothers and sisters in Jesus, people he loves and wants to be with. They bring him joy. We in Christ have the privilege and power of bringing joy to each other.
Our citizenship is in heaven. The one who grants it lives there and has stamped our passports with His own blood. That cannot be changed or challenged by any nation or power on earth. No variant of COVID-19 can infect it. No election or judicial decision can overturn it. Trust in the Cross of Jesus and in His Resurrection and you will belong to Him. Be each other’s joy and crown as you share together in faith, hope and love. That will be who you are. That identity, that citizenship can’t ever expire or be taken away from you. As Paul says, “stand firm in the Lord in this way, my beloved.”
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2022 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
[1] The Epistle to the Philippians (Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1962), p. 113.