Creekside Church Sermon of March 11, 2001 "Don't Lose Your Passport" Philippians 3:17-4:1	Rev. David Bibbee
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As some of you know, I occasionally lose things. Okay…I often lose things. I know exactly where to look in one of my four tackle boxes to find a Rapala deep-dive suspending Shadrap in a fire tiger color pattern, or a 30 pound test black plated cross-luck ball bearing swivel, but I can't find my car keys or checkbook. When I went to France last May I kept telling myself, "Carry your passport with you at all times." Imagining myself in a tight spot without it helped, like having no identification and being conscripted into the French Foreign Legion.

Travel to a foreign country requires a passport. When you cross an international border you hand that little blue book to a customs agent who looks at where you are from and where you make your home and where you will return. The passport declares your citizenship. It makes a statement not only about where you are from, but it says something about your values and allegiances as well. Where you are from says something about who you are.

If asked where we hold our citizenship, we would say, "The United States of America." But are you aware that you have dual citizenship? Much was made of the fact that the apostle Paul was a Roman citizen. To be a citizen of Rome was a great honor. But in Paul's mind this amounted to nothing compared to his citizenship status as a follower of Jesus Christ.

In John 15, Jesus told the disciples, "You do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world." Christians of every generation have had to deal with a tension that exists between life as the world says to live it, and life as Jesus said it should be lived. Christians are like frogs. We must learn to live in two different worlds. We are to be in the world, but not of it. We are in it because there is no place else to be. We aren't here by mistake. Christians are supposed to live in the world in such a way that it is clear to others that our first allegiance is somewhere else.

"Our citizenship is in heaven," Paul told the Philippians. "We do not live as enemies of the cross…our minds are not set on earthly things." There is nothing wrong with earthly things in and of themselves. However, our citizenship is in heaven, and we relate to things in this life in a different way. We find ourselves in a world that is characterized by confusion, division, anxiousness, hostility and hatred. But we belong to a kingdom characterized by understanding, reconciliation, confidence and peace.

Though we will be in eternity for a very long time, preoccupation with hereafter is not as important as living our citizenship here and now. It means that the qualities and concerns of heaven should be what I practice right now. A new pastor came to town and was walking down Main Street looking for the post office. He asked a boy who gave him directions. Thanking the lad, he said, "Come to church on Sunday and I'll tell you how to get to heaven." The boy replied, "How can you tell me how to get to heaven if you can't even find the post office?" Instead of just pointing the way or talking about it, Christians show it. "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven," Jesus taught us to pray.

"Brothers and sisters, I want you to imitate me," Paul told the Philippians. Does this man have an ego or what? "If you want to know what a follower of Jesus is like, look at me." He wasn't bragging that he was the ultimate Christian. No "They don't come any better than me!" This is the man who also called himself the Chief Of All Sinners. "The things I hate are what I do," he said. The greatest thing Paul could do for Jesus was to try to live like Jesus. If he boasted about anything, he wanted to boast about Jesus. As he said earlier in the Epistle, "We must have that desire which was in Christ Jesus."

"Join in imitating me," Paul said. You won't hear me saying anything like this. I wouldn't want you following me around every day, looking over my shoulder, eavesdropping on my conversations, or reading my thoughts. I can tell you how you should behave. But my performance isn't always the best, so do as I say and not as I do. But, you're not so hot either, and isn't this one reason we keep coming together as a church?

Someone said, "The greatest concern has never been that the church will withdraw so far from the world that it will be invisible. The concern is that we will become so corrupted by the world that we will act like we have lost our passports and forgotten who we are. The news networks devoted lots of airtime to the recent earthquake in Seattle, emphasizing that it will take 2 billion dollars to restore the city. But the same networks devoted barely a fraction of the coverage to recent earthquakes in India and El Salvador that killed over 30,000 people. When I see this, and when a white Rap star named Eminem who sings a song about being a casual bystander while his mother is being gang raped is nominated for a Grammy Award; and when yet another teenager goes to high school not to learn but to kill all the classmates he can, the more I realize my citizenship belongs somewhere else. Times like these make us long all the more for citizenship somewhere else under the rule of Jesus Christ.

How does a citizen of heaven deal with such things? In the second century a Roman citizen described Christians in a letter to a friend. "Christians cannot be distinguished from others by country, language or custom. They do not separate into cities of their own. They don't follow an eccentric way of life. Although they live in Greek and barbarian cities, and follow the usual customs of those cities, they never cease to witness to the reality of another city in which they live. They share in everything, yet endure everything as aliens. To them, every fatherland is a foreign land.

They marry like everyone else. They beget children but don't expose their unwanted infants to the elements. They share everything with each other, but not their marriage beds. They busy themselves on earth but their citizenship is in heaven. They obey the laws of the land, but go far beyond the law's requirement. They love all people, and by all people, are persecuted. They are put to death, but brought to life. They are poor, yet they make many rich. They are completely destitute, yet they enjoy complete abundance. They are reviled, and yet they bless. Jews treat them as foreigners and they are hunted down by the Greeks. Those who hate them find it impossible to justify their hatred. What the soul is to the body, that Christians are to the world."

How many non-Christians would describe us this way today? This is why we should regularly ask, "Why does the church exist in the first place?" Is it to improve society, or make nice people nicer, or give youth something to do? No. The world doesn't need a church for this. It has all kinds of organizations doing things like this already. Why do churches like ours exist? There is one reason. William Willimon says, "God wills it to exist." It exists because of Jesus whose life changed everything. Because of Jesus, new possibilities existed where there were none before. We are not limited to citizenship in this world alone. God wills the church to exist because people need to know there is something greater to do with their lives than buy, consume, and be guided by their own desires. There is something better to bow down to than money, malls, and other libido.

In Hebrews 11 we are told that the heroes of the Bible were strangers and foreigners on the earth, seeking a homeland. Verse 16 says, "As it is, they desire a better country…a heavenly one." A little Methodist lady from Atlanta named Mrs. Tilly sought the same. Will Campbell tells of her in his book Brother to a Dragonfly. Mrs. Tilly never weighed more than 100 pounds and looked eight years younger than God. In the 1930's and 40's she and 40,000 other women belonged to an organization called The Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching. Later she became an ardent advocate of desegregating public schools. She got lots of obscene phone calls, calling her everything but the gentle woman she was. But she would not let anyone intimidate her.

She knew racism was evil and she knew that as a white woman she was through with it, and she wanted her town, state, country and world to be rid of it, too. She refused the tactics of her intimidators. She had an engineer hook a tape recorder to her telephone. When people called late at night to spit their venom the voice that answered wasn't Mrs. Tilly's. It was a baritone soloist singing the Lord's Prayer. The calls soon stopped. This frail lady would not give in. Racism was not part of God's plan. She had a vision of what the heavenly homeland was like.

The Chicago Tribune columnist Bob Greene does a lot of traveling, and in one of his features called "Rules for the Road" he offered travel tips. He observed, "The size of the room is more important than the view and that square foot by square foot, the most important area of the hotel room is the bathroom. He then offered this tip. While traveling through America, do not read the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, or USA today. Read the local papers. The whole point of being on the road is to feel like you're on the road."

All in all, this isn't bad advice for Christians. As we travel through life, we must listen to more than the message the world plays over and over. We march to another tune. We are different. We are aliens. We are in the world to be sure, but not of it because our citizenship is somewhere else. The passport you got when you were baptized into Jesus tells you so.

Churches exist because God wills them to exist, and the only way the world will ever know another alternative is when we live as citizens of another world in this one. It means loving one another. It means caring for those who do not know Christ. It means the willingness to be peculiar…like Lyman Woodward. Frederick Buechner spoke at the 200th anniversary of a New England church. In the course of his research he found that a new steeple and bell was added in 1831. When it was completed, the church historian says that, "an agile Lyman Woodward stood on his head in the belfry with his feet toward heaven."

This was the only mention ever made of him. Buechner says it was enough. It was a risky, crazy thing to do. It stood the whole idea that you are supposed to be nothing but solemn in a church on it's head. Lyman pointed to heaven with his feet. Most of us can't stand on our heads anymore, but we can point to heaven with our lives. With Jesus as our guide, with scriptures for our instruction, with love for one another as our bond, and the desire to touch the needs of others with the love of Christ, we can show that not only is there a new world in the midst of an old one, but a new one that can change the old one.

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