Citizenship
October 17, 2010 Phil. 1:27a
Intro:
In the “big picture”, what is your life really about? What do you want out of it, what do you expect out of it, where are you putting your energies and efforts on a day-by-day basis? And I mean that “day-by-day” bit, it is easy for someone to say “it is all about family” but then work 70 hours a week and never see family. How do you live?
Context:
We jump back this morning into our journey through Paul’s letter to the church in Philippi. We have just seen some very personal, emotional writing, with Paul wrestling with the thought of dying and being with Jesus (and how great that would be) against how he feels still needed by young churches whom he can help, even as a prisoner in Rome awaiting trial and possibly death. We’ve seen how everything for Paul revolves around the Gospel (what I called “Jesus first”). Those first 26 verses of chapter one have been about Paul, how he is doing, what he has been praying for, some of his struggles, and has been by way of introduction.
Verse 27 changes direction – Paul has (for the most part) finished speaking about his life and now begins to write about the other pressing issues he wishes to address with his close friends. This verse serves as kind of an introduction to the rest of the book, and so I want to look at it quite deeply together. We aren’t going to get far in our journey through Philippians today, instead we are going to pause and go deep, in less than half of one verse. I know that is a little out of the ordinary, I generally choose a passage that is longer to preach on and I do my research and make decisions about what it meant when it was written, how that translates to us today, and then what it says to us about how to live, and I then focus our attention on the “what it means and what that says to us”, but today we are going to instead take a deep, long look at a short passage, and I’m going to walk you through some process so maybe you can be equipped to look deeper for yourself as you study Scripture. And I want to ask you to do something as we begin: set aside your biases, and choose to enter in so that God can speak. You might not like to study one thing in detail, you might feel like parts of this morning are too “academic”, but I’m confident we can all figure it out and I’m more confident that the Holy Spirit can speak to us through the Word of God in a small piece of one verse. And I’m confident that some of us really do like to get down deep and figure things out, so come along with us and enjoy how much we enjoy it, even if you find it hard to enjoy for yourself.
Phil 1:27-20 (NLT)
I do want to read the passage in context, and then we’ll study one part of it together.
Live as Citizens of Heaven
27 Above all, you must live as citizens of heaven, conducting yourselves in a manner worthy of the Good News about Christ. Then, whether I come and see you again or only hear about you, I will know that you are standing together with one spirit and one purpose, fighting together for the faith, which is the Good News. 28 Don’t be intimidated in any way by your enemies. This will be a sign to them that they are going to be destroyed, but that you are going to be saved, even by God himself. 29 For you have been given not only the privilege of trusting in Christ but also the privilege of suffering for him. 30 We are in this struggle together. You have seen my struggle in the past, and you know that I am still in the midst of it.
Now that we’ve read it in context, let’s go back and focus today on this first phrase:
“27 Above all, you must live as citizens of heaven, conducting yourselves in a manner worthy of the Good News about Christ.”
“Above all”…
Paul begins this new section with a single word, an attention-getter. It would be like us saying, “ok, listen carefully…”, or, “pay attention now…”, and then saying “the most important thing in all of life is…”. Paul often writes long lists, gives a bunch of commands, strings together a series of ideas, but here he does something different: he has just one. So we should sit up, and pay close attention, because what is about to come is a lens – something intended to bring all of life into focus, a perspective through which we can organize and understand our entire reason to be, a truth that shines light – brightly! – into every corner of our existence. Paul’s intent is that we should sit up and pay very close attention to that which comes next.
“Citizens”…
So what does come next? Now we get to dig… The text on the screen is the NLT “27 Above all, you must live as citizens of heaven, conducting yourselves in a manner worthy of the Good News about Christ.” (Phil 1:27a, NLT). This is the translation we use in our pews, but most of you probably own and use the NIV most often. Let’s look at it: “27 Whatever happens, conduct yourselves in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ.” (Phil 1:27a, NIV). What do you see? Anything different?? Any phrases present in one translation and not in another???
Hmmm. So here is what I do in situations like this: first, I look for a footnote in my Bible – those often have explanations about what is going on, but here there aren’t any. So then I start looking at other English translations – most of them follow the NIV. Now I’m curious about why the NLT would add all this stuff about “live as citizens of heaven”, so I use the training I got at seminary to use tools freely available to everyone to look at the original verse as written by Paul in Greek. I use “blueletterbible.org” in my study, enter the verse reference, and then can see the original Greek (demonstrate). Now, I can’t read Greek, but the tools help me with that also, and what we find out is that Paul uses a word in here, politeuomai, which is the source of the problem. I learn it is an unusual word, only used twice in the New Testament, and I also discover it is the verb. Now, the NIV and other (generally older) translators just read the verb as describing how we should live: “conduct yourselves…” and leave it at that, but I’m suspicious there is more to it when I click on the definition provided by blueletterbible.org:
1) to be a citizen
2) to administer civil affairs, manage the state
3) to make or create a citizen
a) to be a citizen
b) to behave as a citizen
1) to avail one's self of or recognise the laws
2) to conduct one's self as pledged to some law of life
Then, my next step is to read the commentaries – commentaries are academic books written by scholars who really know Greek, who really know the Bible, and who often also know a lot about other things that were written at the time and so can compare how words are used in other places to try and understand what they mean. Many of these will write their own translations of the passage, and all of the academic commentaries I read included the ideas present in our NLT. Reading further, I discovered a whole big academic conversation about how Paul really did mean a whole lot more than we find in the NIV and other translations, and it is rooted in this idea of “citizenship” which is in that Greek verb I mentioned earlier. This is a newer conversation, and we see the results beginning to work into the newer translations (like NLT, and in TNIV which is “Today’s New International Version”, a fairly recent update to the NIV (2001) which makes Phil. 1:27, “Whatever happens, as citizens of heaven live in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ.”
This brings me to my point this morning, and why I took the time on that sort of intellectual section. Let me phrase it in question form: what does it mean to be a citizen, and where is your real citizenship?
Now, one of the very very important principles about understanding Scripture is that we have to try and understand what it meant when it was first written and then what it means today. So when we ask “what does it mean to be a citizen” we have to inquire what that meant to Paul, and what it meant to the Philippians to whom he wrote. This was no small deal – Paul was arrested and feared immediate death until he revealed that he was a Roman citizen, when he was immediately taken into custody for his own protection, and he had the privilege of having his case judged by Caesar himself. The Christians in Philippi were also likely Roman citizens, and proud of it, they had a keen sense of duty and responsibility, and of privilege. When so many people around are slaves, to be a free citizen was truly an amazing thing.
So Paul grabs hold of this concept of citizenship – belonging and privilege and responsibility – and uses that as the verb to describe how we should conduct ourselves. But he takes it further than just civic citizenship, as noble and lofty as that is, and combines this citizenship idea with the Gospel. Later in Philippians (3:20) Paul says, “But we are citizens of heaven”, using the same word but as a noun, so that is where the NLT translators get the idea here and I think it is a good argument.
Are you seeing how this all comes together?
Above all… be a citizen… live in a manner worthy of the gospel:
Recall where Paul begins, with this “above all” word, and then he borrows the concept of citizenship which was an amazing privilege with very real responsibilities, and teaches us something vital. Our citizenship is in heaven, and that must determine how we live, which Paul explains with the phrase, “conducting yourselves in a manner worthy of the Good News about Christ.”
So let’s build on our deep academic study now and pull some meaning out for our lives. What does it mean to “conduct ourselves in a manner worthy of the Good News about Christ”, and does that match the way you have lived this past week?
See, I think we’ve got our citizenship identity all messed up. We see ourselves first as citizens of our country and our culture, and we are deeply influenced by that, and we tend to see ourselves as “becoming” citizens of heaven – maybe, - eventually, - when we die. Our values and perspectives are deeply shaped by our present citizenship, not what we see as some time way off in the future: we expect and believe we should be strong and independent, we should be comfortable financially and own the latest new technologies, we shouldn’t suffer, we should be protected physically and treated medically by the state because we are Canadians, we should be respected by the rest of the world, and we should be free to make whatever choices we want to make for ourselves so long as they do not break any laws. But then we must take our Bibles in our hands and discover what it means to be a “citizen of heaven”: we must be weak and dependent on Jesus; we must give generously to others and trust that the God who cares for the birds of the air and the flowers of the field will richly give us everything we need as we seek first the Kingdom of God; we should expect to suffer and we should rejoice when we get to suffer (as we’ll see when we get past Phil 1:27); we should not be surprised when the world hates us because it hated out Lord Jesus first; we should expect persecution from the state because we are citizens of a different Kingdom first; and we are not free to make whatever choices we want because Jesus is our Lord and He has commanded us to become “slaves to all”.
So when Paul writes, “Above all, you must live as citizens of heaven, conducting yourselves in a manner worthy of the Good News about Christ”, he is calling us to a radically counter-cultural way of living, yet one that remains deeply engaged in our world, because this is what it means to “conduct ourselves in a manner worthy of the Good News about Christ.” We live differently, we live better, because we are forgiven and filled with the Holy Spirit and empowered. The next set of verses get into specifics about how we do that, we’ll see that next week, and the point is the Gospel (“Good News”) comes first and must be shared.
The Question:
So now I’m going to ask the obvious question that comes out of the passage: how are you doing at living according to Paul’s “Above all…” admonition? If you take your actions this past week, or even the last three days, have you been living first as a citizen of heaven? Have you “conducted yourself in a manner worthy of the Good News about Christ”?
See, we live our lives in the middle of one culture, but we are called and empowered to live in that culture differently because we recognize that we are really citizens of another. Paul is in no way suggesting disengagement, or a sort-of “I’m only passing through this world so who cares, doesn’t matter how I live in it ‘cause I know I’m going to a better place” – instead the point for Paul is always that we live this way so that we can engage our culture from a different frame of reference – one of freedom, of joy, of unity and community and power, because we are citizens of heaven with a savior who has brought “Good News” that is “for all the people”, that Jesus has come, and the way to be made right with God is now available, there is a new, eternal, sustaining, empowering, freeing, joy-filled citizenship offered freely to each person.
So, as we go, “Above all, you must live as citizens of heaven, conducting yourselves in a manner worthy of the Good News about Christ”
