If You Want to be a Citizen of Heaven, You’d Best Not be an Enemy of the Cross!

Sermon delivered on Sunday, Lent 2C, February 24, 2013, at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Columbus, OH.

Lectionary texts: Genesis 15.1-12, 17-18; Psalm 27.1-17; Philippians 3.17-4.1; Luke 13.31-35.

In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

In this morning’s epistle lesson, Paul warns with tears about the enemies of the cross. It’s the only recorded instance we have of Paul weeping over a group of people so we would be wise to pay attention to what is going on here. Specifically, I want us to look briefly at why being an enemy of the cross results in having our citizenship in heaven revoked and what this all has to do with Lent.

I want you to picture in your mind two images. First, when you think about an enemy of the cross, who or what do you see? An atheist? Some non-Christian? A really bad dude like bin Laden or Hitler? Perhaps it is that neighbor or relative or acquaintance or business associate who annoys you to no end. Or maybe it is something else. Now I want you to think about being a citizen of heaven. What comes to mind? A picture of you in heaven, floating around and playing your harp? A disembodied spirit that is finally freed from the weight of his or her mortal body and fallen nature? Or something else? The kinds of images you conjure up in your mind will tell you a lot about your understanding of the hope and promise of the Christian faith.

To help us understand what Paul had in mind when he talked about enemies of the cross, we need to look at the broader context of this part of his letter. Earlier, Paul had warned against the Judaizers, those who claimed that circumcision was necessary for salvation. Paul asserts bluntly that these people are “dogs” and “evil workers” who are seeking to turn people away from trusting fully in Jesus for their salvation and looking instead to themselves and what they do, or to outward signs like circumcision as evidence they are bona fide members of God’s holy people and thus part of the “in crowd” so to speak. But he doesn’t call these folks enemies of the cross as he does in today’s text so he clearly has another group of people in mind. But who?

From Paul’s description of these people—folks who were controlled by their bodily desires, whose minds were set on earthly things like money, sex, power, and prestige, and whose glory was in their own self-centered priorities and bodily desires—it is clear that he had pagans and other non-Christians in mind. This makes sense because Philippi was a Roman colony with its attendant beliefs of that day. But what if after warning the Philippians to avoid the works-righteous crowd composed of the Judaizers, Paul also felt the need to warn about the opposite group of folks in the church, the gnostics with their libertine philosophy of Christianity?

Gnosticism as a philosophy was just beginning to emerge around this time and sadly has plagued the Church ever since. Among other things, the gnostics (from the Greek gnosis meaning knowledge) believed the body had no importance since humans could only have a mystically spiritual relationship with Christ assured by secret knowledge. And of course the gnostics believed that only they possessed that secret knowledge. How convenient. Since the gnostics emphasized the spiritual dimension of the Christian faith and discounted the importance of the body, they believed that what we do with our bodies is unimportant or irrelevant because it was all about the spirit and spiritual relationships powered by secret knowledge. If asked what they thought constituted citizenship in heaven, gnostics would surely have pointed to a disembodied eternity with God and the end of created matter because creation was at best unimportant and at worst evil. There is more to gnosticism than this, but not less.

We see varieties of this kind of teaching in different quarters of society today–you know, “I’m spiritual but not religious,” whatever that means. If asked the rhetorical question Paul posed to the Romans, “Should we therefore continue to sin so that grace can abound?” the modern-day gnostics would tend to answer, “Of course! What we do with our bodies isn’t important in God’s economy so all the so-called sins of the flesh that the Church has traditionally identified (e.g., any kind of sex outside the context of marriage, drunkenness, debauchery, etc.; cf. Galatians 5.19-21) are really nothing to bother with because our bodies do not matter. It is perfectly fine to indulge in our bodily appetites because the body is mortal and we are not going to have to deal with it after it dies. So who cares what we do with our bodies? God certainly doesn’t and even if indulging in our bodily appetites is a sin, God loves us and will forgive us. No problem!”

What both the legalists and the libertines had in common was that each in their own way were opposed to the all-sufficient and total Lordship of Jesus Christ over all of life—body, soul, spirit. But the gnostic belief system with its typically self-centered and immoral lifestyles (and they were legion) also denied the way of the cross and all that Jesus’ cross stands for, and Paul would have no part of it. Consequently, he did not want the Philippians (or us) to have any part of either legalism or libertinism because he loved them so much. For Paul, Jesus’ death and resurrection was the climax of God’s plan to rescue his good creation from the ravages of human sin and the evil it unleashes. On the cross God condemned sin in the flesh so that he would not have to condemn us and Jesus’ death brought about desperately needed reconciliation between humans and God so that we could finally be healed and become the fully human beings God created us to be

And as Paul tells us in today’s epistle lesson, God’s rescue plan for the world will end with the resurrection of our mortal bodies when Jesus returns to consummate God’s plan to rescue his good creation and fallen creatures from evil, sin, and death. We see Jesus alluding to his redemptive work on the cross and the inauguration of the new creation in today’s gospel lesson when he tells the Pharisees that he must finish his work on the third day, work that he would effect on the cross, a clear reference to his resurrection (cf. John 19.30).

And let us be very clear. This is all God’s doing, a result of his great love, mercy, and faithfulness for his stubborn and rebellious human creatures. We see God’s eternal faithfulness poignantly illustrated in that strange story from our OT lesson. Here is old Abram, wondering how God is going to keep his promise to give him an uncountable number of descendants and use them to be a blessing to God’s broken and fallen world (cf. Genesis 12.1-3). Abram muses that he will be forced to take matters into his own hands by leaving his inheritance to his slave. But God will have none of this defeatist thinking and to show Abram that God is good to his word, God proceeds to make a covenant with Abram but does not require Abram to take a vow to uphold his part of it! That’s what is going on when God has Abram cut up animals and then later puts him in a deep sleep so that God can walk between the animals by himself. God’s walking between the animal parts was a symbolic action that said in effect to Abram, “Let me become like these animals if I violate my promise to give you descendants.” Abram didn’t fully understand God’s plan to rescue his world and its people through his descendants and neither do we. But God always acts faithfully toward his people and always keeps his promises to us. In Jesus’ death and resurrection God has acted to rescue us from evil, sin, and death. New creation and the healing of God’s world and his people is a done deal. We simply have to wait for it to be consummated when Jesus returns in great power and glory.

This is why libertines and other unbelievers find the cross to be so foolish. Why would God choose to rescue his world by becoming human and dying on a cross for us? Who ever heard of a naked and crucified God? It does not compute with our human notions of what power and salvation look like and it is an affront to our human pride! And of course, when the gnostics deny the importance of the body, they are really saying that Jesus’ death and resurrection are unnecessary because our bodies are not important and will not be redeemed. Therefore the cross was never needed in the first place.

But Paul was adamant in arguing otherwise. What we do with our bodies does matter because our bodies will be redeemed ultimately one day at the resurrection and we have Jesus’ resurrection as proof of this. Likewise, creation is important and from all eternity God has had a plan to redeem it from the effects of human sin and the evil it unleashes. This means that if we really believe all this, we must inevitably live as people with real hope. And since resurrection and new creation is our destiny as Jesus’ people, we must adopt lifestyles that are consistent with that hope. After all, didn’t Jesus say that if we want to follow him we must deny ourselves and take up our cross?

This is where the logic of Paul’s argument about being a citizen of heaven comes into play. When Paul talks about being a citizen of heaven, he does not mean that we will get to go to heaven when we die and spend our eternity there with Jesus. No, the logic of citizenship went like this. Since Philippi was a Roman colony, those colonists from Rome who settled there would have seen it as their duty to bring their way of life to bear on their new homeland. In other words, it was their duty to act like citizens of Rome so that the natives would see the benefits of being and living like a Roman and follow suit. Citizens of heaven must do likewise according to Paul. But what does that look like? As followers of Jesus who have been reconciled to God by Jesus’ blood shed for us on the cross and recipients of God’s promised new creation, we are called to bring Christian values and their accompanying lifestyle to bear on our culture. That starts first and foremost by acknowledging that Jesus is Lord and that nothing is more important to us than our relationship with him and doing his will because only in Jesus can we be raised from the dead (cf. John 11.25-26).

Let me give you an example from my own life that I hope will illustrate how the logic of being a citizen of heaven works. As many of you know, the issue of whether to expand Medicaid in this state has become rather contentious. But I do not look at the issue through the lens of politics but rather through the lens of being a citizen of heaven. Given the consistent biblical mandate for God’s people to help the least, the lost, the most helpless, and the oppressed, and given the biblical emphasis on caring for the whole person, body, mind, and soul, I have concluded that it is a wise and faithful thing from a Christian perspective to expand Medicaid in our state because I think it will help address real human needs. I also note that I don’t have to be a supporter of Governor Kasich or any one political party to reach this decision because Jesus is Lord, not them, and so I looked carefully at Jesus’ values to help guide my decision. The next step will be for me to contact my state representative and senator about my position. Let me be very clear about this. I don’t use this example to tell you what to think about this issue or whether to support it, but rather to show you what went into my thinking regarding my support of this issue. I am persuaded that we as the Church must do more of this if we are ever to be good citizens of heaven and this is exactly what the enemies of the cross do not want us to do.

So what does this have to do with Lent? I suspect that most, if not all, of us have a bit of gnosticism and legalism in us. At times we tend to be like the folks who answer yes to Paul’s question about sinning so that grace can abound. We buy into the false notions that money, power, sex, prestige, and security are the tickets to real happiness and contentment and therefore pursue our own self-centered agendas to achieve these things. At other times we who are Christians fall into the trap of believing that the good we do in Jesus’ name will somehow put God in our debt and earn our way into heaven. This, of course, is patent nonsense because we are all too profoundly broken to put God in our debt and this thinking also denies God’s grace and faithfulness that was demonstrated once and for all in the death and resurrection of Jesus.

That is why Lent, with its emphasis on self-examination, repentance, and self-denial, is the perfect time for us to examine our beliefs and behaviors to see which of these tendencies we need to kill so that we can be model citizens of God’s coming new creation. Our beliefs are important because beliefs must always precede behavior and we are called to imitate our Lord in all that we do so that God can use our work to build on the foundation of Jesus’ death and resurrection to help bring his kingdom on earth as in heaven. As we have seen, this is the logic of citizenship as Paul used it and this is our call and duty as Christians. Simply put, our work is important because we believe God will use it to help accomplish his redeeming purposes. This is what it means to stand firm in the Lord. Think carefully about these things, both individually and together, because as Paul reminds us, we cannot grow in grace by ourselves. And when we think about these things together, we will surely be reminded in the power of the Spirit that when we are good citizens of heaven, we have Good News, now and for all eternity, not only for ourselves but also to share with others.

In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.