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What I am holding here is my passport. I expect many of you have one, since this is a congregation that travels a lot. Every now and then I flip through it and reminisce about places I’ve been – in this passport I find visas for St. Lucia, Nepal, Brazil. Lois has a lot more in hers. But a passport is essentially your proof of citizenship, your identity as defined by your nationality.

I started thinking about my passport when I read Paul’s words in the Epistle to the Philippians, where he says "But our citizenship is in heaven." What does that mean? Lois and Abbey and I spent time visiting Peter in Brazil. Like many of you I have traveled and lived and worked in other countries. As a citizen of the United States I can visit another country (to learn, observe, and enjoy), I can stay for an extended period of time (work or study or service), or I can move there more or less permanently as an expatriate. But unless I renounce my U.S. citizenship, the United States is, and will always be, home – even if it is a home I rarely ever see.

When Paul says we are citizens of heaven I take him to mean that that is the spiritual passport we always carry with us in this world. Heaven is home. Home is where we come from, and home is where we are one day returning to. And home is something that, in a sense, we always carry with us. To carry a spiritual passport that says "Citizen of Heaven" on the front page provides something of that sense of security one might feel as a stranger in a strange land, knowing that if you get in trouble with the local authorities, help will be there for you.

As citizens of heaven, we find ourselves here in a sometimes strange, sometimes familiar land. When I spent two years teaching in Ethiopia, I made my home in a house of mud. I taught English, I engaged in community development projects, I made friends, I traveled and learned a lot. But I always knew that I was coming home. Time was short, there were important tasks, and I knew that as a foreigner from a developed country, I had something to give as well as learn.

As citizens of heaven, we are all here for a relatively short period of time. This is our temporary home. Jesus said we are to be "in this world" but not "of this world." Two things are important: we are to love the world ("for God so loved the world"), and we are to bring heaven’s vision, heaven’s perspective to this world. Bill Webber, one of my old seminary professors and mentors, years ago wrote a seminal book about the Christian Church entitled: God’s Colony in this World. We, the church, are called to be an outpost, a beachhead, a counter-culture, however you wish to put it, made up of citizens of heaven who are here to impart a vision and reshape the world to that vision. And we are to do that not through exploitation (as colonialists of old), but through love. This means our tasks are always both visionary and practical. You have to have both. God said to Abraham "I am calling you to a new place and a special task. And if you want to know what it is really all about, have a look at the sky tonight. Your descendents will number as many as those stars."

For the last couple of years we have been addressing the immensely difficult and practical task of expanding and renovating our church facility. We are on schedule, on target, and on the money. But the reason we are doing this is so that we can better fulfill our roles as citizens of heaven who are managing God’s colony here. And that means remembering that we have a vision to impart and projects to undertake.

For example, you will be hearing more about Link-Ages Place, the proposed intergenerational center, at the special congregational meeting immediately following worship. Why are we considering it? Because God’s vision is of a beloved community in which everyone, of whatever age, is honored and included because of their gifts and because, no matter how old you get to be, you never stop being in the image of God. Back home in heaven, where we all come from, remember there are no segregated centers restricted for the elderly, and there aren’t special schools and orphanages where motherless and fatherless and grandmotherless and grandfatherless children are shipped off to. Back in heaven we were all together and people knew each other’s names and people appreciated one another, and played together, and sang together, and gave each other hugs and back rubs. Well, the world here needs that kind of thing. So I think it’s time we did it.

Last week the Rev. Gordon Forbes invited a number of us to visit a meeting of AIM (Action in Montgomery) at which the group was celebrating the fact that Montgomery County Executive, Douglas Duncan is proposing in his budget for the next fiscal year that the allocation to the Housing Initiative Fund be raised to $15 million. This is a loan and grant fund for the development of non-profit and for-profit affordable housing. I think that is a great idea and I am willing to do some lobbying for it with the County Council. Why? Because since I believe in the goodness of God’s creation and also in the resurrection of the body, I believe that safe and affordable housing are in heaven’s vision and on God’s agenda. The Bible says that every person deserves his or her place under their own fig tree. God said your desolated cities will be rebuilt. As people carrying spiritual passports from heaven, our job description includes showing our world that affordable housing is not only possible, it is part of God’s vision for a beloved community.

Heaven’s vision is a clear economic vision. And while the words "tax cut" may sound like heaven to many folks, God’s vision for our world is a beloved community in which there are no extremes of wealth and poverty. Wealth is good. God said that we are to have life in abundance. Just don’t step over other people to get it. Don’t keep other people down so that you can hold on to it. Our attitudes toward wealth and poverty are spiritual matters – I am tempted to say they are the most pressing spiritual matters in the world. In Brazil, for example, the extremes of wealth and poverty are breathtaking, mind-boggling really. And at the same time, the spiritual ferment there is equally mind-boggling – from traditional Roman Catholic, to Afro-Brazilian cults, to liberation theology, to Pentecostalism, to many others. Each in its own way is a spiritual response to economic and political forces that keep the majority of people there poor and powerless.

It’s important for us to remember that we are citizens of heaven traveling with time limited visas, because if we forget that we begin to think that all the wealth and beauty of this world belong to us. Wealth doesn’t belong to the government, as the President reminds us. But we need to remind him that it doesn’t belong to the people either. It belongs to God. And everything, including you and me, belongs to God.

I am told that one of the things you can’t do as an American citizen is have dual-citizenship. If you have a parent from one country and your other parent is from the U.S., by the age of twenty-one you must decide. Where will your worldly citizenship be? Where is your home? And it is just the same with the spiritual passport you carry. Are you a citizen of this world? Does it all begin and end here for you? Or is your ultimate home elsewhere? Open your spiritual passport and read what it says? AMEN.

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