Notre Cité Est dans les Cieux — Citizens of a City We Have Not Seen

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — The Seventh Time

Le calls this a confirmation. It is the seventh one in twenty days.

July 30 — in the doorway of the apartment: Home is where I am.
August 2 — Êxodo 33:14, from the Devocional Diário: Eu mesmo o acompanharei.
August 3 — Cânticos 2: Levanta-te, e vem comigo.
August 6 — James Smith: His secret place our home.
August 9 — Psalm 84:3: even the sparrow has found a home.
August 15 — Salmos 139, from the Devocional Diário: não existe lugar onde Deus não esteja junto.
August 18 — Philippians 3:20: our citizenship is in heaven.

Seven sources, none of them chosen for the purpose. A word heard in a hallway, a Brazilian devotional twice, a Hebrew love song, a Baptist pastor dead a century and a half, a bird nesting at an altar, and now a Roman prisoner writing to a colony town.

And note where this one lands. The apartment is gone. The papers are not signed. The Benimar is parked on the same street it was parked on last week. Le has no address at all this morning — and the reading is about citizenship.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — Why He Says It to These People

The word Paul uses is politeuma — commonwealth, citizenship, the state to which one belongs. Segond renders it notre cité — our city.

And he is writing to Philippi, a Roman colony. Four days ago this journal noted the same fact for a different reason — the garrison in Philippians 4. Paul draws two metaphors from one city, and both work because his readers lived inside them.

Here is what a Roman colony was. Its inhabitants held full Roman citizenship though most had never seen Rome. They were eight hundred miles from it. They used Roman law, Roman coin, Latin, Roman dress. Their identity was fixed by a city they did not live in and would probably never visit.

Paul is not offering them a metaphor. He is describing their daily situation and then pointing one level up. You already know how this works. You have been doing it your whole lives with Rome.

And there is a second half to how colonies worked. Rome did not plant them to bring colonists home. It planted them to extend Rome outward — a piece of the capital, established in foreign soil, so that the place it stood in began to look like the place it came from. Which is what a Christian in a strange country is for.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — Which Direction the Waiting Runs

Now the detail most readers slide past. Paul does not say we are waiting to go there.

Read it again. Our citizenship is in heaven, from which we also eagerly wait for the Savior. D'où nous attendons aussi comme Sauveur le Seigneur Jésus-Christ.

The expectation is not of departure. It is of arrival — His. The traffic in this verse runs from heaven toward earth, not the other way. They are not homesick colonists longing for a ship. They are a colony awaiting the King.

The verb is intense — a straining, watching expectancy, the word for scanning the road for someone overdue. But the eyes are on the horizon, not on the luggage.

Which fits everything else this thread has said. Le did not hear you will be home when you arrive. She heard home is where I am. And now: the citizenship is settled elsewhere, and the One it belongs to is coming here.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — The Body of Our Humiliation

The literal Greek of verse 21 is more striking than lowly body. It reads the body of our humiliation, and Segond keeps it exactly: le corps de notre humiliation. And what it will become is the body of His glory — le corps de sa gloire.

And the word for humiliation is the same root Paul used in chapter 2. He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death.

So the whole letter closes a circle. He came down into a body like ours; ours will be raised into a body like His. He took our humiliation. We receive His glory. Le saw the first half on the seventh of August, and this is the second half.

Two verbs are used, and both matter. Transform concerns the outward form. Conformed concerns the shared inner nature. Not a disguise. Not an upgrade of the old thing. The same word for conformed appears in Romans 8:29 — predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son. The body catches up, at the end, with what the soul has been becoming all along.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — By the Power That Subdues All Things

Paul finishes by naming the power that will do it: according to the working by which He is able even to subdue all things to Himself.

He has done this before, and this journal met it on the fifth of August. In Ephesians 1 he needed a measure for the power available to believers and reached for the resurrection. Here he does the same in reverse — the power that will raise a body is identified as the power that governs everything that exists.

Which means the raising of one aging body is not a special exertion. It is the ordinary operation of the One who holds all things. The same authority that subdues everything is the authority that will change a body — and the two are not different departments.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — Home Is Where God Is

Le's line this morning is the shortest version yet, and it may be the final form of it. Home is where God is.

Notice what has happened to the sentence over twenty days. In July she received it: Home is where I am — spoken to her. On the fifteenth she said it back: God is going to stay with us, wherever we go. Today she states it as a settled fact about the world.

That is what a confirmed word does. It stops being an event and becomes a piece of furniture in the mind — one of the few pieces that did not go out the door.

And Philippians supplies the reason it holds. Citizenship is not lost by travel. A Roman in Philippi did not become less Roman for being far away; the belonging was granted from the capital and could not be revoked by geography. Which is why an apartment can be emptied, a country left, and a household sleep in a van beside the road — with the citizenship completely unaffected.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — No Address, but a Citizenship

Le has drawn the distinction the whole entry was reaching for. An address is where a person sleeps. A citizenship is where a person belongs. We normally assume the second follows the first — you belong where you live. She has just discovered, by losing one and keeping the other, that it runs the other way.

And Paul wrote the companion sentence in the letter she has been reading all month. Ephesians 2:19 gives both words at once: fellow citizens — the belonging — and members of the household — the home. Concitoyens des saints, gens de la maison de Dieu.

He wrote it to people who had neither. Gentiles, outsiders, described four verses earlier as strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. The citizenship was granted to the homeless, which is the only kind of person who has ever received it.