A Place to Call Home...

Where do you belong?

Where do you call home?

It’s a straightforward enough question, but a profound one.   It’s answer says quite a lot.  An inability to easily answer it also suggests quite a problem.

It’s one of the biggest questions in our world today... 

In Calais we hear of state-less people, risking their lives to try and cross the Channel to find a new and different ‘home’.

In Gaza, Palestinian Arabs are fighting for a greater sense of recognition of a piece of land they feel a real affinity to.

In Eastern Europe, the Crimea region has just recently switched from being a part of the Ukraine to becoming a part of Russia, and who knows where that will end.

In the Middle East a group of people have declared an Islamic caliphate over large parts of Syria & Iraq.

In our own country, next week, Scotland will be voting whether or not to become an independent state.   

This can all get very difficult and complicated.  ‘Pointless’ aficionados may well be satisfied by understanding 'Countries' as ‘sovereign states recognised by the United Nations in their own right’, political philosophers though would want to say more. Pointing out the difference between a ‘Nation’, a shared sense of history, ethnicity or culture and a ‘State’  a centralised, powerful political organisation. The later is about security, the former Identity.  For a ‘home’ we need both.

The New Testament was written at a time of political turmoil.  The new Community of Christian believers had no home, they’d become convinced of the truth of the then extraordinary idea that God was God always, for all people everywhere.  He wasn’t tribal or local or particular in any way. 

The Roman Empire, the super-power of the day, threatened them, on pain of death, at every turn.  To be a Roman Citizen was to have status, security and identity wherever you were and, by and large, they didn’t have it.  The dominant religion, from which they had grown, Judaism, also was increasingly at loggerheads with them in the battle of ideas.   

In the middle of all this the Apostle Paul said, when writing to the Christians in Philippi ‘your citizenship is in Heaven’.  He didn’t mean Christian people ought to live in some vague other-worldly denial of life as it is, rather he was reminding all of us that, whatever our circumstances, amidst all the uncertainty, an identity, a security a ‘home’ is on offer, as a part of the very family of God.