Passport to Kingdom Come

Posted April 27, 2007

A commentary by Mary Ann Miller

Heaving my backpack on the overhead rack, I plopped into a seat and reclined as far back as possible. Using my jacket as a blanket, I tried to catch a few hours of sleep as my overnight train rolled out of Düsseldorf heading south.

Toward the morning, the lights suddenly glared overhead. As the train was about to leave Germany, Swiss border officials were making their rounds. Proud of the gap their country forms in the map of the European Union, the Swiss border patrol spot checks trains before allowing them to enter Switzerland.

Apparently, hiding my entire head and torso under a jacket to block the bright light made me look suspicious enough for a passport check. After glancing at my navy-blue American passport and my purple Swiss residency permit, they moved on to search the backpacks of two unlucky teenagers across the aisle.

Every time I cross a border, I find the passport checking process a little odd. A passport and visa does the trick to make the officials confident enough of "who I am" to grant me entrance into their country. But what does my passport really say about me? Would I be a different person if my passport had a red, maroon or green cover instead?

As I finished my train trip, I realized that I have another sort of passport—one that really should be the most visible, but one that represents an entirely different type of citizenship. Paul, the famous apostle, pointed out how our participation in the great news of God’s soon-coming Kingdom bridges current differences in nationality: "For our citizenship is in heaven" (Philippians 3:20). For more information about that message and that Kingdom, download or order your free copy of The Gospel of the Kingdom.

During the border crossing, I couldn’t whip out a passport to document my heavenly citizenship. But suppose I had that second passport, which would I show first? Which citizenship do you and I hold foremost when we read the newspaper or listen to political candidates on the evening news? How often do we forget our primary citizenship while watching world events through the perspective of our home country, as if that was all that mattered?

Do we think of ourselves as Swiss Christians, Kenyan Christians, American Christians or Filipino Christians? Or do we think of ourselves as genuine Christians, who happen to have been born in Switzerland, Kenya, the United States or the Philippines?

Which citizenship determines the shade of glasses we use to view the world—our spiritual or our physical citizenship? Do our "passports of Christianity" remain hidden, folded away inside the passports that declare our nationalities?

What perspective does God have? Peter, another famous apostle, summarized it this way: "In truth I perceive that God shows no partiality. But in every nation whoever fears Him and works righteousness is accepted by Him" (Acts 10:34-35).

Looking at the earth, God must see the mountains, rivers and oceans—not the multicolored, national boundary puzzle pieces we think of as the world map. His love flows easily across the borders that humans draw and redraw. Instead of checking the color of our passports, He is much more interested in how much we treasure our passports to His Kingdom to come. VT