Citizenship

             Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household, (Ephesians 2:19)

 We tend to take citizenship for granted. There are even those who would seem to want to do away with it, declaring us all to be citizens of the world and wherever we hang our hats. At the time that Paul wrote to the Ephesians, less than sixty percent of the residents of the Roman Empire were considered citizens. Among the rights enjoyed by Roman citizens were the rights to vote, hold office, make contracts, own property, have a lawful marriage, have children of any such marriage become Roman citizens automatically, have the legal rights of the paterfamilias of the family, not to pay some taxes, especially local taxes. I especially like the last one.

When Paul writes to the Ephesians about being citizens with God’s people and also members of His household, they understood that Paul was saying something special. What he was definitely not saying is that we are like Harry Potter, living under the stairs, or Ella, banished to cleaning out fireplaces and mocked with a new name: Cinder-Ella.

Sometimes, it’s easy to think that the citizenship Paul wrote about is the sort of citizenship that Harry Potter or Cinderella. We’re citizens, in that we’re allowed to live in God’s Kingdom, but we’re barely tolerated and better not seen or heard. This seems to focus on our responsibilities in the Kingdom, but we face those responsibilities like the guy who returned to the king the talents he’d buried because he didn’t think himself up to investing them.

Other times, we’re encouraged to think that we can issue commands that only God can disobey. Don’t they know who we are? We’re co-heirs with Christ, and they need to get with the program! At this end of the spectrum, the focus is on our rights as citizens.

As citizens, we have both rights and responsibilities, and both center on love. We have a responsibility to love God and to love others as we love ourselves. We also have the right to be loved by God and by others as they love themselves.

I suspect most of us would like to think we fulfill our responsibilities, but how often do we love others in order to earn, manipulate, prove, and turn the focus on ourselves. See what good people we are, we love! And how often do we think we have the right to dictate what sort of love we’re to be given? How often do we say (in effect) “If you love me, you’ll ______.”

What would happen if we began to pray something like, “Father, though I may fail to notice it, please cause me to get loving right for one second today. For one second, cause me to truly love You, and for that second or another, may pure love flow from me to someone else.”

Perhaps harder, what would happen if we prayed, “Father, thank You for the love that You give me, and for the love that so many around me give me. Today, even for a second, cause me to notice, and help me to accept. Teach me that You created me to be loved, and to recognize that I have the right to accept and expect love from You and from Your children”?