Two Passports in the Drawer and a Citizenship in Heaven: Philippians 3 for Families Who Live Between Countries

In many diaspora homes there is a drawer where the passports live. A burgundy one, a blue one, perhaps a child’s with a different country’s crest altogether. They come out for the summer trip back, for renewals, for the border officer who asks the question that never quite has a simple answer: “Where is home?”

For families who live between countries, the question follows them everywhere. In Birmingham or Brooklyn they are the ones with the accent, the ones who go “home” every other year. In Clarendon or Castries they are the ones from foreign, charged a little more at the market, asked when they are going back. They may own a flat in one country and be building a house in another. They may have parents buried in one soil and grandchildren growing up in the other. It is possible to belong to two places and still feel fully at home in neither.

Paul and the colony

Paul understood something of this. Philippi was a Roman colony in Macedonia. Many of its people held Roman citizenship, living far from Rome but proud of the rights and identity it gave them. So when Paul wrote to the church there, “For our citizenship is in heaven, from which we also eagerly wait for the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ” (Philippians 3:20), his readers would have heard it sharply. They knew what it meant to live in one place while belonging to another.

Paul is not saying that earthly places do not matter. He was himself a citizen of Rome, and used that citizenship when he needed it. He is saying that there is a deeper allegiance, one that no border officer can grant or remove, and it is the one that finally defines who we are.

A steadier kind of belonging

For people living between countries, this can be freeing. The endless argument about which place is really home, often carried on inside one’s own head, does not have to be won. You do not need to prove to the relatives back home that you are still one of them, or to the neighbours abroad that you truly fit in. Your fullest belonging is already settled somewhere else.

Hebrews describes the faithful of old as people who “confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth.” It goes on: “But now they desire a better, that is, a heavenly country. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for He has prepared a city for them” (Hebrews 11:13, 16). Abraham lived in tents in a land promised to him but not yet his. He was not homeless in God’s eyes. He was on the way.

How heavenly citizens hold earthly houses

A heavenly citizenship does not make the house in Manchester parish or the flat in Mississauga unimportant. It changes how we hold them.

• We can invest in the place we are. Knowing our final home is secure frees us to care for the street, the church and the neighbours where we live now, instead of treating our current address as a waiting room.
• We can plan without idolising. The retirement house back home can be a good goal without becoming the thing that finally makes us whole. Many people have built that house and found it did not answer the ache they hoped it would.
• We can release the guilt of being away. Being far from ageing parents or the family land is often painful. Faithfulness means doing what we can, honestly and generously, not living under a permanent sense of betrayal.
• We can give our children a clear identity. Children raised between cultures often feel the question of belonging most keenly. Before they are British or Canadian or Jamaican, they can know that they are God’s.

Eagerly waiting

Paul’s verse does not end with citizenship. It ends with expectation. We “eagerly wait” for a Saviour who, he says in the next verse, will transform our lowly bodies to be like his glorious body. The picture is of people watching the road for someone they love, not of people idly passing time.

Many diaspora families know that posture well. They have stood at arrivals halls, craning to see a face coming through the doors. They have waited at the gate in the country for a car from the airport. That eagerness, Paul suggests, is the right way to hold our deepest hope. Not anxious about where we belong now, but watching, with joy, for the one who is bringing us fully home.

For reflection

• Where have I been looking for a sense of belonging that only God can finally give?
• How might I invest more fully in the place where I live today, instead of always waiting for somewhere else?

Lord, you know every border I have crossed and every place I have called home. Thank you that my truest citizenship is with you. Help me to live faithfully where I am, to love the people around me, and to wait eagerly for the day you bring us home. Amen.

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