I hope fans of the hit TV series will forgive me when they discover that this article isn’t about the show at all. Instead, it was prompted by a quotation I came across: “Any country can be their homeland – and yet their homeland, wheresoever it may be, is to them a foreign place.” (The quotation comes from a second century document known as ‘The Letter to Diognetus’, although not much is known about him).
Doesn’t that brilliantly capture the relationship of Christians with this world? We can make our home anywhere: in Birmingham, Belfast or Brisbane. And yet, at the same, we’re not really at home in any of those places. Why is that? The New Testament says that “our citizenship is in heaven” (Philippians 3:20) and that we are “foreigners and exiles” here on earth (1 Peter 2:11). So, we can make our home anywhere here on earth, and yet that home never really feels like home.
Isn’t that true to our experience? Since we’ve been married, Helen and I have called ‘home’ first London, then Hull and now, wonderfully, Birmingham. And yet I never feel I really belong. Now, there could be something wrong with me – more than likely! – but isn’t this also what Paul and Peter and the chap who wrote to Diognetus are talking about? We are ‘at home’ anywhere and nowhere – because heaven is our true home.