Buzz Aldrin wants
to send you to Mars. You’d better pack a change of clothes.
The idea seems to
be that we have the technology to send human beings to the Red Planet, but not to get them
back again. Pioneers would use their spacecraft to build essential structures
like housing and Starbucks coffee shops. Aldrin is not alone. “Mars One,” a
non-profit outfit in the Netherlands, has begun recruiting prospective Martians
for one-way missions. They’ll launch robotic cargo flights to begin with, then the
first occupants, then additional settlers every couple of years.
But nobody comes
back: The idea is not to bring Martians to Earth, but to recreate Earth on
Mars.
The Philippian
believers understood this kind of colonization. The majority population of the
city consisted of Roman soldiers mustered out in a massive reduction in force
following Octavian’s victorious civil war. Their wasn’t room for them in
Rome so their job was to make room for Rome in the provinces. They weren’t
waiting to return home; they were working to recreate home.
For our citizenship is in heaven, from which
we eagerly wait for a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. Paul lets go with some
loaded political language as he challenges the Philippians to forego Roman
colonization for Christian colonization. Christ has already won the victory and
now sends us into the world as outposts of the Kingdom. Notice the language
carefully: We do not wait to depart “from” Earth “for” Heaven to see our Savior
“in” Heaven; we live “in” Heaven and wait “for” a Savior who comes to us “from”
Heaven.
We are colonists, not refugees.
Like the future Martians, we arrive to
discover that God has sent ahead everything necessary to our mission:
forgiveness of sins, spiritual gifts, moral guidelines, the works. Our job is
not to craft these resources into a theological rocket to launch ourselves
elsewhere, but to construct an environment where the Gospel can flourish and
overwhelm the native culture.
Of course, we’re not ultimately up to
the job. That’s why we’re so eager for the Savior to arrive and settle things
once and for all. Some of us will die before that happens and wait in Paradise
until that day. But none of that changes the fact that our real goal is
transformation, not escape. If we forget that, Paul warns, the cross ceases to make much
sense in the present world and earthly logic takes over.
How might we think differently about
the church if we saw ourselves as one-way eternal-lifers instead of temporary spiritual squatters?
Three,
Two, One. . .Blast Off!
Doug
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