It’s a strange fact that every Election Day, the first Tuesday in November, falls right after All Saints’ Sunday, the first Sunday after November 1. It reminds me, as we watch this election unfold, in which more than 70 million people have already voted, myself included, of Paul’s claim that “our citizenship is in heaven, and it’s from there that we’re expecting a Savior.” (Philippians 3:20)

This idea that our citizenship is in heaven doesn’t mean that our citizenship on earth isn’t important. It doesn’t mean that we should just wait for a heavenly kingdom to appear and ignore everything that’s going on in our earthly societies. In fact, it means amost the opposite. It means that our ultimate allegiance is to the values and the identities of that heavenly kingdom, not to the values and the identities of our earthly citizenships.

It’s that heavenly kingdom that we recognize on All Saints’ Day, and so I guess it’s appropriate that it always falls so close to an election. All Saints’ Day, after all, isn’t just the recognition of those who have died—that’s All Souls’ Day, November 2. All Saints’ Day is a recognition and a celebration of the whole communion of saints: living and dead; past, present, and future; from every time and every place; all those who are faithful to our God. It’s a kingdom that’s gathered, as our reading from Revelation this Sunday will say, from “every tribe and language and people and nation.” It’s a kingdom that follows the values that Jesus will lay out in our Gospel this Sunday: “Blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are the meek. Blessed are the peacemakers. Blessed are the persecuted.”

The Bible is always on the side of the poor and the weak. It cries out for justice for the orphan and the widow. It cries out for liberation of the enslaved and the oppressed. Well-meaning people can disagree on what kinds of public policies are best to achieve these goals. But a politics or a policy or a program that doesn’t pursue the goal of relief for the poor and liberation for the oppressed is one that simply isn’t in line with the kingdom of God.

Our citizenship is in heaven. Our community is the community of all the baptized, from every time and place, from every tribe and nation. And when we owe our allegiance to our fellow-citizens, we live our lives in this world, as citizens here in the United States, in accordance with those values.

So as we go to vote on Tuesday—or as we watch for election results in an election in which we’ve already voted—I hope we all remember that our citizenship is in heaven. Not in the sense that what happens on earth doesn’t matter, but in the sense that what happens on earth must be shaped by our shaped citizenship in that larger, transcendent reality.