“Slaves or Siblings?”
Psalm 139; Philemon
September 9, 2007

Dr. Catherine Taylor

How good it is today to be kicking off a new Sunday School year, to commission teachers, and watch the kids parade up for their own worship time. 

To have a full compliment of children within worship feels right to me.  It declares that the body of Christ is young and old, always learning, always turning its face forward to the future that our children represent even as we worship here and now.

And no, I have not forgotten to read the scripture.  It’s just that today is a good day to talk a moment first about what we are going to hear.  On this new day in a new program year we are going to have an old experience, an experience like that of the early church.  We are going to hear a letter read in its entirety, a letter written by the Apostle Paul.  For once there is no question about authorship.  It is a personal note written by Paul to his friend, Philemon.

Although there was mail service in the world of ancient Rome, it was reserved for the exclusive use of the government.  Personal letters had to be delivered by courier, and often a wealthy family would keep several slaves whose primary purpose was to deliver letters, an assignment that could take weeks or months.  Because travel could be difficult and delivery iffy due to delays or accidents, often more than one copy of the same letter would be sent to ensure its arrival, a fact that explains in part why there are multiple copies of New Testament letters.  The churches, of course, would also make their own copies and send the original copies on to other churches, where they would be read aloud and copied and sent on again.

The courier for this letter is the subject of the letter itself, a slave name Onesimus.  The name Onesimus means “useful,” “profitable,” or “beneficial,” and Paul will make a play on those words in the letter.  “Useful” is not a name that a freedman is likely to have been given, so it is unreasonable to assume that Onesimus was born into slavery.  It was a fairly common practice in the Roman Empire for those born into slavery to be freed when they reached the age of 30, so perhaps Onesimus is in his 20s when the letter was written.

In the letter, delivered by Onesimus’ own hand, Paul asks Philemon to receive his own slave, Onesimus, back into his household.  Listen for what the Spirit is saying to the church:

Read Philemon.

Philemon is a very direct and personal letter, the shortest letter of Paul in the New Testament, in Greek just 355 words.  Although there is much about it we can never know, right away we do learn several things. 

We learn that Paul is a prisoner at the time of writing, and although it does not say, he is probably in Rome.  We know that a church meets in Philemon’s house and that he owns Onesimus, so Philemon probably has some degree of wealth.  We know, too, that Philemon has “love for all the saints” and faith in Jesus.  Paul says he has received much joy and encouragement from Philemon and that “the hearts of the saints have been refreshed” through things Philemon has done, which may mean that, as a man of wealth, Philemon has given Paul money to support himself and his fellow workers in ministry.

Having said all these heartfelt and complimentary things Paul moves to his real purpose, and as he does he is tender and careful, yet straightforward all at the same time, the way people often are with true friends.  Paul wants Philemon to accept the slave, Onesimus, back into his household without punishing him for some offense that Onesimus has committed.  What the offense is the letter does not say.

Perhaps Onesimus ran away, an offense punishable at the time by death by stoning.  More likely, say the scholars, Onesimus was involved in some lesser offense, because it was the practice at that time for a slave who was in trouble with a master to go to an influential intermediary such as Paul and have that person negotiate on the slave’s behalf.  That could be what is going on, but we are best off admitting that we will never know.

 Regardless, the whole situation is hard for us as modern people.  Most of us would insist we know nothing firsthand about slavery.  It was not until recently that historic houses in living history museums such as Williamsburg allowed much evidence of slavery in America.  School children learned about slaves in Charleston, South Carolina, but may not have known that New York City had the second largest slave population in the U.S. before the Civil War.  Today that has changed and reproductions of rough palettes appear on the floors of the finely appointed bedrooms of many living history museums, north and south.

To my mind this revisionist history is good for our children and for us.  But it adds further to the illusion that slavery is a thing of the past.  It’s not.

There are economic slaves in many countries and in the United States today who work for years and sometimes lifetimes to pay their so-called debt.  There are sex slaves in many countries and in the United States, teenagers who thought they were signing up for legitimate jobs, only to find themselves trapped. 

Even if we stand at a relative distance from such horrors, there are other things that can and do enslave.  Who here walks down unfamiliar city streets at night unaffected by the countless crime stories the news media uses to attract audiences?  Gavin DeBeckar, the author of the book The Gift of Fear, maintains that the U.S. is in fact a far safer place than its citizens have been led to believe.  Those who don’t believe this, however, lose the real benefits of fear, which is an adaptive response that allows us to know the difference between what will really harm us and what to ignore.  DeBeckar’s book was a bestseller in hardback and paper, not because people believe they can be fear free, but because they are so frightened already.

But that is only one example of how modern people can be enslaved.  Many feel helpless to influence a popular culture that no longer offers security or protection to young children by shielding them from adult subjects. 

Last week when I was looking at lists of best places to live, I discovered that when it comes to the best place to be a child, UNICEF currently lists the U.S. twentieth out of 21 industrialized nations – next to last.  Top reasons for this ranking have to do with what children report about their relationships, especially with their peers; and with risky behavior such as sex, drink, and drugs. 

Human beings are not openly traded as commodities here, but who here feels any real ability to change entrenched economic patterns that benefit people who already have a lot, burden many in the middle, and shuffle the poorest aside?  And who is not enslaved to some extent by fear of otherness, of racial prejudice, the sin that led to the justification of actual historical instances of slavery in the first place? 

Perhaps there is something in your own life that you experience as a kind of slavery, an obsession, an addiction, a personal paralysis that acts against who you want yourself to be.  Addiction to pornography is now an epidemic that adds to the further deterioration of genuine relationship with spouses or partners.  So much for saying that people in modern times don’t have any direct experience with what it means to be enslaved.

Some people in the volatile political mix of today lay the charge that religion itself is a form of slavery.  If they heard the Jeremiah reading, the first words out of their mouths would be that the potter portrayed there is a despot, destroying vessels at will.  But they aren’t paying attention to the language.  What is portrayed is a genuine relationship that allows resistance and responsiveness, the essence of clay. 

In other biblical texts the clay talks back, as when Job challenges God by saying:  “Remember that you fashioned me like clay and will you return me to dust again?” (Job 10:9)  In Jeremiah, God cries out to a partner and wants a reply.  God is trying to lead the partner away from disaster.  The partnership is not equal, but God’s plans can be changed by the actions of Israel.  Karl Barth has called this responsiveness God’s “holy mutability,” “…the living God,” says Barth, “possesses a mobility and elasticity which is no less divine than [God’s] perseverance.”

If the potter still comes off like a despot to you, look again at the psalm.  The one who fashioned us in the womb does not withdraw.  God is acquainted with all our ways, even our thoughts.  This presence is not oppressive to the psalmist, but wonderful.  The images of wonder evoke devotion, protection, and love, not tyranny.

If relationship with God means freedom rather than tyranny, why is Paul sending Onesimus back to Philemon to take up his life as a slave?  The answer is, he isn’t.  He is sending Onesimus, now converted to Christianity, back to Philemon not as a slave, but as a brother.  That is why this very personal letter made it into the New Testament in the first place, why it was kept and read by house churches, and cherished along with all Paul theological tomes. 

It is the letter that states most clearly that following Christ means changing the way we relate to other people, that Christians are not to use other people as objects or as a means to personal ends, but to treat everyone as brothers and sisters in the family of God.  The brother and sister language here is much stronger than it is to our 21^st century ears.  The brother and sister relationship was primary in the ancient Mediterranean world.  Patriarchal family lines were everything.  A married woman’s status was determined by the status of her brothers of the same father, not by her husband.  Her family was her brother’s family - not that of her husband.  [Knowing this about the words brother and sister makes reading much of the New Testament a very different experience.]  When Paul speaks of brothers and sisters, he is speaking of immediate allegiance, not fondness or simple family feeling.  So it is deeply profound for him to insist that Christians are to treat everyone as brothers and sisters in the family of God.

Everyone?  Surely that doesn’t mean employees?  Or business competitors?  Or people who can be called enemies?  But it does.  Onesimus was a slave, a person with no rights under the law; a piece of property.  If Onesimus, the slave, is to be received by Philemon as a brother, surely all other categories of relationship are subject in Christ to the same kind of transformation.

What kinds of havoc and possibility would it create in your life if all the people you have relationships with were suddenly in the category of nuclear family?  What kind of effect would it have on how you behave?  I am always a little startled when people put enormous amounts of money and energy to travel to seminars and retreat weekends in an attempt to deepen their spirituality, in an attempt, they usually say, “to grow closer to God.”  There is nothing wrong with seminars and retreats, but Paul’s letter to Philemon suggests that all one really needs to do to feel God’s breath on the back of your neck is to look up from the table and pay a little more attention to whoever happens to be in the room:  your family member, co-worker, fellow teacher or student, or the stranger who is right in front of your nose. 

Abba John the Dwarf, one of the desert fathers, once said, “A house is not built by beginning at the top and working down.  You must begin with the foundations in order to reach the top.”  When his listeners asked him what he meant, he added, “The foundation is our neighbor, whom we must win, and that is the place to begin.  For all the commandments of Christ depend on this one.”

Paul knew this in a particularly personal way.  A former Pharisee, he was once a persecutor of Christians with the good sanction of the authorities and public opinion on his side.  But he gave up his reputable job of Christian bashing when he was knocked down one day and blinded in the road.  He woke up with a headache and the voice of Christ in his ear, asking, “Saul, why do you persecute me?” 

Thereafter Paul cherished the very people he had once condemned, and became the kind of man who was completely dependent on the good will of strangers in countless communities who took him in, fed and housed him, and created the circles in which he preached the gospel.  It just might be that Paul knows full well that Onesimus is already free, and that Paul, who also gained his freedom that day on the road, is really after Philemon’s freedom when he writes his very personal words to be carried by Onesimus’ hand.

We don’t know, of course, what happened when Onesimus got home.  We do know that the church kept and copied and distributed the letter, which to me is a good sign that things turned out well.  And we know something else as well. 

Forty-five years or so after the death of Paul, Bishop Ignatius of Antioch wrote a letter to the church at Ephesus.  In that letter we learn that the Bishop of Ephesus was a man whose name was Onesimus.  There is a good chance that this Bishop Onesimus was once a young slave, whom Paul referred to in his letter as “my own heart.”  He may have been the one who saved the letter that had so affected his life, who had it copied, and sent to the churches.  But, of course, we will never really know.

The only thing we can be sure of is that as Christians we are invited to see other people as if they belonged to God.  To see them, and ourselves, as God’s “own heart.”  I wonder what might come of that.

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your Spirit.

AMEN.