Fifteenth Sunday After Trinity

Philemon 1-21

After our summer break, we’re back to following the Lectionary, the set readings that help ensure that over a period of time we hear the Bible widely and together. This autumn, when I’m preaching, we’ll be looking at letters written by the apostle Paul, not to congregations but to individuals. We’ll be listening-in as a follower of Jesus, who is closer to the end of his life than to the middle, passes his wisdom on to the next generation. In Olympic Games terms, we’ll be thinking about legacy: both Paul’s, and our own.

We begin, this week, with Paul’s letter to Philemon. It’s a short letter, only 25 verses long (for some reason, the lectionary leaves out the last 4). Here’s the background, as best we can piece it together:

Often when Paul and his travel-companions came to a city they were met with welcome and rejection, seeing households come to faith in Jesus before having to move on very quickly, continuing the relationship by letter-writing. But when they come to Ephesus, something different unfolds. After three months of talking about Jesus to the resident Jewish community, to mixed reception, Paul relocated to the lecture hall of a teacher known as the Tyrant – you can imagine how he got that nickname! For two years, Paul’s time is occupied in three ways:

firstly, he is working, alongside companions who share his trade, to support themselves by making tents, possibly for Silk Road traders or Roman legionaries;

secondly, during the mid-day siesta hours, he is talking about what it looks like to be the church, to anyone who was interested, at the Tyrant’s school;

and thirdly, both of these activities are interrupted by at least one spell in prison, during which time Paul is dependent on his friends for food and clean clothing, and occupies his time writing letters.

Now, so many people were interested in Paul’s lunchtime workshops that, without his leaving Ephesus, the gospel spread, and churches were established, right across the Roman province of Asia, which we know today as Turkey.

One of those people was Philemon. One of those churches was his household in Colossae – the church to whom Paul wrote the letter to the Colossians. And with that letter, Paul sent the little letter to Philemon.

Now, Greco-Roman households were made up of the family, and their slaves. The whole Empire was built on slaves; they were as ‘natural’ and ‘normal’ and ‘everyday’ as car-ownership is today. In many ways their lives weren’t terrible, but ultimately they were possessions and their lives were held in their master’s hands. The whole of the Bible can be read as humanity held captive and God coming to set the captives free. In his letter to the church in Colossae, Paul tells Philemon’s household that the slaves have a share in the inheritance, and the freeborn belong to Jesus the master: in other words, there is neither slave nor free, because all are simultaneously free children of God the Father, and slaves of God the King.

But alongside this, Paul writes personally to Philemon, and his kin Apphia and Archippus, concerning Onesimus. It would appear that Onesimus was one of Philemon’s slaves, and that he had run away, from Colossae to Ephesus. And there, somehow, he had come across Paul, the prisoner, and found himself in serving Paul’s needs. You see, the name Onesimus means ‘useful’ – and before, he was perceived as useless. Paul asks Onesimus to carry these letters back home, and advocates on his behalf: Onesimus and Philemon are both partners with Paul in the gospel. They are brothers in God’s household, and – more – they are both like-a-son to Paul. They are both slaves of God, and – more – they both owe themselves to Paul, as a master holds his slave’s life in his hands. The whole household dynamic, on which the very Empire rests, is completely deconstructed; and God’s household constructed in its place. This is what is at stake in Paul’s asking Philemon to receive back Onesimus.

So, where are you in this letter? And where am I?

Perhaps you identify with Onesimus. Perhaps you have been running away from something, from a situation that makes you feel useless – only to discover that you can’t outrun God, and that God is challenging you to discover yourself anew as useful in the divine economy? Or – even more fundamental – inviting you to discover that your new status as son or daughter is not dependent on your useless/fullness, but on the grace and peace given by God our Father?

Perhaps you identify with Philemon. Perhaps you enjoy the privileges of being a son or daughter without thought, and God is challenging you to use that privilege to set others free, from the ways in which you have judged them or they have judged themselves? Or – even more fundamental – inviting you to discover that you are not master of your own life, but God’s bought slave, serving others not in your own strength but in the grace and peace given by our Lord Jesus Christ?

Perhaps you identify with Paul, and God is prompting you to speak up on behalf of someone else, to seek to see two divided parties reconciled? Or to recognise the constraints you live within – constraints you would not have chosen – as the opportunity to partner with God rather than the excuse not to?

What the Spirit is saying to you will be different from what the Spirit is saying to me; but the same Spirit is speaking to us, together. We have been bound together, and it is in our common life together that we are transformed into the likeness of the only begotten Son who came as slave of all. Don’t try to make this a private matter between you and God. Let’s speak, listen, and minister to one another as we work out our salvation together.