9/7/25 Sermon

Today we’re going to do something we’ve never done before in worship. We’re reading an entire book of the Bible. Specifically, we’re reading Paul’s letter to Philemon.  And this letter is a little different than most of Paul’s letters in that he isn’t writing to a church or trying to lay out a theological proof for anything.  It’s a personal letter.  Paul’s writing it to one person, a well-off man named Philemon.  Philemon lived in Colossae.  He was a Colossian.  And it’s widely believed that Paul wrote this letter during his first imprisonment which is the same time he wrote his letter to the Colossians.

Now, just like everything in the Bible there’s some argument over where and when Paul wrote it but no one argues that Paul actually wrote this letter: I can safely say he wrote it somewhere between 50-60 CE and he most likely wrote it from jail in Ephesus which is only about 100 miles away from Colossae. It also means that this letter was written before any of the Gospels.  In fact, New Testament Scholar Marcus Borg believes it was one of the first things that was written in the New Testament.

What’s happened here is that a slave Onesimus - who’s name means useful - has run away and come to Paul while Paul’s in jail.  And while he’s visiting Paul, he converts to Christianity. We don’t know if he decided he made a mistake and wants to return to Philemon or if Paul convinced him that he should.  But either way, Paul is writing to Philemon to take Onesimus back. Let us now listen for God’s word:

From Paul, who is a prisoner for the cause of Christ Jesus, and our brother Timothy.

To Philemon our dearly loved coworker, Apphia our sister, Archippus our fellow soldier, and the church that meets in your house.

May the grace and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ be with you.

 Philemon, I thank my God every time I mention you in my prayers  because I’ve heard of your love and faithfulness, which you have both for the Lord Jesus and for all God’s people.  I pray that your partnership in the faith might become effective by an understanding of all that is good among us in Christ.  I have great joy and encouragement because of your love, since the hearts of God’s people are refreshed by your actions, my brother.

Therefore, though I have enough confidence in Christ to command you to do the right thing,  I would rather appeal to you through love. I, Paul—an old man, and now also a prisoner for Christ Jesus—  appeal to you for my child Onesimus. I became his father in the faith during my time in prison.  He was useless to you before, but now he is useful to both of us.  I’m sending him back to you, which is like sending you my own heart.  I considered keeping him with me so that he might serve me in your place during my time in prison because of the gospel.

However, I didn’t want to do anything without your consent so that your act of kindness would occur willingly and not under pressure.  Maybe this is the reason that Onesimus was separated from you for a while so that you might have him back forever—  no longer as a slave but more than a slave—that is, as a dearly loved brother. He is especially a dearly loved brother to me. How much more can he become a brother to you, personally and spiritually in the Lord!

 So, if you really consider me a partner, welcome Onesimus as if you were welcoming me.  If he has harmed you in any way or owes you money, charge it to my account.  I, Paul, will pay it back to you (I’m writing this with my own hand). Of course, I won’t mention that you owe me your life.

Yes, brother, I want this favor from you in the Lord! Refresh my heart in Christ.  I’m writing to you, confident of your obedience and knowing that you will do more than what I ask.  Also, one more thing—prepare a guest room for me. I hope that I will be released from prison to be with you because of your prayers.

 Epaphras, who is in prison with me for the cause of Christ Jesus, greets you,  as well as my coworkers Mark, Aristarchus, Demas, and Luke.

 May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit.

Friends, this is the word of the Lord

I don’t think we need to spend much time this morning talking about the evils of slavery and that it’s wrong.  Can we all agree just to take that as accepted?  Biblical Scholar NT Wright makes the analogy, however, that if someone in the first century would stand up and tell people they need to get rid of slaves, it would be similar to me standing up here this morning and telling everyone that you need to get rid of your cars.  We know they damage the environment, we may know that they are dangerous, dirty things, but we’re sort of stuck with them.  They’re just a necessity of our life right now.  Wright said many people -  including Paul probably - felt that way about slavery in the first century. For them it was just a necessary evil.  It doesn’t justify or excuse it. It doesn’t make it any less evil. And you can do with Paul what you will. But that’s the context in which we’re working.

Some people say that slavery was different back then compared to how we did slavery in this country. And maybe that’s true but there are still some striking similarities between the situation of slaves of the first century Roman empire and the American slaves.  Slaves weren’t considered people.  They were less than, or sub-human, and if a slave ran away like Onesimus did, they would be severely beaten at best, but most likely they’d be executed and killed.

Paul, by writing this letter, could quite possibly be literally saving Onesimus’ life.  And I just want to say that Paul often gets a bad wrap from us sitting here in the 21st century.  Some of it’s deserved and some of it isn’t.  But one of the things that this letter shows powerfully is Paul’s faith in action.  He didn’t just talk the talk, he walked the walk.  He worked to live it out in the messy realities of life and embody his faith in how he responded to real people and real circumstances.

Paul’s relationship with Onesimus was nothing like his relationship with Philemon. Onesimus had only come to see him a few times in prison where we get the sense that Paul knows Philemon pretty well, and unlike with Philemon, Paul had nothing to gain from onesimus.  Paul actually risks ticking off and losing a major contributor to the church by writing this letter.  And at this time, the church in Colossae isn’t doing the greatest and is rather small. So, I’m sure every person and every dollar counted.  But that isn’t Paul’s concern.  Paul’s concerned with doing what is right.

So Paul writes this letter on the behalf of a man he barely knows; someone who’s almost a stranger to him; someone society didn’t even see as fully human and who could just be simply cast aside without a second thought.  But how does Paul talk about this guy? He’s like a son to me.  He may have been useless to you (remember his name means useful) but now he’s useful to both of us, I’m sending him back to you and it’s like sending you my own heart. To welcome him is to welcome me.  I’ll repay any damage or cost he’s caused. It’s like Paul is sending back to Philemon the most precious person in the world to him.

And if we had the time to really go through the rest of the letter, we really see how great a salesman or politician Paul could have been because he appeals to Philemon on every level in this letter. It’s brilliant.  He defers to his sense of importance.  Appeals to his faith.  Talks about how great and faithful Philemon is and even offers to come visit and make him feel even more important. Paul even starts by saying he could command Philemon to take him back but he KNOWS that Philemon will make the right choice on his own. I mean, it’s brilliant.

But Paul, with nothing really to gain and only things to lose writes this letter and goes to bat for a man he barely knows because that person has become a brother in faith and is a child of God.  Paul does the right thing because it’s right and because his faith tells him that there is no such thing as a sub-human, no one is beyond redemption, and every person has intrinsic value.  And for Paul, that’s enough to invest in and to go to bat for Onesimus.  Paul stands up for the cast aside, a throw away person, who probably no one else would have given the time of day to or even bothered to see as a person.  Paul who used to stone people to death based on what they believe is trying to save a man’s life based on what he now believes.

So, I’m reading this letter thinking about what this really tells  about Paul and early Christianity and about our faith today.  And I had the painful thought about what if the letter didn’t work.  What if Philemon didn’t care or couldn’t look past the infraction?  What ever happened to Onesimus? Did he get executed or stay a slave or was he set free? There’s no post-script here that tells us what happened or what the outcome was. So I began a search to figure out what happened after all this…

That led me to a really fascinating story about how this letter even got into the Bible.

Not long after Paul writes this letter and sends Onesimus back to Philemon, Christianity begins to spread rapidly mainly due to Paul’s ,missionary efforts. The church in Ephesus grows large enough to need a bishop, and they choose a gifted young man — sharp, talented, deeply devoted to Paul and his teaching. In fact, tradition says this bishop may be the reason we even have most of the New Testament. He set out to collect and preserve Paul’s scattered letters so that future generations could hear the gospel.

And among the very first letters he saved was one Paul had written years before — a letter carried by a runaway slave back to his master. A letter where Paul called that slave “my own heart” and his spiritual son. A letter where that slave may have felt like they mattered, they weren’t disposable, like they were actually worth something for the first time in their life. This letter.  And how did this Bishop of Ephesus come into possession of this letter?  Because Paul himself had placed it into the bishop’s hand to take back to his master Philemon in the hopes that it may be enough to spare this Bishop’s life after he’d run away as a young slave.

Paul meets a young slave who’s run away and will probably be killed, gets to know him a little bit, writes a letter to save the boy’s life, and the slave becomes the Bishop of Ephesus and saves Pauls writings and thereby is responsible for the vast majority of our New Testament and our understanding of Christianity today. It’s hardly believable yet there it is…

So… clearly as someone who’s had a horrible drinking problem in the past and who was written off by quite a lot of people, this story resonates with me. Because if it weren’t for good Christian people acting like Paul - who for whatever reason took a chance on me, I can guarantee you that I wouldn’t be standing here today.  Those people quite literally saved my life.

But here’s the thing: I can’t just accept that grace, say thank you, and walk on my merry way. The only faithful response is to live it out — to become the kind of person who see worth in others when the world does not, and to extend the same kind of grace that was extended to me. Because the real power of this story isn’t only that Onesimus’ circumstances changed and that his life was spared. It’s that Paul’s risk gave him dignity, helped him know he was worth something, and showed him what it meant to be treated as a child of God.

What this letter speaks to is the power of our faith.  Not only to change our lives, but to change others.  The beautiful thing about the Christian faith and the Christian life is that we don’t believe in people beyond redemption or people of lesser worth than others…

That’s the profound significance of this little letter. Paul, with nothing to gain and everything to lose, takes a risk for someone the world didn’t count as worth anything — and because of that, the gospel took root in a way no one could have imagined. And if that’s true for Onesimus, then it’s true for you and it’s true for me too. There is no such thing as a sub-human. There is no one beyond redemption. There is no one God does not call “my child.”

But here’s the hard part: it’s easy to say that about people long ago, or people who feel far away. It’s so much easier to accept this story in the abstract and agree with the premise. The harder question is — who are the Onesimuses right here, right now? Who are the people we’ve decided aren’t worth our time? We can name the obvious: the immigrant, the person living on the street, the LGBTQ neighbor, sometimes Jews, sometimes Palestinians. But we have to make sure that we don’t see this as some abstraction. These people aren’t some theoretical categories. Because if we look, It can hit close to home — in our own community, in our own families, in our own pews. Take for instance these politically divided times, we’re told every day that people on the other side of the aisle are the problem, that they’re dangerous, that they’re less than us. And if we’re honest, we can start to believe it. We can start to see not a neighbor, not a brother or sister, but an enemy.

But Paul won’t let Philemon get away with that. And Christ won’t let us get away with it either. The gospel keeps pressing us to see differently. To look across the dividing lines — political, social, economic, whatever they may be — and say: you are not disposable. You are not subhuman. You are my brother. You are my sister. You are my own heart.

And that’s exactly what happens at this table. When we gather for Communion, God levels the ground. There are no Democrats or Republicans at this table. No insiders and outsiders. No greater than or lesser than. Only people who are hungry for grace. Only people who need forgiveness. Only the beloved children of God.

So maybe that’s the invitation today. To come forward and receive the bread and the cup, and to remember that we are all Onesimus. We are all Philemon. We are all Paul. We are all welcomed and redeemed at this table, and then we are sent out to welcome others the same way.

Friends, this is the good news: in Christ there are no nobodies. Only brothers. Only sisters. Only the beloved children of God. And thanks be to God for that.