Sermon

Philemon

by The Rev. Canon Susan Sommer

Of all of Paul's letters in the New Testament, I think the Letter to Philemon is my favorite. Our second reading today is all but 3 verses of the entire letter, and in the 21 short verses we heard, all of Paul’s rhetorical brilliance shines through. Paul is imprisoned and he is sending one of his disciples, a fugitive slave named Onesimus, back to his owner, named Philemon. Now this may sound cruel or heartless to our ears, but in first century Greco-Roman society it was the norm for fugitive slaves to be returned. And when they were returned, it was also the norm for their owners to severely punish, perhaps even execute them as a warning to others. So for Onesimus to be the bearer of this letter to his former owner was for Onesimus to risk suffering and possibly death.

That's a pretty tall order. But take a look at what Paul expects Philemon, the owner, to do. He’s supposed to overlook his former slave’s escape and to welcome him as a brother. In other words, Philemon not only should forego his right as a property owner to deal with his property in the legal and customary fashion, he’s also supposed to treat this guy as an equal. In Philemon’s world, there simply was no precedent for this.

As for Paul, he’s in prison, facing an uncertain future of his own. Onesimus was likely the one who brought him food and clothing, since prisons at that time did not reliably feed or clothe the prisoners. So Paul is giving up the one bit of comfort and security he had, plus promising to underwrite another person’s debt -- and a slave’s at that.

So what do we have here? Onesimus is being asked to put his life on the line, Philemon is being asked to forfeit his property, not to mention sacrifice his honor in the eyes of his peers. And Paul is giving up his life-line, and taking on someone else’s debt. Sure sounds like a lose-lose-lose situation, doesn’t it?

Well, there IS loss here, no question. But in the topsy-turvy world of Christian discipleship, loss is less about subtraction than it is about transformation. It is loss in the same way that an acorn loses itself when it is planted and becomes an oak tree, or the way a woman loses her familiar body when she is carrying a child within her. It is loss in the sense of setting aside an old way of being in order to embrace  transformation. 

And transformation is costly. For one of these three men, it meant risking personal safety in order to play a role in another’s salvation. For another, it meant setting aside cultural values when they conflict with ethical values. For a third, it meant sacrificing personal comfort in order to bring about reconciliation between two people who, working together, could be a major force for evangelism.

Paul knew something about the cost of living a transformed life. His epistles are all clear testimonies to that. In fact, in the whole of Scripture, probably the only person who knew that cost better was Jesus himself. Jesus addresses that cost in today’s Gospel. In no uncertain terms, he tells the crowd that they must be willing to set aside their familiar priorities in order to embrace the God who desires the best part of ourselves, and not simply the leftovers.

Very few of us are likely to be imprisoned for our faith, as Paul was. None of us is an escaped slave facing a death sentence as Onesimus was. So if there’s anyone in this story we can identify with, it’s probably Philemon, the property owner. And I wish we knew more about him. But since we don’t, imagination will have to suffice. And so I imagine that Philemon was a good guy, probably a real go-getter -- certainly enough so to have started up a house church and to have been a friend of the Apostle Paul, who didn’t exactly hang out with slackers. If there had been such a thing as a Vestry, he probably would have been on it. Probably worshiped pretty regularly, when he wasn’t out of town on business. Probably never in his wildest dreams figured that his buddy Paul would lay something as outrageous as this letter on him in the name of his faith.

Philemon’s was a different kind of transformative challenge than that which Onesimus or Paul faced, but no less real, no less no less countercultural, and certainly no less costly. Philemon was called upon to respond out of type, against all conventional wisdom; to do something which surely would have set a dangerous precedent in the community, cost him money and prestige, and probably made him unpopular. He could not have known ahead of time, back when he became a Christian, that transformation was going to look and feel and be like this.

So what do you suppose he did? How do you suppose he responded? Would he have focused only on the potential loss and counted it too costly? We’ll have to use our imaginations again, since we have no Second Letter to Philemon. And so maybe the place to start is to ask ourselves, how would WE respond? How DO we respond to the challenges of discipleship that come our way? Do we embrace the costly transformation?

Or are our arms already filled with other things?

© Grace and Holy Trinity Cathedral