Hilton Head Island, SC – July 16, 2017
The Chapel Without Walls
Deuteronomy 15:12-15, 23:15-16; Philemon 1-10
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – I appeal to you for my child, Onesimus, whose father I have become in my imprisonment. – Philemon 10 (RSV)
Paul’s letter to Philemon is the third-shortest book in the New Testament. It isn’t a book, really; it’s a letter, an epistle, a mere email, if you will, two thousand years before there were emails. Philemon is so short that there are no chapters. There are only verses, twenty-five of them, to be exact. When I announced that I would be reading “Philemon 1-10,” your heart may have skipped a beat, or three, imagining that you would be subjected to listening to ten full chapters of holy writ. Holy cow! But since there are no chapters, only verses, you just heard 40% of an entire New Testament “book.” And you survived it, no less.
In seventy-eight years, I have heard Philemon used as the scriptural basis for a sermon only once. As I recall, it must have been in 1956 or 1957. For a few years back then, I attended the National Council of Presbyterian Men convention in the Palmer House Hotel in Chicago with my father and other men from the Christ Presbyterian Church of Madison, Wisconsin. Those meetings were highly inspiring. The speakers were excellent, the convention themes were carefully chosen, and the singing was very enthusiastic. Not excellent, technically, but very enthusiastic.
The man who preached two or three sermons, using the letter to Philemon as his choice of scripture, was Professor Addison Leitch of Pittsburgh Seminary. One time our own John McCreight happened to mention to me that Addison Leitch was his professor of New Testament studies when he was in seminary. I told him that I remembered Ad Leitch’s sermons about Paul’s letter to Philemon. I confess I don’t recall anything specific the esteemed professor said, but I never forgot that he used Philemon, which, as I said, was the first and only time up until now I heard any preacher use this fascinating, very personal, and very short epistle. And I’m going to do three Philemon sermons in this short, very personal, series of sermons.
When Paul wrote the letter to his friend Philemon, Paul was under house arrest in Rome. That arrest would eventually lead to Paul’s execution, but he could not know it at the time.
The letter begins with a typically Pauline-type greeting: “Paul, a prisoner for Jesus Christ and Timothy our brother, to Philemon our beloved fellow worker, and Apphia our sister and Archippus our fellow soldier, and the church in your house: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ” (verses 1-3).
From this opening sentence we learn two major things. First, Timothy also was with Paul. Paul later wrote at least two letters to Timothy while he was still in prison. The early Church eventually also included them in the New Testament. They are certainly more familiar to us than Philemon. Furthermore, Paul wrote this letter not only to Philemon, but to other Christians living in the city of Colossae, a town in Asia Minor, “Little Asia,” or what now is modern-day Turkey. If you read the New Testament from the Book of Acts onward, you know that Paul was the Jewish convert to Christianity who became the apostle to the Gentiles, while Peter and the other Jewish apostles concentrated their missionary efforts on their fellow Jews. Everyone cited in the opening sentence of this letter has a Greek name: Philemon, Apphia, and Archippus, as does everyone in the next to last verse – Epaphras, Aristarchus, and Demas, along with – to us – the much better known Mark and Luke, Markos and Lucas.
Secondly, we learn that Philemon had, as Paul said to him in this letter, a “church in your house.” There were no church buildings in New Testament times. Instead, churches met in people’s homes. Church buildings probably did not come into existence until late in the second century or well into the third century. So we may deduce from this letter that Philemon was perhaps the principal leader of the Christian community in Colossae.
Proper New Testament study requires a good bit of “reading between the lines.” Much of it is deduction, because many things are left unsaid. Paul also wrote his letter to the Colossians while he was under house arrest in Rome. In the fourth chapter, verses 7 through 9, he mentions Philemon’s slave, Onesimus, although he does not identify him as a slave, or as the slave of Philemon. Only in the letter he wrote to Philemon does Paul refer to that dicey situation. Paul also said that a man named Tychicus, a friend of both Paul and Philemon, would personally deliver the letter to the Christians at Colossae, along with this private letter to Philemon. In those days there was no United States Postal Service, nor a postal service for any nation anywhere. Letters got delivered only in person by somebody to somebody. There was no alternative method.
With that as a background, we come to the nub of the reason why Paul wrote this letter. During the short time Paul was in Colossae, Philemon allowed his slave Onesimus to join the other Christians who worshipped in Philemon’s home. (This is a deduction; it is never overtly stated.) As a result, Onesimus became a Christian himself. And after that happened, Onesimus ran away from his master, and went to Rome, where he found Paul, who by then was a prisoner under the jurisdiction of the Roman Empire. Paul’s preaching persuaded Onesimus to become a Christian, and Onesimus decided to flee to Paul when he ran away. So Paul wrote to Philemon, “I Paul, an ambassador and now a prisoner also for Jesus Christ, I appeal to you for my child Onesimus, whose father I have become” (Philemon 9-10).
Is this a sticky wicket, or what? Philemon permitted Onesimus to attend worship in the church which met in his house in Colossae. Onesimus quickly was converted to Christianity because of that. Then, when Paul moved on, Onesimus ran away to find him. Runaway slaves were no doubt as unpopular with their masters in first-century Asia Minor as they were in the nineteenth-century American South. Wars could be fought over such issues, and the worst war in which our nation was ever engaged was fought largely over the “peculiar institution” of slavery. It didn’t begin because of slavery, but that was the main disagreement over which the war was finally resolved. Over six hundred thousand Americans died in the Civil War, more than twice as many as died in World Wars I and II combined. And slavery became the Number One issue.
But why on earth would Philemon ever have allowed Onesimus to attend the church that met in Philemon’s house? Paul doesn’t tell us. I suspect Philemon did it because he was positively disposed to Onesimus. Perhaps he even felt great affection for Onesimus. Many Southern slave owners felt a deep affection for their slaves, despite the painful fact that they owned them. Certainly not all felt that way, but many did. Slavery was widely or rather narrowly accepted as a social institution in most societies through most of human history up until the nineteenth century, when it was abolished nearly everywhere. But it was abolished at a far greater cost in every sense in America than anywhere else on earth. America does many things in big, bold, brash ways.
Earlier I read two passages from the Book of Deuteronomy about slavery. If any Hebrew owned a Hebrew slave, he was to free that person after six years, giving him provisions and food for his survival in his liberation(15:12-15). Non-Hebrew slaves they could keep for life, but not Hebrew slaves. The Hebrews had been slaves themselves in Egypt, and God commanded Hebrews to free their Hebrew slaves after a specified number of years. It is odd, but also oddly humane.
Astonishingly, Deuteronomy declares that runaway slaves who came to live in the household of any of the people of Israel were not to be returned to their masters. Whether these were Hebrew or non-Hebrew slaves it doesn’t specify. They were to remain in that household as a treasured member of the family (23:15-16). The slave could not ever become a slave again.
So here was the apostle Paul, who had a runaway slave living with him under house arrest in Rome, and he wrote a letter to the slave’s owner in Colossae, asking him to allow the slave to stay with Paul. Personal situations don’t get much more dicey than that.
Last Tuesday I returned from a 4600-mile homiletic and book-peddling road trip. Three weeks ago today I preached in a church I served forty years ago, two weeks ago I preached in a church I served twenty years ago, and last Sunday I preached in a church I served fifty years ago. Along the way I talked to scores of old friends, and heard scores of personal stories. In the midst of this giant odyssey I also attended the sixtieth anniversary of my high school class graduation.
I heard the story of a woman I knew and admired in one of those churches. She told a few of us at a small brunch gathering that she was adopted. Not long ago she tried to locate her birth mother, which she managed to do. Many people who are adopted want to locate their birth parents, but others do not. The same is true in reverse for the birth parents. She learned that her birth mother was a Jewish woman who survived the Holocaust. At first the mother was willing to meet her daughter, but then she decided against it. So now the daughter must wonder for herself what it was like for her to live in the Nazi slave labor camps and the death camps. She understands her mother’s decision, but she is saddened by it and by her unanswered questions. A dicey situation.
A close friend from high school and college married another close friend from high school and college. They have had a long and committed marriage. As the years have gone on, however, she has become psychologically and existentially more isolated. Now she is almost a recluse, and he has been required essentially to create a life for himself in the outside world without her. Until the last few years I assumed they never came to any of our class reunions because neither of them wanted to do so, but now I know it’s because she doesn’t want to see anybody, and he doesn’t want to come by himself and have explain that. No one can play the game of life without encountering sticky wickets. Both those dear people are to be commended for making accommodations to one another over more than fifty years of marriage. But still, it has become an increasingly dicey situation for both of them.
Before the reunion, I called many classmates to urge them to come to the class clambake, because it may be our last one. I was surprised to learn how many classmates or their spouses have varying degrees of dementia. At ages 77 or 78, that shouldn’t be surprising, but nonetheless, it is. A very dicey and also a very inevitable situation. The longer we live, the more likely we are to be afflicted by dementia. It is a statistical and medical fact.
The day before the first event of our reunion, I called another couple from our class, hoping that they were in Madison and that I might stop to visit them wherever they were. She answered the phone, and said that her husband had wakened in the night at their home in the far west, declaring that he was dying. They were scheduled to fly to Madison that day, but he said a voice told him not to go. When I returned home, I called to see how he is doing. She said that he soon rallied, and now he is doing as well as can be expected. Like so many other couples at the reunion, they represent the highest affirmation of the wedding vows. To be “a loving and faithful husband (or wife), in plenty and in want, in joy and in sorrow, in sickness and in health, as long as we both shall live”: they certainly have admirably accomplished that. But in theirs as in all marriages, many dicey situations inevitably have emerged.
I had phoned a longtime close friend who was a high school and college classmate. He was planning to come to the reunion, but he didn’t show up. So I called him again. He said he and his wife were taking care of their grandson in order to give the boy’s parents a break. When he was six months old, the Mayo Clinic diagnosed their grandson with a rare neuromuscular disease which has rendered him unable to understand anything or to communicate with anyone. He is alive in a living death. Now he is ten years old, and Grandpa and Grandma were taking care of him to give Mom and Dad a breather. A dicey situation, by any definition.
“I thank my God always when I remember you in my prayers,” Paul wrote to Philemon, “because I hear of your love and of the faith which you have toward the Lord Jesus and all the saints” (Philemon, vs. 4-5). Paul, ever the ecclesiastical politician, begins by flattering his friend. Philemon’s runaway slave is with him, and Paul feels very close to Onesimus. “I, Paul, appeal to you for my child, Onesimus, whose father I have become in my imprisonment” (v. 10).
There are some situations which are so complicated and/or convoluted that there is no clear or easy way to resolve them. Instead, they simply must somehow be lived through, as painful and unpredictable as that may be. Social convention, Roman law, and first-century morality required Paul to return Onesimus to his master. Nevertheless the wily old apostle asked his Colossian colleague to step outside the bounds of law and custom to permit a runaway slave to attend to the needs of a prisoner who before long would be find himself on a Roman cross, just as the one he called Lord and Savior also ended up on a Roman cross. There was no easy way out of this mess. Paul knew it, Philemon knew it, and Onesimus surely knew it. But it didn’t prevent Paul from making this astonishing and even outlandish request anyway.
There is no one who lives beyond childhood who can manage to escape multitudes of dicey situations. Therefore the question is this: How do we get through it?
God knows all of us, and He cares equally for all of us. No one is ever outside the loving kindness of El Elohe Yisroel, God, the God of Israel. Nothing escapes the providential concern of the God who created us. God never promised us carefree lives, but He does promise us His unfailing care of us in the midst of our challenges and dilemmas. Many dicey situations can have only messy endings. But that does not mean God is not there. It may simply mean that God is there in the uncertainty and the messiness: guiding, upholding, supporting, and comforting us.
God sent one among us who gives us hope and assurance and inspiration. But if we suppose that God miraculously resolves all of life’s trials and dilemmas, we need only look at the life of Jesus to realize the misperception of such an unwise rose-tinted view of life. Jesus lived largely, and perhaps exclusively, with dicey situations for his entire existence. Nonetheless, we have come to believe that Christ is made the sure foundation, Christ the head and cornerstone. Let us praise the God who sent Christ Jesus, and Jesus, the Christ whom He sent.