Hilton Head Island, SC – July 30, 2017
The Chapel Without Walls
Philemon 1-14; 15-25
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text –Perhaps this is why he was parted from you for a while, that you might have him back forever. – Philemon 15 (RSV)
It takes a lot of chutzpah to try to draw three sermons out of a New Testament letter that almost no one has ever heard of and over whose title there is no unanimity of pronunciation and that also has only twenty-five verses. Furthermore, if a preacher were going to try to pull this off, why would he wait fifty-two years before attempting it?
To that question I have a ready answer. I never thought of doing it before. If I had, I likely would have done it. I think this series happened serendipitously because of a conversation with my good friend and our collective good friend, John McCreight. He happened to mention Dr. Addison Leitch, his New Testament professor. As I said previously, that reminded me that I had heard Dr. Leitch preach a sermon on Philemon 60+ years ago. So I re-read the letter to Philemon, and decided it warranted three sermons.
Paul’s letter to Philemon is unlike anything else Paul wrote that is included in the New Testament. In virtually every other piece he wrote, he was the epitome of confidence and certainty. A timid soul Paul was not. What he said he said with conviction, even boastfulness. “But whatever anyone dares to boast of, …I also boast of that. Are the Hebrews? So am I. Are they Israelites? So am I. Are they descendants of Abraham? So am I. Are they servants of Christ? I am a better one” (II Cor. 11:21-23). Humility does not ooze from those statements.
In the letter to the Philippians, Paul expresses similar sentiments. “If any other man thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh” (i.e., in his genetic pedigree) “I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews, as to the law a Pharisee” (Phil. 3:4-5).
But when Paul wrote to his Colossian friend Philemon, he wasn’t feeling nearly so certain about everything. He was under house arrest, or maybe even in prison, in Rome. He was only a year or two, or perhaps a few months, from being executed. Besides that, he was considerably older than when he wrote his earlier letters. Older people sometimes lose their confidence and convictions and clarity. Thing may become more of a muddle to us as we get older.
That comes through in the letter to Philemon. To reiterate in one long sentence, Philemon owned a slave named Onesimus who ran away from his master and found Paul in Rome, and Onesimus was very helpful to Paul, and Paul knew he should send Onesimus back to Philemon, but that was a very hard decision for him to make, and he simply didn’t know what he should do. This epistle is a kind of stream-of-consciousness examination of the Grand Old Man of the Early Church wondering what on earth and what in heaven’s name he should do about Onesimus and Philemon and a dicey situation and a social conundrum. Paul wanted Onesimus to stay with him but he knew he should him back to his master, because both law and custom required it.
After the opening sentences of the letter, Paul flatters his friend Philemon. “I thank God always when I remember you in my prayers” (v. 4). He probably did that in order to follow it with this: “Accordingly, though I am bold enough in Christ to command you to do what is required, yet for love’s sake I prefer to appeal to you…I appeal to you for my child Onesimus, whose father I have become in my imprisonment” (vs. 8-10).
What’s going on here? Here’s what I think this means. The old Paul, the former Paul, is inclined to demand that Philemon allow Onesimus to stay with him. But the new Paul, the less-confident Paul, thinks that isn’t really right. So he tells Philemon he is sending Onesimus back, but not without some more literary sparring.
Haven’t we all been there? We too have encountered situations where we were not certain morally and ethically what we should do, and we dithered back and forth. This issue is not one of the most profound matters ever addressed in holy writ, but it is a common enough circumstance in everyone’s life that it may assist us to ruminate about it. Then, when we experience sticky wickets like the one that confronted Paul, we may be better prepared for how to deal with them.
For example, for years you have been estranged from a member of your family. You communicate when it is absolutely necessary, but the distance is there; it persists. Is it better to try to restore the relationship, or will that only make it worse? Long ago a beloved friend crushed your feelings by something that person said or did. Should you forgive the offender and try to resolve it, or is it wiser to let sleeping dogs lie?
The previous Paul would have told Philemon what he was going to do. The older Paul had lost much of his confidence and certainly and clarity of thought. What to do; what to do? “Perhaps this is why (Onesimus) was parted from you for a while, that you might have him back forever, no longer as a slave, but more than a slave, as a brother” (vs. 15-16). If I send Onesimus back to you, Paul wonders aloud to Philemon, will you treat him with love and respect, or will you be angry with him for running away, and therefore mistreat him?
“So if you consider me your partner, receive him as you would receive me. If he has wronged you at all, or owes you anything, charge that to my account” (whatever that might mean, and we don’t know and can’t know). “I Paul, write this with my own hand, I will repay it – to say nothing of your owing me even your own self” (vs. 17-19)).
It is the old Paul warring within himself with the new Paul. He tries to lay a guilt trip on Philemon for wanting his slave returned to him. But Paul says he will return Onesimus, and if Philemon lost any money or income because Onesimus ran away, Paul will repay it --- even though he tells Philemon that Philemon owes his very life to Paul.
Did Onesimus go back to Philemon in Colossae? Did the slave insist on staying with Paul? Did Philemon receive his slave warmly, and with affection, or was he furious that Onesimus had run away? How does this story end?
We don’t know. We shall never know. But a hint is given in our sermon text for today. “Perhaps that is why (Onesimus) was parted from you for a while, that you might have him back forever” (v. 15). In saying this, Paul was suggesting that in the providence of God, Onesimus might at last live up to his name, which, in Greek, means Useful or Beneficial. If Philemon heeded what Paul wrote to him, he would accept his slave back with generosity and grace rather than with animosity and a grudge. And on the basis of what Paul may have said to Onesimus to prepare him for his return to his master, Onesimus may have positively re-evaluated his service to someone we may trust was a loving Christian master. But we don’t know how it ended.
We do know this, however: Sometimes difficult problems somehow seem mysteriously to work themselves out. We are stymied, and the world seems stymied, but in the providence of God, God silently moves behind the scenes through the actions and decisions of mortal and fallible people, until, as the old Shaker hymn declares, “turning, turning, it comes round right.” Unforeseen solutions manifest themselves where we thought no solutions would ever arise.
A week ago we went to see the highly acclaimed new movie Dunkirk. A few people here are old enough to have remembered what happened seventy-seven years ago at the Belgian beach community of Dunkirk on the English Channel, just north of the French border. Everyone here learned about it at some point along the way. But let me refresh your memory about the extraordinary deliverance of hundreds of thousands of British and French soldiers in May,1940.
You will remember that Hitler’s Blitzkrieg conquered Poland in a few days in early September of 1939. The Fuhrer then turned his attention westward to the Low Countries, Holland and Belgium. The Dutch and Belgians were no match for the well-trained and well equipped German army, and in no time they collapsed. In the early spring of 1940, the allied British and French forces tried to stem the German advance in northern France, on some of the same battlefields where World War I had been fought over twenty years earlier. Eventually the Wehrmacht drove almost half a million allied troops onto the long, wide beach at Dunkirk. Belgium. It appeared as though nothing could prevent all of them from being captured. Were that to happen, the war would be over after it had barely begun, and history would have turned out far differently than it did.
The Royal Navy was in no position to rescue that many soldiers in as brief a time as they had to attempt the rescue. Therefore a call went out to English civilian owners of any kind of vessel which might be utilized to cross the Channel. They were asked to volunteer to go and retrieve as many soldiers as possible. Unnumbered hundreds of Brits responded to the call, making the twenty-five mile crossing in choppy seas. It was the strangest naval flotilla of commercial and private boats ever patched together in human history. And they rescued nearly all the stranded soldiers, the better part of four hundred thousand of them.
How did it happen? It occurred because one man, Der Furher, Adolf Hitler, dithered a little too long. His generals desperately wanted to close the pincer operation and capture the entire contingent of helpless soldiers standing forelornly on the Dunkirk beach. Nevertheless the brilliant but erratic Hitler hesitated, until it was too late.
“Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all of the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and with growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender.”
Who, at the beginning of 1940, could have imagined that the ramrod-stiff, unbending Neville Chamberlain should resign as Prime Minister, and that a short, rotund, politically-ostracized-for-a-quarter-of-a-century Winston Spenser Churchill should become the new Prime Minister? It was an unforeseen solution to a hopeless situation. Who would have imagined that Adolf Hitler, the psychopathic magician who led Germany out of an unimaginable morass of inflation and economic chaos would lose his nerve when he had the entire world in the palm of his hand? It was an unforeseen and unforeseeable solution. Who, in the wildest of dreams, could have supposed on the last day of April in 1940 that within several days the Royal Navy and an enormous armada of pleasure craft, fishing boats, and commercial vessels would cross the surging surface of the English Channel, saving two entire armies who were inevitable cannon fodder or pawns to be traded for an allied declaration of unconditional surrender? It was an unforeseen and unforeseeable solution to an utterly impossible situation.
If you think movies should be light and happy from beginning to end, don’t go to Dunkirk. If you believe that great victories can be won at little cost, don’t go to Dunkirk. But if you like to ponder how history is eventually woven from the threads of horrible chaos and unavoidable bloodshed, see this awesome, awful, often very loud movie.
I know a woman who was devastated when the man of her dreams abandoned her days before they were to be married. She thought she would never survive the heartache and the heartbreak. But she met a man whom she later married, and she said he was even better than the man she thought she was going to marry, and she always believed she would have been delighted with him. It was an unforeseen solution to a particularly painful problem.
A woman from India named Swapna Augustine was born without arms. She has gained fame and fortune by means of beautiful and exquisite paintings she fashions by holding a paintbrush between her toes. It was an unforeseen solution to an insurmountable obstacle.
In October of 1962 Nikita Khrushchev blinked, and the time when the world came closest to nuclear was over in a matter of minutes. Given the terrifying suspense of those days, it was an unforeseen solution.
On a cold day in 1989, the people of East Berlin and West Berlin tore down a wall which had separated them for twenty-eight years. It was an unforeseen solution to a dangerously thorny problem which had confronted the whole world for nearly three decades.
The GOP failure to produce anything resembling successful legislation to repeal or replace the Affordable Care Act might conceivably and finally result in a system of universal health care for every American. Until the United States Senate gives the final coup de grace to the lengthy and ultimately doomed effort to obliterate the admittedly flawed and faulty system of health care now in place, it is unclear what might happen. But, as a famous man once said, this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it might be the end of the beginning. Reasonable health care for everyone at a reasonable cost might yet transpire.
There are times we can see nothing that will ease our roadblocks and logjams. And then something happens.
God moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform. But usually, and perhaps always, He inspires us to do what He wants done, rather than directly doing it Himself. That is what the providence of God means.
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