Rev. Dr. Jared Michelson—Year C Proper 18

Anthony: Let’s get to it. Let’s move to our first text of the month. It’s Philemon 1:1-21. I’ll be reading from the New Revised Standard Version, updated edition. It is a Revised Common Lectionary passage for Proper 18 in Ordinary Time, September 7, and it reads,

Paul, a prisoner of Christ Jesus, and Timothy our brother, To our beloved coworker Philemon, ² to our sister Apphia, to our fellow soldier Archippus, and to the church in your house: ³ Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.⁴ I thank my God always when I mention you in my prayers, ⁵ because I hear of your love for all the saints and your faith toward the Lord Jesus. ⁶ I pray that the partnership of your faith may become effective as you comprehend all the good that we share in Christ. ⁷ I have indeed received much joy and encouragement from your love, because the hearts of the saints have been refreshed through you, my brother.⁸ For this reason, though I am more than bold enough in Christ to command you to do the right thing, ⁹ yet I would rather appeal to you on the basis of love—and I, Paul, do this as an old man and now also as a prisoner of Christ Jesus. ¹⁰ I am appealing to you for my child, Onesimus, whose father I have become during my imprisonment. ¹¹ Formerly he was useless to you, but now he is indeed useful to you and to me. ¹² I am sending him, that is, my own heart, back to you. ¹³ I wanted to keep him with me so that he might minister to me in your place during my imprisonment for the gospel, ¹⁴ but I preferred to do nothing without your consent in order that your good deed might be voluntary and not something forced. ¹⁵ Perhaps this is the reason he was separated from you for a while, so that you might have him back for the long term, ¹⁶ no longer as a slave but more than a slave, a beloved brother—especially to me but how much more to you, both in the flesh and in the Lord. ¹⁷ So if you consider me your partner, welcome him as you would welcome me. ¹⁸ If he has wronged you in any way or owes you anything, charge that to me. ¹⁹ I, Paul, am writing this with my own hand: I will repay it. I say nothing about your owing me even your own self. ²⁰ Yes, brother, let me have this benefit from you in the Lord! Refresh my heart in Christ. ²¹ Confident of your obedience, I am writing to you, knowing that you will do even more than I ask.

So, Jared, I wanted to ask you if you were preaching, proclaiming this text to a congregation, what would be the focus of your heralding?

Jared: There’s loads of different methods that people have for preaching, ways that they organize a sermon. And I don’t think there’s any right one right way or wrong way. And obviously any kind of method like that becomes formulaic can be really unhelpful. And I think you want to be guided by the text itself, not by your method. Nonetheless, sometimes it does help to have something to help organize your thinking a bit.

And for me, one of the things I try to do, especially because when I do preach in St. Andrews, it is to a very diverse audience. It’s not … I can’t assume that people are interested in the gospel, that they accept the authority of scripture. And I feel even in that, to me, the first thing you want to say is you want to earn your right to be heard.

And in this text, I feel like in that sense, it’s very easy because it raises this just profound existential question. Paul is writing to Philemon asking him to accept back this runaway slave, Onesimus, and it raises these questions: Is Paul somehow endorsing slavery? Is he, even if he seems to be appealing on Onesimus’ behalf, but is he in so doing, is he somehow accepting the institution? Does this mean Christianity is pro-slavery? What do we do about the fact that at times Christians in the past were pro-slavery?

So, to me, I think that that’s right where I would go. And I think this passage, when we read it in context, I think it just has an incredibly liberatory message far from — this is a very controversial issue, but I’ll just jump right in — far from endorsing the institution of slavery, in verse 8 and 9, Paul says basically, I could just tell you to do the right thing.

In other words, Philemon, the right thing to do is to release Onesimus. That’s not in doubt. This is someone that is following in the way of Jesus. The question is, how do we move towards this vision of justice? And what I think we find in the New Testament is a text that is not laying out a political vision for society.

For example, when Paul instructs people in Romans 13 to obey the emperor, do we take that and say, “Ah, what this means is Paul is endorsing a politics that has an emperor and he’s opposed to democracy?” No, that, that’s not the sort of text Romans is. Paul isn’t giving his ideal account of how the government should be set up. He’s saying, given the situation you find yourself in, how can you behave in a way that reflects the ethics of the kingdom of God?

And that’s very much what I see Paul doing here as well. He’s not endorsing the institution of slavery. Again, he’s saying, I could tell you the right thing to do. But he’s actually appealing to a deeper motivation. He’s basically saying if you understood the gospel, if you understood the fullness of what you’ve received in Jesus, then this issue would resolve itself. You would realize that what you have here is a brother, and you would have to think through, how do I treat this other in light of their status as a beloved child of God? There is still something provocative for us, though, here, if I can keep going, Anthony. Is that all right?

Anthony: Please. You’re on a roll, man. Let’s go.

Jared: What is provocative about it is that we would like Paul to proceed differently. We would think, “Paul, this slaveholder is an evil, wicked person. Why would you possibly say to him, respond to his sin of slaveholding, in this roundabout way that appeals to the gospel of Jesus Christ rather than just exposing his utter wickedness?”

And the truth is, I understand that feeling, there’s something absolutely right about our modern reaction to this text, which lives in a culture that has been I think, informed by the ethic of the gospel and that sees slavery for the horror and the wickedness that it is. And yet what is so beautiful about the gospel is that it meets all of us where we are.

In other words, where the gospel meets the slaveholder in this culture is not at all endorsing their slaveholding, but is nonetheless trying to restore and free the slave, while also redeeming the slaveholder. And so, the challenge of this text is we oftentimes wish that Paul had responded to the slaveholders of his day much more harshly.

And yet, do we want the same for us? Do we think that if God looked at our own wickedness and our own brokenness and the things that we as a culture are totally blind to, that we would merit a different response? I doubt that.

I remember a good friend of mine recently — we were going through a really difficult situation. Someone had made a big mistake that was in our community. And they said to me, it feels like we are free in the church to say we’re sinners but we’re not actually free to commit a bad sin.

In other words, it’s absolutely fine if you get up in front of heaven and you say I’ve sinned in all sorts of ways and state it with generalities and vagueness, but as soon as you say something you’ve done and it is something that is destructive and that is harmful and that hurts another person, we suddenly don’t want people to get grace anymore. We want to go straight in with the law.

Anthony: Sure.

Jared: And so, part of what I think is scandalous about Philemon … look, part of it is it’s a difficult text. I absolutely recognize that. … But part of it is that I think it is a way of being utterly opposed to slavery, that is nonetheless opposing slavery with a gospel message and a call to what’s sometimes called evangelical repentance.

I don’t know if you’ve heard that phrase before, that the reason we repent is not just because of the law — though it’s not opposed to that — but it’s because of such a profound realization of the grace or the gospel that we’ve received. So, that’s part of the message that I see here. Yes. Part of the reason it’s scandalous to us is because we live in a culture that now where slavery is no longer accepted at all, which is a wonderful good thing, which I think again, we could talk about is partially produced by the gospel. Indeed, Nietzsche in his criticism of religion called Christianity a slave’s religion. He saw that it was a religion, when it says there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free; it was a religion that was from the beginning deeply for the downtrodden and the oppressed. And that is part of what has transformed our society.

But again, the other reason I think we struggle with it is because when people actually do real sins, they don’t just talk about sin in vague general terms. We oftentimes rush to want to see them destroyed and pushed down, not redeemed from within by the gospel.

Anthony: Yeah, it’s powerful what you said. And I’m just thinking back to the very beginning when you said, when you proclaim the gospel, it’s often with people that are diverse in the group — there’s diversity there, but there’s also those that don’t necessarily believe in the authority of scripture.

Jared: Absolutely.

Anthony: And so, a text like this is very appealing because it really does get to the heart of the human condition. Not just slavery, but like you said, sin — whatever sin looks like in a person’s life. And it’s powerful to see Paul’s approach with the brother here.

And to me, it is it just shows how forgiveness, reconciliation — it’s all a part of the healing process. Which really brings me to the next question, because I’ve heard some people say that this appeal that Paul makes, it puts forgiveness and justice at odds. But is that really the case? What’s going on here?

Jared: Yeah. I think that’s another huge issue, isn’t it? I think we know forgiveness and justice aren’t at odds, and part of the reason is because, again, if we just ask, do we think that what would be the best thing for a slaveholder is that they would be forgiven and they would be allowed to continue in their slaveholding?

I think the answer is obviously no, primarily, and firstly, because God cares for the good of the slave, but secondarily because God cares for the good of the slaveholder. There’s a quote from Herbert McCabe, who is a Cambridge Dominican theologian, and he said, “Look, sin always hurts the other.  Sin always has harmful effects on the other, but what makes sin sin, what defines sin as sin, is actually what it does to the perpetrator. And what he means by this is, he’s not saying it’s more important, like the sometimes the bigger deal, so to speak, is what sin does to the other person.

But you can accidentally hurt another person. If you accidentally performed some action and then you intentionally perform the same action and it had the same result on the other person. One of those would just be a terrible accident. But the other that was intentional and deliberate would be sin.

So, if the effect on the other is the same what makes a difference? What makes one just a terrible accident? And the other a sin? And the difference is that sin mars, the soul; it destroys the sinner. And so, when you look at this all throughout the Christian tradition and then some — it has this long discussion on how in order for God to be merciful to the sinner he has to be just, because the best thing for us is to be freed from our sin which makes us less than fully human.

The tragedy for the slaveholder is yes, first and foremost what they’ve done to the other, but it’s also how they are marring and defacing their own humanity. This is a beautiful person made in the image of God who has somehow become so distorted that they can hold another in bondage. So, the way that God’s mercy works itself out in our life is actually through justice, through God moving us towards a more humane way of living, which is ultimately for the good of the world and for the good of the other, absolutely.

But it’s also equally for our own good and were God to give a kind of mercy that wasn’t transformative, a “cheap grace,” as Bonhoeffer said, that didn’t make us different, that would be a profound lack of kindness and mercy to us because it would be leaving us trapped in a dehumanizing way of living.

Anthony: Now you’re meddling because … and I absolutely agree that God loves the perpetrator just as much as the victim, and he loves the perpetrator so much that he is just. And confronts him. And but boy, we just want … smite the perpetrator, Almighty smiter! That’s our desire.

But that person is an image bearer of God. The Imago Dei is there and sometimes we forget how that’s harming that image within them, that God is still for them, but he is so for them that he is going to confront the sin. And thanks be to God. That is kindness. It is kindness to show compassion in such a way that faces up against that which would harm another. That’s what good news is to the other. “Stop it!” And that’s what Paul is telling Philemon here.

Jared: Absolutely. Absolutely. We can sometimes have this kind of schizophrenic vision of God. I certainly did — I could tell a long story about that — where we think that God has two sides. The one side is loving and good, and the bad side is justice and wrath. And that orthodoxy means balancing those two sides.

And I think that is, yeah, I think that’s a kind of — I don’t want to overstate it here — but I do think that’s in danger of being a kind of pagan view of God.

Anthony: Yeah.

Jared: That God’s, as the Puritans talked about, God’s justice or his wrath is just the strange side of his love. It’s not something different. It’s not something in competition. It’s his utter and decided will for the flourishing of all he has made. And his settled opposition to what is defacing and dehumanizing and destructive.  It’s a way his goodness expresses itself for our good.

Anthony: Well said, my friend.