Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15; 1 Timothy 6:6-19; Luke 16:19-31
Have you read some of the safety warnings on items you have bought recently?
• On Children’s Cough Medicine: ‘Do not drive a car or operate machinery after taking this medication’ (We could do a lot to reduce the rate of construction accidents if we could just get those 5 year olds with head colds off those bulldozers.)
• On packaging for a clothes iron: ‘Do not iron clothes on body.’ (But wouldn't this save me more time?)
• On a cardboard windshield sun-shade: ‘Warning: Do Not Drive With Sun Shield in Place.’ (But the sun is in my eyes.)
• On alphabet blocks: ‘Not for children. Letters may be used to construct words, phrases and sentences that may be deemed offensive.’ (Doh!)
The irony is that for all of us for whom these warnings are unnecessary, there is somebody who needs these warnings. Sad to say.
Several years ago, a book came out entitled Fifty Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do). The basic premise was that today’s parents tend to be over-protective of their children. Yes, there are dangerous things that should be stayed away from. On the other hand, flirting with danger is how we humans learn about the world and about ourselves.
Confession time. How many of you have used a magnifying glass to ignite paper on fire? How many of you every put a penny on a railroad track? (I know that my mother did that when the President Harding funeral train went through her home town.) How many of you ever used an eraser to remove an ink mark off your skin? (I did that once. It took a long time to heal.) Have any of you ever stuck your tongue to a cold flag pole like Flick did in the movie, “The Christmas Story”?
None of these thing are particularly constructive, but they are fun, especially if you are a kid. Yes, there are a lot of things that shouldn’t be tried at home, And as the automobile ads often note, professional drivers on a closed course. So why not lick a battery and learn about electrical currents? It’s safer than biting an extension cord.
We seem to live in a world with a lot more “don’ts” than “dos.” While some dangers are very real, others are not tainted with the same degree of fear. And it is true that some people are way more klutzy than others. Nevertheless, we are a society raising a generation of timid beings who will ultimately be afraid of their shadows and not willing to venture anything without the ministrations of tort attorney lest the least something not go as expected.
Think about all the things that might never have happened if the don’t-do-it tribe had had their way. Columbus would never have sailed the ocean blue. The Montgolfiers would never have gotten manned hot-air balloons to fly. The Wright brothers would still be pedaling bicycles. Dr. Christian Barnard would never have tried heart transplantation. And Jeremiah would still be sitting in prison wishing he had bought his cousin Hanamel’s property in Anathoth.
A local business person in Waverly once told me that he never turned down an opportunity to buy a piece property that was strategic to the future of his business. The potential might not be for years down the road, but it still couldn’t be ruled out. Opportunities like that, he said, don’t come around a second time. I’m sure that he had to stretch sometimes to seize the opportunity, yet he dared to succeed where others would have said, “I can’t do it.” And he has succeeded.
The prophet Jeremiah, however, isn’t just taking a little risk and exposing himself to a little danger: He’s taking a huge risk when he buys a field during the Chaldean army’s siege of Jerusalem. The prophet is in prison in the middle of all this upset and he takes the unexpected action of purchasing a piece of land in his hometown.
How come Jeremiah says “do” when all the conventional wisdom said “don’t”? The word of the Lord came to Jeremiah through a cousin named Hanamel, saying, “Buy my field in Anathoth in the land of Benjamin, for you are next in line and have a family obligation to purchase it.” (Jeremiah 32:8). Hanamel is offering Jeremiah a piece of land that seems to be worthless because the Chaldeans are about to crush King Zedekiah and the Israelites. Then the Israelite A-Listers will be taken into exile in Babylon, leaving only the wretched poor to fend for themselves in a land of destroyed infrastructure. But Jeremiah jumps at the opportunity — the Lord speaks to him and says, “Houses, fields, and vineyards will again be bought in this land.”
Jeremiah takes a chance and makes a risky investment. Why? Because the Lord has spoken to him. He does a dangerous thing because God has promised that the land of Anathoth has a future, despite all evidence to the contrary.
And sure enough, the people of Anathoth do eventually return, after the exile (Ezra 2:23). God’s Word is revealed to be reliable, trustworthy and true. What looked risky turns out to be right.
Jeremiah is not risk averse. He revels in risk. He takes on Zedekiah, who is like so many other politicians. He’s been in office long enough that he has forgotten what it is to be on the outside of the system. He’s a seat keeper looking after his own interests rather than a seat holder who understands the community responsibility of the position he is in. Zedekiah is risk averse because he can’t change the way he is doing things, no matter how many people tell him that he is heading for disaster. “Read my lips: Stay the course.” Jerusalem is under siege; the Chaldeans are banging at the city gates. They are starving the citizenry. The future looks pretty bleak.
Jeremiah has been the chief internal thorn in Zedekiah’s side. All of Jeremiah’s words have tried to alert the king to the impending doom and to get him to change his ways so that God would save the people. Jeremiah might as well have been talking to himself. The king didn’t listen. Jeremiah bought a pot and shattered it in front of the people saying, “You are broken beyond repair.” That was the last straw for the king. He had Jeremiah arrested, thrown in prison, and condemned to death. If the end of Judah was bleak, Jeremiah’s end was bleaker.
That’s when he agrees to buy the property in Anathoth. Buying the property has nothing to do with the present. It has everything to do with the future. Buying the property has nothing to do with Jeremiah. It has everything to do with God.
The destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of the people may mean the end of the nation of Israel as it was then understood. That destruction did not mean that God had abandoned God’s people nor did it mean that God had lessened God’s intimate connection with them. They will still be God’s people just as much as they were under the old covenant. What’s more is that they will thrive—they will till the soil, marry and bear children, worship God and celebrate together.
Buying the property has everything to do with the future and has everything to do with God. Jeremiah knows God is present and working in the world. This is in spite of and because of all he and the people have been through. He knows that each of them, limited and flawed as they are, participate as integral parts of something that transcends them utterly. We call this faith. This is not faith in the sense of declaring to be true something that cannot be proved through the physical senses. Rather, it is the recognition that meaninglessness, while not to be ignored, totally lacks the power to engage a situation in a creative way. It cannot obliterate the power of being, which is the gift of God.
By purchasing the land in the midst of Jerusalem's destruction by Babylon and while he was imprisoned, Jeremiah defines what it means to have faith in God’s future. He attests to his belief that God is present even in catastrophe. He declares that meaninglessness or non-being will not triumph.
That’s Jeremiah’s message to us when we suffer from hopelessness and despair of unexpected setbacks, when we look at a health choice in front of us, when we look at the people who would be our leaders, when we despair about how small, how aging, how vulnerable we are as a congregation, as a denomination, as a world faith community. Out of the depths of Jeremiah’s prison cell he declares that out of the chaos of change, God’s eternal promises will be fulfilled. Jeremiah bet his bottom dollar on it—he went ahead and purchased a field right in the middle of the turmoil!
What field is God offering you to buy today? Is it your future witness for a vital congregation in 2030? Is your field one of seeing the gospel taken to the last outposts of the earth? Is it a field that says the message of Christ has things to say alongside all the other religious messages for people to have the right to choose among?
Friends, whatever the field is, buy it!
General resources:
“Living Dangerously,” Homiletics, September 26, 2010.
Sharon Peebles Burch, “Pastoral Perspective - Jeremiah 32:1-3, 6-15,” Feasting on the Word (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010) Year C, vol. 4, 98-102.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright © 2016 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
1 Timothy 2:1-7; Luke 16:1-13; Jeremiah 8:18-9:1
About coffee break time on Thursday morning this week will be the autumnal equinox when the orbit of the earth results in the sun crossing the equator. Day and night will be equal length for one day. We will be halfway between the first day of summer (15 hours of daylight) and the first day of winter (with 9 hours and 21 minutes of daylight). You have probably noticed that the sun has been rising later each morning and setting earlier in the evening.
At 39̊ 20' N latitude Waverly is neither in the tropics or the arctic zone. Nevertheless we do get depressed feelings when the winter days are short and grey. If we lived above the Arctic Circle, we would notice both the never-ending light of mid-summer and the never-ending night of mid-winter.
Psychologists have defined seasonal affective disorder, or SAD, as a depression from the lack of sunlight and the effect that sunlight has the chemistry of the body.
In Finland, March and April are “birthday months.” It is an amusing fact, that far and away, more babies are born in those two months than during any other time of the year. The reason is that people really enjoy themselves during the long, golden days of high summer, which given Finland’s high northern latitudes, lasts for more than 20 hours every day.
The curious thing is that the lowest birth months are July, August and September. Recreation during the bleak weeks of near total darkness in November and December occurs inside but not in the bedroom. It seems that the Finns are particularly susceptible to SAD. For Americans, the highest concentration of SAD people is not in Alaska but in Seattle. So that’s why so much coffee is brewed there! Add to that the near constant drizzle and we would be SAD too.
There is a reason so many northerners go to Florida and Arizona every winter. And it’s not just arthritis.
An acronym is a word made up of the first letters of several words. Any good acronym can stand for a number of things. Before I came to Waverly, the only thing NCR stood for was National Cash Register Company. I had to forget that quickly. Because I live in several levels of the church, I sometimes have to stop and think where I am in order to flesh out an acronym.
SAD, the acronym for Seasonal Affective Disorder, can have a meaning in church language: Spiritual Affective Disorder. SAD churches display all the classic symptoms associated with individuals struggling with the seasonal disorder. SAD churches are lethargic, slow to react to events either within their faith community or in the world around them. This is layered with an underlying sense of anxiety running through everything these churches try to do.
Like individuals, SAD churches have a notoriously low reproduction rate. Every year the number gathered in their pews grows fewer, grayer, frailer. New members aren’t attracted to a SAD congregation, and current members who haven’t been completely spiritually debilitated often flee in order to keep their flickering flame of faith from being snuffed out by the spiritual vacuum around them. SAD is no longer a mainline church malady. It is effecting evangelical Protestantism and Roman Catholicism as well. Big congregations and urban ones are as prone to SAD as are small or rural congregations.
Just as the cause of Season Affective Disorder is a lack of light in a specific spectrum, so, too, churches that suffer Spiritual Affective Disorder do so because they lack a certain type of light in their lives. That light, of course, is the “Light of the World,” Jesus Christ.
Today’s reading from 1 Timothy celebrates the universality of God’s love and God’s redeeming intentions. That divine urge may be universal, but it can be possible only by one thing: the “one mediator between God and humanity, the human Jesus Christ, who gave himself as a payment to set all people free” (vv. 5-6).
What that means is that the church is called to stand out in a darkened world as a life-saving beacon of light, a blazing torch of hope. The church needs to be lit from within by a single source of power – the redemptive love and spirit of Christ.
Academic theology has fixated its thinking on God, has dissected Christ like a chef mincing vegetables, and has shied away from even thinking about where the Spirit comes in. Much of our theological talk keeps God at arms length through abstract words and concepts. Because Paul’s theology is dense, we miss out on the core of his consistent message, which is “Jesus.” Jesus is our all in all.
An African-American Gen-Xer in Chicago started coming to church because he got excited about somebody named Jesus. He told his pastor, “If it weren’t for Jesus, I wouldn’t be a Christian.” Think about that. Sometimes the obvious is in plain sight and we still miss it. The man said that he had encountered numerous followers of Jesus, but all of them were afflicted with SAD. That might explain the T-shirt which proclaims, “Jesus save us ... from some of your followers.”
Dr. Paul says that we don’t have to SAD Christians or SAD churches. We can be transformed into GLAD Christians and GLAD congregations. What does GLAD stand for? God’s Love Always Delights. God’s Love Always Delights. Say that with me, please. God’s Love Always Delights. Again. God’s Love Always Delights.
Don’t take Paul’s word for it. The psalms give ample opportunity to be delighted by God’s love. Here’s a portion of Psalm 113:
God’s glory is higher than the skies!
Who could possibly compare to the Lord our God?
God rules from on high;
he has to come down to even see heaven and earth!
God lifts up the poor from the dirt
and raises up the needy from the garbage pile
to seat them with leaders —
with the leaders of his own people! (113:4-8)
Paul doesn’t tell us to go the Florida. He gives us a prescription in the opening verse of today’s reading: “First of all, then, I ask that requests, prayers, petitions, and thanksgiving be made for all people.” If we are praying, and if we are giving thanks, there is no way we can suffer from SAD!
- Feeling overwhelmed by your problems? Pray for someone else whose burdens are equal to or greater than your own.
- Feeling resentment toward an individual? Give thanks to God for that person, asking God to let him or her be an instrument of growth in your life.
- Feeling alone and in the dark, uncertain where to go next? Pray, asking God to shed the light of divine wisdom in your soul.
- Feeling critical of others? Thank God for the objects of your criticism, and ask God to make them a blessing wherever they go.
- Feeling bitterness toward others who have succeeded where you have failed? Pray for their continued success.
- Feeling impatient with the pace of your spiritual growth? Thank God for your progress so far.
- Feeling unforgiving toward others?
There’s the rub, isn’t it? How can we be GLAD Christians, praying and thanking God, unless we have an attitude of forgiveness? Not just toward others, but towards ourselves. And towards God. Doctors have shown that being unwilling to forgive or being unwilling to be forgiven is more detrimental to health than many physical ailments.
The inability to be forgiven or to forgive someone is like a room darkening shade that prevents the light of Christ from penetrating our lives. If we can roll that shade all the way up we can bathe in the delighting which God’s love always brings. That sounds easy, but we all know how contrary window shades can be. They sometimes need to be nudged and coddled, and dealt with carefully. They can’t be forced. Forgiveness can’t be forced. It must be genuine. But the more there is, the GLADer you can be.
Remember: God’s Love Always Delights. Say it with me again. God’s Love Always Delights.
General Resource:
Homiletics, September 20, 1998.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright © 2016 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
1 Timothy 1:12-17; Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28; Luke 15:1-10
Timothy enjoyed a special relationship with the apostle Paul. Of all of Paul’s correspondence, the Timothy letters are the only personal ones. I am sure that Paul wrote more letters than we have. He didn’t keep carbon copies or PDF files of his letters. And most of the people who received letters from him didn’t file them away. A couple of reads and into the trash basket. Perhaps Timothy valued Paul’s words so much that he hung onto everything he ever received from the apostle. We are fortunate to have these letters. While they were written to Timothy, the letters contain much that any disciple of Christ could benefit from.
Paul and Timothy were close, like father and son, not unlike the spiritual relationships that Paul had with Philemon and Onesimus whom we talked about last week. While Paul had collegial relationships with Barnabas, Epaphras, Silas, Priscilla, Aquila, and others, there is a sense that Paul had raised Timothy into the ministry.
The call to gospel ministry often has been extended through the wisdom and counsel of a pastor who perceived gifts for ministry and the working of the Holy Spirit in a person’s life. Perhaps some of my retired colleagues have had the experience of being an agent of God to direct a person towards ministry. Several people were directly and indirectly key in my own call to ministry.
Paul sensed the deep work of the Spirit in Timothy and prodded him to do more than attend church services. Today many young people who were raised in the church’s teaching head off after college into careers full of a sense that faith is expressed through social action and intellectual curiosity. They have learned to think for themselves and to tease out their beliefs in personal reflection.
That’s one of the reasons there are increasing numbers of “nones” – the people who are spiritual but not religious, who have a strong belief in God but aren’t interested in the institutional church. As a popular motto floating around the internet says, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” They believe deeply in acceptance and inclusion of all people in the social, economic, and political spheres of life, regardless of ages, genders, races, sexual orientations, and abilities. They are caught in a tension of being both passionate about changing their world and paralyzed with anger and fear about the world they are inheriting from their parents and grandparents.
I don’t know if Timothy’s thinking two millennia ago resonates with any of today’s hopes and angst. What I do know is that Paul took him under his spiritual wing and coached and counseled him about faith and life. Nearly thirty years ago theologians Stanley Hauerwas and William Willamon wrote their landmark work, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony. Hauerwas and Willamon unapologetically called for the church to be “a colony of heaven” comprised of Christians who are resident aliens in a strange land. With the disenfranchisement of Protestant Christianity in particular, the church has a rare opportunity for a new, truer Christian faithfulness.
About the same time Alban Institute director Loren Meade said that Christendom was no longer a viable model for the church. Christendom – where church and world were the same thing – had been the church model ever since Emperor Constantine adopted Christianity as the official state religion over 1,500 years ago. The empire devolved into feudal fiefdoms and tribal societies, which in turn gave way to nation states, to superpowers, and to political and economic blocs of nations. Travel and mass communication, now nearly instantaneous, have brought the reality home to every population that religions are no longer regional but global. That means that regions are no longer all one kind of religion. The world has returned to the dynamics of the apostolic age where Christianity is one among many completing religions and faith expressions.
While Waverly may be something of a cultural backwater, the increasingly urbanized world is full of people who rub shoulders and who are searching for living relationships with a deity. They may recognize that god through the eyes and faith of Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, Mormonism, Wicca, or New Age, not to mention the huge variety of Christian expressions ranging from ancient Orthodoxy, to Catholicism, to Protestantism which runs from high-church Anglican to traditional mainline to evangelical to charismatic and pentecostal. The reality of our 2016 world is that it is much more similar to Timothy’s world than it is different.
Paul self-discloses intimate revelations and confessions about his faith. We wonder how Timothy received them and how he responded in his own faith and his day to day living.
There are Pauls and Timothys in today’s church world. Can the Pauls of our time be as open as the first Paul was? Can those people who are fathers and mothers in faith to younger believers share intimately with the Timothys of today, who may be female, non-Caucasian, and for whom English may not be their first language? Can today’s Pauls be vulnerable enough to share their confessions of faith, their personal relationships with God, their questions and doubts, as well as affirmations and celebrations? Leaders need to communicate the gospel to today’s future church through honest, raw sharing. Warmed-over platitudes and stale theological language will never bridge the generations. Today’s Timothys want to know if there is substance behind the ancient language of the church.
Friends, we are the Pauls of this day. Our Timothys may be fifty- and sixty-somethings rather than twenty-somethings. That doesn’t matter. Each of us is being invited to reexamine our language of Christian faith. We aren’t being asked to get rid of it. Rather we are being asked to make it alive and to frame it for twenty-first-century ears. If you think that is hard for you, imagine how hard it is for those of us trained to use traditional theological language.
For example, after a discussion of the parables of the Mustard Seed and the Yeast in Matthew, a young man asked his pastor to explain the kingdom/realm of God in “plain language” and not in “church words.” Pausing and catching her breath, the pastor began describing the organic unfolding of creation and all that is in it, including human beings, as a part of the Divine, as a revelation of the Divine, as the continuing work of the Divine. “Oh,” he replied, “The Oneness of all things. The way we are all connected energetically. I get it.” We all know that the subject is really a lot more complicated than that, but she had opened a door and gained his attention. Pushing the door open further will be the work of many more discussions and a lot of faithful imagining.
Colleague Thom Shuman writes that he heard the account of how a pastor in Indonesia (where there are no sheep) read Jesus’ parable as “Which of you, having a hundred ducks, if one is lost, does not leave the 99 in the rice fields and go searching for the one which is lost.” The pastor put the ancient parable into words that the people would relate to, just as Jesus did.(1)
Twenty-first-century Timothys won’t take the logic that was handed to us when we were their age. I’m sure you remember it: “Because I said so, that’s why.” Today’s Timothys don’t want to be treated like toddlers. They long for personal experiences of the mystery of life and the animating force that they hope lies behind the workings of the creation. They want us to set aside our stony facades of impassiveness and to share with them the joys and the agonies of our faith journeys. They want to hear our doubts as well as our affirmations.
If you and I can offer them this openness, if you and I can welcome them into our faith experiences, today’s Timothys may decide that “church” is the right institution for their world and not a relic from Christianity’s bygone glory days. These Timothys search for wholeness of body, mind, and soul and wholeness of creation which they equate with real salvation. They understand sin as disconnection from wholeness, from the Oneness of the universe, for it means disconnection from their very selves. They have been raised to understand the web of life as it is seen in family systems, ecological systems, and quantum physics. Sin is tearing the web and denying its existence. While they reverence the connectivity of the universe in all its forms, they get caught up in and are wounded by its brokenness just as easily as older generations. They seek ways to be part of the healing process.
You and I are twenty-first-century Pauls. The first Paul challenges us to mentor our Timothys rather than complain about them. Our charge is to listen carefully to them so that together we can participate in experiencing God in Christ Jesus. Our Timothys invite us onto unknown paths of faithful, worshipful living, allowing the Spirit to help us change our “churchy” language into idioms that are recognizable today.
We live in a connected world. Every Facebook post, every web-blog, every social media post, has a “Share” button. Pre-internet Paul would nevertheless have known what to do with a “Share” button. Use it. That’s what he did, long before it became fashionable. He shared Jesus Christ gladly, honestly, lovingly with everyone he met. And he especially did it with Timothy. That’s our calling as well. As today’s Pauls we are called to hit the “Share” button on our faith.
General Sources:
Jane Anne Ferguson, “1 Timothy 1:12-17 - Pastoral Perspective,” Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010) Year C, vol. 4, 62-66.
Robert P. Jones, The Death of White Christian America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2016).
Loren B. Meade, The Once and Future Church (Washington DC: The Alban Institute, 1991).
Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willamon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony (Expanded 25th Anniversary Edition (Nashville: Abindgon Press, 2014)
(1) Thom Shuman, “Re: [Midrash] Opening Comments for Sunday September 11 2016 which is the Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost. Proper 19. Year C,” Wed, Sep 7, 2016 at 12:00 PM.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011
www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright © 2016 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
Philemon 1-21; Jeremiah 18:1-11; Luke 14:25-33
What a delightful letter. With cosmopolitan sensitivity the author combines the Greek concept of “grace” with the Hebrew idea of “shalom/peace” and uses the result to underlie the entire correspondence. The letter is different from Paul’s deep and often polemical writing. These 21 verses bring a human and practical reality to ideas and images that are heady by nature and made more so by our human attempts to understand them.
We don’t know if Paul ever visited Colossae. It was near Laodicea which would have been on his route from Psidia to Ephesus during his third missionary journey. Since Jews in neighboring towns often came to hear Paul, that was likely how Paul and Philemon first met. Philemon was a wealthy man. He owned at least one slave and was the master of a house large enough to accommodate a church. He, his wife Apphia, and Archippus were the leaders of this congregation, and the entire community got to overhear the apostle’s request when the letter was read aloud.
A young man named Onesimus had run away from Colossae and had come to Paul during Paul’s house arrest, possibly in Ephesus but more likely in Rome, although Rome would have been a long way for a slave to travel. Did he know that Paul was there? We don’t know. Onesimus’ name means “useful” or “beneficial” and he apparently lived up to it assisting Paul during the imprisonment. Paul brought Onesimus to Christ and made the young believer’s faith strong. A close bond—like that of a father to a son—grew between them.
We don’t know what Onesimus did. Did he run away from Philemon’s household? Did they have a falling out that possibly ended with an assault? Did he steal something from Philemon? We simply don’t know. Paul says only that Onesimus had found his way to the imprisoned Paul and became a Christian through his close contact with the apostle.
Over the course of their relationship Onesimus had confessed to Paul about the rift which existed between himself and Philemon. Paul must have felt caught in the middle of a poor situation. On the one hand Onesimus was quite useful to him. And it was a joy for Paul to teach him about Jesus and to watch the young man eagerly grow in the faith. And on the other hand, Paul had had much the same kind of experience a number of years earlier as Philemon eagerly received Paul’s teaching about Christ and took it to heart.
There are three main actors in this vignette: a slave, Onesimus, who has very little to his name other than the clothes on his back (and now, thanks to Paul, the good news of salvation); a gentile (Greek) Philemon (who also has come to know Christ through the agency of Paul), a man with a good deal of means including a great house and the need and ability to own a slave; and Paul, a Pharisaically trained, diaspora Jew, tentmaking itinerant, converted by Christ into an apostle of Christ for the gentile world. What strange companions. They are from radically different backgrounds and cultures. The only thing in common is Jesus Christ, who makes them equal.
Paul lived and practiced a very deep ethical principle that he shared with Christ: the principle of non-dominance. By their backgrounds Jesus, a Palestinian, Aramaic-speaking, Jewish carpenter with a rudimentary synagogue education and Paul, a Hellenistic, Greek-speaking, highly trained Pharisee were very different men. What they shared through their teaching and living was a refusal to dominate other people, even when they could easily do so. Jesus had a quick mind to perceive the hypocrisy of other people’s words and actions. Paul had a caring yet sharp tongue to put people in their place.
In his letter to Philemon, Paul openly declined to tell Philemon what to do although, as he said, he could have done so. Rather, Paul stated that any economic, class, or cultural differences that had existed among the three of them have been eliminated through Christ Jesus working in each of their lives. Paul dared to contemplate a wealthy Hellenistic Christian receiving another Christian, who had been his disobedient slave, as a spiritual equal, as a brother. He trusted Philemon not to fall back into the reigning patterns of prestige, discrimination, and violence that were the customary framework for everyday life in those days.
Paul’s letter reminds us on this Labor Day weekend that regardless of our day-filling work, be it a highly trained profession, a skilled trade, customer service work, social service work, or the career of retirement, the chief work of the Christian is to live a Christ-like life for the world each of us interacts with minute by minute and day by day.
Much of the church through the ages, including today’‘s church, has not caught the drift of this radical understanding of the community of Christ. We routinely regard power structures in the church as normal. We worry about matters of authority as if they were the chief concern of God. The Church shies away from deep discussions of theology. And the conversations that are had are thinly disguised arguments over issues that have little relevance to what people think about the nature of God or how to contemplate the Exodus or the Resurrection.
Columnist E. J. Dionne says that “We go straight to hot-button issues.”(1) He calls that politicizing the Gospel. In that sense what passes for discussion is theological domination – who is right and who is wrong. Neither Paul nor our Lord take that approach. They are braver than we are because they did not seek to dominate fellow believers. After all, Jesus got down on his hands and knees and washed the feet of his disciples, saying, “I have given you an example: Just as I have done, you also must do” (John 13:15). Paul said “God forbid that I should boast about anything except for the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Galatians 6:14).
In a recent blog post Marshal Segal said that we cannot serve both God and theology. He wrote,
“Be committed to having a right theology, but be as committed to having a relational theology—a growing, humble and heartfelt intimacy with God. Do not simply search the Scriptures for soteriology [how Christ saves us], but search for salvation—the eternal life—that is only found in the flesh, blood and person of Jesus Christ (John 5:39).”(2)
In his request to Philemon, Paul sought neither to dominate him or to be dominated by him. Philemon, Onesimus, and Paul were equals in the sight of Christ. Further, Paul’s trust in God was so deep that he was able to discover the love of God in every situation, no matter how difficult or strange. He wrote while he was imprisoned and it sounded more like a vacation postcard, “Having a wonderful time. Wish you were here.” Would we be able to discover a loving gift if we were to revisit the catalog of our past ills and misfortunes? That’s not as easy as it might sound, but saints across the ages courageously have done just that.
Paul also challenged Philemon to allow the Holy Spirit to take up residence within him and start moving the furniture. Paul trusted his friend to quit worrying about respectability and to act in favor of what is just and right, not traditional and expected. Christ’s Spirit heightens our native abilities in ways that feel at once both natural and beyond natural. The Spirit of Christ working in us will always direct us to behave generously on behalf of others. When God’s people are “in the Lord” or “in Christ” (a favorite expression of Paul’s) there is no longer any special status—neither up or down, older or younger, slave or free, male or female (Gal. 3:28). All are beloved brothers and sisters in the love of God in the Lord Christ Jesus.
That takes great courage which only the Holy Spirit can provide. Living the Christ-life is not for sissies.
We don’t know how the story ends. In Jesus’ parable of the father and two sons, we don’t know the elder son finally joined the party. Did Philemon receive Onesimus as a brother rather than as chattel?
In Huckleberry Finn, Huck was ready to post a letter to Miss Watson about her runaway slave Jim. Then he got thinking about all he has been through with Jim, how Jim has cared for him and become a friend, and treated him like the kindly father Huck never had. Huck then tears the letter up.
Imagine an illegal immigrant today. Say that it is Rosa, now the single mother of children born in this country, but who herself entered the country illegally. There are reasons for laws dealing with illegal immigrants, and Christians are meant to be law-abiding citizens. Yet, before all else, the immigrant is a sister or brother in the love of God. Gospel teaching and baptismal vows call Christians to respect the dignity of every human being. Imagine receiving a letter—one Christian community to another—commending reconciliation and care for Rosa.(3)
We don’t know how Philemon responded to Paul’s request. When the gospel brings strange companions together in our lives, we can respond as Paul believes we should. We can live out the answer that Christ looks for.
Paul’s closing words still have power: “May the grace of Christ be with your Spirit.”
General Resource: Gray Temple, “Philemon 1-21: Theological Perspective,” Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), Year C, vol. 4, 38-42.Christ).
(1) E. J. Dionne, “Theology gets lost when religion is politicized,” Columbus Dispatch, August 25, 2016, B-11.
(2) Marshall Segal, ChurchLeaders.com, August 25, 2016, http://www.churchleaders.com/pastors/pastor-articles/247944-cannot-serve-god-theology.html
(3) Frederick Borsch, “Philemon 1-21: Homiletical Perspective,” Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), Year C, vol. 4, 43.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright © 2016 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
