Message from Fr. Austin 

This past Sunday, our Epistle reading was almost the entirety of St. Paul’s Letter to Philemon.  It’s rare when we get to read so much of a book of the Bible in the context of one service!  

But even though the Letter to Philemon is small by biblical standards, its message is incredibly poignant and potent.  At issue is nothing less than how being one in Christ Jesus alters the way we are to relate to one another in the secular world.  If you haven’t read this book before, or you need a quick refresher on its contents, you can find a text version here.

Paul is writing a presumably wealthy slave-owning Christian named Philemon, who lives in Colossae and has come to faith in Christ because of Paul’s missionary efforts.  Paul has continued his travels and is most likely imprisoned in Ephesus during a notably difficult time for him spiritually.  Paul writes because Onesimus, a former slave of Philemon, has run away and sought out Paul for sanctuary and support.  Will Philemon exercise his rights to punish and return Onesimus to slavery, or will Paul’s argument that Philemon should receive Onesimus not as a slave but as a brother prevail?  

I love that our patron apostle is writing this appeal from a prison, and that it was his free choice to follow Jesus Christ that put him there.  Paul is asking Philemon to make a free choice to follow the ethics of Jesus’ reign instead of Caesar’s, and he is also asking Onesimus to make a free choice to go back to Philemon and trust that his old master’s going to do the right thing.  What an extraordinary amount of faith Paul is placing in the Holy Spirit and in these members of the fledgling Jesus movement!  

We don’t know what happened at that first encounter between Onesimus and Philemon following the sending of this letter.  As I imagine it, the fear and wariness of both parties gave way to the realization that because of what God had done in both raising Jesus from the dead and turning a violent Saul into the apostle Paul, they too could chart a new reconciled course for relationship.  A new way of being with one another that brought resurrection to them both and allowed them to jointly proclaim its reality as members of the church.  Such forms of witness are what transformed the ancient world and can yet transform our world today.

I encourage you to use the freedom you have in Christ for the healing of our churches, our neighborhoods, our nations, and our world this week.  Give yourselves over to trusting that God can yet reconcile former enemies and draw us into deeper community in order to proclaim the good news together.  And may we always have the strength and courage to orient our lives according to the ethics of God’s reign—no matter the cost.

Yours in Christ,

Austin