Proper 18C
September 7, 2025
St. Dunstan’s
The Rev. Patricia Templeton
Today we hear a story about a slave named Onesimus who was owned by a man named Philemon. After enduring years of slavery, Onesimus sees his chance for escape.
He runs away from Philemon and heads to the big city, where he hopes to find freedom and anonymity in the crowds of people. But instead of finding freedom, he is arrested for a minor offense and thrown in jail.
There he meets a man named Paul, who claims to be imprisoned because he is a follower of Jesus Christ. The days in prison are long and Onesimus spends them listening to Paul talk about Jesus, about love and forgiveness and grace, and about how each and every person is equal and precious in the eyes of God.
Paul’s powerful words of love and forgiveness and radical equality strike a chord in the heart of the man who has spent his life in the degrading situation of belonging to another human being. Onesimus tells Paul that he would like to be a Christian, too.
Within those prison walls, Paul baptizes Onesimus and proclaims that the runaway slave is now his son, beloved not only by him, but by God.
If the story stopped there it would be a wonderful tale of redemption, of deliverance from slavery to freedom.
But it doesn’t stop there, and what comes next is shocking. Paul sends Onesimus, his new son in Christ, back to the slave owner Philemon.
At this point in the story I find myself starting to bristle. When Paul baptizes Onesimus, I hear in my mind the words of our baptismal covenant, the promise to “strive for justice and peace among all people and respect the dignity of every human being.”
How can Paul baptize Onesimus, embrace him as a son, and then send him back to a life where there is no respect for his dignity?
Why doesn’t Paul provide Onesimus with refuge? Why doesn’t this apostle of Christ overtly condemn the Roman system of slavery?
And why is this strange story that seems to pervert the heart of the gospel included in scripture?
Its inclusion seems even more appalling when we learn that for many years in this part of the country, Paul’s Letter to Philemon was a favorite of preachers who wanted to justify and defend slavery.
One preacher in the mid-1800s, basing a sermon on this letter, proclaimed that slavery was a “divine trust” which the South was “duty bound to preserve and perpetuate.”
No wonder one Black theologian calls Paul’s Letter to Philemon “the apostolic sanction of the chains of slavery.”
When faced with scripture passages, such as this letter, that seem to be antithetical to the Christian message, I remember an article I once read called “Preaching the Gospel versus Preaching the Bible.”
That may not make much sense at first. Aren’t preaching the Bible and the Gospel the same thing?
Well, not necessarily.
As Christians, we are called to proclaim the Gospel, that is the good tidings or good news of Christianity.
One theologian describes the Gospel as “the proclamation of the vision of God revealed in Christ.”
Those good tidings, that vision of God revealed in Christ, is shown to us in the Bible – and not just in the four gospel books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John – but all throughout both the Old and New Testaments.
These good tidings tell the story of moving from oppression to liberation, of radical forgiveness and equality, of God’s love for all creation.
But to say that the good news of the Gospel is found in every passage of the Bible is not true.
Psalms that ask God to wreak disaster upon one’s enemies are not proclamations of good tidings. Nor are stories of sacrificing one’s child to appease God or passages proclaiming women to be inferior to men.
There are dangers in drawing broad conclusions from isolated passages of scripture. An isolated passage from the Bible may contain a message that preaching the Gospel must oppose, not proclaim.
Today we would be shocked to hear someone use the Bible to defend slavery, although I’m sure there are places where that still happens. But all too often we hear isolated passages of scripture used to justify an oppressive hierarchy, proclaim a chilling exclusivity, condemn people for their sexual orientation or identity, promote a deadly anti-Semitism, and denigrate all other faiths.
What may in a narrow sense seem like an accurate interpretation, when seen in the larger sense of the Gospel, may be antithetical to the proclamation of the vision of God revealed in Christ.
It is also important to remember the context in which Scripture was written.
When Paul’s letter to Philemon is looked at in context and in the larger light of the Gospel message of love and freedom, we see that Paul intended this letter to be a call to a transformed life, not a defense of slavery as we have come to know it.
Philemon, the slave owner, is also a Christian, converted by Paul. Paul praises Philemon’s faith, then calls on him to live it out in a dramatic way.
Paul challenges the Christian slave owner to defy the conventions of his day – not only to forgive and receive a runaway slave back into his household, but to recognize in Onesimus a beloved brother in Christ.
“I am appealing to you for my child, Onesimus, whose father I have become during my imprisonment,” Paul writes. “I am sending him, that is, my own heart back to you.
“Perhaps this is the reason he was separated from your for a while, so that you might have him back forever, no longer as a slave, but as a beloved brother.
“Welcome him as you would welcome me.”
The focus of Paul’s letter is not the institution of slavery, but the power of the gospel to transform relationships and bring about reconciliation.
Paul’s actions are not intended to send Onesimus back to a life of oppression, but to give Philemon a chance for transformation.
That is the radical gospel message of Paul’s letter to Philemon – that if we believe, as Paul proclaims in another letter, that “there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female; for all of us are one in Christ – then we must show it in the way we treat one another.
Amen.