Doulos 2 of 3 (9.27.20)
Doulos 2
Philemon 1.1-21
September 27, 2020
Rev. Elizabeth Mangham Lott
St. Charles Ave. Baptist Church
The more I study and research for this brief sermon series, the more I realize how inadequate my library is, how white my library is, and how dominantly cis-male my library is. That is not to say there is no good content available to me in my study but to remind us all that our tradition has largely been passed to us through a very specific framework. If we hope to understand Christian scripture and Christian tradition differently, then we will need some new teachers. I want to start with that word of confession today. I’m working on my own study so that my teaching and preaching will be informed by more than one dominant voice (even if I have loved that dominant voice and miss many of those good, good folks who helped shape me.) My goal for now is to build out the very empty shelves of Black, Indiginous, People of Color, Queer, and Feminist writers as we move forward together.
So. With that, we take a second look at texts in the Greek New Testament using the word doulos—either metaphorical or literal stories about slaves. Today, we come to Onesimus who was a literal slave. And if we are to trust this letter as being a 1st century communication between an imprisoned Paul and church leader Philemon, then we are reading a founding document of the early church that appears, on the surface, to be sending an estranged (perhaps even a runaway) slave back to his owner.
Let’s pause there. I don’t think I have to even lay out the ways this text has very likely been used and abused in more recent centuries. I am quite certain you can hear it already. I’ve come across a number of preachers who don’t ever plan to reference the letter again and scholars who say the cost of putting Onesimus’ story in a 1st century cultural context is too high against the way his story hits contemporary ears. Let’s consider how stories like this one might have been weaponized in recent history.
In White Too Long, Robert Jones writes about a featured “slave Bible” at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., “on loan from Fisk University in Nashville. The title page reads, ‘Parts of the Holy Bible, selects for the use of the Negro Slaves, in the British West-India Islands.’ [Published in 1807,] the slave Bible, one of only three known to still exist, was constructed specifically to help white Christian missionaries emphasize passages demanding obedience to masters and to exclude passages suggesting equality or liberation. As a large wall display notes, the slave Bible excludes 90 percent of the Old Testament and about half of the New Testament.” Of the inclusion of this rare item among a monument to American Christianity, Jones writes, “It shows the way a mutliated Bible could reinforce slavery, but it fails to cast light on the evil that an intact Bible could foster among whites.”
Raymond E. Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament, Chapter 21: Letter to Philemon, pp. 502-510
Paul is writing to the head of a Christian house-church, or even to a church in the person of its host (since Paul anticipates communal pressure on Philemon)
in every line of the letter, just beneath the surface, is the basic challenge to the societal rank of master and slave offered by the changed relationship introduced by the gospel (Onesimus returns as your equal, welcome him that way)
Brown reminds us that society in 1st century Roman Empire was highly stratified. At the upper level would have been the Romans appointed by the Senate or the emperor to administer the province politically, fiscally, and militarily; next would come the local privileged class; then small landowners, shop owners, craftspeople. Below them woudl be freedmen and women who had been released from slavery through action of their masters or their own purchase of freedom; and then at the bottom would have been the immense number of slaves with who’s existence the economic welfare of the Empire was intimately involved. (p.503)
Brown adds, “any proposal of the abolition of slavery would have had Empire-shaking potentialities.” (p. 503)
There were so many different types of slavery that ranged from those who did heavy manual labor to the very well-educated slaves who administered their master’s estates or businesses, instructed their children, and even earned their own money (p. 504)
What is the story of Onesimus and Philemon? Can we really know? Brown offers this: A plausible reconstruction is that Philmon was a well-to-do Christian, Apphia was his wife, and Archippus was close to him; Philemon’s home served as the meeting place of a house-church. It is not clear that Paul has ever personally encountered Philemon; however, the evangelizing of the area in which Philemon lived was probably the fruit of Paul’s mission. (p. 504)
Onesimus was Philemon’s slave who seemingly had run away, and Paul encountered him in prison and converted him. Brown notes, he would not have been thrown into prison for running away, however, because he would have been sent back to Philemon for that.
Brown also points to another possibility—Onesimus could have sought help from a prominent Christian teacher because he found himself in a strange city and in trouble. It is possible that someone like Paul would have advocated for Onesimus by letter
However they met, Paul speaks of Onesimus in the same language he reserves for Timothy, his partner in ministry and mission. He is not asking for Onesimus to be received safely home to his former position as slave. No, Paul asks Philemon, “receive him as you receive me.” Brown notes, “The request is a dramatic example of Paul’s way of thinking in fidelity to the change of values brought about by Christ.” (p. 505)
Paul even notes that he plans to come see them all some day, “prepare a room for me”…as if to say, “I’m coming to check up on Onesimus myself, and I expect him to be an equal in your household and not a slave.” To this, Brown adds, “Taking such a gracious stance might have deleterious social implications in the eyes of outsiders and even of less daring Christians. It might make one who acts thus look like a troubler of the social order and a revolutionary; but that is a price worth paying out of loyalty to the gospel.” (p. 507)
However, Brown also notes that some scholars critique Paul harshly for not going a step farther to directly speak against slavery altogether. By not stating that belief explicitly, “some Bible readers [used this silence] as proof that the institution was not evil in itself.” (p. 507)
Perhaps the loveliest interpretation I came across was from the work of Goodspeed and Knox in the 20th century. In their study and writing, they question who the actual owner of Onesimus was (perhaps Archippus, who is named). But more interestingly, they argue that the short letter to Philemon was included in the Christian canon because the Onesimus in this letter is also the one mentioned in Ephesians 1:30. Brown calls this “a more romantic proposal” and borrows from an Italian saying to add, “Even if it is not true, it was still worth being proposed.”
In Goodspeed and Knox’s imaginations, Onesimus was released by Philemon and returned to work with Paul in Ephesus, remaining there as a principal Christian figure once Paul had left. He was still there more than a half-century later when Ignatious of Antioch addressed the Ephesian church, “in the person of Onesimus, a man of love beyond recounting and your bishop.”
Wouldn’t that be a remarkable and radical detail to identify in this story? Alas, Raymond Brown bursts the romantic bubble to say, “there is virtually no proof for this truly attractive theory.” (p. 509)
What do we do with it now?
Prof. of New Testament, Eric Barreto writes, “One crucial level of our interpretation of Philemon must deal with our recent, collective past; a past in which biblical sanction of slavery and segregation and rancid racism was simply taken for granted by most of our predecessors in the faith.
I would invite us…to linger on this dark history, reminding one another that we too are heirs of these historical disasters…our past is not just our past but our present and our future. It is not enough to preach what Paul might have meant in Philemon all that time ago. We must confront how Philemon was actually read not that long ago. And in reminding us about this text’s past misinterpretation, we may be reminded to be both bold and humble in how we read the Bible today. Yes, God is certainly present in our reading of these texts, but we know too well that our own sinfulness has too often driven us to read a text that affirms our every assumption, even the cruelest ones we hold. We are no more immune to this tendency than those who have come before us.”
In addressing the text itself, Barreto concludes, “In the end, I’m convinced that Paul here is calling for a radical reorientation of the community’s understanding of Onesimus’ identity. He is no longer merely a cog in the machine of the household, no longer worthy because of the utility he provides for his master. Onesimus is now a beloved brother. He is kin. And this transformation is a vivid embodiment of the gospel.”
We can make as many attempts as we want to fill in the gaps around this brief letter. But Gafney and Jones and Brown and Barreto are all right: reading this text must call us to honestly consider how we engage the whole of scripture and to confess our own complicity in the unjust, evil systems and structures our sacred texts have been manipulated to endorse and sustain. That is our work right now, and it can be frightening to rearrange the stuff of our inherited faith in the midst of one of the most chaotic and transformational years in our lifetimes. But part of the work I believe we are called to do as white followers of Christ is to read our sacred text with a much more critical lens and then act distinctly in the world because of what we understand to be the Truth that guides us.
As we do this, I hear the blessing words of that old hymn, dated to the 1500s:
1 God be in my head,
and in my understanding;
2 God be in mine eyes,
and in my looking;
3 God be in my mouth,
and in my speaking;
4 God be in my heart,
and in my thinking;
5 God be at mine end,
and at my departing.
Amen.