Doulos 3
Colossians 3:11-17
Sunday, October 4, 2020
Rev. Elizabeth Mangham Lott
St. Charles Ave. Baptist Church

11 In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all!

12 As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. 13 Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. 14 Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. 15 And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body. And be thankful. 16 Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly; teach and admonish one another in all wisdom; and with gratitude in your hearts sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to God. 17 And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.

Today we conclude a 3-week series that merely counts as a brief introduction to the Greek word “doulos” translated as slave/servant. In no way has this been a comprehensive study as we’ve spent this time looking at a handful of passages in Christian scripture that refer either to literal or metaphorical enslavement of people. We took this time right now because there are many references to slaves in our sacred text, and we tend to overlook them or think nothing of them when we hear them read in worship. Slave/servant language is common not only in our scripture but in our hymnody and choral music, and also in our own metaphors for Christian leadership and Christian posture in life. The words we use matter, and we need to give attention to them.

How did we get here? Why did I decide now is the time to address problems in our sacred text? In this decade of a year, one of the commitments we have made has been to our increased and earnest efforts at becoming anti-racist. That work involves more than just verbally acknowledging all people are equal or that black lives matter. We are very slowly doing the work of understanding the systems and structures of white supremacy that make white lives easier. Then we are doing the uncomfortable work of dismantling the systems and structures what we maintain because they protect white comfort. Oof.

It’s like this. In a 2014 call to churches in response to no-indictment decisions in Ferguson, MO, Austin Channing Brown wrote: “Its time for churches across the country to break the silence on racism and racial injustice. There are many who have chosen the way of silence, believing it to be an apolitical stance. Except that we all know the truth. We all know that silence is a political tool used to plead ignorance or plan avoidance. In this moment in history, there are many tools made available to you, and silence is certainly one of them, but I encourage you to smash silence into pieces. 

If you believe that racism and injustice are not sitting in your churches, indicting your credibility as a witness of God, you are sadly mistaken. If you have ever heard one story about injustice. If you have ever had one complaint from a person of color. If you have ever been  in a meeting and heard one insensitive joke, heard one racial stereotype, heard one racial slur, heard one inappropriate comment- than you have work to do. Silence cannot be an option for you.” 

And so we do the work. One effort is looking honestly at the Bible and naming it’s shortcomings and danger areas. Where is it misused and abused? Where do we need to do our work? One spot: anywhere doulos is used. While none of these texts referred to a universal system of chattel slavery as practiced the colonies and United States, they were used to support that system and maintain the enslavement of African people. That means these texts are problematic and tainted by layers of misuse; not to mention the loss in translation across time, culture, and language.

We know the slavery of the Roman Empire in the 1st century was not exactly like that in the American experience, particularly in the ability of slaves to be freed. In a PBS series on the Roman Empire of the 1st century, it’s noted, “All slaves and their families were the property of their owners, who could sell or rent them out at any time. Their lives were harsh. Slaves were often whipped, branded or cruelly mistreated. Their owners could also kill them for any reason, and would face no punishment.” 

We read literal references, translated both as “slave” and as “servant,” to describe an enormous, layered system. The word could refer to people born into slavery, debtors taken into temporary slavery to pay off their debts, a servant working-class that was subjugated to service of the wealthy because of their social status at birth, and enslaved people taken as prisoners in war and domination between empires.

In his Introduction to the New Testament, Raymond Brown notes: 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 (Brown, p. 504)

Because these enslaved working classes were determined by war, debt, or class by birth and not by ethnicity or race or skin color, enslaved people were not easily identifiable. At one point, the Roman Senate considered clothing markers to easily identify enslaved people but feared repercussions and insurrection if enslaved people became aware of just how many of them existed.

Manumission or not, the Roman Empire ran on slavery and amassed power and wealth through slavery in the very same ways the United States first did. And if we’re being very honest and much less technical in our words, the United States still maintains power and wealth through the unjust arrest and incarceration of black and brown people. But that is beyond the scope of the 2000 words I have to share today.

One of the most problematic issues for me with looking at these New Testament texts is that no one addresses the institution of slavery as evil in plain, direct words. Jesus makes powerful statements about demanding equal treatment through nonviolent resistance in his teachings on going the extra mile and turning the other cheek, but even thee teachings are misused as modern expressions. Going the extra mile gets watered down to mean hard work. Turn the other cheek somehow becomes a weak act of passive response to abusive treatment. Even Jesus’ death by crucifixion, a means reserved for enemies of the state, gets re-interpreted by modern theology as an orchestrated act of God and not a direct result of the anti-empire ways of Jesus. Lost is the radical teaching that the love of God calls us to push against the structure and priorities of the empire in such a threatening way that Jesus is perceived as an enemy.

Perhaps the avoidance of these words had to do with the immense power of the Roman Empire. No one was going to completely dismantle a system of inequality and oppression in their lifetime, so Jesus’ words were largely focused on creating an alternate, truer reality within the dominant one. While Paul (or the letters written in his name) spoke of finding contentment within that oppressive and limiting reality. It’s also important to remember that the epistles are the oldest pieces in our Greek New Testament, and the early church widely believed Christ would return in their lifetimes to complete his work. Why dismantle systems that would soon burn away?

Dr. Wil Gafney points to the issue of imagination when only one world has ever been known, “[Paul] had never known a world without slavery and truth be told he couldn’t imagine a world without slavery. Paul sounded a lot like the white slaveholders of this country, believing that freedom was all in your head or in the world to come but not necessarily for your body in this world. He wished the saints wouldn’t hold slaves but he would not use his apostolic authority to forbid buying and selling and holding of human beings in bondage.” Dr. Raymond Brown adds, “any proposal of the abolition of slavery would have had Empire-shaking potentialities.” (p. 503)

When read together, our two epistle texts speak to the literal context of Roman slavery and the spiritual reality that supplanted the Roman one as followers of Christ acknowledge a far more superior way.

We surely can interpret our way out of or through problematic texts. We are right to honor and change our language when we realize our words and images cause harm or allude to supporting past harm. But they will continue to be right there waiting in our canon. And we will begin to overlook them again. And we might even dismiss the old language as inconsequential. Whatever we end up doing with it, we ignore the parts we don’t like and we lean into the parts that we love. That’s the thing, isn’t it: we pick and choose how we use this text. This ancient, sacred text can be used to silence women, to block LGBTQ+ siblings from community, and even to support the ownership of other human beings—or, in a more modern misreading, support the subjugation of certain groups of people because parts of the Bible seems to indicate there’s nothing wrong with that. Obviously, I think those are abuses and misreadings of the bible, but it’s not hard to figure out how people get there. 

This ancient, sacred text can also be used to disrupt the status quo, to challenge and re-order social classes and the accepted order of who is “in” and who is “out.” This old Bible, the very one that has been used against me a time or two, calls out to me to love above all other things. Because that’s the way we read the Bible in our church tradition. We start with the belief that all human beings are made in the image of God and called very good from the beginning, and we go from there.

This command I leave you: love one another. They will know you are my disciples because you have love for one another.

When you take the poor into your house and stand against injustice, then your light will rise like the dawn out of darkness, and the Lord will be your guide.

I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was in prison and you visited me. Surely as you have done for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.

In Christ Jesus, you are all sons and daughters through faith…there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

Whether our reading shrinks our circles or expands our circles, opens our hearts or hardens them is ultimately connected to interpretive choices and community discernment for a collective “yes” to the ways of teaching and practice. That’s how Franklin Graham and Robert Jeffress and Paula White and I come to such opposite conclusions about what it means to follow the Jesus path. We are saying “yes” to different things.

Last week we looked at a featured “slave Bible” at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., “on loan from Fisk University in Nashville…that “excludes 90 percent of the Old Testament and about half of the New Testament.” Thomas Jefferson did the same thing and cut out the parts he didn’t want to include. He made his own canon. It seems so impossible to us to do such a thing, but we ultimately employ our hermeneutic to shape the bible we want. The most conservative evangelicals who swear every word is God-breathed, inerrant, and infallible ignore and overlook certain texts. And less literal readers also tend to dismiss the problems and lean into the overlapping, winding themes of love and justice and grace and compassion and so on. There is a lot of human choice involved in this interpretation thing, and that means we need to get really honest about what we’re choosing.

Again, Austin Channing Brown writes, “If you proclaim to believe that we are all created in the Imago Dei, you must break the silence. If you say you believe we are all brother and sister in Christ then you cannot hold back. If you believe that we are all one body and when one body suffers- we all suffer, then you must break the silence. If you profess love as a defining characteristic of your body, prove it. Prove that you love all people. Prove that black lives matter. Your silence speaks more than you realize.”

I am choosing. Every week. Every day.

And I choose the path with less power and more love.

I choose the way that lifts up the marginalized and ignored while singing songs of toppling the oppressor.

I choose the part about peace, love, joy, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness, goodness, and self-control. (Blech. Always gotta throw that self-control part in there.)

I choose the self-emptying Christ.

I choose the way of love.

And just in case I’m tempted to pat myself on the back for believing in love and preaching a few sermons, I hold out Austin Channing Brown’s last word to us on silence and the work still before us: “Silence must be broken, never to recover because your one sermon will fix nothing. Racism and racial injustice has been a problem for centuries. Silence must be broken so hard that no one can put back together the pieces. We must remain committed to giving voice. We must remain vigilant in our storytelling. We must remain absolute in our commitment to watch, to see, to hear, to unpack, to learn. This is not a one-time event. This is not a check list. This is a structural change to the way your church operates.”

May it be so with us. Amen.