St Peter & St Paul, Hambledon
SUNDAY 5 SEPTEMBER, 2004 AT 10.30 AM EUCHARIST
Readings: Philemon 1-21, Luke 14: 2-33
Every morning, the postal service delivers a pile of paper, some of it personal letters sent to me, but an increasing amount copied to other people, that is, over and above the usual circulars from various organisations. Then at 9.00 am the office computers are switched on and the e-mails start coming in; and a similar mixture appears, with a few things meant personally for me only, but an increasing amount copied for many other eyes to see. The trend in recent years has been noticeable: the private letter, sometimes hand-written has become rarer, and the need to communicate to a wider group at one and the same time, has become greater. The barrier between private (for my eyes only) and public (for a wider audience), it would seem, has become more and more eroded; and I always hold my breath if a letter is marked ‘personal and confidential’ because it may well be someone giving me a piece of their mind!
However, the personal letter has not always been private property, if one looks at history. It may be hard for us to imagine but in the ancient world, any letter one wrote was regarded as being in the public domain straight away. That explains, among many other things, why so much of the New Testament consists of letters, most of them from St Paul, one of your patron saints; and just to add to the surprises for us in our day, it was quite acceptable to write in someone else’s name without any risk of litigation, if one was associated with them, or part of their school of thought. That explains, for example, why the Letter to the Hebrews, which has long carried the name of St Paul, couldn’t possibly have been written by him. The style is quite different, but the content bears obvious signs of his teaching; in all likelihood it was penned by a pupil of his; the same view is held by many scholars of the two letters that bear St Peter’s name, your other patron saint. Many explanations can be offered for this state of affairs, which is so different form ours today. Proportionately fewer people could read and write; paper and papyrus were in short supply; ink was not so easily available; and the postal service, insofar as there was one, was personal, and usually took a long time, tempting other eyes to peer into what, for example, I might write to Lambeth Palace were we living at the time of Archbishop Theodore in the 670’s rather than Archbishop Rowan in the early 2000’s.
So it is with some real delight that, among the many letters that bear Paul’s name, there is a very short one, consisting of only twenty-five verses, the first twenty-one of which were read a few moments ago (the last four verses are personal). Unlike the other letters, which are addressed to groups and communities, like the Romans or the Corinthians, this one is addressed specifically to a man called Philemon. It concerns not a usual range of theological and ecclesiastical problems, but a slave called Onesimus, who has either run away from Philemon in order to be with Paul, who is in prison, or who Philemon has actually sent to Paul in order to assist him in prison. Like many letters that one reads as someone not involved in the situation, the precise meaning is not entirely clear, though one can obviously assume that it was known to Paul and Philemon. Is Paul asking Philemon to take Onesimus back? Is Paul asking Philemon by any chance to let him, Paul, have Onesimus as a more permanent servant in prison? Or is Paul asking Philemon not only to take Onesimus back, but to free him, so that he is no longer a slave? Whatever the answer to these questions, it is clear that Paul had a hold on Philemon, even though he wants Philemon to act not on the basis of obedience but out of love. Further, Paul could not resist the temptation in the course of the letter to make a pun on the name Onesimus, which means ‘useful’: ‘let him be useful to you, Philemon.’
Regardless of how these points of details are resolved, it is a small miracle that we have this letter at all - an example of the law of unforeseen consequences if ever there was one; and we are left to wonder how much else Paul wrote which we have missed – but perhaps that is just as well! The Letter to Philemon has never figured big-time in the various reading-schemes of the Churches. I can only recall it being used occasionally as a boy. Now we encounter it in an obscure part of the year – the 13th Sunday after Trinity in year C, or, in secular terms, just after the August Bank Holiday. Evidently, Paul had no compunction about making fairly public his desire to twist Philemon’s arm, nor to say how ‘useful’ he found his slave Onesimus.
Sometimes it is salutary to discover something homely, unusual, or off-beat about a celebrity. Some of the entries in ‘Who’s Who’ reveal some hobbies that are homely, unusual, or off-beat about some big names; I remember years ago discovering that my bishop’s hobbies included sneezing! Paul spent so much of his time with the big picture problems of the Churches that he helped to found in Rome and in Corinth. But even from prison he could find the time to write to a slave-owner in terms of affection and wisdom. Yet the letter is about still more. It not only reveals Paul’s interest in the nuts and bolts of human relationships, and their importance for the proper ordering of communities. It reveals his fundamental belief that this is the area of God’s love and mercy. Good relationships matter, and matter a great deal. We do well not to order our domestic and community lives by the much vaunted Anglo-Saxon virtue of ‘what works’, but instead by what is right, proper, and true, which is not always the same thing. Philemon must face the fact that his slave is a Christian, and while that does not quite place Paul (anachronistically) on the victorious, anti-slavery North-side at the end of the American Civil War, there is a clear signal about how Onesimus should be treated, namely as a Christian brother. No individual or group has a monopoly on human goodness, but if the recent tragic evens in Beslan can bring one thing home to the world, it is that we are all part of one human race, and of spiritual ‘use’ to each other, and are not to be manipulated in cynical power games, especially where children are concerned.
All of which, of course, has a direct bearing on the community of faith gathered here this morning in this ancient place of worship. In the gospel-reading, Jesus makes a similar point, though from another perspective. To be a disciple means tension with the world’s values, because it is about carrying one’s cross – and realising in advance that the cost of following him may be rather greater than one at first imagines. Sometimes that cost may mean looking at oneself, one’s attitudes, one’s habits of approaching situations and people, in an entirely new way. In terms of a ‘letter’, our Christian faith is both private and for our eyes only, and a very public matter as well. If this is what Paul was trying to say then to Philemon about Onesimus, it may well be what Jesus is trying to say now to us about our common life in him.
+ Kenneth Portsmouth
