"Consent"
- FirstPres Abq
- Sep 7
- 6 min read
Rev. Matthew Miller
Unlike most of the letters we find in the bible, today’s reading is not addressed to a particular city and its church. This is not Paul, or someone close to Paul, writing to Rome, or Corinth, or Ephesus, or Thessalonica. It is Paul writing to a single person. The only other personal letters that we have are to church leaders: Paul’s protégé, Timothy; or Titus on the island of Crete. Those other letters generally offer encouragement and direction for the leadership of those communities. They are personally addressed, but in service to Paul’s larger project of spreading word of the new life in Jesus Christ to every corner of the Roman Empire. But what we get today almost feels a little like snooping, like dipping into someone’s private mail. That’s because the issue it addresses is personal. Somewhere in his travels, Paul came across a man named Onesimus. Who knows how they met. Paul says something about his imprisonment. It seems like Paul was always being thrown into jail for something. So maybe they became friends in prison. You know how those things go. Well, maybe not. But you can imagine, locked up all day without much to do but talk with whoever is locked up with you. However it happened, it’s clear that they became close. Paul describes himself as having become a father to Onesimus. Then perhaps, the time came for the young man’s release, and maybe that’s when he confessed to Paul the whole truth about who he really was and what he was doing there, that he was a slave who had run away. It’s one of those good news/bad news situations. Good news, you’re being released from jail! What’s the bad news? Oh, you’ll be sent back to the person from whom you ran away, who would be well within their rights to have you killed for fleeing. Only here’s the kicker- it turns out that Paul just happens to know the slave owner from whom Onesimus ran away.
“Did you say Philemon?”
“Yes.”
“Rich guy, big house?”
“That’s the one.”
“We go way back. Let me write you a letter to take with you from me to him.”
Now, Paul could have easily said, “Onesimus you’ve become like a son to me. I can’t bear the thought of letting you go, particularly letting you go back to being a slave. Why don’t you just stay here with me? It can be lonely and I’ve come to depend upon your company. I’ll write to Philemon. I’m sure he wont mind.” He could have done that and no one would have been the wiser. We probably wouldn’t have that letter in the bible, or this one. But he didn’t do that. He wrote this one instead. I would venture to guess that it’s included in our bible because it is a practical lesson in what it means to be the church. More than that, it’s a lesson in what it means to belong- as a Christian- to a way of life that should challenge all the conventional ways things get done in the world around us. I think this letter got saved because while it may look like a small matter in grand sweep of history and the cosmos- it contains something like the good news that gets hold of us and will not let us go. One of the things that following Jesus does is that it challenges our understanding of power and authority. This comes straight from Jesus himself, by the way. In each of the gospels there are multiple stories about the twelve that he called to his inner circle and how they had the same desirer for status and position that people continue to have today. They could all see the power Jesus had to heal people, cast out demons and perform other miracles. But they also witnessed how little status he had relative to the formal power structures he encountered. Still, they can’t help themselves and start to argue about where each of them stands, relative to the others, in this Jesus movement. He asks them about it and they come clean only to have him explain to them that this whole thing is about the opposite of status. Other people may care about that stuff, says Jesus, all the things we use to size one another up as some kind of competition we call life; who is better or more important than whom. But that’s not how it should be with us. That’s not at all what the reign of God that calls us into kinship with one another is about. Under God’s reign power and status get turned on their heads. The powerful are brought down from their thrones and the lowly are lifted up. God doesn’t really care how important any of us think we are, because each of us is equally important to God.
If that’s the case, then Paul can’t very well turn around and start giving Philemon orders. He can’t go all power-trippy and retain any sense of integrity as someone in service to the gospel of Jesus Christ. If he forces Philemon’s hand on the issue of his former slave, he’s just exercising the same kind of power that Jesus deliberately gives up for the sake of something better. He won’t do it, because while that may be the way power and authority work in the world around us, that is decidedly not how it’s supposed to work in the body of Christ. The other thing that following Jesus does is that it opens our eyes to seeing the world, and specifically the people around us, in a new and different way. There are all kinds of stories throughout the gospels of Jesus healing blind people so that they can regain their sight; or in at least one case, see as never before. When Jesus gets up to read the scroll in his hometown synagogue, Jesus is handed the section about the Spirit of the lord being upon him to announce recovery of sight to the blind. But what’s clear is that it isn’t just a physiological condition that Jesus has come to cure. There’s plenty of spiritual blindness in the world too. And the more time we spend with Jesus, the more time we take to worship with others and learn from one another as we listen to scripture together, the more our eyes are opened to see the world the way that God sees it, which is to see it differently than we’re used to.
Onesimus’ name literally means, ‘useful’. So when Paul writes about his usefulness to Philemon, he is being clever. He’s also revealing the way we happen to treat people too much of the time. We gravitate toward the people who are useful to us. The ones that make us feel good, or who can help us up the career ladder, the ones with social standing who can give us cache with the movers and shakers. In other words, we treat them like objects instead of people. It’s easy to point to the hyper-sexualization of young women and men and talk about objectification. But to treat anyone as a means to your personal end, whether that’s physical, professional, or social, is to rob them of what makes them most who they are. It denies their personhood, their unique identity as someone made in the image and likeness of none other than the Lord of all creation.
So, Paul does the only thing he can do in this situation. He appeals to the love of Christ that turns the world upside down as the only power and authority any of us should need to do the right thing. We need a letter like this to be in the bible. We know how power in the world works. We see it exercised and strategized every day in ways that mean the difference between life and death in places like Ukraine and Gaza and Sudan and Myanmar and Washington D.C. and sometimes even in our own homes and families. What Paul does with this letter is show us the alternative. Paul shows us what power looks like when it’s exercised in the spirit of love and consent instead of authority and dominance. This isn’t love as an abstraction, but love in the lived experience of a child of God named Onesimus and one named Philemon. It looks like someone who used to be known as a slave, and a thief, who was as good as dead and seeing them instead as bone of your bone and flesh of your flesh, seeing them as one of your own and giving them back their life; not as it used to be, but as someone just like us. It looks like a place we call church, where no one cares what they call you out there- whether you are management, or labor- because here, we follow a different way of being in the world. It’s a way that opens our eyes so that all the old labels fall away: Jew/Greek, slave/free, male/female, rich/poor, white/non-white, documented/undocumented, gay/straight; and we begin to see one another as God sees us: as beloved, forgiven, set free, made right, and one of the family.
