We all come from families, and every family has its own dramas. Our family dramas can run the gamut from interesting to idiosyncratic, from curious to strange to alarming, from truly weird to dangerously abusive, even to fatal. No matter our own family’s story, however, we are each and every one of us shaped by our interactions with those we grow up with. Once we are adults we are all of us well advised to reflect on our own personal dramas, to recover our memories, reconstruct them, analyze them, and come to terms with them. When we do so they can give us foundations for conscious adult self-understanding. They can give us opportunities for insight and growth. They can strengthen our bonds of love, and they can enlarge the possibilities for our future. Especially if we had a difficult childhood. In any case, one of the steps to fully aware adulthood is to know who we have been and what made us who we are. That can give us choices. Sometimes, however, we are tempted to cling to this self-understanding as though it were itself a possession which we can not give up. If we do cling to
it, our memories can take over our lives. To have a new life, we need to be willing to leave our old one. I am struck by the almost angry force of this morning’s sayings about family and possessions. They seem so all-encompassing, so lacking in nuance that I want tone them down, to “explain” them, to hedge them about with qualifications, and so I (and doubtless many others) ascribe them to Jesus’ use of a particular kind of rhetoric, his habitual use of what some call “semitic hyperbole” - outrageously off the chart exaggeration to make a point. But then I also realize the power that family and possessions can have to shape, dominate and control us if we don’t put them in a proper context. Jesus is calling us to a new, different, better life, and to begin to live that new life we will need to leave behind the negative controlling forces of our past. We need really to put them in the past. As Jesus says in another place, Let the dead bury their dead. If we don’t, we may well not escape, we may not grow, we may not be able to move forward. Unless we let them go, we may not be able to enter the Kingdom.
And how wonderful that this gospel passage is paired in today’s readings with the Letter to Philemon, which so beautifully models a gracious, Spirit-filled approach to building a godly future out of a less than perfect past. And as it happens, that future seen in the Letter to Philemon grows out of these same two dangerous minefields: possessions and family.
Onesimus is a slave of Philemon, who is a friend and co-worker of St. Paul. Onesimus is a possession. Philemon owns him. There can be no area of human relations less satisfactory than slavery, whose effects our own age is strenuously engaging to understand and to rectify. We may be shocked that St. Paul does not take the opportunity of this letter to urge Philemon to set Onesimus free. But such was the culture of that place and that time. Rather than pursue manumission, St. Paul does something entirely unexpected, something which foreshadows the coming Kingdom which he, Paul, is proclaiming: Out of slavery, which traps both the owner and the person owned, comes a set of entirely new and transforming relationships.
Paul asks Philemon to take Onesimus back, after what seems to be a period of estrangement between the master and the slave. Onesimus has become a great help to Paul in Paul’s old age and in his imprisonment. Onesimus has progressed from a state of uselessness to one in which he is valued for his good work. This is the utilitarian basis of slavery: How much better to be a happy worker than a negligent one. A “good” slave.
But there is more. Paul now considers Onesimus not just a slave, but a part of himself. Indeed, Paul identifies Onesimus as “his own heart”. In sending him back, he is sending Onesimus back to Philemon as the center of his, of Paul’s, own life. He identifies Onesimus as part of his own self. Onesimus has moved from being a “thing” to being a person, and more than a person - to being part of Paul’s self. Slaves and masters become one in each other because they become one in Christ. And even more: Paul identifies himself as Philemon’s father, and so he identifies Philemon as his son. And Paul urges Philemon, as a son, to regard Onesmus as his brother. Paul has become father in Christ to both Philemon and Onesimus, a father who now has two sons, each the brother to the other. And as if to underline the point, that master and slave are equal in Christ, Paul ends the letter by addressing Philemon the master in language that would be used to a slave: “Confident of your obedience, I am writing to you, knowing that you will do even more than I say.” Confident of your obedience. Do even more than I say. The world’s distinction between master and slave in Christ is transformed into a new family of brothers to each other. Possession becomes the starting point of a new relationship of the family of God.
We may be sure that Paul is deliberate in saying this, that he is not simply using flowery language to dress up an everyday note of recommendation. We may be sure of it because slavery is a primary image in Paul’s understanding of the nature of Christ. In the second chapter of the Letter to the Philippians Paul famously writes: “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” The saving life of Jesus comes from the deliberate decision to be a servant, a doulos, which in Greek means both servant and slave. Christ’s self-identification as the lowest among us means that the lowest among us can count Jesus as brother, as equal. His obedience to death is the key to life.
And so for us. Our family, who we have been, does not have to define who we can be. Our possessions do not need to define us, whether they are things or ideas. Our possessions can become occasions for unexpectedly life-giving relationships if we allow them to transform us and themselves be transformed into God-filled vessels of love, leading to relationships we never might have thought possible.
A memory which used to trap us can become a springboard to wider and deeper and more compassionate engagements with the world and with the people we meet in it. A possession which used to define us can lead to something that enters into the center of our life’s being, into our very heart. Which then can grow and be shared in relationships that build a new family, this one as brothers and sisters, parents and children in the love of God, which is ever reaching out to rebuild the broken world God so earnestly wills to be whole, to be vibrantly alive.
This is the choice we make when we decide to become disciples of the one who chose to be the servant, the slave of us all. We choose to be like him: in service to each other, and with the Spirit who knits the world back together again. We have been what we were and we have had what we have had. New life comes, not from holding on, but from taking our past, whatever it may have been, and offering it to the One who can make it whole, offering it to the One who can take what we were and what we had and make of its unlikeliness a Kingdom, God’s Kingdom: the blessing of the everlasting Shalom. In the words of God which Moses speaks to Israel and which we have heard this morning: “I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life.”
