Sermon for the 2nd Sunday in Lent – 13th March 2022 : Gen 15, 1-12, 17-18; Philemon 3, 17-4, 1; Luke 13, 31-end.

Fr Leonard Doolan – St Paul’s Athens

 

It is around the late 50s AD. We might be in the city of Rome, or maybe Caesarea or Ephesus, there is some doubt, but we are definitely in a prison. A slave is one of the prisoners. His name is Onesimus and by upbringing in the ancient world he was most likely a worshipper of the pagan gods. In his prison he has converted to the Christian Way. His prison companion is a man who was born in Tarsus and he is known to us as St. Paul. Onesimus has become a believer in Jesus.

Onesimus was as a slave in Colossae. His slave owner may have been someone called Archippus (Col 4, 12-16) or possibly someone called Philemon. Slave ownership was part of the normal order across the Roman Empire of the ancient world.

From prison Paul sends a letter to Philemon who has some sort of leadership of the church in the city of Laodicea in Asia Minor very near to the city of Colossae, to whom St. Paul also directed one of his letters – the Letter to the Colossians.

Basically Paul is commending this new convert to Philemon, urging him not to be treated as a slave, but in the new radical and revolutionary church of Jesus Christ, as a fellow believer, and equal in the eyes of the Lord.

With real passion in his heart and tears in his eyes St. Paul is urging the Christians of this community to rise above the chains and shackles of the social conventions of the day – to break the accepted and unquestioned protectors of the strata of society, whom St. Paul calls the ‘enemies of the cross of Christ’. (Philemon 3, 17).

We know too well what St. Paul says elsewhere about the equal dignity of the members of the body of Christ. To the Galatians Blessed Paul writes, ‘There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.’ (Gal 3, 28); and when he speaks to the Colossian Christians of our renewal of life in Christ, St. Paul says, ‘In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian or Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all!’ (Col 3, 11).

In his book about St. Paul, Rowan Williams refers to the message of St. Paul as ‘The universal welcome: Paul’s disturbing idea’. (Williams: Meeting God in Paul, SPCK, p27).

This phrase seems to sum up the challenge of the Christian faith, the challenge that totally overturned all of Paul’s pre-conceived ideas. He is turned upside down and inside out by the message presented in the cross of Jesus. In this ‘new order’ Williams goes on to say, ‘Those who were once strays, migrants, exiles, foreigners, are now insiders.’ (ibid. p32).  What a mind-blowing message from Paul’s pen this must have been to both Onesimus in prison, and Philemon in Laodicea, both trapped in the ancient world of unquestioned social conventions.

What a mind-blowing message to all the Christian communities in the era of St. Paul! What a mind-blowing message it is even to our own ears, for we too are trapped by all sorts of shackles of acceptable behaviours, acceptable types of people, acceptable types of refugees and unacceptable types of refugees, acceptable ‘people – like – us’.

For St. Paul ‘The community of believers…is an organism, in which the welfare of the whole depends on the welfare of every part, where the sickness of any part is the sickness of the whole.’ (ibid. p44).

In this image the citizenship of different people means absolutely nothing. We are not defined or imprisoned by the artificial boundaries that make us part of this nation, or that nation, for as believers we are one in Christ, and our citizenship is of the kingdom of God. This is not just applicable to Paul’s time but to our own, and perhaps very acutely to our own time.

We need to hear the call of Christ Jesus to be one, as he and his heavenly Father are one. (John 17, 22-23). It is not possible therefore to be a Russian Orthodox Christian, or a Ukrainian Orthodox Christian; to be an Anglican Christian or an Episcopalian Christian or a Roman Catholic Christian; to be a Baptist Christian or a Pentecostal Christian; it is not even possible to be a “non-denominational’ Christian, because we know that even they have a sub– text.

Have I gone mad? Maybe. However, I know that we have identities, that we need passports, that we need visas, in life. I know that some of us follow this or that tradition of Christ’s church – and I accept that at one level. At another level I, we, all know, if we are honest, the radical message of Jesus – that radical message understood and so well articulated by Paul the Apostle; and we all know how much easier and comfortable it is to be defensive about our nationalities, or our church traditions. ‘The universal welcome; Paul’s disturbing idea.’ (Williams, see above).

What we witness in our day is a tragedy unfolding before our eyes in Ukraine. Brothers and sisters in the same ‘Cyrillic’ speaking Orthodox tradition caught up in such a bloodbath. Religion has been used as a hand-maid to justify this terrible conflict. Christian killing Christian; Orthodox persecuting Orthodox. It is never acceptable behaviour, but perhaps all the more shocking when people formed around a gospel of love, turn their backs on the very gospel at the heart of their faith. It is heart-breaking. The sad truth is that Christians fail.

 

Yet, despite our exasperation, we are all too aware that at the heart of our faith is the mystery of the cross. In another of Rowan William’s books, Being Christian SPCK p5 he reflects on sharing in the life and death of Jesus and says this, ‘… baptism does not confer on us as status that marks us off from everybody else. To be able to say, ‘I’m baptized’ is not to claim an extra dignity, let alone a sort of privilege that keeps you separate from and superior to the rest of the human race, but to claim a new level of solidarity with other people. It is to accept that to be affected – you might even say contaminated – by the mess of humanity. This is very paradoxical.’ We share in the life and death of Jesus.

Jesus himself knows paradox. He is approaching the holy city of Jerusalem – the city of the temple, the place of the ‘holy of holies’. ‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it. How often I have desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you. And I tell you, you will not see me until the day comes when you say, ‘Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.’ (Luke 13, 34-35).

Our lives together as Christians are formed in the mystery of the cross; we tell of this mystery, even in the tragedy of today’s realities, even with heavy hearts and with tears in our eyes.

From his prison cell, and on the road to his martyrdom, we wrestle with Paul’s words to Philemon and the Christian community in Laodicea,

‘Therefore, my brothers and sisters, whom I love and long for, my joy and my crown, stand firm in the Lord in this way, my beloved.’

Amen.