Forgiveness, Philemon, and (the Vertical/Horizontal) Gospel

Hello, friends.

This is Pastor Creighton.

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The second lesson is the book of Philemon.

Paul, a prisoner for Christ Jesus, and Timothy, our brother.

To Philemon, our beloved fellow worker, and Athia, our sister, and Archipus, our fellow soldier, and the church in your house.

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

I thank my God always when I remember you in my prayers, because I hear of your love and of the faith that you have toward the Lord Jesus and all the saints.

And I pray that the sharing of your faith may become effective for the full knowledge of every good thing that is in us for the sake of Christ.

For I have derived much joy and comfort from your love, my brother, because the hearts of the saints have been refreshed through you.

Accordingly, though I am bold enough in Christ to command you to do what is required, yet for love's sake I prefer to appeal to you.

I, Paul, an old man, and now a prisoner also for Christ Jesus, I appeal to you for my child, Onesimus, whose father I became in my imprisonment.

Formerly he was useless to you, but now he is indeed useful to you and to me.

I am sending him back to you, sending my very heart.

I would have been glad to keep him with me in order that he might serve me on your behalf during my imprisonment for the gospel, but I prefer to do nothing without your consent, in order that your goodness might not be by compulsion, but of your own accord.

For this perhaps is why he was parted from you for a while, that you might have him back forever, no longer as a bondservant, but more than a bondservant, as a beloved brother, especially to me, but how much more to you, both in the flesh and in the Lord.

So if you consider me your partner, receive him as you would receive me.

For he has ringed, if he has ranged you at all or owes you anything, charge that to my account.

I, Paul, write this with my own hand.

I will repay it, to say nothing of your owing me even your own self.

Yes, brother, I want some benefit from you in the Lord.

Refresh my heart in Christ.

Confident of your obedience, I write to you, knowing that you will do even more than I say.

At the same time, prepare a guest room for me, for I am hoping that through your prayers I will be graciously given to you.

Epiphras, my fellow prisoner in Christ Jesus, sends greetings to you.

And so do Mark, Aristarchus, Damas, and Luke, my fellow workers.

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit.

The word of the Lord thanks to God.

Paul writes, this is perhaps why he was parted from you for a while, that you may have him back forever.

No longer as a bondservant, but more than a bondservant, as a beloved brother.

Let's pray.

We'd be foolish to think that it does not come with great cost, but I think we'd be foolish to think it does not come without great privilege and joy and depth and life.

So, Father, help us to count the cost in our own hearts and in our relationships with others.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.

Please be seated.

I don't know if I've ever read that verse, hating your father or your mother with my parents present.

That's a tricky gospel passage that I don't have time to preach on today.

But maybe we can talk about it over coffee afterwards.

So it's May in 1981, and four shots ring out in St.

Peter's Square in Rome.

Pope John Paul II has been shot by a young man radicalized by a terrorist group.

And as John Paul II recounts this event, he recalls his trip to the hospital.

And that's where he says, in his heart, he determined his next course of action was to forgive this young man.

Maybe this seems like an extreme example of forgiveness, but I can't help but think in my own life, I have not come anywhere close to the kind of harm done by a would-be assassin.

I only know how difficult forgiveness is.

And I only have to think that that was a difficult thing for John Paul II to set himself to do.

I don't think that highlights what an amazing and exceptional man John Paul II was.

I think it highlights what an amazing and exceptional God we have who works in our hearts and works in his heart.

Forgiveness is difficult business, isn't it?

I think we know that if we've ever tried to forgive, which I think statistically is roughly in the 100% range.

I think we all of us know that forgiveness is not an easy business.

The book of Philemon, Paul's letter to a man named Philemon, is a letter about forgiveness.

It's a letter that recognizes a vertical dimension of forgiveness that relates us to God, but it's a letter that relates that vertical dimension of forgiveness to the horizontal dimension of our relationships with one another as brothers and sisters in Christ.

See, that's the good news, the gospel of forgiveness, that empowers us to forgive.

The good news of our forgiveness empowers us to forgive in the vertical and in the horizontal.

Pardon me, the vertical forgiveness empowers us to forgive in the horizontal.

And I think that's what we're praying when we pray the Lord's Prayer.

Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.

Don't we pray that?

So how we treat one another as brothers and sisters, especially within the body of Christ, says everything about how we regard God's grace given to us in Christ.

How we practice the horizontal says everything about how we understand the vertical.

In real relationships between real people and real time.

And that's what receiving Onesimus back, not just as a bondservant, but as a beloved brother, is all about.

That's the heart of this letter, a heart of forgiveness.

Now, before we dive into this letter, I think I should just have a quick aside here, because the book of Philemon and other passages bring up this uh difficult topic of slavery in Scripture.

Maybe some of your translations don't have bondservant, but they have slave.

And it might leave us wondering: is Philemon a pro-slavery letter?

Is Paul intercepting a slave on the underground railroad as it is and saying it's your Christian duty to go back into oppression?

I don't think he is.

I think there's a few things we need to acknowledge about slavery in the Old Testament, well, in the New Testament and scripture generally, just so that we can enter into the context of what Paul is conveying to Philemon here.

It's messy and we should talk about it more over coffee, but I want to share just a couple of bottom lines to help just give us a sense of where we're going, a sense of what we're talking about here.

The first thing we can say about slavery in the New Testament is it is not the equivalent of what we understand about the transatlantic slave trade in the 19th century, predicated on this horrid idea of racial superiority and inferiority.

Instead, slavery in the New Testament, bondservanthood in the New Testament, functions maybe more like a social welfare system.

So here's uh from the uh introduction to the ESV translation, it gives a uh a little bit of a blurb on this word do loss, which is translated as bondservant.

It says, in New Testament times, uh dul loss is often best described as a bondservant, that is, someone in the Roman Empire officially bound under contract to serve his master for seven years.

When the contract expired, the person was freed, given his wage that had been saved by the master, and officially declared a freed man.

So maybe we can already hear some of the differences between what we understand to be true of the transatlantic slave trade and what we're talking about here in the New Testament.

That's the first thing we can understand.

The second thing is what Paul understands to be functioning in terms of the relationship between the gospel and social institutions of the time.

See, Paul understands that the gospel is not simply a political message.

It has political implications, certainly it does.

But first and foremost, the good news of Jesus transforms human hearts.

It regenerates and makes new the hearts of real people who participate in real social institutions.

So when real hearts are regenerated and made new and animated by the love of Christ, then their participation in the social institutions around them changes, even reforms those institutions around them.

So we can trace a line from Paul's appeal here to Philemon right to the abolition of slavery in the late 19th century in England.

By the way, led by evangelical Christians.

Okay, a couple of bottom lines to keep in mind, just so that we don't get caught in the weeds and we risk missing the central message of forgiveness here.

Philemon is not a pro-slavery letter.

It is a pro-forgiveness letter.

It is a pro-reconciliation letter, it is a pro-renewal letter.

In this way, it is a pro-gospel letter.

So, how do we see the gospel at work here?

Well, here's what I'd like us to do.

I'd like us to meditate on the main characters that we're encountering here and then ask what this means in our own life.

So, in the book of Philemon, first off, we meet Philemon.

If you have your order of service, by the way, or your Bible, please do track along with me if you'd like.

Philemon is a wealthy man.

He lives with his family in this populous city of Colossae.

At some point in the past, he was converted by Paul, probably on a business trip to Ephesus.

He accepts Jesus into his life.

He's made new.

He goes back to Colossae, and now he and his family, having converted to Christ, host a church in their own home.

In the first century, the Christians didn't have beautiful church buildings filled with lovely art like this one.

They met in homes and living rooms together.

And so they host this Colossian church in their own home.

We know a few things about Philemon from Paul's description of him.

We know some of his character.

This is a man who's full of love.

This is a man who is eager to share his faith and seems to infect those around him with joy and comfort.

Do we know some of those folks for ourselves?

We seem to spend time with them, and it's like we catch joy like a disease, right?

I'm a bit of a dour German, so sometimes I walk away going, oh, he made me so joyful.

I think Philemon is a guy like that.

In fact, Paul says that Philemon is a guy who refreshes hearts.

When Philemon encounters someone, he has this, he seems to have this encouraging ability to leave your heart feeling restored and revitalized and made full.

That's the kind of person Philemon is.

Now, Philemon, being a wealthy man, seems to have some influence, seems to be an upstanding character in the community, he has a bondservant in his home named Onesimus.

And Onesimus, it seems, at some point has stolen from him and split.

He ran.

And he ran off to Rome.

Although Philemon presumably doesn't know where he ran off to.

Here Philemon is the wronged party.

Philemon would have given a considerable degree of trust to Onesimus.

Onesimus would have been involved in the everyday affairs of his household.

He's been wronged.

He's been betrayed.

Perhaps he feels abandoned.

And maybe for those of us who have been wronged in a similar way, can identify with Philemon at this moment.

I was reading the book of Jonah earlier this week.

If you've been tracking with the daily readings that we put out, you've been reading Jonah as well.

Jonah's a really interesting character to me.

He is the most reluctant prophet of all the prophets.

Like he doesn't want the job.

He keeps trying to refuse the job.

And at the very end, he delivers this message of repentance in the city of Nineveh he's speaking to, who actually repents and there's renewal there.

And Jonah walks away feeling so angry because he wanted to see God wipe this city out.

And so this final scene is this conversation between Jonah and God.

And Jonah is just, he gets, he gets to the point where he says, I am so angry, I would rather die.

You know, have you ever experienced anger like that?

It seems like, I mean, for Jonah, it's this imagined injustice, but if it's imagined or not, you get to this point where you go, I am so angry, I'd rather die than release my resentment, my bitterness, my hatred.

Something wrong has been done and it needs to be rectified.

See, I wonder if Philemon is in a place like this.

I wonder if in these moments where we've been wronged, resentment is the easy answer.

Bitterness festers.

Anger is internalized, and we refuse to let go.

Because to let go, maybe, is to say this doesn't matter.

This injustice can be excused.

The tricky thing that happens, though, when we refuse to release that kind of resentment, we hold a grudge against someone else, is we think we're holding on to a sense of justice, but we end up getting trapped by our own anger, like Jonah, unable to celebrate this wonderful work that God has just done.

One of my favorite descriptions of resentment comes from A.A.'s big book.

And the bottom line it says about resentment is this: it is plain that a life which includes deep resentment leads only to futility and unhappiness.

We become trapped in our own anger, captives to our own resentment when we refuse to let go.

This is not the gospel life.

The gospel offers an alternative to this life of being trapped in resentment, a life of love and faith and joy that characterizes Philemon, and it's incompatible with this sort of bitterness.

Resentment has to be dealt with.

And that's why I think Paul is writing to Philemon.

Paul is writing to make an appeal, not to coerce Philemon, not to come down hard on him and say this is exactly what I expect and when I expect it.

He makes an appeal, a persuasion, appealing to Philemon on the grounds of Christian love.

Maybe even that he stepped back just a little bit and acknowledged the depth of God's own love for him, the depth of God's forgiveness, and maybe invite him to put that vertical forgiveness and love into practice in the horizontal between he and Onesimus.

Paul's not trying to coerce him.

He's walking a tightrope here, but he's not trying to hem Philemon in.

The thing is, when I think when I think when church leadership comes down hard on someone experiencing resentment or bitterness, when the church says, you better get over it, I don't think the church is operating from a gospel place.

I think the church can offer invitation.

I think the church can remind hardened hearts of the depth and overflowing love of the gospel.

But here's Paul making his appeal to love, not coming down hard on this man who's been wronged.

Philemon is the wronged party, but he has a choice.

He can choose a life of bitterness, having built up a wall between he and this brother of his, or he can choose a gospel life of forgiveness, of releasing Onesimus from this wrong.

So we meet Philemon.

But we also meet Onesimus.

And Onesimus, like I say, was Philemon's bondservant.

We don't know why he took off, but he took off.

He stole from Philemon.

Probably enough money to get by on, and then he runs off to Rome, the most populous city in the empire, probably to lay low and remain hidden.

They didn't have Facebook those days, right?

So it's not like you can track people in the same way.

Onesimus in this way is not the one who's been wronged like Philemon, he's the one who's committed the wrong.

And in the way that only God can work, by his sovereignty, so the letter seems to say, Onesimus' life intersected with Paul, who was in prison in Rome.

And when Onesimus met Paul, he heard the gospel.

He heard the good news of Jesus' forgiveness for him, and he accepted the gospel and decided to walk as a disciple in newness of life.

Even so much so, Paul describes him as a faithful and beloved brother in Colossians chapter 4 and useful to his own gospel ministry.

Colossians 4 · chapter mention

Onesimus is living proof that the gospel transforms lives, can grab anyone, anywhere they're at, and change their lives completely.

I don't know if you all watch the Shia LaBeouf video that's been going around.

I posted on my Facebook earlier.

It's amazing to watch.

All say is an aside, there are these moments.

Onesimus is an example.

This uh you know, this this former hedonistic actor is an example of how God's grace can grab someone exactly like that where they are and transform them completely.

We should celebrate those moments.

Onesimus has had such a moment.

But Onesimus, who's been transformed by God's grace, is now ready to count the cost.

Wrong has been done between he and a Christian brother in the past, and now that wrong needs to be acknowledged, needs to be addressed.

Amends need to be made if restoration and renewal of the gospel is going to be fully realized.

So if we've ever wronged another person, maybe at this point we can identify with Onesimus.

Maybe we can identify with that impulse, having done wrong, having hurt someone so deeply, we can identify with that impulse to run away, to shelter and hide, to not poke our head out of the trench.

I mean, we've been doing this as the human race since our first parents, haven't we?

When Adam and Eve first transgressed, first trespassed against law, what did they do?

They ran and hid.

They tried to cover their shame.

We've been trying to run and hide ever since.

Hide from the consequences and hide from the ones that we've wronged.

But the gospel offers a different way of dealing with wrongs.

The gospel asks us to count the cost, to acknowledge our wrongdoing, to seek forgiveness, and then to walk in newness of life, not as one who is trapped in captivity by wrong we've done in the past, but one who can be released and renewed and restored to a life that we otherwise couldn't have of freedom from our past wrongdoing.

Here's Philemon and Onesimus, the one who's been wronged and the one who's done the wrong.

But there's a third character we should notice, and that's Paul himself.

Paul the Apostle, Paul the pastor writing personally to Philemon.

This is Paul's only personal letter we have in the New Testament.

I love that we read the whole letter today, by the way, because that's how scripture is supposed to be read.

Paul didn't write chapter numbers and verse numbers as he was writing his letter.

He meant it to be read like a letter.

And when we receive a letter in the mail, who among us just reads a couple of paragraphs and go, okay, I'll get to the rest tomorrow.

I'll read another chunk and another chunk.

I love that we read the whole thing, because sometimes it's a good discipline to sit down and set time aside.

To read through a whole letter or through a whole passage of scripture and catch the overall arc.

Okay, sorry, that's just aside.

Here's Paul writing to Philemon, making an appeal.

I appeal to you, Philemon, for my child Onesimus.

Why is Onesimus his child?

Because Paul was used by God to give birth to his faith.

And he calls Onesimus a beloved brother, a beloved brother of Paul, but he reminds Philemon that he is a beloved brother of him, of Philemon's own self because of the gospel, because we are made brothers and sisters in Christ.

And Paul writes: if he has wronged you at all, if Onesimus has wronged you, Philemon, or he owes you anything, charge that to my account.

Here's Paul stepping into the middle of this broken relationship, acting as the mediator, reconciling two alienated parties at enity with one another, intervening towards reconciliation and restoration.

Paul is a peacemaker here.

Because I think Paul understands that gospel life is a life of peacemaking.

Blessed are the peacemakers, they will be called sons of God.

Paul understands that there is reconciliation, mediation in the vertical dimension.

When we who have transgressed against God's law, I mean the Bible makes no apologies to say that we are sinners who have transgressed God's law, in the midst of our transgression, in the midst of this broken relationship between us and God, insteps a mediator, at God's own initiative, Jesus Himself.

And so Paul writes elsewhere to Timothy, his protege, that there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all.

Here we are in the midst of this broken relationship with God, and in steps Jesus to mediate between the two parties.

Not because God is reluctant to forgive us, but precisely because God is so eager to forgive us that he sent his only son.

And here's Jesus reconciling us with the Father for love.

So eager to do that, he is willing to give himself as a ransom for all.

What we owe the Father for our transgression, Jesus says, charge that to my account.

And that is the cross.

So that by his resurrection we can have his newness of life.

Paul understands that the gospel of forgiveness works in the vertical, it has to be practiced in the horizontal.

Those of us who experience peace with God through Christ make peace with one another in Christ.

That's how the gospel works.

This is the gospel reality.

The good news of our forgiveness in Christ empowers us to forgive.

Friends, I think there are times in our life where we are each and one, every one of us, onesimous.

I think we know times in our life where we have done wrong to another.

And in those moments, isn't it so easy to run and hide?

Isn't it so easy to not face the one we've wronged and to split into the other direction?

But the gospel gives us a way forward.

The gospel invites us to acknowledge our wrongdoing, to ask forgiveness of the ones we've wronged, and to seek restoration, to find freedom in forgiveness.

I think the words, I was wrong, please forgive me, are some of the most important words that Christians can say.

Because maybe those words are us practicing the gospel.

Is there wrong in your own life that you're running from?

Is there restoration that needs to be realized?

Sometimes we're onesimists, but sometimes we're Philemon, aren't we?

Sometimes we've been wronged.

And in those moments it's easy for us to resent, to cling on to bitterness, to refuse to let go, to say like Jonah, I would rather die than let go of this.

And we become captives to our own anger, captives to our own bitterness.

The gospel gives us a way forward to release the wrongdoer from bitterness, from the hardness of our own heart, for the sake of a refreshed and renewed heart.

For the sake of true freedom, love, faith, and joy.

See, resentment, it said, is a poison that we drink, hoping that the other dies.

Releasing resentment is refusing to drink from that poison chalice.

To restore relationships, to practice forgiveness.

It doesn't mean that what happened in the past is okay.

Doesn't mean what happened in the past is just something that's forgotten.

Nor does it mean that the way forgiveness and reconciliation is happening here in Philemon is exactly the mechanism that it's going to work in every situation without fail.

But the very heart seen here in Philemon is the heart that informs our own practice of Christian forgiveness.

A heart of love towards one another.

A heart that desires restoration and forgiveness.

So do you have resentment in your own heart this morning?

Is there a brother or a sister in Christ against whom you just hold a grudge you can't let go on?

Maybe the place to begin is to start by praying for that person.

That the blessing you desire for yourself is the kind of blessing that God would give them.

And maybe to that prayer you add, God, make me willing to forgive that person.

And if that's too scary a prayer, sometimes I need to start by saying, God, make me willing to be willing to forgive that person.

Or make me willing to be willing to be willing to forgive that person.

You know what I mean.

And I'm convinced God can work with that.

And God can do gospel work beginning there.

Do you have resentment in your heart that needs to be released?

So the good news of forgiveness in Christ empowers us to forgive, to practice the peace with one another, like Philemon and Onesimus.

One of the interesting liturgical moments for us in our service is the peace.

We never really know what to do with the peace.

We do a lot of peace signs, which is great because it's been COVID and we've sort of been where we're at, and that's fine.

But the peace originated in the very earliest church as a practice of restoration and reconciliation.

Here we've all just confessed our sins to God.

We've received God's forgiveness.

And now what are we going to do?

We've done the vertical, we're going to practice that in the horizontal.

The peace of Christ be always with you, is my way of saying we're at peace with one another.

And that is the moment for the earliest Christians, where if there is a broken relationship where restoration needs to take place, that's the moment where Christians would tap each other on the corner and say, We need to talk.

I was wrong.

Please forgive me.

Even if we need to say, I was wrong to hold this much resentment against you for this long, that's when we do that.

After receiving God's forgiveness for us, and before we come to this table, which for us is the table of forgiveness and reconciliation with God and with one another.

That's what the peace is for.

So if ever we need to tap one another on the shoulder and say we need to talk, and we go out into the foyer, no one's going to think anything of it.

We're going to celebrate that forgiveness is being practiced.

We need to do that, saints, don't we?

Wouldn't it be a beautiful thing?

If the if unchurched unbelievers came to New Song and they went, I can't deny that there is truth to the vertical gospel of forgiveness because I see the horizontal dimension of forgiveness being practiced Sunday for Sunday for Sunday.

That's the kind of church we desire to be.

That's the kind of church the gospel can shape us to be.

So here's John Paul II lying in the ambulance, committing himself to forgive his would-be assassin.

John Paul II, five days later, released a public declaration of his forgiveness, and then he went and visited this young man in prison.

I'm not saying that we always have to go and visit the one who's done us wrong.

But listen to John Paul II's reflections on forgiveness.

He writes, forgiveness is above all a personal choice, a decision of the heart to go against the natural instinct to pay back evil with evil.

We all need to be forgiven by others.

So we must all be ready to forgive.

Dear friends, the gospel is good news of forgiveness in Christ, and it empowers us to forgive.

If we can understand the vertical, we can put into practice the horizontal.

So, Lord, forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.

Amen.

Thank you for listening today.

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