Canadian Mennonite
Volume 11, No. 10
May 14, 2007

Faith&Life

Pentecost was a time of mighty movement by God’s spirit to bring new life into the church. It was not new wine, as some thought, that led the apostles to speak out. It was the Holy Spirit’s leading the church in fresh and unexpected ways. Canadian Mennonite’s Eastern Canada correspondent, Dave Rogalsky, uses Paul’s letter to Philemon to reflect on how the Holy Spirit has moved in the church, then and now, in a number of areas. (In the New Testament book, Paul asks Philemon to welcome back his runaway slave, Onesimus.) Ed.

Imagine yourselves members of Philemon’s household the morning the letter from Paul arrives. Listen to what might have been Philemon’s rant in response:

“The gall of that man! Telling me how to run my own household. And that good-for-nothing Onesimus. Comes waltzing in here as if nothing was wrong!

‘I should put him on privy cleaning duty for a year!’

“Onesimus has been gone for months. A good slave he was. But he got ideas of freedom beyond his station in life. And he ran off, taking my money and possessions with him! I should have had that thief beaten and then locked in chains! I should sell him to a pig farmer for labour. I should put him on privy cleaning duty for a year! But no, not if I want to stay in Paul’s good books.

“The gall of that man! He recognized Onesimus in Rome. Remembered him from one of the many times he stayed here. ‘He was useful to me.’ That’s a play on his name. Onesimus means ‘useful.’ He should have sent him right back. But no, he used him, talked with him, was gentle with him, convinced him to become a follower of Jesus. If Paul would have just sent him straight back to me, or sold him at market and sent me the money, then I wouldn’t be in this quandary now.

“‘Do your duty, no longer treat him like a slave, but as a brother in Christ.’ Bah! Thirty pieces of silver, that’s what Onesimus means to me. I’d like to treat him like the possession he is. But Paul said he wanted to come visit here or he might learn what I’ve done from afar.

“Treat him like a ‘beloved brother,’ not a slave. Give him his freedom—that’s his basic idea. He’s your brother in Christ now. Welcome him like you would welcome me, Paul writes.

“That Jewish meddler! He doesn’t understand our culture. We can’t just go freeing anyone who becomes a Christian. Then we’d have all the slaves becoming Christians, just to get their freedom. And that would be a wholesale departure from our customs and culture. That would demand a re-organization of our thoughts and ways of doing things. That would change everything!

“We Greeks need the slaves to keep our economy and our households going. Those Jews have rules about not keeping each other slaves more than six years. But non-Jews, they treat just as we treat our slaves.

“Doesn’t Paul understand the depth of change he’s demanding? It’s almost as great a change as the church accepting Greeks as equals to the Jews in Christ. And he went through that change himself, learning that God was accepting us Greeks if we would accept Christ. He must understand how great a change he’s demanding of me!

“Paul says, ‘So if you consider me your partner, welcome him as you would welcome me.’ What will I do? Paul gave me the good news of Jesus Christ. I don’t want to snub Paul, but I don’t want to free Onesimus. Maybe I should write him back and work this Greek-Jew angle. Maybe if I remind him how hard it was for him and the Jews to accept us Greeks, then he will relent.

“Right. He would probably agree with me completely and then turn the tables. I can hear what he might say now. ‘If God directed us, the Jews, the chosen people, to give up our 2,000 years of seclusion and separateness, and accept you Greeks as brothers and sisters in Christ—as members of our own families—then shouldn’t you do the same, accepting as sisters and brothers and equals those of your slaves who are believers in Christ? Even if it means giving up your long-held traditions, your laws, customs and culture? God called us to do it. Why would God not call you to do it?’

“Bah! I’m convinced by my own words! But I don’t have to like it.”

A radical thing to do

We actually don’t know if Philemon ever freed Onesimus, or what Onesimus did later in his life after leaving Paul. What we do know is that in the area where Philemon probably lived—around Colossae in Asia Minor—that there was an early bishop in the church named Onesimus, who could have been the same person. But it was a common name for slaves—“Useful.”

Philemon, the recipient of grace through one major decision that challenged a long-held belief, was himself challenged in his long-held belief. Freeing Onesimus would have been a radical thing for Philemon to do. It was a radical thing for Paul to demand or request. Paul was asking Philemon to do something outside of a literal interpretation of the Jewish Scriptures. Yet it was Paul’s experience that, before God, all people who named Jesus as Lord were his sisters and brothers in Christ (Galatians 3:26-29).

Even those who are already God’s people sometimes need experience and prodding to hear God in new ways.

Paul had already overseen just such a radical change. It was in no small part due to his call and preaching that gentiles began to become followers of Jesus Christ. And then Paul argued for their full inclusion in the church as gentiles. He argued that they did not need to become Jews first and then Christians. They could remain socially and culturally non-Jewish and be full followers of Jesus Christ.

This was a radical change for the early church. Did not the law, prophets and writings demand that to be a follower of God—one of God’s people—one needed to become a Jew? Yet Peter’s experience with Cornelius, the Roman centurion, made him back Paul in the acceptance of gentiles as full believers, full followers in the church of Christ (Acts 10-11).

Hearing God in new ways

Even those who are already God’s people sometimes need experience and prodding to hear God in new ways. Paul’s letter to Philemon was in the Bible all those years while Christians held slaves. Even some of the quiet and sincere Quakers in the U.S. held slaves—until John Woolman in the 1750s travelled from one Quaker group to another, speaking persuasively but also waiting to see if there would be unity in the Spirit on the matter. In this case, the Quakers did achieve unity that slavery was sin, and in 1790 the church wrote to the U.S. congress to publicly call for the abolition of slavery. It took another 75 years before there was full emancipation of slaves in the United States. And now we wouldn’t think of owning another person created by God.

When I began my studies in the 1970s I came with the long-held Christian views that ministry was the exclusive prerogative of men. It was not until I sat with a good friend who was working as a chaplain in a university that my assumptions were challenged.

Her call to ministry was not much different than mine. She had gifts to share. She had a faith in God. What made me eligible to be a pastor and her not? I went back to Scripture and found the parts that support women as active in church life and leadership changing how I understood the verses that reserve church leadership for men. And as I studied, I discovered that, instead of limiting women, these passages could be seen as radical openings of possibilities for women in that culture.

Paul’s comment, “let a women learn in silence” (I Timothy 2:11) was radical in a society that thought women could not learn.

Peter stated in his Pentecost sermon in Acts 2:17-18: “In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. Even upon my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy.”

I came to believe that God had sent the Spirit to both men and women to prophesy, preach and do ministry. The same spiritual gifts were given by God to women as to men. I confessed my sin and began to teach otherwise, encouraging women in their ministry and doing what I could to promote equality in all relationships between men and women.

We must treat seriously that the Bible is not unanimous in this regard. There are passages that promote male supremacy, just as there are those that allow for slavery, and there are passages that argue the position our church holds now.

Determining which passages God calls us to follow is a difficult but vital job of spiritual discernment for the whole community of faith.

Determining which passages God calls us to follow is a difficult but vital job of spiritual discernment for the whole community of faith. We need to keep working at this. Where would the church be if Peter and the other early Christians had not preached what many thought were just drunken ravings: “Therefore let the entire house of Israel know with certainty that God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified.”

As the Mennonite Church, we have faced other serious issues where Scripture is not unanimous:

In these situations we need to rely on the movement of God’s Spirit in our midst to help us search the Scriptures and discern together what is right. Is our understanding truly shaped by God’s teaching in Word and Spirit, or are we mistakenly following what are actually human sinful impulses or secular culture?

The Confession of Faith states, “In making decisions, whether to choose leaders or resolve issues, members of the church listen and speak in a spirit of prayerful openness, with the Scriptures as the constant guide. Persons shall expect not only affirmation, but also correction. In a process of discernment, it is better to wait patiently for a word from the Lord leading toward consensus, than to make hasty decisions.”

Let me also suggest some ways forward:

And I am convinced that God will continue to lead us into whatever the future holds.

—Dave Rogalsky

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