Bible reading: Philemon 1-21.

Message.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, and that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”. I wonder if you recognise that sentence? It is part of the American Declaration of Independence, agreed in Philadelphia in July 1776. And it includes some stirring words: that God created all men (today we’d say all people) equal, that everyone has the right to liberty and happiness, and that these are “self-evident” truths – no-one could possibly argue against them. It’s therefore no surprise that the United States calls itself “the land of the free” – yet its first President, the revered George Washington, was a slave-owner. That fact seems to fly in the face of these wonderful words.

To be fair, Washington wasn’t one of the people who wrote or signed the Declaration of Independence. That’s because he was busy in New York, leading the army which was fighting the British. But he was certainly familiar with the Declaration’s contents, as he read it out to his somewhat downhearted troops to inspire them in their struggle. So it seems strange that, despite its statements about equality, liberty and happiness, Washington – at least at that stage of his life – seemed to accept slavery as a normal aspect of American society. Indeed, by the time of his birth in 1732, slavery had been a feature of American life for nearly a century; it was an indispensable part of the economic, social, legal, cultural, and political fabric of the colony of Virginia. Washington inherited slaves, mostly of African origin, when his father died; as a young man he bought more and, when he married, his rich young wife brought more still to the Mount Vernon estate; and that wasn’t the end of it. When he died in 1799, there were 317 slaves on his estate. I’ll tell you what happened next at the end of this message.

Slavery was, of course, endemic across the ancient Roman Empire. It’s estimated that, at the time of Jesus and Paul, between 10% and 20% of the empire’s population were enslaved: only those at the very top of Roman society would have the freedoms we take for granted today. Enslaved people worked in cities, the countryside, households and businesses; many carried out hard manual labour under strict supervision, while others performed more specialised craft activities with a higher degree of autonomy – indeed some were even responsible for other slaves. Under Roman law, enslaved people had no personal rights and were regarded as their masters’ property or even tools. They could be bought, sold, and mistreated at will and could not own property, enter into contracts, or legally marry. Slaves might be highly skilled but their masters were always legally responsible for their actions. Even if they gained their freedom they still owed duties to their former owners and were not eligible for public office.

It’s this world – so different from ours (or is it? I’ll come back to that) which forms the background to Paul’s letter to Philemon. It’s a short letter and, unlike most of Paul’s letters that are in the New Testament, it was written to a person rather than to a church or group of churches. Philemon isn’t a part of the Bible we’re familiar with, it isn’t full of quotable verses – so I wonder how many of us have actually read it?

The story of this letter is simple. Onesimus, a slave, has run away from Philemon, a Christian man of some standing. At some point Onesimus has met Paul, during on of his imprisonments, and has become not only a Christian but a spiritual companion and son to the apostle. Paul is in a quandary: Roman law demands that he send the slave back to his master, but what will happen to him when he gets there? Philemon has the right to impose any punishment that he wishes, even execution – a thought which clearly horrifies Paul.

So what we have here is basically a begging letter, which Paul begins by buttering up Philemon with praise. He goes on: “I love Onesimus; he’s been very useful to me and become my dear friend. Now, we’re all believers, so please will you take him back and treat him kindly as you would treat any Christian brother”. Legally Paul doesn’t have a leg to stand on (and it’s notable that he doesn’t ask Philemon to give Onesimus his freedom); he is relying on a spirit of Christian goodwill – together with an offer to pay financial compensation for loss of service – in order to achieve the desired outcome. The themes of reconciliation, forgiveness and the transforming power of the Gospel are very evident.

We may be surprised that Paul – who, after all, had written that “there is no longer any distinction between Gentiles and Jews, barbarians, savages, slaves, and free” in the Church, if not society – didn’t take advantage of the situation to condemn the whole system of slavery, or at least tell Philemon to give Onesimus his freedom. He didn’t do that, and we must ask why. I can think of a number of possible answers. One is simply that a personal – in fact a begging – letter wasn’t the place to spell out detailed Christian ethics. Paul was addressing a personal situation: nothing more.

Another suggestion is that Christians who, you’ll remember, refused to worship the Roman emperor, were already regarded as members of a dangerous cult. Condemnation of the slave system, so crucial to Roman society, might have been seen as a call for slaves to rise up against their masters – a constant and terrifying thought for the authorities. So Paul may have kept quiet to avoid any possibility of that accusation being made against the Church. He wanted to stay well within the law and keep Christianity’s head “below the parapet”.

A third thought is that Paul realised that there was no point in the Church trying to change ideas which were deeply ingrained in Roman society. The Empire was mighty, the Church was tiny. The best he could hope for was to change attitudes among the believers – even that would provoke a lot of criticism and wouldn’t be easy.

This leads me on to my final thought as to why Paul didn’t take this opportunity to denounce slavery: it was because he just didn’t see it as wrong. For Paul was a first-century Roman Jews: slavery to him was part-and-parcel of society. Just as many British Christians a century ago saw nothing wrong in singing about “the rich man in his castle, the poor man in his gate”, and as wealthy Christians in the previous century made their money from sugar plantations in the West Indies where slaves shipped from Africa worked under appalling conditions, so perhaps Paul, a man of his time, thought slavery was a manifestation of the natural order of humanity. He didn’t condemn it because he’d never really thought about it, it was just “how things were”. In fact, in his letter to Timothy, he tells slaves “to regard their masters as worthy of all honour, so that God’s name … may not be blasphemed”, while in Ephesians he writes, “Slaves, obey your human masters with fear and trembling; and do it with a sincere heart, as though you were serving Christ”. That’s advice which makes us want to cry, “No!”

Now, before we criticise Paul too severely, let’s stop and think: how much of the goods we buy, whether it’s food, electronics, fast fashion or whatever, has been produced by people who are effectively modern-day slaves in China, Bangladesh or Vietnam? One recent report says that almost £1bn of goods, including nearly two million T-shirts, 243,000 bras, 170,000 toothbrushes, 30,000 hair dryers, 6,000 lawn-mowers and 15 tonnes of walnuts have been imported into the UK in the last year from the Chinese region of Xinjiang where hundreds of thousands of people are allegedly forced to work in factories and fields against their will. Even here, we have people effectively working as slaves not just in the sex trade and as house servants but in nail bars, car washes and the fields of East Anglia. We keep our eyes closed too.

I’ve said that Paul didn’t call for the abolition of slavery in his letter to Philemon, and I’ve suggested some reasons for that. Nevertheless, what he did write was quietly subversive as he’s asking for Christian slave owners to regard their slaves as equals in the Church, he’s seeking lenient treatment instead of harsh brutality, he’s recognising that God sees slaves as precious human beings rather than goods and chattels that can be worked to death. If every slave master took Paul’s words and applied them – and that applies just as much to modern slavery in brothels, sweatshops, farms and packing sheds – then the practice would be fatally undermined and would die out. Sadly it has not and that must cause God, who values every human life, to despair of us.

I said I’d return to George Washington; and I’ve got some good news – well, fairly good news – to finish with. It’s that he changed his views on slavery during his life, to the point where he decided to never buy or sell another enslaved person, and hoped that the institution would eventually be abolished. His views changed most rapidly during the Revolutionary War against Britain; this was because he travelled to parts of the country where farming took place without the use of slave labour, because he saw black soldiers fighting just as bravely as white ones, and because he heard the views of abolitionists for the first time. Although Washington never went as far as setting free all his slave workers, he did include in his will a clause which meant that they were freed upon his death. Sadly the legacy of those days lives on to this day in at least the southern states of America.

The foundation story of Israel is of God setting them free from slavery in Egypt. Through Isaiah, many generations later, he told them to “remove the chains of oppression and the yoke of injustice, and let the oppressed go free”. And, of course, Jesus came “to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free the oppressed and announce that the time has come for the Lord tp save his people”. We’d all agree that freedom is a fundamental human right; but it’s more than that. For Jesus came to give all people perfect freedom. We’re a long way from achieving that.