City Church Charlottesville Sermon Podcast
Freedom & Slavery || Relationships || 7/21/24
- Welcome to City Church. We are a biblically based, relationally driven, spirit led church, encouraging everyone to follow Jesus, grow together, and serve others. We're excited to share this sermon with you today, and you can always find out more about us online at citychurchceeville.com. - Good morning. My name is Peter. If I haven't met you before, it's lovely to see you. I'm so glad we have this time together. Now, my name is Peter, and if you've come to City Church for any amount of time, maybe we've been in the same place, and I say this every time I preach, it would be weird for me to introduce myself because I've known some of you since 1994, and it would be weird for me not to introduce myself, so why should you know who I am? But I'm Peter, and I'm on the teaching team here, and my dad is the lead pastor of this church, but I went to seminary, I swear. My parents are just on vacation this week, as they were last week, as it's July. And if you were here last week, then you came through part of our sermon series on the pastoral epistles, where we tackled the somewhat controversial issue of women in ministry. So you're probably glad that we came this week to tackle the somewhat controversial issue of slavery in the pastoral epistles, which is what we'll be covering today. The pastoral epistles are a group, a small group, a subset of letters that Saint Paul wrote to some of his mentees who were running churches. They're first, second, Timothy, and Titus. And they're this kind of window, not only into some of Paul's personal relationships, but in the way that Paul was trying to teach his mentees how to build a church that modeled the kingdom of God. And so we've been looking at that when it comes to money and good works and women in ministry. And if you read the pastoral epistles and you're awake and the translations in English, and you're paying any attention at all, you come up to these moments in the epistles where Paul starts talking about something that's, I think, extremely difficult for us, which is the institution of slavery. And right, that's difficult for a couple of reasons. One basic reason is, as Americans, and rightfully so, the institution of slavery is deeply morally offensive to us. But some of us here, people of color, might also have the experience of, when you come up against these words about slavery, well, that rings deeper and differently, at no point in human history would I, Peter Hartwig, really have been in danger of being enslaved, of being brought under that kind of oppression and trapped into that kind of life. But for people who know that, whose personal and family history has that, these words ring intensely. And so as we're going through these letters, and we wanna square up to what God says in scripture, as we wanna hear and gather a word from it, it seems unwise, I think, to pass over passages like this, where they are difficult, even offensive. But let me offer you one little angle, maybe, one small phrase that I stole from a book called, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, if you'd like a resource. And it's just this little phrase, that scripture is written not to us, but it is written for us. Have you ever heard that before? People throw that around a little bit. Scripture is written for us, but not to us. So what does that mean? Well, it means something like this. When Paul wrote the letter to the Romans, he wrote it to the Romans. Raise your hand if you're a Roman, right? And I write emails to people, particularly. I don't want you reading all of my emails. And yet here we are. The Bible is kind of like going through Paul's emails. He wrote letters to specific people. He wrote the letters that we're writing today to his closest younger mentee in the world. And we're listening in on that. So it's not written to us. It's not written with our context in mind. Like, you may remember from your high school history classes, how wild the so-called discovery of the new world was. For centuries, people had thought that basically Europe, North African Asia, that's what there was. And then all of a sudden, there was this whole other half of the world. Paul didn't necessarily see that coming. We live on a continent and a cultural context on the other side of one of the greatest shifts in human history, from what Paul thought, what he saw, what he was writing. And so when we read the Bible, we have the task, the God-given spirit-led, but difficult task, of reading scripture on the other side of some of the biggest shifts in human history. And so there's this book that God has given for us, but not necessarily addressed to us. And so when we go back into Paul's pastoral epistles, not only are we going back into his personal relationships, but we're going back into a culture that is largely unlike ours. And so the question is when we come up against the difficult texts, like the ones we're gonna look at today, that address, for instance, the institution of slavery, they're not written to us. But is there for us, for our community, for our church in 2024, is there anything for us there? And I'm gonna submit to you that there is. There is something there for us. So let's take a look at what I think is, to be perfectly honest, the single most difficult passage in Paul's writings that address the institution of slavery. And that's 1 Timothy, chapter six, verses one and two. Paul will talk about the institution of slavery in several places in his letters. And I'll talk about why in a second, but I think this is the most difficult one. And of course, it appears in the pastoral epistles, which I was assigned to preach on. So here we go. This is what Paul writes in 1 Timothy, let all who are under a yoke as bond servants. This is how the English standard version translates it. The Greek word is dooloy. It's someone who works with no pay, but properly, we would call this slavery. So let all who are under the yoke as bond servants or slaves regard their own masters. The Greek word is despotos. It's where we get the word despot. So regard their own despots as worthy of all honor so that the name of God and the teaching may not be reviled. Those who have believing masters must not be disrespectful on the ground that they are brothers, rather they must serve all the better since those who benefit by their good service are believers and beloved. Okay, I don't know exactly where your mind goes when you hear that, but let me tell you where mine goes, where I hear that. When I hear that passage, I somehow imagine that St. Paul has been magically lifted out of the ancient Mediterranean and dropped into 18th century Georgia. And he is walking through Georgia and he comes upon a plantation that is using enslaved human labor to get its work done. And here Paul arrives in this place where there are hundreds of oppressed, impoverished, enslaved black folk. And it's, and I wonder if Paul walked up to them and they said, you know, this life is awful and this institution is in Justin and humane. Would Paul respond by going like, well, you have to treat your owners with respect? Is that what he would say? I mean, if this was all you had of St. Paul's work, and if you tried to drop him out of his context into ours, my, to be honest, chilling fear when I started reading through this material is that that's what he would say as though Paul and the Bible were pro-slavery. Now, what I want to suggest to you is that that's not the case, that what Paul is writing here is not properly applied in our own American context as somehow being pro-slavery. In fact, I want to suggest in the long run that Paul would be delighted to find out that in this country, in the new world, slavery had been abolished. But we got to take a couple slow steps to get there. If we're going to wade through the Bible faithfully and with a way of approaching scripture that honors its history and context. So this is the extremely, I think, difficult passage that we're dealing with today. So let me first of all give credit to Craig Keener, a biblical scholar whose name is getting a lot of air time around here recently. If you want more in this, let me throw you his way, Craig Keener. Let's, and I'm stealing a lot of this stuff from him. But let's start by approaching this passage by offering you a little bit of historical context of what exactly Paul might be talking about here. When he addresses the duloi, when he addresses the enslaved, who's he talking about? And what kind of life might we imagine for them? So there are some important historical differences between the kind of slavery that Paul would have been writing about in the ancient world and the kind of American chattel slavery that this country experienced for 300 odd years. Here's probably the most important one. In the ancient world, slavery lacked what we think of as a kind of racial basis. So there are great history books on this. You can read through them. But American slavery was based in this notion of race. So you have these European descended people living on this continent and they're saying terrifying things. Like, oh, these people who came from Africa, they are somehow by nature supposed to be enslaved. Ancient slavery lacked that kind of logic. So if you talk to the average Roman citizen and you said, who is fit to be enslaved, they would say, well, anybody who's not a Roman citizen. In the ancient Roman world, people ended up in slavery for a lot of reasons. Perhaps the most common was you had been defeated in war. You were functionally a prisoner of war. But it wasn't because, say, you're a Macedonian. It wasn't because you were British. American slavery had a particularly, I would say, an evil way of thinking about the nature, ethnicity, the race of enslaved people. And ancient slavery didn't quite have that element. In the ancient world, there were a number of fields, both literally and metaphorically, in which enslaved people would work. Gladiators, for those of you who are a fan of the movie gladiator, pretty much all gladiators were slaves. Pretty much everybody who worked in minds in the Roman Empire were enslaved. Lots of field workers were enslaved. And in urban contexts, lots of people who were enslaved worked in domestic service and homes, but they were also doctors and teachers. In fact, most doctors and teachers in ancient Rome were enslaved people. They tutored folks in the household or they had a kind of doctor's office owned by the family. So, when Paul is writing to these du loy in Ephesus, where Timothy is, he is an all likelihood not talking to folks who work in minds, who work in fields, who are gladiators. He's an all likelihood talking to people that work in urban homes and who may well have the vocation of doctors and teachers. So, for me, at least, this makes a significant difference in who I understand who Paul is talking to. So, one, there's not a significant racial element here in the way there is, in modern, I say modern starting in 1450, for what that's worth, in modern era American slavery, as opposed to ancient slavery. And also, Paul is probably talking to people who have, you might call him in a particular sector of the enslaved economy. There's also the fact that in the ancient world, it was actually really common to free slaves. Now, it's not because people were good people and they believed in liberation. It was because as enslaved people got older, the cost of caring for them got more expensive. But in the Americas, less than 1% of all enslaved people were ever freed. In the ancient world, it's a significant minority. So, there's also some sense that Paul might be talking to people who don't have quite the same total certainty that they'll never get out of this work. All right, Paul's talking to folks who this, in all likelihood, urban-based domestic group of Dooloy, whose lives, well, they look very, very different than the lives of people who were enslaved in the U.S. It's one reason why we can start to imagine that when Paul did walk into Georgia in the 19th century, these aren't the words, he would say. So, that's a little historical background, an ancient slavery. Here's another piece of context that I think is really important. Paul, in his letters, spoke about slavery in several places that had, I'll call them, extra elements than this little passage. So, here's an intriguing thing. In 1 Timothy 1, in the beginning of this letter, Paul has a list of people who he says will not inherit the kingdom of God. And one of the groups of people he lists are the Andhra Padistes, the enslavers. At the beginning of this letter, he has said that people who put other people in slavery, they won't make it into the kingdom of God. Okay, that's a little curious that this comes afterwards. Here's another bit, in 1 Timothy 5, he quotes directly the passage from the Torah that says, "The laborer is due their wages." Laborers deserve their wages. Well, now he's talking to a group of people whose whole life is contextualized by the fact that they are not paid their wages for their work. That's a little interesting. Here's a more radical moment, not from one of the pastoral epistles, but I think is a compelling window into what Paul is trying to do when he writes about slavery. This comes from Ephesians in the sixth chapter, verses five to nine. It goes like this, "Duloi, bondservant slaves. "Obey your earthly masters, Kuroy, with fear and trembling, "with a sincere heart as you would Christ, "not by the way of eye service as people pleasers, "but as bond service of Christ, "doing the will of God from the heart, "rendering service with a good will as to the Lord, "and not to man. "Knowing that whatever good anyone does, "this he will receive back from the Lord, "whether he is a bondservant or is free." Masters, do the same to them, and stop your threatening, knowing that he who is both their master and yours is in heaven, and there is no partiality with him. Okay, here's a moment in Paul's writings, where Paul looks at the duloi, looks at the enslaved, and he asks them to treat their masters a certain way, and then he looks back at those same masters and said, "You need to treat them the same." Some people have said Paul couldn't have possibly meant that, but he said it. I think the obvious looming question here is for a man who could write that sentence, for a man who could command the slave owners in the churches that he was growing, that he was guiding, that they had to treat the people that they had enslaved as equals. They had to do the same to them. They had to be in community with them where Jesus Christ was their Lord as well as their own. This is somebody who is kind of putting a time bomb in the foundations of the institution of slavery. Paul is, Paul is slow rolling a program here, a program that we would call the kingdom of God, that at the end has every human being free, both free to each other in the real world, but also free to God. Perhaps the most potent moment in which Paul does this is in a letter called Philemon. It's really short. I wish I could read it all to you now, but as you can see, I'm trying to cover a lot of material and a very short amount of time. In the letter to Philemon, Paul knows a man named Philemon, who owned another man named Anissimus. Somehow, Anissimus escapes and somehow runs into Paul. Small world, only getting smaller. And in a different city, Paul finds this escaped slave named Anissimus and he sends him back to his former owner, Philemon. Now, if Paul was a good Roman citizen, he would send him back with a letter that might say something like this. You should beat him up a little bit. I have already beaten him up a little bit, just to scare him. I don't think we should kill him this time, but hopefully from now on, he'll be a perfectly dutiful slave. That is precisely not the letter that Paul sends back with Anissimus. Paul sends a letter with Anissimus back to his former owner, saying, you know, I don't have to use my authority as an apostle to command you to do this. I hope out of the goodness of your own heart, I hope out of recognition that Jesus Christ has set us free, that you will also set Anissimus free and not only set him free, but bring him back as a supported member of this church. When Paul has the opportunity to square up one-on-one, to a slave owner whose slave has escaped, what does he say to him? He says, you need to take this man back, you need to set him free and you need to set him up economically. So in the wider context of Paul's writings, we see all of these places where he is actively, consciously, beginning to shake the foundations of the institution of slavery. And in Paul's own personal life, there's a couple of elements that I think are really interesting. The most obvious one is Paul is Jewish. And the central event of Jewish history, Jewish theological history, is the Exodus. This moment where God rescues God's people out of slavery. There's an amazing couple words at the end of the second chapter of the book of Exodus where God says that God has looked on his people and he has heard their cry and the last three words, the last three words in English of the second chapter of Exodus just say, and God knew. Paul comes from a people who believed that God was the kind of God who knew the atrocity and the oppression and the evil that is slavery. God knew what it was like for his people when they were in slavery. Their cry came to his ear and he set them free. And every year, Paul would have gone through this high holy holiday Passover Pesach where he and his family and his people would have celebrated what a miraculous thing it was that God had drawn them out of slavery. Second bit, Paul was a Roman citizen. You might know that already. Paul's a Jewish man with Roman citizenship. How did that happen? He might have bought it. He might have bought Roman citizenship. But the numerical majority of Jewish people in the Mediterranean and Paul's day who were Roman citizens were Roman citizens because their ancestors had been enslaved by Roman citizens. And the freed slave of a Roman citizen was always automatically granted Roman citizenship. In all likelihood, Paul is the child with a grandchild of freed Jewish slaves who had been owned by Romans. So Paul comes from a people whose deepest celebration was freedom from slavery. Paul may well come from a family who themselves had been freed from slavery. When Paul walks, when Paul looks at the American context, the kind of slavery that happened here, what kind of advice would he give? Well, I don't think he'd be pro the institution. I don't think the kind of slavery that caused civil war, I don't think he'd have been on the side of the south, to be perfectly honest. I think that what Paul was doing was trying to build a community that could actually model the kingdom of God. So this letter, it's not written to us. None of us own slaves. None of us live in a country where slavery is still legal. None of us are from ancient Ephesus. This letter isn't written to us. So what are we supposed to do with it? Are we supposed to look at what Paul has said about slavery and think like, oh, great, Peter suggested he'd have been on the side of abolition? Awesome, we can go home happy today. Is that what we're supposed to do? I don't think so. What I think Paul is doing most fundamentally in the pastoral epistles, what he's actually on about is the creation of a community of people who are so bound up in, so taken over by, and so much more deeply growing in the kingdom of God, that every single one of their relationships and every kind of relationship is being transformed. At the end of these pastoral epistles and Paul talks to Timothy or Paul talks to Titus, he keeps giving him advice, treat older men this way, treat younger women that way, give the younger widows this advice, give some of the people that are going off the rails that advice. Paul is on this tour of the relationships that were in his church and at every single point, I mean, it's in general, he's not in the mix, he's not in Ephesus, he doesn't always know these people. But in general, what he's trying to do is teach them how to rework their relationships around Jesus, around the crucified and risen Lord, who gave his life for all of us, that we might also have eternal life. Paul is trying to imagine the incoming kingdom of God and the ways it changes relationships in our world. That fundamentally is what I think is for us in these passages of the pastoral epistles. Paul was trying to renegotiate the relationship between enslaved and enslaver in such a way that over time, it would come to manifest the kingdom of God. Thank God, we live in a country that went through the illegalization of slavery and abolition such that we don't have these kinds of relationships anymore. But I don't think that frees us of the task of trying to do what Paul was trying to teach his churches to do. When we hear this message, I think the questions we ask ourselves should sound maybe a little something like this. For those of us who are employers, how do you pay your employees? For those of us who are business owners and there's a lot of us in here, do we own our businesses like the kingdom of God is coming into the world? Or do we own our businesses like we are sitting happy on the laurels of an America that gives you a lot of freedom for how to run your business how you want? Paul says that everyone who follows Christ has one master in heaven. And we work fundamentally for him. For those of us who have run own businesses, do you run them like the kingdom of God is coming into the world? Here's a second question. Where is slavery still at work in our world and can we root it out? In 2021, the global slavery index estimated there are still 50 million people enslaved in our modern world. There are still, and three years later, that number has an all likelihood grown. Three years ago, there were 50 million people on planet earth still living in slavery, more than five times the population of New York. Some of us in this room will be called to give our lives in part to the ending of that evil institution. Some of us will be called to work against the reality and the continued institution of global slavery. Here's a third question, a little bit less geopolitical. Where does your most creative and energetic work go? In your career, in your, I don't know, hobbies, in your side hustles, and trust me, none of you have more side hustles than I do. Does your most creative and energetic self come into play when you were given an opportunity to benefit yourself or when you're called into service for other people? Is that where you lean in? Is that where you come alive? Or is it when you have the opportunity to get yourself a little bit more and a little further ahead? These are the kinds of questions that I think, if you wanna take what God said through Paul to Ephesus and bring it to America in 2024, we should be asking ourselves, how do we exist in our world of business? How do we exist in relation to the continued institution of slavery? How do we exist in relation to other people with the call to serve them? At City Church, we have what Keith lovely calls, not a practice, but a conviction, that we pray the Lord's Prayer every week when we're together. And usually we do it at the beginning of the service. But this is the prayer that Jesus gave his disciples to pray to help them learn how to pray the kingdom of God into the world. And so this week, as we've talked about the difficult issue and as we've attempted to look for a word from the Lord, perhaps not to us, but for us. I wanna return back to that kingdom prayer to ground ourselves in those words before we leave. So if you'd stand with me, let's pray together the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples to pray. This then Jesus says is how you should pray. Our Father who is in heaven, how would be your name? Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth in Charlottesville as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil and Lord Jesus as we come to you at the end of this service and worship. We ask that your spirit would be among us, not only in this place and this time, but as we go from here into the world that you have made, the world where there is still evil and injustice and that you would sustain us with daily bread, that you would forgive us our trespasses as we forgive others, that your kingdom would come and your will would be done through us and in our lives as it was with your son Jesus, as it is in the presence of your spirit and we pray as it will be until you return in the life of your church. Those of us who follow you Jesus, those of us who are disciples to you, we offer ourselves up to you again and ask that you would have your will and way among us until that day when we meet you in the city who has foundations whose builder is God and all this we pray in your own name. Amen. (gentle music) [BLANK_AUDIO]