A Slave to God?
Preached at St. John's, Elkhart and St. James, Goshen, on July 28, 2026.
The propers can be found here. We are following Track 2.
Sometimes the Bible makes me uncomfortable.
From God deciding to kill everyone in a worldwide flood in Genesis, and the conquest narratives in Joshua, where God commands the Israelites to wipe out all the Canaanites living in the Promised Land, to Revelation’s account of Jesus leading the armies of heaven in the final battle at the end of the world, the Bible has lots of parts that I find challenging, at best.
And yet, as a priest in the Episcopal Church, at my ordination, I solemnly declared before God, our Bishop, and the baptized people of God, that “I do believe the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God, and to contain all things necessary to salvation.”[1]
This declaration does not claim that the Bible is infallible or inerrant, which are much more modern ideas than most of their proponents realize. Nevertheless, I am called by my ordination vows to take scripture seriously as the word of God, and not to just ignore anything I don’t like.
Which brings us to the question of slavery in today’s lesson from St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. Slavery was taken for granted in the ancient world. We should keep in mind that slavery in the ancient world was not the same as slavery in the United States before the Civil War.
The concept of race, based on skin color, as we understand it today, had not yet been invented.
But a system of owning other human beings as property did.
Often, these were people taken captive during war or being punished for a crime. Slavery was not seen as an inherent trait of a specific group of people. But slavery was the backbone of the Roman Empire.
And far from being a foreign, sinful, gentile custom, the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, traditionally believed to have been written by Moses, and which are central to Jewish life and practice, takes slavery for granted. Leviticus has laws about how to treat your slaves.
In the New Testament, the book of Philemon is a letter that Paul gave to the escaped slave Onesimus, whom Paul sent back to his master after Onesimus came to faith in Jesus Christ. Jesus himself never condemns slavery in the Gospels, despite mentioning it in his parables many times.
Many modern translations try to downplay this by translating the Greek as servant instead of slave, but that’s what the original languages say.
So, it is not exactly surprising that Paul uses slavery as a metaphor in today’s lesson.
Like all of us, Paul was a product of his time. It may not have even occurred to him to question what would have appeared as a natural part of human society. Many later generations of Christian theologians didn’t. At best, they recognized it as a result of the world’s fallen state and thought it would only end when Christ returns to make all things new. Like war, they viewed it as a necessary evil. At worst, they saw it as an institution ordained by God, just as marriage is. After all, we are all equal before God, and isn’t that really the important thing?
Additionally, Paul, like most of the first generation of Jesus followers, believed that Christ would return within his lifetime. If Jesus is coming back tomorrow to usher in the end of days, there isn’t much point in trying to change society today.
Finally, the kinds of people who were attracted to the Gospel message in the first generations of Christianity tended not to be those with the kind of political power to change things. Christianity was illegal and persecuted after all.
And to be fair to Paul, I’m not convinced he was pro-slavery either. At least not within the Christian community.
To return to his letter to Philemon, while Paul doesn’t command Philemon to free Onesimus, if I were Philemon, I would find it hard to justify keeping him enslaved after getting Paul’s letter.
Paul lays it on thick, praising Philemon’s faith, calling Onesimus his spiritual child (apparently, in the Greek he writes about spiritually giving birth to him), and promising to cover any harm or debts Onesimus caused Philemon.
Then he casually mentions “Of course, I won’t mention that you owe me your life”[2] and asks Philemon to prepare a guest room for him so he can visit as soon as he is out of prison.
You can read the whole letter for yourself after Mass. It is only 25 verses long.
My friend and fellow historian turned priest, Fr. Michael Sturdy, argues that there is a lot of evidence that Christianity led people to question slavery as an institution.
Even so, what do we do as followers of Jesus in the twenty-first century when the scripture that we affirm is the word of God uses slavery as a metaphor for our relationship with God?
I still believe and affirm that this passage from Romans teaches an important truth. God’s free gift of grace is not a license to do whatever you want because God will forgive you, but a call to live a Christ-like life.
If we take Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection seriously, we will want to live a life of obedience to his teachings.
This is what Paul, inspired by the Holy Spirit, was trying to get across. And, at the same time, he was an imperfect human being, drafting a letter to other imperfect humans that he would never have guessed Christians two thousand years later would read as sacred scripture. He wrote in a specific time and place to a specific group of people. This context shaped the language and metaphors available to him to express the Gospel.
Does this let him off the hook?
Maybe.
Maybe not.
Speaking as someone who planned to become a history professor before God annoyingly intervened, historical context can explain why someone thought and acted the way they did, but I’m not convinced it excuses it.
Slavery was still wrong.
And I wish Paul had condemned it in his letters.
I wish Jesus had explicitly condemned it in the Gospels.
Despite its presence in scripture, I do not like using it as a metaphor for anything positive, especially not our relationship with God.
God does not want us to be their slaves, but, through baptism, adopts us as their children.
And, as Paul himself said, in God’s kingdom “There is neither Jew nor Greek; there is neither slave nor free; nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”[3]
The word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.
[1] BCP 1979, 526.
[2] Philemon 1:18, CEB.
[3] Galatians 3:28, CEB