Scripture: Philemon 15-16
Perhaps the reason he was separated from you for a little while was that you might have him back forever—no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a dear brother. He is very dear to me but even dearer to you, both as a fellow man and as a brother in the Lord.

Reflection: Philemon’s Speck and Our Log
By John Tillman

Between Philemon’s time and now, many have struggled to live out Paul’s challenge to overcome the cultural mindset of slavery. It has been a struggle uniquely led by Christians.

However, when we look to the past, there is a temptation to sneer. Many modern moralists convince themselves that if they had lived in certain ages, they would have been on the “right side” of history and as a result they treat writers of those ages as hypocrites, refusing to learn from them.

This is foolish, arrogant, and is an attitude that is condemned by Christ himself.

Better that we remove the log in our own eye rather than seek to remove the speck from the eye of some deceased writer in another age.

In our own time, Paul’s challenge to Philemon is still applicable. Slavery may not be sociologically acceptable anymore, but it is still economically viable and, as a criminal enterprise, is alive and well. The United Nations estimates that over 89 million people are currently or have been enslaved in the past five years.

And though we may not have slaves, all of us have servants. Even those without in-home staff such as maids, butlers, chefs, or nannies, have an entire service industry taking care of everything we might need. The Bureau of Labor and Statistics projected that by 2018 over 131 million people would be working in the service industries.

Our food is prepared for us, our coffee is customized for us, our packages are delivered for us, by servants. Yet our society denigrates manual labor of all kinds, and especially labor in the service industries.

We denigrate and look down on service so much that we use service jobs as a way to scare better grades into our kids. Service jobs are the stick that spurs youth toward the carrot of a better job after incurring massive debt attending college.

Our existence is supported by the labor of people who directly or indirectly serve us, just as Onesimus served Philemon. How we treat those individuals—both relationally and economically—shows whether we consider them part of the economic machinery or spiritual brothers and sisters.

Prayer: The Greeting
Your statutes have been like songs to me wherever I have lived as a stranger. — Psalm 119.54

– Prayer from The Divine Hours: Prayers for Springtime by Phyllis Tickle.

Full prayer available online and in print.

Today’s Readings
Ecclesiastes 12 (Listen – 2:38)
Philemon (Listen – 2:52)

Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come and the years draw near of which you will say, “I have no pleasure in them.” — Ecclesiastes 12.1

“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it,” Seneca quipped in his work On the Shortness of Life. “Everyone hustles his life along, and is troubled by a longing for the future and weariness of the present.” In the same breath, “meaningless!” shouts the wisdom of Ecclesiastes; “What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun?”

Seneca cautioned that life is too often “wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing.” Maria Popova links the great philosopher’s work to the modern contrast of business and “the art of living.” In Seneca’s words:

Your own frailty never occurs to you; you don’t notice how much time has already passed, but squander it as though you had a full and overflowing supply—though all the while that very day which you are devoting to somebody or something may be your last.

You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire… How late it is to begin really to live just when life must end! How stupid to forget our mortality!

To this the author of Ecclesiastes couldn’t agree more. Why squander our days, our energy, our passions on the meaningless pleasures of this world when we are designed for eternal glory? Why settle for earthly riches when heavenly honors await us? The answer—in Genesis, as in Seneca’s day, as in our time—is that we become consumed in our labor. Seneca writes:

It is inevitable that life will be not just very short but very miserable for those who acquire by great toil what they must keep by greater toil. They achieve what they want laboriously; they possess what they have achieved anxiously… New preoccupations take the place of the old, hope excites more hope and ambition more ambition.

The calling of Ecclesiastes is to reorient our lives to our labor and give ourselves daily to the one that matters most in this life. Christians don’t retreat from labor, nor become consumed or defined by labor, but align our earthly passions with God’s desires. For, as Ecclesiastes concludes, “I perceived that whatever God does endures forever; nothing can be added to it, nor anything taken from it.”

Today’s Reading
Ecclesiastes 12 (Listen – 2:38)
Philemon (Listen – 2:52)