St. Paul’s United Church Sunday, September 9, 2007

Love Letters – Rev. David Mundy

Jeremiah 18:1-11 Philemon 1:1-21

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Are there any letter writers in the house this morning? In case you aren’t sure what I am referring to, I’m asking if there are persons here today who pick up what is commonly known as a pen and apply its ink to paper for the purpose of communication. This piece of paper is inserted in an envelope, then affixed with postage. Eventually a postal worker will ensure that it arrives at its destination. It may seem silly that I’m explaining what is involved in writing a traditional letter but we can’t take this for granted anymore.

The telephone was probably the first major assault on the art of letter writing. Why write a letter when you can get on “the blower?”Then came email, although this is considered to be old technology these days. Text messaging, MSN, Facebook – the list lengthens. Now sending a letter through Canada Post is considered “snail mail,” slow and ponderous.

It’s odd though. Nearly all of us appreciate getting cards and letters, even though they may are becoming a rarity. Letters of support and congratulation and condolence and gratitude are deeply appreciated. When we experience the loss of a loved one the words of comfort which arrive through the mail slot mean a great deal.

Through the years members of various congregations including this one, have sent me notes of encouragement and thanks in various forms. I keep the handwritten ones and I actually take them out and read them again, often when I am feeling discouraged.

I have never been much of a letter writer myself, or at least I tend to be “hit and miss.” I do use letters as part of my work as a minister but the only time in my life where I have been really focussed and intentional about my personal letter writing was during my engagement to my wife, Ruth. We spent a year apart attending universities in cities hundreds of kilometres apart. Of course this was back in the Stone Age when we had to pay for every long distance phone call and neither of us had a computer, let alone email. So we corresponded with letters in which I lavishly expressed my love in words and with illustrations. Ruth kept all those letters and every once in a while she hauls them out to have a friendly laugh and embarrass me to no end. “Listen to this” she’ll say, and I squirm. I was sickening!

Still, love letters – any letters really – do touch us, and sometimes what we read can have a more enduring impact than what we hear.

Where would the Christian faith be without the letters of our scriptures? In the New Testament there are a number of books which didn’t begin their life as “the bible.” While we call them epistles, they are letters. In fact, of the twenty-seven books of the Christian scriptures, twenty-one of them are letters. There are several different writers and while the authorship of some is disputed, the majority were written by the Jewish rabbi named Saul who was converted to Christianity and became the apostle Paul. The shortest of Paul’s letters is a one-pager, a book you may never have heard of before because it is so insignificant in terms of length and which comes up only once every three years in the lectionary or schedule of scripture readings we use. In its own way it is a love letter although this is more of a hasti-note than an epistle.

It is unusual in that it is written to an individual rather than a group of people as is the case with most of the New Testament letters. It is addressed to Philemon who was probably a wealthy Christian in the town of Colossae and it was in his house that the small congregation met. Philemon owned a slave named Onesimus who became a Christian himself. We don’t know the “back story” of this letter, to use a movie term, but from what we can gather he fled his master and ended up with Paul, who was in prison at the time. While Paul takes a liking to this slave he encourages him to return to his master and then sends a “love letter” of a different sort to Philemon, asking him to welcome back without punishment and in a different relationship. This is risky because the penalty for a runaway slave could be execution and Onesimus hand-delivered the letter.

Paul is often portrayed as a rather distant man, driven by the desire to share the gospel. But we hear the warmth in his greeting. Listen to this paraphrase in The Message by Eugene Peterson.

⁴Every time your name comes up in my prayers, I say, ““Oh, thank you, God!””⁵I keep hearing of the love and faith you have for the Master Jesus, which brims over to other Christians.⁶And I keep praying that this faith we hold in common keeps showing up in the good things we do, and that people recognize Christ in all of it. Friend, you have no idea how good your love makes me feel, doubly so when I see your hospitality to fellow believers.

The Message – Eugene Peterson

You have to hand it to Paul. He was very skilled at “buttering up” the recipients of his letters before he hit them between the eyes with his expectations. He goes on here to say that he could simply order Philemon to welcome Onesimus back home, but Paul would rather he do so because of the love he has experienced in Christ. Do you notice that Paul doesn’t go into a lengthy criticism of the evil institution of slavery? He does challenge Philemon to enter into a new relationship with his slave because they are brothers in Christ.

Love letters. If we read this short and rather unassuming letter patiently, we will find the message that Christian love will almost always stretch us beyond our place of comfort and call us to love in ways that we may never have expected.

Is this always the case for Christians? Unfortunately the answer is no. Instead of love letters we send out something closer to hate mail. Instead of the gospel making our circle of love wider too often it becomes shrunken and meanspirited. I’m sure that every person here this morning would agree that slavery

It’s not all that long ago that slavery was acceptable to many Christians and in the United States there were heated debates between Christians who stood toe to toe with bibles in their hands justifying their positions. It serves as a reminder that to be loving in the fullest sense can take us beyond what we have assumed to be right in order to find the deeper truth.

I have certainly become aware of my own blind spots and prejudices through the years. When I began my seminary training for ministry thirty years ago this Fall I still had mixed feeling about the role of women in ministry. After all, there are passages in scripture, some of them written by Paul, which strongly suggested that this is a male role. Part of the shift in my outlook came about through my training and study of scripture, so it was what happened in my head. It was also a matter of the heart as I studied alongside women who were preparing for ministry, including my predecessor here at St. Paul’s. I knew that they would be effective leaders in the church. So I learned to read and experience the gospel in a different way.

Love is practical and patient and kind, as Paul points out in a letter to the congregation of Christians in Corinth, although we may be taken off guard by how this shows up. This past week the world noted the tenth anniversary of the death of Mother Teresa who began a ministry to the sick and outcasts of the city of Calcutta and India. Those who met Mother Teresa were often surprised that she could seem abrupt and bordering on unfriendly, but she lived the love of Christ with the unlovely of the slums of Calcutta. She constantly challenged other Christians “

I am not sure exactly what heaven will be like, but I do know that when we die and it comes time for God to judge us, he will not ask, “How many good things have you done in your life?,” rather he will ask, How much love did you put into what you did?

You may be wondering this morning, am I being encouraged to actually handwrite a letter to someone? Maybe! Can you imagine the impact of every person here writing even one simple note of thanks or encouragement? What if we all did that once a week for a year? I am sure that the impact would be amazing.

Rather than being overly literal about this, we can accept the challenge of being Christ’s love letters within our own sphere of influence. We can be encouraged by the thought that the kindnesses we do in Christ’s name are expressions of love which have a personal signature. In the letter to Philemon Paul makes the point that he has written the letter with his own hand to emphasize that this is from his heart. We know he often used a scribe to write his letters while he dictated, but not this time.

I hope we can also allow ourselves to be stretched in what it means to be loving and living the gospel with those we don’t understand or who have hurt us or we consider our enemies. The other morning I looked up the passage from Luke’s gospel in my devotional reading. Jesus says: “But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.” Jesus goes on to say that anyone can send a love letter to those who already love them, but we live the gospel when we love those who are different or who have done us harm.

We will end with Jesus today. God’s choice was to come to us Priority Post in the person of Jesus the Christ. One of the constant criticisms of Christianity is that the notion of God entering the human condition in the form of a peasant from Galilee is primitive and nonsensical.

When we send a letter through the mail today there is the expectation we will address it properly, including the postal code, so that it will reach its destination. We affix the proper postage according to weight and it costs us more if we are sending it by courier.

We follow Jesus, who was born in a place called Bethlehem and grew up in a place called Nazareth, and died and rose to new life in a place called Jerusalem was and still is God’s “special delivery” love letter to this planet. Amen.