Which of you, intending to renovate your kitchen, or attend to a couple decades of deferred capital improvements at your church, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether you have enough resources to complete it?
So how many of us sat down, before being baptized, to estimate the cost of following Jesus in our lives, and tally up the resources we can commit, making sure they are enough and we won’t fail mid-project?
Many of us never really had that option if we were baptized as small children, with others making the decisions for us.
Even those baptized at a more mature age often find that it’s just not possible to see the potential costs of following Jesus, especially in a context like our current one, where Christian life is assumed to be part of the dominant culture.
For many of us, then, following Jesus is much more like the small, ordinary renovation project that uncovers a foundation that has to be completely re-built in order to go forward: a cost that comes to us to be estimated and paid after we’ve committed to the project.
I think something like that happened for both Philemon and Onesimus, the object and subject of the unique little letter of Paul’s that we read this morning.
Paul writes to urge Philemon to welcome Onesimus back as a brother, as equal family, although when Onesimus left Philemon’s house, he was Philemon’s slave. There’s something more between them, too. Onesimus has done something that caused “damages” to Philemon.
He might have stolen something; might have escaped from enslavement; might have made an expensive error in his work. Or something else. We don’t know what it was.
But this relationship is tense, broken. There’s law and custom – an expectation so deeply rooted it behaves as fact – that demand Onesimus should be punished, as a slave, not freed and celebrated.
And yet Paul says that, for the sake of love, he expects Philemon to receive Onesimus as beloved family: owing nothing, welcome to anything, a fellow worker for the gospel.
Because that’s what Onesimus is now. He’s been assisting Paul during Paul’s imprisonment, and has himself become a Christian, committing himself to the radical good news of resurrection, and to the way that requires us to live out of generous love here and now.
And, as Paul has written more than once, there can be no distinction between Christians.
All are siblings.
Philemon made his commitment to following Jesus, to the radical love of all God’s children, some time before Onesimus left, without any expectation of change in his household. And now he’s being asked to actively choose the economic loss of freeing a slave, the status loss of welcoming a slave into his home as a sibling.
To sacrifice his existing sense of family and rebuild it. To sacrifice his sense of self, even, letting go of everything he might be owed, financially, morally, spiritually, experientially.
It’s an ask that could completely up-end his life.
Just like Jesus tells the crowd following him in our gospel story today. “Carry the cross; radically re-think family; give up all your possessions, or you can’t be my disciple.”
Onesimus was far from Philemon, temporarily free, when he made the decision to follow Jesus. Now he’s accepting the cost of returning as a slave, not knowing whether or how he’ll be punished for whatever wrong he has committed, if that’s what happens. He’s giving up whatever he possesses to join or re-join this particular community of the followers of Jesus.
As you and I observe this from our own place and time, it’s difficult to wrestle with the fact that while Paul makes radical demands of both Onesimus and Philemon, he isn’t actively critiquing the institution of slavery; an institution that has warped all of our lives in its long shadow.
But it’s also worth noticing that because this letter was preserved in scripture, this invitation to freely welcome one who you previously enslaved as your dear sibling, with all the difficult work of being reconciled that is implied, helped later Christians recognize that the institution of slavery – Roman, American or any other - is fundamentally incompatible with the gospel, impossible to sustain when we are committed to following Jesus, to loving and living as Jesus does.
The stakes are high, in whatever context we read this ancient letter. In the glimpse we get today, both Philemon and Onesimus are faced with the decision of whether and how to sacrifice and rebuild their sense of family, to accept the risk of their own life – to give up all they have, in different forms – to follow in Jesus’ teaching and footsteps, toward a world radically transformed by unlimited love.
And they could decide not to.
We do not know – will never know – what happens next.
We all have a chance to decide not to pay the cost; to decide that the renovation of our world, our life, our faith, into the image of Jesus’ self-giving love is too expensive.
When they are faced with the cross, Jesus’ most famous disciples – Peter, John and James, almost all the others named in the gospels – decide it’s too expensive.
They get offered those decisions, opportunities, and costs again, though.
Once isn’t the only chance. Not for them; not for us.
And enough of them count the cost, and do invest their whole selves and lives, that the world you and I live in is transformed.
You and I, most likely, will never face a Roman empire and religious establishment trying to crucify us. But we might find ourselves asked to put our personal financial security and comfortable relationships on the balance sheet, and speak up against injustice, petty everyday evils, or widely-accepted selfishness in our workplaces, neighborhoods, or families.
We might have to choose to put our physical lives as well as our financial comfort on the balance sheet when evil takes a form that can be resisted with military force.
To put our sense of self, our independence, on the balance sheet when God’s love for the world, for the planet and the planet’s most vulnerable, “least valuable” people, requires us to give up small habits we’re comfortable with, or expectations we find essential, and spend ourselves and our resources to benefit others.
There are many ways you or I may find ourselves invited to give up what we possess; re-imagine our family and our identity; give our whole lives, literal or metaphorical, for the love of Jesus.
Today, Jesus reminds us that we will, soon or late, need to take all that into account, to assess how and if we can commit our whole selves to the extraordinary, holy, renovation of the world into the image of Jesus’ own love.
We don’t do it alone, though.
Jesus doesn’t demand all this all-you-possess commitment from the disciples privately, one-on-one. He offers this invitation to an entire crowd of people, people who’ve come together from all different and diverse backgrounds and life situations because they’re attracted to Jesus’ love and life.
And when Paul asks Philemon to welcome Onesimus in love, he doesn’t write to Philemon alone. He includes the whole community of disciples, both in Philemon’s neighborhood and those with Paul far away, in the invitation.
You and I, too, come to these choices surrounded with witnesses, and with people God has given to us to share in the love, the hope, the trust that makes the sacrifices seem almost natural, when our faith brings us to them.
When we release all we possess, when we give ourselves away, we do it within a community of Jesus’ own love, broad and deep and wide and strong.
So when each of us has given all we possess to the renovation of the world, to following whereever God’s abundant, risky, extraordinary love will take us, there is always more.
And to count all those resources – that richness for giving all we have and are to Jesus’ love – will take a lifetime - and more.
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