Seeing Persons

by the Rev. Dr. Paul S. Nancarrow

This sermon is based on Philemon 1-21.

What happens when you look at a person, and see something more than just stereotypes, or prejudices, or social conventions? What happens when you look at a person, and see them as something other than just a screen where you project your own fears or desires or ambitions or threats? What happens when you look at a person and see – a person: a living, breathing, thinking human being, who has hopes and fears and dreams just like you do, and who might, just might, be someone you could relate to?

I think that question is a lot more complicated than it sounds. Because I think – and a lot of psychological and social studies find – that we human beings do a lot of projecting onto other people. We do a lot of sizing up of other people, assuming that we know what they will do or how they will act or what they might say or whether we can approach them or whether we need to run away from them, depending on how we see them as black, or white, or Hispanic, or teenagers, or elderly, or running in gangs, or all by themselves, or men, or women, or rich, or poor, or powerful, or victimized. We have a way of making judgments about people based on the categories to which our perceptions assign them. And we have a way of doing that so quickly, so unthinkingly, so unconsciously, we’re not even always aware that we’re doing it. So the question what it would be like if we could stop doing it isn’t even a question we are likely to think to ask. But what would it be like to look at someone and see, not what we expect, but see who they are?

Our Epistle reading this morning puts that question before us in a very particular way. Paul’s letter to Philemon is one of the shortest letters in the New Testament – in fact, it’s one of the shortest books in the entire Bible – and it is written for one purpose: to get Philemon to look at his slave Onesimus, and to see him not just as a slave, but as a brother in Christ.

The letter doesn’t tell us enough to know exactly what’s going on here. We don’t know if Philemon sent Onesimus to Paul to serve him while he was in prison. We don’t know if Onesimus ran away from Philemon and fled to Paul for protection. We don’t know if there is enmity between Philemon and Onesimus that Paul is trying to reconcile. All we do know is that, according to the conventions of Roman law, Onesimus belongs to Philemon; Onesimus has no rights, no privileges, no status in society, other than what Philemon chooses to give him; and Philemon can do just about anything he wants to Onesimus, up to and including having him executed if he is returned as a runaway slave. What we do know is that Onesimus has no life of his own to speak of, and that Philemon can project onto him just about anything he wants to.

And that is the point that Paul is addressing. Because Paul is sending Onesimus back. Paul is fulfilling the requirements of Roman law, and he is instructing Onesimus and Philemon to fulfill those requirements, too. But Paul is also adding something new to the picture: above and beyond Roman law, Paul is adding Christian reality to the mix. While Onesimus was with Paul he was converted, he was baptized, he is a Christian now; and that means that Onesimus and Philemon are brothers, they are equals before God,  both of them called to mutual love, both of them called to active compassion, both of them called to work together in effective faith. Outwardly, according to law, they may still be master and slave. But when Onesimus gets home, he and Philemon are going to have to learn to see each other differently. Philemon must look at Onesimus and not see “slave.” Onesimus must look at Philemon and not see “master.” Both of them must look at each other and see past all the baggage, all the expectations built up by unjust power, and learn to build a new relationship as persons, children of God, with strengths and weaknesses, and gifts and talents, and needs and shortcomings, and faith and love, there for each other, and there for the church, and there for the world.

What happens when we can look past baggage and stereotypes and expectations, and see each other as persons, held together by Christ? What happens is that lives are changed, and lives are saved.

About three weeks ago, on an ordinary Tuesday at the Ronald E. McNair Discovery Learning Academy elementary school in Decatur, Georgia, school clerk Antoinette Tuff was at her post in the school office when a young man named man named Michael Brandon Hill walked in carrying an assault rifle and other weapons and a backpack that was suspected of holding explosives. Hill said he had no reason to live, and that he expected to die that day – and Tuff said she could see in his eyes that he was ready to kill and it didn’t much matter who.

Now I would guess that most of us, in that kind of situation, would have looked at Hill and we wouldn’t have seen a person at all. We would have seen the rifle. We would have seen the threat. We would have seen a gunman – not even a whole man at all, but just a gun-man. But Tuff saw something different. Tuff saw past the stereotype and the expectation and the threat, and she saw a person: a person in pain, a person who was lost, a person for whom she felt real and genuine compassion. So she reached out to him as a person. She told him she could see he was having a hard time. She told him she was having a hard time, too. She told him she’d lost hope when her marriage of 33 years ended, and she could understand if he didn’t feel any hope in anything. But she said she was getting through it – and he could get through it, too. She’d help him get through it. And she’d start by helping him put down his gun, and lay down on the ground, and let the police come in without shooting – and she would stand over him and not let the police hurt him. Antoinette Tuff saw Michael Brandon Hill not just as a gun-man but as a person; and she reached out to him as a person; and she saved his life, and her life, and the lives of who knows how many schoolchildren and police.

What happens when we can look past baggage and stereotypes and expectations, and see each other as persons, held together by Christ? What happens is that lives are changed. What happens is that lives are saved.

May God grant us grace to look at those around us and see past the stereotypes and preconceptions and prejudices that divide us, and to see each other as persons, held together in Christ’s love, and working together to bring Christ’s love to the world. Amen.