Philemon. Yeah. Philemon. Yeah. Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast, and we are working our way up to the little tiny New Testament book of Philemon. We've nodded to it a couple times in the early going here of this new season of the 10-minute Bible hour podcast, season six. The Philemon, just straight up, it's not going to take us very long to get through it. It's one chapter, it's only 25 verses. It is a very quick read, and I'd encourage you to go and read it even now. But we're doing a pretty legit history buildup this season to try to put ourselves in a position where we really, as best as possible, can put ourselves in the shoes of the people to whom this letter was written. Now, look, I'm just going to tell you exactly why I'm doing that. One, because I always love historical context. It makes everything better when you're reading ancient documents, and it really makes the Bible better because, unlike other ancient documents, the Bible holds itself out as still having some kind of claim on your life. It is living and active. It's sharper than any double-edged sword. That's what it says about itself. And to anybody who reads it, it it speaks. The I mean, the teaching of the scriptures is that the Holy Spirit, God the Spirit, can open your eyes to read what's going on there. Like it, it's alive. So it's different than other ancient documents. And that is why, all the more I love the process of trying to put myself in the shoes of the people who were the original audience to these different parts of the Bible. Now, ultimately, that doesn't like decode the Bible or get us into some new secret knowledge that you can only get on this cut rate podcast from some guy in his shed. No, like we're not solving this thing anew for crying out loud. We're building on top of the work of other people who've come for two millennia before us who have carefully poured over the word of God and thought about these things faithfully and come to different conclusions, made sense of it in their own times. But hey, we're on the stage of history right now. We have the baton. Then so we're trying to make sense of it as the generation that is here right now and living and thinking about it. And so I love the historical context, part of all of this. So yeah, are we taking a long time to get to Philemon? Yes, yes, yes, we are. But the second reason that I'm totally cool with how long we're taking to get to Philemon and doing all this historical context stuff is because Philemon is, how can I put this delicate? It deals with a touchy topic, as you know. I've mentioned it several times. The issue in question is that Philemon is written to from Paul to a guy named Philemon, and it's about Philemon's runaway slave who somehow sought out this guy whose name he had probably heard bandied about in this church and colossae, Paul. He went and found Paul, found him in prison, and maybe went to him for guidance. Maybe he knew Paul would be somebody who would have cached with his master, Philemon, and can maybe broker and negotiate his freedom or a better set of circumstances. Or I don't know. We'll speculate about that later. And it works. This runaway slave, Onesimus, finds Paul and he becomes a Christian in the process of all of this. Well, now Paul has somebody else's runaway slave, and the expectation is you'll give him back under punishment of law. But also, there's this new family of faith thing that kind of changes the equation when it comes to stuff like social status, social standing, and jobs and prestige, and who gets to be in charge and how it all fits together. So it's uh, as we've discussed, it's a Kobayashi Maru, it's an unsolvable conundrum, it's a riddle, it's a pickle. And so because this is so delicate, and because it's not just delicate from the distant past, but delicate because of now, particularly because of, I mean, for the last 2,000 years, hey, guess who has really been into slavery? Everybody on planet Earth until a small majority of us here in like the last 125 years. There are actually more slaves on planet Earth now, I've heard it estimated, than at any other point in time. So, really, you could say we're still not over it. Humans like to enslave other humans. I'm not going to do the self-flagellation thing on this podcast where I'm like, oh, America, we're the awful ones and we should feel guilty. No, we're one of the awful ones who should feel guilty because our slavery was dirty and awful and horrible in its own unique way. But there's been dirty, awful, horrible backstabbing slavery since the dawn of time, and we still haven't got it whipped. Well, guess what? If you still have people living in the institution or living memory of people who lived in the institutions, or families whose lives are still in ways shaped by the institution of slavery that is in view and is in question in the book of Philemon, well, then it makes sense that we would take all the time that we can to really understand how the original audience would have received this letter, how they would have conceived of themselves culturally, how they would have conceived of people, how they would have conceived of themselves legally, so that we have the best chance possible of understanding the letter as best as possible, avoiding the extreme mistakes in interpreting a letter like this, like looking down our noses at these idiots from the distant past who weren't enlightened like us. Uh, granted, not a single person listening to this podcast has done anything to actually end slavery. Braver people before us handled all of that for us where slavery has been snuffed out institutionally in my country and probably in yours. But, you know, we still feel very proud of how much better we are than everybody else. Well, okay, the good. I'm glad we know to be against slavery. That seems like pretty low-hanging fruit, but we're gonna be tempted to read Philemon and read the whole thing from this triumphalist perspective, like I see in many of the commentaries I've read about how bad Paul was and these people were, and Philemon was and everybody back then. Tisk, tisk, tisk. And in doing so, I think we're gonna miss the point of the letter that is bigger than slavery. Well, the other extreme reaction we can have the other way is to be like, slavery wasn't even bad back then. It was just like a job or whatever, and why is anybody worried about it? Nobody listening to this podcast is a slave. Like, we're gonna minimize the heck out of that and the implications of that, and we're gonna take it all out to the metaphorical, allegorical level of interpretation and take some nice take-home lessons for us that won't require any grappling with one of the deepest, darkest elements of human history, which is our desire to assert massive control, power, force, and violence over other people, and how much we as a species seem to hate to give up on that once we have our hooks in somebody else. Okay, that's time well spent. That's a good mid-season reset apologetic for why we're doing this big historical run-up to understand the people of Colossae and whatnot. But now it's time to get going on the next leg of our historical journey here. And I want to set that up with a trivia question. And if you're new to the show, you might not know this, but when I ask you trivia questions, that isn't just a passive thing. I'm giving you an opportunity here to stand out socially and impress the people around you, even if they're strangers. So let me imagine what situation you might be listening to this in. I imagine that you're at a restaurant and you have earbuds on right now, and you're having lunch by yourself. The problem with this is that nobody is gonna know when you get this trivia question right, and they're not gonna think you're cool. So, what I need you to do is one of the most socially cool, adept, universally beloved moves of all time, which is to take out your earbuds, let it play through your speaker, and turn it up really loud so that people can hear it, so that they can have something fun that happens during their lunch as well. People, they're crazy about this. Everybody loves it. Do that. Is it done? Is everybody here in this? Hi, restaurant, hello, everybody. There's a trivia question here. I don't know if anybody can get it, but we're about to find out who's super cool. All right. The trivia question is as follows. In my country, we have got a chain of amusement parks called Six Flags. I think the full name is Six Flags Over Texas. I think it originated in Texas. And the name of this amusement park chain is a nod to the diverse history of a very unique American state that is Texas. My trivia question for you is what are the six flags that flew over Texas? I'm just gonna stall for a minute. I'm kind of mumbling right now, so nobody at the other tables can hear this part to buy you a little bit of time to do what you need to do to get this answer right. Now, at this point, you can pause it, blurt out the answer, and then just get ready to accept all of the adulation, high fives, hugs, confetti that are probably going to come your way. Number one, the United States of America. That's the obvious flag number one over Texas. That's a gimme because it's just how the things are right now. Number two, Mexico, because the whole Santa Ana Alamo situation, that was about attention. You know, does Mexico own it or somebody else? Number three, you got France, they were there for a little bit. Number four, you got Spain, they were there for a little bit. Number five, you got the Confederate States of America. And number six, this one's easy to forget, but Texas itself. Texas was its own republic there for a little while. So that's six of them. And I don't know, maybe Six Flags has its own flag for its amusement park. So would that be the seventh flag over Texas? I'm not going to count that one. I don't think they have gubernatorial oversight of the people of Texas there at Six Flags. The point is this Texas is not just one thing. And if you go to Texas and you ask anybody from there, they'll tell you everything's bigger in Texas, including the history. There's so many eras that happened over the centuries there. Any proper Texan who's been there for any period of time, they've had that taught to them in their schools. They've osmosed that history just by being there. Texans are very proud of their history. And I think they should be. It's cool history. They will tell you uh Texan is kind of its own thing. We're made of a lot of cultures and a lot of moments and a lot of history, and it all kind of adds up in this swirly little cocktail to make a Texan what a Texan is. Oh, I feel a likewise coming right about three, two, one now. Likewise, Colossae has had at least six flags that have flown over it by the time we encounter Colossae in the New Testament, which is in the first century AD, about 2,000 years before now, as I'm recording this. And in the same way, that Texas isn't really just Texas, it's an amalgamation of all of these different eras of Texas. So, Colossae is a product by the time we meet it in the first century of a whole bunch of different cultures and moments historically that have rolled through that little corner of the world. If we want to understand Philemon, if we want to understand, well, yeah, I guess the bonus is the letter to the Colossians in the Bible, but if we want to understand the people to whom this was written and what they would have thought about the very delicate subject matter covered in the book of Philemon, we got to do more than just say, they're Roman. Well, that's one of the flags that flew over Colossae. And frankly, at the time we encountered Colosse in the first century, it's probably the second least consequential one. The Romans had been there the second least amount of time. Well, they're Greek. Yeah, I mean, kinda, but that's really pretty recent for the Colossians as well. There's a rich ancient history before Greece that includes really diverse, really different things going all the way back to time immemorial. So, what we're gonna do over the next few days here is we are going to look at each of the flags that have flown over Colossae and get a sense of this rich historical cocktail that is the Colossian culture, that is the Colossian mind, that is the Colossian people. And I hope that by the end, in the same way, that if you know anything about the United States or people from Texas, you can be like Texas, huh? Yeah, it's kind of its own thing. It's a little different. It's made of a lot of history and a lot of culture, so you will be able to do that with Colossae, which will position us better to understand this book of the Bible. I predict fun ahead, but that's plenty for now. All right, more tomorrow. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.