Lucretia Coffin Mott(1793-1880) is widely known for her tireless labors on behalf of abolitionism and women’s rights. She would never have chosen the book of Philemon as one on which to base her message to a hushed Quaker gathering or any interfaith assembly of abolitionists. But, in 1842, she attended a Quaker quarterly meeting in New Jersey, where conservative Hicksite George F. White “preached of Onesimus being sent back to Philemon. . . He … carried many with him.” (Letter to Nathaniel Barney, 10^th mo. 8, 1842) Mott was also moved by God to speak on that occasion, and she records that she spoke as if White had not been present. This could be seen as a subtle rebuke to White. Later speakers in a Quaker meeting often attempt to bring in strands of the insights of earlier speakers. But Mott implied that White’s use of Philemon, at least in this particular way to celebrate Paul’s decision to return a fugitive slave to his master, was not at all inspired and thus she would take no notice of this previous message.

The historical realities that shaped the preaching of Jones, Mott, and White, and the responses of their audiences are close enough to our own reality in the United States (even after the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment) that we may well find the presence of Philemon in the Scriptural canon as an embarrassment. Perhaps we sympathize with the seventeenth-century Quaker theologian Samuel Fisher who objected to the presence of Philemon in the canon, because it had no worthy spiritual dimension. Since it dealt only with “private” and “domestick” matters, Fisher argued, its relevance beyond the initial audience of one for which it was intended was highly suspect.

At the least, it is a text to be handled with care.

But I wonder what interpretive possibilities have been missed with this text. What might be done with a reader-centered interpretation of this intriguing narrative? Can we understand this story as an exercise in contextual ethics? Unlike Paul’s other epistles, there are no matters directly relating to proper Christian doctrine in this epistle; it deals with matters that, within a seminary curriculum, have fallen under the province of ethics and pastoral care.