New Term and Philemon

I hope to do better than one post per month in the future.

Well, the break in between classes was shorter than I expected. In fact, I managed to miss two classes of my January Term course, Christ in the Old Testament. Last Monday night, I happened to be browsing the Gordon-Conwell web site, when I found out that the term had begun the on the preceding Friday! I packed up my things and made the drive back immediately. Thankfully, when I arrived at the next class, we hadn't gotten very far. I had missed two-ninths of the class, yet we were still on Genesis 1:2! I was very grateful for my American Literature training in undergrad as I caught up with 200 pages of reading over the next two days.

Meanwhile, the youth ministry is in the middle of a short series in Philemon (though I don't suppose you could have a long series in Philemon, could you?). In the shortest of Paul's letters, he writes to Philemon, apparently a slave owner who has been wronged by his runaway slave, Onesimus, and implores him to receive the newly converted slave as his brother. It stands as a beautiful portrait of how the Gospel holds power to transform the paradigms of our human relationships. It was fun to design the series; and the first talk, which I delivered last week, went well. Although the letter is less than a page in lenght, I have acquired nearly 1,000 pages of commentary on it!