The Useful One

A meditation written near Ephesus

By Thomas A. Robinson; copyright 2025. All rights reserved.

I’m writing from Kusadasi (7 hours ahead of my friends on the East Coast), on the Aegean coast of Turkey—just a few miles from ancient Ephesus. Tomorrow, I’ll join fellow pilgrims in walking the ruins of that early Christian city, and we’ll celebrate Eucharist not far from where Paul once preached and Timothy once served. It’s also here, according to some early traditions, that Onesimus—the runaway slave mentioned in Paul’s letter to Philemon—became a bishop. Whether that tradition is historical or a kind of holy imagining, it stirs something deep. What if the man once called “useless” was not only received as a brother, but became a leader of the church? This poem wonders what Onesimus might say to us still.

Did they call you “Useful” with bitter irony,
Your very name a declaration of your purpose,
Your identity reduced to how well you served,
Your worth measured by the tasks of another’s house?

What indignities did you endure in Philemon’s home
That finally drove you to risk everything in flight,
Gambling your life against the distant hope
That freedom might outweigh the cost of capture?

How desperate must the road have felt,
Each step shadowed by the law’s heavy blade,
The Roman codes etched in flesh and fear,
Fleeing what claimed to own you.

Was it chance—or providence—that brought you
To the very cell where Paul was bound,
This apostle in chains becoming the doorway
To a liberty far stranger than you’d imagined?

What did you make of his strange message,
This gospel that promised freedom while honoring chains,
That named you brother while acknowledging your status,
That saw beyond your usefulness to your soul?

Did the irony strike you as Paul wrote your name,
Turning it gently in his hand like a coin:
“Once useless, now useful”—a man called Useful
Finally discovering what purpose might mean?

Could you believe he was sending you back—
This one who called you “my very heart,”
Who claimed you as his child born in bonds,
Yet returned you to the master you once fled?

What fears walked beside you as you carried the letter,
That small scroll upon which your future hinged,
Paul’s careful words your only shield
Against the punishment the law permitted?

Did your hands tremble as you gave it to Philemon,
Your eyes lowered as the words were read aloud,
The room weighted with a radical plea:
“Welcome him as you would welcome me.”

What passed between you in that stillness—
You, the runaway; he, the master—
As Paul’s appeal hung in the silence,
As gospel love reached beyond the law’s demand?

How strange to hear yourself called “beloved brother,”
The chasm of status crossed in a sentence,
Paul’s ink dissolving what chains could not—
A new community imagined into being.

Did tears rise when you saw what the letter did,
Not just saving you from judgment,
But planting a seed of something deeper:
Freedom that outlives the moment?

When did you know your story wasn’t ending,
That your usefulness to God had only begun,
That the one called Useful might be claimed
Not by duty, but by calling?

How many times did you tell that story
As your place grew firm in the early church,
Your journey from slave to shepherd
A living parable of the gospel’s reach?

Did you help preserve that letter in the canon,
Ensuring your name remained beside Paul’s,
So that others might learn how Christ
Shatters every hierarchy?

Could you have imagined, when you first fled,
That one day you’d be called bishop,
Your hands no longer bound to labor,
But lifting bread to bless a waiting church?

Was there peace in knowing your name endures,
Not as fugitive, but as witness—
That in Christ, there is no slave or free,
Only the beloved, sent and seen?

Have you watched how your story still disrupts,
Still questions what we think we know of worth,
Still calls us to see Christ
In those we once called merely useful?

And are you still speaking through that letter,
Your voice joined to Paul’s across the years,
Reminding us that gospel seeds, once planted,
Grow toward a harvest we may not yet see—
But must still believe is coming?