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Freedom!
Sermon preached in Street Mission Church on the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade.
Whatever else about slavery is commemorated today, for me this is a time to honour the men and women who stood up to the rich and powerful, who rejected the beliefs held by almost everyone in the world, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, and who worked long and laboriously until the British Parliament, first of all the nations of the world, took the first great step towards ending slavery, by abolishing the slave trade. When you read the April edition of LIFE you'll see that one of the abolitionists was a woman, and lived just up the road.
The first I heard of her was at a kind of pageant held in Wedmore Church to celebrate the 2,000th anniversary of the Treaty of Wedmore, when King Alfred the Great signed a peace treaty with the Danes. Hannah More was an important name in Wedmore's history. She brought schooling to the common people of the village, despite opposition from the Curate.
Then I took a service in Shipham, near Axbridge, and there I saw a poem carved in stone, by the same Hannah More.
So when I was visiting my sister a month or two back, and spied a paper-back biography of Hannah More, I asked if I could borrow it. Fascinating.
She was brought up in Bristol, and was quite a beauty. And intelligent. She had the great benefit of a father who exelled in Latin and Greek, and taught his daughter. A rich landowner proposed marriage to her, and she accepted, but he twice postponed the wedding. When she and the guests actually arrived at the church for the third arranged date, the bridegroom left her standing there. He sent a message that he couldn't go through with the marriage. He settled a comfortable income on Hannah for the rest of her life, which was some consolation, but the experience turned her against marriage for good - no surprise there. In Bristol she became well known, numbering the Dean of Gloucester and Elizabeth, Duchess of Beaufort among her friends. While she was still a teenager she wrote a verse drama about women's education and place in society. It sold 10,000 copies by 1780 and ran into several editions.
She put her energies into teaching, with her sisters, in a school they set up. She also found time to go up to London when she was 28, and went every year for the next 35 years. There she met some of the leading figures of the time. The great Dr Johnson admired her a lot, and flirted with her. Her wit and intelligence made her a fit sparring partner in conversation with him. David Garrick, the famous actor, and his wife also, I hasten to add, made Hannah their close friend. Hannah was most distressed when Garrick died, and became even closer to his wife. She knew the painter Joshua Reynolds who founded the Royal Academy. Several painters persuaded her to sit for them. She was received by the nobility, and even wrote a book for Princess Charlotte.
She wasn't like a modern 'celeb', famous for being famous. Her achievements were real. She wrote more plays, and had them produced, with success, in the Theatre Royal in Bath and on the London stage. She wrote poetry. It wasn't great poetry, as we can see now, but at the time it was well received, and Dr Johnson liked it. She wrote books about the education of women and other subjects. And she became quite rich as a result.
In her thirties or forties she had an evangelical conversion. She had always been a Christian believer, but this conversion meant that God took over her life. She made new friends, including John Newton, the slave trader turned clergyman, and William Wilberforce. Their lives and their advice changed her life. She spent less time in London, and retired to a cottage that she had built near where Bristol Airport is now, at Cowslip Green. And she discovered, with the help of Wilberforce, two areas of desperate need to devote her life to. One was the terrible condition of the people of the Mendip villages, beginning with Cheddar - and what she did for them would take a course of sermons to tell; and the other was the horrors of slavery.
The radio and TV have take up the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade in a big way, so I won't bore you with a retelling of the evils of the trade. I won't discuss whether it makes any sense to apologise for something we ourselves didn't do. I will say that the abolitionists discovered some implications of New Testament teaching that the rest of the world was blind to. What teaching? Does the NT says anywhere that slavery should be abolished? No. But Jesus did say, as we heard, that he had come to proclaim liberty to the captives. St Paul does say that "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for you are all one in Christ Jesus." Galatians 3.27 St Paul did write to Philemon, as we heard, Perhaps Onesimus [the runaway slave] was taken from you for a little while so that you could have him back for good, but not as a slave. Onesimus is much more than a slave. To me he is a dear friend, but to you he is even more, both as a person and as a follower of the Lord.
What I also want to do is take Hannah More's work then as an inspiration for our work now.
Because, as many broadcasters have reminded us recently, 1807 wasn't the end of slavery. It was the end of the transatlantic slave trade. It took another 30 years for slavery to be outlawed throughout the British Empire, and Hannah and Wilberforce both lived just long enough to see that great day. But slavery continued after 1838, and it still continues. We have heard of southern Sudanese being taken as slaves in Northern Sudan. There is a vast amount of forced labour in the world, which is hardly different from slavery. If you looked at the exhibition in the Parish Church yesterday you'll know about sex slavery, children forced to be soldiers and to commit unspeakable horrors, and more.
What did Hannah do about it, and what can we do about it?
1. She agitated for abolition. Her "correspondence documents show how she and her fellow abolitionists canvassed MPs by letter and in person." She told her friends and acquaintances about it, without spoiling for a fight. "At one dinner party in April 1789 she was showing the company Thomas Clarkson's cross-section of a slave ship when she was interrupted by the arrival of John Tarleton, a leading Liverpool slave trader and opponent of the bill to regulate the trade; fearing a row, she said she 'popped the book out of sight, snapped the string of my eloquence, and was mute at once.'" (ODNB)
And us? The very least we can do is sign one or other of the cards that have been provided for us. That doesn't involve us in any of the embarrassment that Hannah may have felt as she opened that shocking picture of the slave ship to show at polite upper class dinner parties. Sending one of the cards may not even get us the honour of being treated as a potential dissident by MI5. But it's worth doing all the same. And there may be other ways your can think of, maybe more costly ways, that you could agitate for an end to modern slavery.
2. Hannah used her particular gifts in the cause. Her poem 'Slavery' took the message in a different way to a large number of people.
Shall Britain, where the soul of Freedom reigns
Forge chains for others she herself disdains?
You know what your particular gifts are. Whether they are drama and poetry, like Hannah's, or hospitality, or the gift of conversation, or of organisation, or whatever, think of using those gifts to see to it that our fellow men and women are free, and treated with respect.
3. Hannah supported and joined in the boycott of sugar from slave plantations. Hundreds of thousands of people stopped buying West Indian sugar. A historian has written:
In several parts of the country, grocers reported sugar sales dropping by a third to a half in a few months' time. Over a two-year period, the sale of sugar from India increased more than ten-fold.
Advertisements resembled the "fair trade" food labeling of today: "BENJAMIN TRAVERS, Sugar-Refiner, acquaints the Publick that he has now an assortment of Loaves, Lumps, Powder Sugar, and Syrup, ready for sale
produced by the labour of FREEMEN."
That boycott was effective. It put pressure on slave owners. We've seen similar boycotts hasten the end of apartheid in South Africa. They can still work. For us, again, it has been made easy. Fair Trade goods are now in our supermarkets. Even the highly suspect firm of Nestle was proposing a fairly traded coffee as part of their range some months ago. It has become even easier now, because now we don't have to sacrifice taste or quality in our fair trade purchases. And, easiest of all, there are fair trade products for sale here in this very church on this very morning.
I've been reminded recently that when we come to church to worship God we should expect to change as a result. Hannah More was a churchgoer all her life, but it was only in the 1780s that her faith began to change the way she lived and behaved. She called it by a quaint old phrase, 'the reform of manners'. We might call it 'a change of life-style'.
Have you heard Muslims say on the media: "Islam, as opposed to Christianity, is a religion that affects the whole of our lives"? If that's the impression that Muslims get of Christianity, then it says something devastating about us Christians. It calls into question whether we are Christians at all. If we say that Jesus is Lord of our lives, but we don't behave any differently from other people, then where is our integrity? St James puts very clearly what I've been saying in a roundabout way. St James says: "Faith without works is dead."
If God is nudging you to a change in life-style in response to this commemoration, then I'm sure you will know what to do. If you are wondering just what definite response would be good to make, then there are two kinds of response I could suggest.
The first is a broad, large-scale one. It will entail finding out, as far as you can, where each product that you buy comes from, and what conditions it is produced under. That's a big job. Just take clothing as an example. When I visited my daughter in Beverley Hills ten years ago, she took one look at me and hauled me off to a clothes shop, to make me fit for her to introduce to her American friends. In that posh place, she found me a fashionable shirt. I felt good in it. It had the name Tommy Hillfiger embroidered on it, which I assume is a classy brand. America's finest, no doubt. I looked at the label. It was made in Sri Lanka. Under what conditions, I wonder? I never did find out. We have heard the accusations that the best-known and most expensive makes of trainer are produced in Indian and Bangladeshi sweat-shops. What's the truth? Are we dressing in the products of forced labour? Are we in effect supporting slavery?
But perhaps that broad response is not for us. Perhaps our favoured outfitter is Oxfam. Well then, there is a small but very definite response that I seriously suggest, and that I am going to try myself. Here it is. Resolve that from now on there is just one product which you will always buy fairly traded. The most obvious product is coffee. Fair Trade coffee has been around for many years, and has captured a noticable share of the market. Every supermarket stocks it - probably more than one brand. Even Smile stocks it. It's good. It costs a few pence more than the cheapest unfairly traded coffee, but of course it does. The extra pence are what provide a living wage to the grower in the third world.
All right, you say, I've been doing that for years. Well then, now could be the time to add a second product to your fair trade basket. Could be tea, could be sugar (think of Hannah More and the sugar boycott), or a number of other things.
Don't say, "There's no point in one person like little me doing anything." You may like to use the old saying "One with God is a majority." Or you may prefer to think that 80 people from this church, all changing their buying habits just that little bit, combined with similar people from other churches, add up to a number that can exert an influence on retailers. Or you might just remind yourself that right is right.
Whatever we do, don't allow this centenary to go by without it affecting us in some practical way. Let's make just one change, so that brothers and sisters for whom Christ died may have freedom and fullness of life.
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Thursday 28th of August 2008
