set all free

Isaiah 43: 14-21 NRSV text
Galatians 3: 27-29 NRSV text

Many churches in the URC will be marking the bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act. That’s good! It’s fitting, and it’s important. My personal sorrow is that the URC – the Church to which I belong, not least because of its passionate commitment to social justice as a vital expression of the Gospel – has not seen fit to apologise for the slave trade. Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, has apologised on behalf of the Church of England. The URC – usually well ahead of the game and courageous on these sorts of issues where other churches will wriggle and resort to casuistry – has, in this case, retreated behind the wall of history: “How can we meaningfully apologise for something that happened over 200 years ago? We weren’t the ones who did it! What use is an apology, anyway – unless it’s a plan to try and extract reparations from us. Anyway, our people were some of those who opposed the slave trade! And, at the end of the day, it’s a tragic chapter of history – but it is history and ought to be allowed to remain in the past!”

That won’t do. That’s not how we treat history – except when the history is inconvenient! We can’t appeal to the Christians who fought so courageously in the name of Jesus Christ for the abolition of slavery and, at the same time, absolve ourselves of our connections with the whole Christian history of the global slave trade. The slave-owning nations who ran the slave trade were Christian nations and appealed to the Bible to justify it when they were challenged by the abolitionists. To argue that “the past is the past and ought to be left to rest” is a denial of the biblical view of history.

“Remember!”
Christianity, like Judaism, is a faith which lives by its memories. What is Easter if not a celebration – a marking – of the great saving act of God in Jesus Christ? Why else, in the Communion service, do we recite the story of the Last Supper – and eat and drink explicitly “in memory” of Jesus?

Biblical “remembering” is not simply a recalling of the past. It is participation in the saving events that we remember. The purpose of memory is not to recall some distant era when things were different: it is to locate ourselves in the ongoing story of God’s salvation of the world. That story is what we call “the Christian tradition”. The point is that the past is important because it has bearing on and ought to shape the present – and the further point of recalling it in the present is to create a future that is more faithfully God-shaped.

Look at Yahweh’s words of promise to the exile in Isaiah 43. This Yahweh speaking to Israel in exile in Babylon and the first thing they are told is who it is that addresses them: “[I am] your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel … I am the Lord, your Holy One, the Creator of Israel, your King!” Israel’s very identity is given by Yahweh – to be “Israel” is to be saved – liberated – by Yahweh. That is the foundation of Israel’s story as a nation. Yahweh goes on to evoke the memory of that saving act: “I am the One who makes a way in the sea, a path in the mighty waters, who brings out horse and chariot, army and warrior; they lie down, they cannot rise, they are extinguished, quenched like a wick!”

This is the Exodus from Egypt. Yahweh is promising to deliver them from exile in Babylon, and, in the face of the seeming intractability of Babylonian military might, Yahweh reminds them of what happened to Pharaoh. Explicitly, the people are reminded of the stunning climax to the deliverance story: “Thus the Lord saved Israel that day from the Egyptians; and Israel saw the Egyptians dead on the seashore” (Exodus 14: 30-31).

History – memory – matters, because it tells us where we have come from, who we are and what we can be in the future. And in the context of God, that is about salvation. God is the God who liberates the slaves.

Slavery and liberation: the fundamental image of salvation
Far more important in the debate about “what the Bibles says about slavery” is the observation that it is the image that is used to describe the deadly effects of sin. The Exodus story is to the Old Testament what Easter is to the New Testament. But what is really important to note is that it becomes the foundational memory for the rest of biblical history.

The Exodus is where we first meet God as Yahweh. Moses learns who God is in the context of being instructed to “Go and tell Pharaoh, ‘Let my people go!’” Who are Yahweh’s people? They are the Hebrew slaves, groaning in the Egyptian brick-pits. Did they know they were Yahweh’s people? No, they didn’t. This is as much news to them as it is to Pharaoh! Were they crying out to Yahweh – appealing to their God? Not that they knew! And this “groaning” – the agony of slave-bondage – is, they learn, what makes Yahweh choose them to be God’s people! Yahweh chooses the Hebrew slaves because they need liberating. Yahweh is the God of Life, and these people are enduring a living death – a living hell.

To be Yahweh, then, is to be a saviour – particularly, to be a liberator of slaves! The Exodus story thus becomes not only a memory of a dramatic act of deliverance, but the mode by which Israel understands who God is. The liberation from slavery becomes the paradigm for understanding the whole history of Yahweh’s saving acts. It is the history – the communal memory – that both they and Yahweh repeat again and again. It becomes the ground of their national life and their hope during exile.

That they are liberated former slaves becomes the foundation for social justice in Israel and Judah. The prophetic denunciation of injustice appeals to the fact that they used to be slaves – and if that was a living hell for them, how can they inflict any similar hell on anyone else? Exile is cast in terms of re-enslavement, and the return from exile is the New Exodus – the new liberation from slavery.

In Jesus’ time, the promise of the Messiah is understood too in terms of a New Exodus. And Jesus’ message of the Kingdom – in Mark’s gospel particularly – is that he has come to plunder the house of the Strong Man: to bind the strong man and unchain his slaves. Liberation from captivity is a key way in which the New Testament writers all, in some way, talk about salvation and the way in which Jesus saves us.

Paul uses the image of slavery to describe the human condition and the need for God’s salvation. “We are slaves to sin”, he tells us – captives in need of release. With typical Pauline irony, he then goes on to describe the freedom in Christ as slavery to Christ! But here, it is radically deconstructed: freedom is to be found in service of the Liberator God.

My point here is to highlight the obscenity of our history over the slave trade. To be a slave-owner is, in terms of the biblical narrative, to be a Pharaoh, a Babylon or a Rome - and how is that to be anything other than under the judgement of God? This creation of a living hell on earth is the creation of Christian people who read the Bible that speaks of God fundamentally as the Liberator of Slaves and of God’s salvation in Jesus as liberation from all that enslaves. And yet these Christian forebears of ours – often people whose names appear in our own family albums – justified what they did as Christian! This is as much a part of our history with God as the story of Jesus. We did it. We did it as Christians. We justified it by appeal to the Bible. And we taught generations of Africans that this was what God was like. We denied and lied and obscured who God is and who Jesus is. This is the faith we handed on – and now our Christian brothers and sisters, descendants of our slaves, are saying to us, “The story of what your people did to our people is a terrible one. When you hear it now, 200 years later, and see it for what it is, don’t you feel sorry? Don’t you want to apologise and say how much you wish it had never happened? And how terrible you feel about what your people in the supposed name of Jesus Christ? When you see the continuing effects of the slave trade – the dehumanisation of black people that still funds racism in our society today; that still makes the descendants of slaves second class citizens – doesn’t that make you want to say sorry?”

“There is no longer slave or free … for all of you are one in Christ Jesus!”
To create a system like the slave trade, and to sleep at night, means that you have to be able to believe that your victims are less human than you are. If they are as human as you are, then they deserve nothing less than you do. So you seize on some characteristic that can be used to explain how difference equals inferiority. In the case of the slave trade, it was the blackness of the African skin.

Slavery was a racist system. Racism, as Steve Biko famously observed, is not just about prejudice. It is about the way in which people use colour difference as a justification for wielding power over others. That’s the deadly thing about racism: it doesn’t just insult black people, it kills them.

“Racist”. That’s an instructive word. It embodies what I have just been describing in terms of dehumanisation and what Paul explicitly denies is true in his famous 28^th verse of Galatians chapter 3: there are not different “races”, but only one human race. Dividing human beings into different “races” is the precondition for discrimination and oppression. And that is sinful.

That is why Paul talks about the abolition of “racism” here in this verse. He takes the ways in which people emphasise difference in order to dehumanise others: Gentiles, who are less human than Jews; slaves, who are less human than free people; women, who are less human than men. And he asserts that there is a new, unified humanity in Jesus Christ in which these distinctions are not allowed to apply. It is a new humanity – a new creation, born anew in baptism into Jesus.

The “dangerous memory” of the slave trade
Our black brothers and sisters tell us that it would really help if we said sorry. We need to listen to that. It isn’t for us to respond by judging whether or not it is the right way to deal with the past. How can we ever do some kind of justice to the obscenity that is the history of the slave trade? If descendants of our victims – who still experience the effects of the slave trade – tell us that it is important to them that we apologise, and that it would help, who are we (other than arrogant racists) to tell them that we don’t think much of that idea and aren’t prepared to do it?

But what is in it for us if we do apologise? Those who wriggle at the notion of apologising do so for good reason: it is about accepting some responsibility for that history. But the purpose in doing so is not to beat ourselves up as though we inflicted that suffering with our own hands: it is to recognise where we have come from, what has shaped us and what is still a present reality. It is to realise and accept that we are people who are capable of tolerating a world of slavery for others – something we would fight tooth and nail against if it happened to us or to our loved ones.

We not only tolerate it, we contribute to its cause and maintenance. Part of what blinded people in the past to the awfulness of slavery is that slavery was about economics. The slave trade benefited the slave trading nations enormously. It was a source of cheap labour, so that goods could be produced inexpensively. Our demand for low-cost goods and a high standard of living creates sweat-shops in the east and south, where women and children are particularly vulnerable and work in slave conditions. We want cheap coffee and cheap bananas, so coffee growers get a pittance for their crops and plantation workers are exposed to inhumane working conditions and exposure to dangerous chemicals. Our obsession with recreational sex is fed by people who provide child sex tourism and trick women into a lifetime of sex-slavery on our own streets.

We know that slavery is still going on. We tolerate it – because we don’t do absolutely everything in our power to eradicate it. It isn’t enough to disapprove or lament contemporary slavery. If we are serious about it, and sincere when we express our horror at our history, then we need to change things. We need to change our lifestyles – not just individually, but corporately. We need to be vigilant – to learn to hear the groans coming from the modern-day brick pits. We need to see and hear the world as God does – and pray that the Holy Spirit will ignite in us God’s holy compassion for those whose life tells them that there is no God like Yahweh, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ; that there is no salvation, no resurrection and no hope. It isn’t a matter of words; it’s about acting with the single-mindedness, the compassion, the courage and the sheer humanity of people like William Wilberforce … and Jesus Christ. And it starts by saying sorry.

Amen.

© Lawrence Moore March 2007