"I am a Great Sinner. Christ is a Great Saviour."

Remembering the Two Hundredth Anniversary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade in the British Empire

This Sunday, at the altar, I would like us to remember the two hundredth anniversary of the ending of the slave trade in the British Empire. I begin the remembering, with the story almost twenty-five years before, in 1783. In 1783 the American Revolution had ended. George Washington, with the help of the French army and fleet, had won the Battle of Yorktown in October of 1781. The story is that when Cornwallis surrendered, the band played the tune “The world turned upside down.” Late in 1783, Washington left the army and withdrew to his home at Mount Vernon. Benjamin Franklin was in France, negotiating the Treaty of Paris with the United Kingdom, signed on September 3, 1783, recognizing the former colonies as independent. Franklin would stay on in France until 1785, when he was replaced by Thomas Jefferson. The entrance hall of the United States Embassy in Paris has a list of the American Ambassadors on the wall, and the first name is Benjamin Franklin.

In December of 1783, William Pitt was asked by the king to be Prime Minister and form a government. He was twenty-four years old. Son of a Prime Minister, another William Pitt, “the Elder Pitt”, Earl of Chatham, he became a member of Parliament two years earlier. He would be Prime Minister for nineteen years, with one interlude between 1801 and 1804, and died as Prime Minister at age forty-six in 1806.

William Wilberforce

Another young man, the same age, who entered Parliament at the same time, was William Wilberforce. They would become close friends and allies. Wilberforce’s story is told in the new movie, currently playing Amazing Grace. I highly recommend seeing it. There is a brief scene where Pitt and Wilberforce race each other out on the lawn of Wilberforce’s house – emphasizing how extraordinarily young these two were. After all, the youngest President of the United States was Theodore Roosevelt, who was 42 when he succeeded McKinley – and John Kennedy, who was 43 when elected.

William Wilberforce was a deeply committed Christian. In the generations before him, John Wesley and a great circle of other preachers, and awakened the sleeping Church of England with the good news of God in Jesus Christ, calling people to faith and faithful discipleship. I love the stories of John Wesley, how he traveled all over England on horseback to preach, often out in the fields, as our Savior did, preaching to workers in the new industrial towns where there might not be an old country church. Wesley and his brother Charles, the great hymn writer, when they were students at Oxford, formed with friends a society to pray and read the Bible and take Holy Communion more frequently, which was, I am told, derisively called Methodist. The same stuck.

A parishioner gave me a Hogarth print of the sleeping congregation, showing an 18^th-century London preacher up in the pulpit with the congregation sound asleep at his feet! Wesley and the others woke the country up. They woke up the heart of a former slave trader named John Newton, who was converted, who became a priest in the Church of England, and wrote the hymn “Amazing Grace.” One of the best things about the movie Amazing Grace is Albert Finney’s portrayal of John Newton – Newton said, “I am a great sinner, Christ is a great Saviour.”

William Wilberforce, acting out of his belief in who Jesus Christ was and is, awakened to commitment to his Saviour, decided to use his position as a Member of Parliament to fight to end slavery in the British Empire. It was a very long, hard struggle, played out against the backdrop of the French Revolution, and the long wars with France – with Revolutionary France and with Napoleon. Wilberforce had the encouragement of his friend William Pitt on the long journey.

This month is the two hundredth anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire in March of 1807. Slavery itself would not be abolished for another thirty years, in 1837, and of course, slavery was not abolished in America until the Civil War. There is an old story that America and England are sometimes on different timetables, most notably in 1776, sometimes the United Kingdom ahead, sometimes we – but then I daresay at some crucial hours coming together.

The Prime Minister speaks against slavery

There is one correction I would make to the movie Amazing Grace. It shows the close friendship of Pitt and Wilberforce but does not show Pitt actively taking a lead in the fight against slavery. Pitt did. In the great debate in 1792, Wilberforce spoke, and then the Prime Minister spoke last for abolition. It was a long speech. Pitt asked what would have happened if the Romans had enslaved the English, as the English the Africans. It was in the old House of Commons, not the old one bombed by the Nazis, but the earlier one before that, that burned down in the 1830s (the great painting of the houses burning by Turner which now is at the Tate Museum) – it was in the old House of Commons re-done by Christopher Wren. And Pitt ended as dawn broke through Wren’s tall clear windows – and as speakers did in the 18^{t h} century, trained as they were in the classics, Pitt ended with a spontaneous quotation from Virgil about the dawn.

              …nosque ubi primus equis Oriens adflavit anhelis….  (Virgil, Geogics 1:250)

   …and when on us the rising sun first breathes with panting steeds… (Loeb Classical Library, Fairclough translation, p. 117)

. . .so might the dawn of freedom come.

That morning Wilberforce and Pitt did not succeed. But they did not give up, and the day came when slavery was no more.

What has Jesus Christ got to do with ending slavery?

What does Christian discipleship have to do with decisions made in a Parliament? God calls men and women, you and me, to follow Jesus as disciples in our daily lives, 24-7. I believe God makes use of the Gospel stories of Jesus calling the first twelve disciples to follow him, to call us. As we read those stories, and hear how Jesus stopped by the fishermen at their nets by the lake in Galilee, and called them to follow, I believe God intends us to hear God’s call to us – a true, living, real call in our contemporary lives – to follow Jesus today as disciples. Each of us has to think and meditate and pray about how we are to live out our discipleship – in our work, in our loving, in our home, in what we do with money we earn, in the causes we support.

Part of our discipleship is, of course, the decisions we make, as Christians, on the basis of our conscience – decisions in ethics, about social issues, and in a free society in politics. Except in the most extraordinary circumstances, the preacher, I believe, should not tell people how to vote. But it is for the preacher to say that voting is a duty of discipleship, and public service may be what we are called to do. I have known several elected public servants who had a real sense of living out their Christian faith in their service.

Wilberforce and many other faithful Christians came to stand against slavery – which by the way, was a deep change in a very ancient and embedded world view – because of the Christian theology of the creation of all human beings in God’s image in the Book of Genesis – a belief we echo every time we say the Creeds. You know well, actually, one of the finest examples of the theology of human rights in the 18^th century. There is always some great sadness to me as we read these words, for they were not seen to apply to people of color, and what cost it would take to end slavery in our country. But still, the great example of this theology in these words from 1776: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…”

Today’s first lesson from the story of Moses (Exodus 3:1-15) is of the very first importance in the history of the abolitionist movement in this country of how God spoke to Moses out of the burning bush on Mount Sinai – God taking the initiative, God acting to save God’s people in slavery – and sent Moses to stand before Pharaoh to say, “Let my people go.” Every generation has to ask where God is sending us to free God’s people – from disease, from poverty, from oppression, from prejudice, from being alone.

One of my favorite books is Sir Llewellyn Woodward’s 1938 The age of reform 1815-1870 – part of the old Oxford History of England. Society – and church – had to come to terms with moving into the new industrial age.

After long discussion about the number of hours which a child of nine or ten could be expected to spend at work in the bad atmosphere of a cotton mill, the house of commons agreed in 1818 to fix a limit of eleven hours a day. (page 11)

And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.

Well might people be afraid to look at God in the face of such a child, in the face of a slave.

“Christ is a great Saviour.”

Christ, give us your love, to see you in a child, in anyone in need.

God calls us to trust in the mercy and compassion we find in Jesus Christ – to trust in God’s presence and friendship, given as grace, it is all grace. Tout est grace.

God calls us to follow Jesus as his disciples on his way of self-giving love, bringing his mercy and compassion to the city and world.

(This sermon was preached by the Rev. Raymond Webster, Rector, in St. Chrysostom’s Church, Chicago, Illinois, on Sunday, March 11, 2007, The Third Sunday of Lent.)