Sermon: Slavery: Only Connect

In Holy Trinity church on Clapham Common you can see an old and well-worn table. It's the table on which William Wilberforce wrote the draft of the Act to abolish the slave trade in that remarkable period of social reform inspired by a group of Christian lay people in the early nineteenth century. And that's the same table on which Holy Communion is celebrated every Sunday to this day. What a brilliant symbol of the holistic nature of Christian mission.

The table of communion and the table of politics. The same table. As EM Forster wrote ‘Only connect... Only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted.'

Let's just follow both sides of that connection and see where they lead. Take the writing table first. That connects to a famous meeting when William Wilberforce met his old friend William Pitt, then Prime Minister, under an old oak tree near Croydon. Pitt persuaded Wilberforce of the urgency of the need to abolish the slave trade, and how that was an imperative of his Christian faith. Wilberforce, still a young MP, had found his cause.

So that meeting was connected to Wilberforce's Christian faith, a faith which would energise and uphold him all though the decades of struggle until the final abolition of slavery itself, not just the slave trade, in 1833.

And that faith in turn is connected to the Jesus of the gospels whose Freedom Manifesto we've just heard in the reading from Luke chapter 4. This is what the young Member for Galilee South would have posted through the letter boxes in his election campaign (if he'd had one). This is what he stood for. This is what he'd come for. ‘To proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free [listen to that], and to proclaim the year of the Lord's favour.'

Only connect - and that writing table in the church on Clapham Common is connected to the social manifesto of Jesus himself.

Now, what if we follow the other use of that old table, its use as a table for Holy Communion? What are the connections we can trace over there? First, of course, it connects to the table at which Jesus and the disciples sat for the Last Supper. It was the table at which Jesus opened his heart to his friends, and told them all he could about what was really going on. It's where he saw one of his best friends go out into the night to betray him, and then, in the gathering darkness, summed up the whole meaning of his life and death in the breaking and sharing of bread and wine. That's the powerful connection we make every Sunday when we ‘do this in remembrance of him.'

But then that event connects vividly with the Passover of a thousand years before when the Lord ‘passed over' the land of Egypt and in the ensuing mayhem set his people free from slavery. They set off that night, ‘free at last' as the black preachers would say so many years later.

And what does that Passover connect with? Well, Jesus' Freedom Manifesto of course. ‘He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free [of course], and to proclaim the year of the Lord's favour.'

And so the connections come full circle. What is united in that table in that special church on Clapham Common, leads in both directions to the Freedom Manifesto of Jesus in Nazareth. Only connect.

There's been a huge response to this bi-centenary of the abolition of the slave trade. TV programmes, radio programmes, magazine articles, discussions, commemorations, services, walks of witness and so on. Each of us probably has our own particular ‘take' on the event. One vivid way it's been brought home to me is through seeing Turner's painting entitled ‘Slave Ship.' In typical vivid colours the painting tells the searing story of when 132 men, women and children, their hands in fetters, were thrown into shark-infested seas so that the traders could claim the insurance money for their loss. And we protest ‘How could they?!'

But only connect. In Wilberforce's day there were an estimated 4 million slaves. Today there are an estimated 12 million. ‘How could they?' Or rather - ‘How could we?' As Herschel said ‘Some are guilty; all are responsible.' Whether it's sex trafficking - organised crime's fastest growing business - or drug trafficking, or the slavery caused by debt or by systematic economic injustice - whatever it's form, slavery is alive and well and living before our eyes.

Isn't that the most important connection to make? There's a straight line between the events of 1807 and 2007. William Pitt might want to meet us too, under an old oak tree, and ask us to connect what's happening all over the world to our Christian faith and the Freedom Manifesto of Jesus.

If you go to the old oak tree now you'll find it's died; just a stump remains. The site is overgrown and surrounded by barbed wire. But there's a new sapling there, the contemporary manifestation of the old tree. May today's church be a new sapling, determined never to separate the table of Communion, the table of the Lord, from the table of politics and social change.

Only - always - connect.