The weeks since the killing of George Floyd have seen many demonstrations and protests. In the USA in particular, but also elsewhere, we have reached a crisis-point, and hopefully a turning-point to a better future, in relation to long histories of racism. Race is an important question for the Church, and Helen has mentioned it a number of times here at St Ursula's, expressing our call to be a genuinely multi-racial expression of the Body of Christ. However, my focus today is not race, but slavery, a central theme in today's reading from St Paul's letter to the Romans. But racism and slavery are of course closely linked: the current crisis over racism, especially in the USA, has roots deep in the history of slavery, which has been called America's 'original sin'. Before we listen to what Paul wrote about slavery and freedom 2,000 years ago, it may help to reflect on how we think about slavery and freedom today.
The abolition of slavery throughout the world is widely seen as one of the great moral advances of the modern world. This happened mainly in the 19th century, though in some places not till much later. But even though now illegal, slavery still flourishes. Around 40 million people, or one in 200 in the world, of whom over 70% are women or girls, live in slavery today, forced to work against their will, owned or controlled by an exploiter, with limited freedom of movement, bought and sold as property. (Guardian briefing, Feb 2019)
Today we may find it difficult to understand that in the 19th century Christians did not all support abolition. Many in fact stoutly defended slavery. But the abolitionists, including Christian leaders such as Wilberforce, won the argument. One of the moral foundations of the modern world is the conviction that the innate dignity of every person demands that they should be free, that they should not be slaves. So we are deeply troubled by the continuing reality of slavery for 40 million people today. They should be free; they should not be slaves.
Freedom is one of the most cherished values of the modern world. And going beyond freedom from slavery, we place great emphasis on freedom more generally – political, social, moral, sexual freedom. We recognise that we must not infringe on the freedom of others (which can lead to tricky balancing-acts) but basically we should be free to decide who we are, what we believe, how we live. Otherwise, we are oppressed, in a kind of slavery.
But we may also sometimes see that just because we are free – politically, socially, morally free – doesn't mean we are OK. We realise that freedom isn't the only thing we need; or, maybe, that we have to think what freedom really is, what freedom is for. In a song from the 1980s, David Bowie spoke of 'the vacuum created by the arrival of freedom, and the possibilities it seems to offer'. That's a painfully honest recognition that we don't really understand what it means to be free. We attain freedom and the possibilities it seems to offer, but we then find ourselves in a vacuum, an empty space of meaninglessness and anxiety. What do we do with our freedom? Bowie's words speak for the wider experience of the western world. At a leading American university where I recently worked, a third of undergraduates were on medication for depression and other mental health conditions. That doesn't sound very free. In the country that most symbolizes freedom and prosperity, whose message to its young is often 'You are free to become who you want', the rising elite is deeply troubled.
What, then, does it mean to be free?
Christians have to say more than one thing to answer that question.
First, there can be no retreat from the moral progress of the modern world that led to the abolition of slavery. The God-given dignity of every human being demands that they should not be slaves to other human beings. We should all be free to make fundamental choices about how we live our lives.
But, second, making a quite different point, but one that does not contradict the first, Christians must also acknowledge that once we have that kind of freedom, we are still faced with further questions. Even if there were no slavery at all in the world, we would still have to confront the reality that at another, deeper level, we are not as free as we might think; in fact we are all slaves. This applies not just to those of us who might be addicted, or enslaved, to destructive patterns of life through abuse of drugs or drink, through gambling or pornography. No: in and of ourselves, none of us, not even the best of us, can liberate ourselves from our own self-centred attitudes and desires, the fundamental orientation to our self, our will, which infects everything, and which Paul calls slavery to sin.
And Paul's message is that it is only as we become slaves to God that we will become truly free.
Over the last two weeks, Helen spoke on earlier passages from Romans where Paul describes the great transformation God has brought about through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We have been united with Christ, and we must now live into that reality, dying to our old self, Adam, and living a new life in Christ. We must remind ourselves of what God has done for us and what God says about us: that we are dead to sin and alive to God. In today's reading, Paul speaks about this same transition in another way, in terms of slavery: we were slaves of sin, but now we are slaves of God; and we must live into the liberating reality of who we are as slaves of God. Helen also spoke about the tension in the Christian life between the old and the new: we are dead to sin but we continue to sin; God has made us new in Christ but the old Adam still lives in us. There is something illogical about us: we do not yet live as those who we truly are, and we must daily seek to live into the new reality into which God calls us in Christ. In today's passage, Paul again suggests how illogical it us for us to keep living as slaves of sin when we are now slaves of God.
Paul's references to slavery would have made perfect sense to his readers. Slaves were bought and sold all the time. Imagine you were a slave. You used to belong to Mr A; he gave you orders; you did as he commanded. But then Mr B bought you; now you belong to him and take his orders. One day you are out in the market-place running an errand for Mr B, when Mr A spots you and shouts: 'Come over here – I've got something for you to do...' To which you can only reply: 'Sorry, you know well that Mr B bought me; I now belong to him, not you; I am doing what he has told me to do; I don't take orders from you any more. I'm under new ownership.'
If we find it difficult or uncomfortable to think ourselves into the place of a slave in the Roman world, we can maybe imagine some other form of new ownership. A football star is transferred at great cost from Liverpool to Chelsea. And some time later his old club plays his new club. When the ball comes to him, it would be unimaginable for him to turn round and start playing for Liverpool again. He has been transferred to Chelsea; he wears the Chelsea shirt.
Paul's point is that through Jesus Christ God has transferred us from slavery to sin and made us his own slaves. God has in fact done this to make us free, because his service is perfect freedom. But we are as illogical as slaves obeying their old master (who in fact is a murderous tyrant with whom they should want no further contact), or footballers turning round and playing for the opposition. That doesn't happen; at least it shouldn't happen; but that is the old unreality in which we choose to keep living at least part of our divided lives, rather than fully embracing the freedom that God gives us in Christ.
A truth we have to grasp is that, one way or another, we will be slaves, whether to sin or to God. There is no third option in which we are ultimately masters of ourselves. Recognising this is a low door through which we must pass, which may mean stooping a long way. So Paul pleads with us to say good riddance to the proud but pathetic delusions of the past, the old ownership, the reign of sin which God judged and destroyed in Christ crucified; and to step into the new world opened up by the risen Christ, where there is true freedom.
What Paul says here is part of the wider story the Bible tells. The Exodus is the crucial moment in the Old Testament that speaks of the same reality. Through Moses, God delivered Israel from slavery, from cruel oppression, exploitative labour policies, genocidal racial hatred; God brought Israel out with the promise of a new life in a new land. But they were not set free from Egypt to be able to do what they wanted. They were transferred from one slavery to another, from slavery to Pharaoh to slavery to God, from oppressive ownership to liberating ownership. And here too there are the same tensions, the same illogicality, the same reluctance fully to embrace the freedom that God gives. On the way to the promised land, on the way to becoming what God has called them to be, the people grumble and wish themselves back in their old slavery in Egypt. It has never been easy to learn to be the liberated slaves of God.
Above all, this message comes into focus in Jesus himself. Not that he needed to be liberated from sin; uniquely, he did not. But he is the one who, unlike anyone else, lived a life of uninterrupted, perfect submission to God's will. He thought of himself as God's servant, God's slave; he spoke of himself as doing not what he wanted to do, but what God had sent him to do; his food was to do the will of the one who sent him (John 4:34). Unlike everyone else, he never clutched after the illusory freedom of doing what he thought best, what he wanted to do. He did what God asked of him – 'your will, not mine, be done' – even when that cost him everything. Because he is God's slave, he is utterly free of the disastrous self-centredness that distorts every other human life. He is God-centred, other-centred. Does that make him weak, a puppet, a door-mat? Not at all: he is free. And we are not, and we need to be set free by him. And he says to us: 'If the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.' He draws us into his own freedom, saying: 'If you continue in my word ... you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free' (John 8: 31-38).
So, in conclusion, let me draw together the two rather different strands of what I've been saying. Part of our responsibility as followers of Christ is to recognise and oppose all forms of slavery in this world through which some human beings oppress others. Just as we want it for ourselves, so we should seek for all people, of every nation, race and religion, the freedom to live in just and peaceful societies in which they are able to flourish and make fundamental decisions about their own lives. But in the light of Christ we also know that we need a deeper, more radical freedom than any political order can give us. That freedom has already been won for us by Christ, crucified and risen. We can only enter into that freedom by living as slaves of God. Because much in us still rebels against this truth, let us constantly remind ourselves that his service is perfect freedom.
Revd David Marshall