THOUGHT FOR THE DAY - 30th August 2007

The Rt Rev James Jones, Bishop of Liverpool

Good Morning from Liverpool, where this week we’re celebrating our 800th Birthday. One of the city’s major new attractions is the highly acclaimed Slavery Museum. It opened last week on the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade. This is the day that marks the first uprising of the slaves in the colonies, telling us that the ending of slavery was not just a white man’s story, that the efforts of Wilberforce and Clarkson were equalled by the slaves themselves.

San Domingo, now the nation of Haiti, had the biggest slave population in the Caribbean. When the slaves rose up against the French one of their leaders shouted, ”Throw away the image of the god of the whites who thirsts for our tears, and listen to the voice of liberty which speaks in the hearts of all of us.” These haunting words show how much the Christian religion had been compromised by slavery.

Earlier this year I was in America for the 400 th Anniversary of the first service of Holy Communion in Virginia on the banks of the James River. Up that river alone sailed 500,000 black slaves, traded into slavery. I took time out to walk the slave trail –the slaves were unloaded at night and made to walk through the woods in darkness so that nobody would see or smell their festering sores. It must have mingled relief with fear – relief to be able to move their limbs after months of manacled confinement, fear at not knowing what further horrors lay in store.

Slaves settled on the plantations and grew their families in captivity. But some owners would sell on a slave to another plantation further down the river uprooting them from their kith and kin. So the phrase ‘sold down the river’ was born, and became a byword for betrayal.

One of the miracles to emerge from the history of slavery was evident on the banks of the River during that service of Holy Communion. There, hundreds of years later, drinking from the same cup of blood-red-wine were both white and black. The fact that the slaves came to share the Christian faith of those who’d enslaved them is extraordinary. That borrowed faith sustained them as they laboured in the cotton fields singing their spirituals, longing for freedom.

Somehow the slaves were able to see through the hypocrisy of the white religion that oppressed them, to see that the God of the whites didn’t thirst for their tears, but shed his own at their misery. Somehow they came to find in Jesus a kindred spirit, one who himself had been ‘sold down the river’.

Standing on the banks of the James River I began to see an unnoticed fact of history. I see it here in Liverpool whenever black and white gather together to worship God. It was the Christian faith of black slaves that rescued and redeemed the Christian religion.