A sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
22nd May 2022
Philippians 1.1-18a
In April 1963, just 18 months after he preached in this building,
the Baptist Minister Martin Luther King
was arrested and imprisoned in Birmingham, Alabama,
for coordinating a nonviolent campaign to protest against racial segregation.
Whilst in prison, initially writing in the margins on scraps of newspaper,
King wrote what has become one of the most profound and persuasive defences
of the methods used by the civil rights movement against racial segregation.
Other religious leaders of the time were urging that the case against racism
should be made through the courts and the legal process,
but King’s understanding of the gospel of Christ
was that it compelled him to advocate urgent and nonviolent action
to bring about justice for the oppressed black population,
even if that action broke the law.
In this letter from a Birmingham jail,
he outlines his reasons as to why it is sometimes appropriate
to break the law in a nonviolent way
in order to raise an issue of profound injustice.
It’s often lost in the way Martin Luther King’s story is told
that the motivation for his views was his Christian faith.
His citation for the Nobel Peace Prize makes no mention of his Christian faith,
and yet he was clear that what compelled him
was his understanding of the Gospel of Christ.
He said,
“The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust.
I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws.
One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws.
Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”
He goes on:
‘I would agree with St. Augustine that ‘an unjust law is no law at all.’”
And in response to the allegation against him that he was nothing but an extremist,
he rises to the accusation, claiming,
“The question is not whether we will be extremists,
but what kind of extremists we will be.
Will we be extremists for hate or for love?”
I wonder if you, like me, can begin to hear echoes here,
of Paul’s letter from a Roman jail,
which we heard read earlier,
as he wrote to his friends in Philippi,
urging, encouraging, and exhorting them to works of love,
to become single-minded and bold in their proclamation
of the message of Christ’s love for all without exception or barrier?
But I’m also reminded of another letter written from a prison,
this time it’s not a prison in Rome, or a jail in Birmingham Alabama,
it’s a cell in a concentration camp in Bavaria,
and the author is the German theologian and pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Perhaps understandably,
his thoughts have turned to issues of justice and unjust suffering,
and in his prison letter he says,
“We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or omit to do,
and more in the light of what they suffer.”
And he goes on,
“We have to learn that personal suffering is a more effective key,
a more rewarding principle for exploring the world in thought and action
than personal good fortune.”
Before concluding that:
“The Church is the Church only when it exists for others...
not dominating, but helping and serving.
It must tell [people] of every calling what it means to live for Christ,
to exist for others.”
And so we have three prison letters,
from three Christian pastor-theologians,
writing in three very different contexts,
one from the first century, and two from the twentieth century;
and we find that they offer us parallel insights:
The call of Christ on the church in any age is to pay attention
to the voices of the suffering, the marginalised, and the disempowered,
to those excluded because of ethnicity, poverty, identity, or ideology,
because in the these voices we hear the voice of our crucified saviour
speaking to us through those we could so easily ignore.
If you want to hear the voice of the crucified saviour speaking to you,
listen to the voices of those who suffer.
So as we spend a little time this morning
with the opening words of Paul’s letter to the Philippians,
I wonder if we can read his words through this lens of Bonhoeffer and King,
thereby hearing Paul’s words from prison echoing down into our context,
challenging us to single-mindedly pursue in our world
the Christ-call to works of love, justice, and righteousness?
What will this mean for us, to hear this message in our context,
in a world where still so many are excluded or marginalised,
cut off from society, from the body of Christ, from one another?
This letter, Paul’s letter to the Philippians, written by Paul and Timothy from prison,
is possibly the last letter we have from Paul before his death;
and certainly it was written some years after the events
of the founding the church in Philippi,
which we heard about a couple of weeks ago
in our reading from the book of Acts,
when we met Lydia the dealer in purple cloth,
the un-named slave girl with the demon of prophecy that was cast out of her,
and the Philippian jailor whose suicide was averted
and whose whole family were converted.
These, and those who had joined them in Philippi,
formed the core of the church to whom Paul writes,
from a prison cell probably in Rome.
The letter begins in the normal way for an first century letter,
by naming the authors.
These days, our convention is to sign off at the end of a letter,
but in those days you would put your name at the top,
so that readers would know straight away who was writing to them.
It’s noteworthy that Paul uses his Greek name here,
rather than his Hebrew name ‘Saul’,
and in this he’s following the pattern we see in the book of Acts,
where he moves from his Jewish name to his Greek name,
as his life turns from being a Jewish religious leader
towards his mission to the Greek-speaking gentile world.
Issues of race and identity are, it seems, always in the background to human relations,
and this was as true in the first century
as it is in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
After a standard opening, our two authors, Paul and Timothy,
then describe themselves in a way that is quite unusual,
they say that they are ‘slaves’ of Christ Jesus.
And here we have to pause,
because I don’t think we can hear the word ‘slave’
in a sermon that has already mentioned Martin Luther King,
without also hearing an echo of the evils
of the race-based enslavement of so many people
that lay behind the racial segregation and injustice
against which King protested,
for which he was arrested,
and as a consequence of which he was assassinated.
Whist it is true that many of those
who led the movement for the abolition of slavery were Christians,
there is also a despicable story to be told of white Christian complicity
in the enslavement of black Africans.
And it is also true that the Western Christian church today
continues to be complicit in, and benefit from,
those racist structures in society that perpetuate the disempowerment
of black and brown people in society.
If you want to know more about this,
can I encourage you to read the display boards in the foyer,
and to come along on Wednesday evening for the premier screening
of the new documentary After the Flood,
which explores in more detail this story of white Christianity and slavery,
and the ongoing legacy of racism and structural oppression in our society and world.
Further details on this can be found in the weekly news email,
including the link to buy your ticket.
So given this lens of racial oppression and enslavement,
offered to us by Martin Luther King’s letter from a Birmingham jail,
what are we then to make of Paul’s description of himself and Timothy
as ‘slaves of Christ’?
Well, firstly, I don’t think that our pew Bible’s attempt to soften this
by reframing it as ‘servants of Christ’ helps us very much,
because the word in Greek is clearly ‘slave’,
and also because servants were also, historically speaking, recipients of oppression,
and in many ways experienced life as economic enslavement,
even if not politically mandated enslavement.
We cannot sidestep this question,
into a trite homily about ‘servant leadership’
as exemplified by Paul, a ‘slave of Christ’.
Rather, we have to go through it instead,
this uncomfortable language of slavery.
But I think it was uncomfortable in the first century too:
Paul is using this language to raise some really deep questions
about human identity and how we see ourselves before God.
The key thing for Paul here, in his use of this language of enslavement,
appears to be the issue of ownership.
Who owns you?
In the ancient world, where slavery was widespread,
Roman society was broadly divided into two classes of people:
either you were enslaved,
or you owned or benefitted from those who were enslaved.
And Paul, as a Roman citizen from birth,
would have been on the beneficiary side of this equation;
we have no indication that he personally owned slaves,
although it may be that his family had done so,
but he would certainly have benefitted and profited from the enslavement of others
throughout his life.
In those days, slavery was not so much demarcated on one’s skin colour,
but there was still a very clear line down the middle or Roman society,
and you fell on one side of that line or the other.
In our world, we too face a division within society:
on the one hand there are some who, by virtue of their birth,
have inherited the oppression caused by the structures and systems of racism
in ways which limit their lives, opportunities, and circumstances;
whilst on the other hand there are others who, by virtue of their birth
have inherited the privileges given by the structures and systems of racism,
in ways which enhance their lives, opportunities, and circumstances.
In our world it’s largely focussed around how your skin colour and heritage
map against the European empires of the last four hundred years,
and particularly against the economics attached to the transatlantic slave trade.
The context from the first to the twenty first century may be different,
but it also has striking similarities,
particularly around disparities of opportunity and liberty
based on an imperial legacy of violent conquest
and individual circumstance of birth.
So what does it mean for Paul, a man born with privilege, a Roman citizen,
to name himself as a ‘slave of Christ’?
Why does he do this?
Well, as I said, it’s primarily a statement about ownership.
In the ancient Roman world, everyone in the empire was owned by the Emperor;
for some people that was an opportunity and privilege,
for others it was a cause of oppression and disadvantage.
But by describing himself as a ‘slave of Christ’,
Paul was consciously aligning himself with another authority.
It was an act of rhetorical rebellion,
every bit as compelling, I would suggest,
as that articulated so brilliantly by Martin Luther King
in his letter from a Birmingham jail.
The point is clear: if Paul is owned by Christ,
then he is not owned by the Emperor.
And this means that he is no longer bound to live according to the rules of the empire,
he is free from the compulsion to comply.
And as we know from elsewhere in his life and ministry,
this leads him into illegal acts of nonviolent resistance.
He often finds himself imprisoned,
we heard only a couple of weeks ago about his torture, beating,
and imprisonment in Philippi.
He can, and does, speak and act in ways that I am sure,
both Bonhoeffer and King would recognise
as subversive resistance to the systems of power in his world.
By naming himself as a slave of Christ,
Paul is putting out there that he has a different master now,
one who compels him to live by different rules.
And I wonder what it might mean for us, in our world,
to take seriously what it would mean for us
to declare ourselves ‘slaves of Christ’.
I have news for you: you are owned.
All of us are owned:
by the powers of our society
by our possessions and money
by systems that have dictated that because of our skin colour
we are advantaged or disadvantaged.
We do not have, in and of ourselves,
the ability to step outside of the ownership
that the structures of society puts upon us.
Except and unless, I wonder, if we declare ourselves ‘slaves of Christ’.
What might it mean for us, if we have inherited privilege and advantage,
to resist and reject the systems that define so much of our lives?
It can’t have been easy for Paul, a man born on the right side of the division in society,
to reject his advantages.
The temptation would surely have been there for him, as for us,
to stay on the inside, to fight the good fight from within.
And in fact this is what he does sometimes,
as in Philippi where he claimed Roman citizenship to get out of prison.
There is a time for using your privilege for good,
but there is also a time, as Paul discovered to his cost,
for setting it aside and identifying with another master.
What might it mean for us to act and speak
in ways that are subversive to the unquestioned assumptions of society,
where some are born free, and others are born enslaved,
where some are born privileged, and others inherit oppression?
I think that in our time, this begins to focus around the question of reparations:
decisive action taken to address the imbalances wrought by former generations,
but which continue to blight lives in the present.
The recent visit of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge to Jamaica,
in celebration of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee,
was disrupted by protests,
as people took the opportunity to press their case
for not only an apology from the British,
but also for reparations for subjecting the island to colonial rule and slavery.
This is a live issue, and it is an issue of justice and freedom.
An open letter to the Royal Family and the British government,
signed by one hundred Jamaican leading academics, politicians, and cultural figures,
and made public on the occasion of the royal visit,
said the following:
“We are of the view an apology for British crimes against humanity,
including but not limited to
the exploitation of the indigenous people of Jamaica,
the transatlantic trafficking of Africans,
the enslavement of Africans,
indentureship and colonialization
is necessary to begin a process of healing, forgiveness,
reconciliation and compensation,”[1]
I am heartened at the amount of money that has already been committed,
to the rebuilding of Ukraine when the opportunity comes,
and I am absolutely supportive of the attempt to bring Putin’s regime to justice,
and to hold them to account for evils they are wreaking in that country.
But if we are taking that seriously,
why are we not also taking seriously the wrongs that our society
wrought against another people group on the basis of skin colour,
generations before we were born, but which have never been addressed?
A few years ago I went to hear Professor Verene Shepherd,
give the Baptist Union Sam Sharpe Lecture
at the Jamaican High Commission here in London.
She has spoken strongly in favour of a Christian case for reparations.
The annual lecture series is named after Sam Sharpe,
who was both an enslaved Jamaican and a Baptist Deacon,
and played an important role in the ‘Great Jamaican Slave Revolt’ of 1831-2.
He was one of the leaders of a group of enslaved people
who took part in a ‘sit-down strike’ against slavery
and for sitting down and refusing to work, he and more than 500 others
were executed by a British backed colonial force.[2]
In her lecture Prof Shepherd explored the substantive contribution
that black women made in the campaign for freedom and rights
in the colonial Caribbean,
demonstrating from her research
that anti-slavery activism is not the preserve of males.
And there is important work to be done,
in recovering the black male and female contribution
to the fight against slavery.
We have a picture at Bloomsbury of an anti-slavery rally, in London, in the 1840s.
It is a sea of white men, good people all of them I’m sure.
And one of them is the founder minister of this church, William Brock.
And there is much to celebrate in the story white Christian activism
against the evils of the slave trade, don’t get me wrong.
But when that whitewashes the contributions
of those who stood up as enslaved men and women,
fighting the cause as those who had suffered from it,
then we rather miss the point,
and we’re back at Bonhoeffer,
reminding us that we have to listen to the voices of those who suffer,
if we are to hear the voice of Christ, our suffering saviour.
Prof Shepherd also called for reparations
for all those impacted by the horrors of colonialism,
something which Wale Hudson Roberts,
friend to this church and Racial Justice Enabler for the Baptist Union,
grounds in the writing of Dietrich Bonhoeffer,
who spoke of what he called ‘cheap grace’.
Wale Hudson Roberts says that,
“Reparations is the antithesis of cheap grace.
Reparations call for an enduring commitment to the ‘other’,
one that emerges from the inner recesses of our hearts.
Reparations are a genuine outcome of repentance,
seeking to make collective recompense for collective violation
perpetrated over years and sometimes even decades of systematic violence.”[3]
And so I wonder if those of us who would want to join with Paul and Timothy,
in identifying ourselves as ‘slaves of Christ’,
can hear the wisdom of our three imprisoned letter-writers this morning,
calling down the years for us to ground our lives and actions
in the overriding call of Christ
to live in love, and with love towards all,
to do so with knowledge and full insight,
as we determine what is best,
and pursue the harvest of righteousness
that comes through Jesus Christ.
[1] https://time.com/6160376/prince-william-kate-royal-tour-controversy-caribbean/
[2] https://www.baptist.org.uk/Groups/310750/Sam_Sharpe_Project.aspx
[3] https://www.baptist.org.uk/Articles/564908/Sam_Sharpe_Lecture.aspx
