Two hundred years ago this weekend, Britain abolished the slave trade. This weekend there are celebrations all over the country. The trade in slaves stopped - though slavery did not. There had to be a civil war in America - the greatest user of slave labour, before it could be totally abolished.
I felt a glow of pride last week when the deputy Mayor of Bolton, who was speaking at a dinner given by the Bolton Council of Mosques spoke about the progress being made in Bolton in Interfaith relations.
He was saying that go back a few years and it would have seemed inconceivable that the Muslim community in Bolton would have organised such an occasion; would have invited women as well as men to the function, would have openly admitted that there were problems of health, drug taking, crime and poverty within their own community that needed to be addressed.
He went on to boast that Bolton had always been at the forefront of progress. Then he began talking about the abolition of the slave trade and said that the first people in Bolton to be active against the slave trade were the congregation of Bank Street Unitarian Chapel - and that the workers in the mills had refused to handle cotton that had been picked by slave labour.
In those days, Unitarians everywhere were reformers. They campaigned for social justice in education, housing, sanitation, health care,- reform of Parliament too.
In those days they were driven by their faith - in the belief that Christianity really did mean faith through works - of caring for all humanity. They were the Good Samaritans of society.
Time has moved on. The social changes were achieved. The Unitarians had done their bit for society - and as usual, society began to forget them Society had no need for them. The Unitarians began to look inwards at themselves.
Unitarian Christianity based on the love of God and the example of and teachings of Jesus began to fragment. The Unitarian denomination became broader and broader. Christianity could not reach into the margins.
Unitarianism now is about personal spirituality; about discovering who we are as individuals; about developing that ‘higher self’; about finding our place in the great scheme of things and being able to float on the stormy seas of modern life and strife without our spirit or our mind capsizing. All the religions of the world have something to teach us, we say. The Christian God is not the only God -- maybe there is something greater still.
Once we can sort ourselves out - step firmly onto the path of our own enlightenment, only then we can lift our eyes and regard the world around us.
When we talk about Christianity, we fall into arguments that have never been resolved - the old ones about Christian worship with is symbols and its rituals and Christian dogma about the Trinity and the creed. About heaven and hell and who is authorised to do what - who can preach and who can question. There are the perpetual arguments whether Unitarians are really Christians at all and whether they should be entertained at the table by other Christians.
When you read the sermons of William Elery Channing or if you read Emerson's famous Divinity School address, you realise that their ‘Christianity’ transcended all the arguments of their day.
They lived by principles that were more godly than discussions about creeds and who could or could not be a believer. Their Christian religion inspired them to look again at the world they lived in and to ask if what they saw was what was really meant to be.
They were not going to be part of a world that simply accepted all that they saw.
They challenged the preachers who said that slavery was justified because Paul in his epistle told the slaves to obey their masters - their slavery was OK in God’s eyes. In slavery they saw God’s purpose unfulfilled.
They challenged the preachers who said that we were all born into sin but salvation was only for a few.
They challenged the idea that the words of the Bible were a holy scrip with only one meaning - that had been set by church fathers centuries ago.
To be a Unitarian then was to be an outcast -- but an outcast who preached a truth that would eventually change the world for the better and teach it to accept that all are born equal and no one is the property of any other.
What do we have in common with them? They were the giants of their generations.
I say we have much in common with them. If you read their stories you will see they were people of faith - but people of faith who had wrestled with their faith. They had wrestled with the beliefs they were brought up with. They had wrestled with the dogmas and the scriptures of conventional religious belief. They had wrestled with the accepted traditions of their day and they wrestled from a basis of faith.
And they came through with a new understanding of what it meant to be a person of faith. They came through with a new vision of how things ought to be - and their wrestling gave them strength - inner strength, spiritual strength to step up to the front of the world and tell all the people that the world was wrong.
When reading the scriptures you have to take into account what was happening at the time. Paul for example really believed that the second coming was imminent. Amongst the new believers there was an outbreak of antinominism - that the laws no longer applied. So the people went very liberal - families broke up, people started to do what they had always wanted to do! They started having a good time and the church got a reputation for licentiousness. Paul was trying to bring stability back. Restore the status quo. He wasn’t writing for the twenty-first century, he was writing for the first.
Wilberforce, Channing and the other reformers, didn’t want reform for reforms sake. They were not siding with a political party. They weren’t trying to fix things that didn’t need fixing.
They looked at the world with new eyes - the eyes of their faith and saw that the status quo was wrong. It could not be justified in any way. So they campaigned for change. The vision of their faith was that all are loved by God, all are valued by God. No one is simply someone else's property.
When we look at our world today, with the eyes of our faith, with the strength of the spiritual struggle in our blood, what do we see?
Is the status quo acceptable to the God we have found? Could we turn to God and say all is OK. That all the people are loved equally, treated equally, man and woman, child and adult, rich and poor, - that is doesn’t matter which country or which continent they come from.
And we should also remember the words of Channing when he said, ‘Don’t tell the slaves to struggle for their freedom. Don’t tell them to rebel. The task is our who are free and who have the power to make things change.
Could we heed those words today in our world and say: Don’t sell guns to the oppressed. Don’t encourage the starving to rebel or the sick to rebel or the thirsty to fight for water - when we have the strength. When we have the freedom to speak for them.
If we have struggled with our faith and found meaning and truth within it and it has made us feel strong - then let that strength be used to free the oppressed and feed the hungry.
Amen
No comments:
Post a Comment