On November the 29th, 1781, the Officers of the British slave ship Zong found themselves perilously short of drinking water and still far away from their destination in Jamaica. To preserve water the crew decided to throw overboard what they deemed to be expendable cargo. That is one hundred and thirty enslaved African men and women. If this wasn't horrific enough when they reached Black River in Jamaica. The ship's owner put in an insurance bid for their lost cargo, those they had massacred in the mid Atlantic. What followed was a complex legal case which only came to wider attention because of the efforts of Olaudah Equiano, whom the church remembers with William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson on the 30th of July. He himself had been enslaved as a child, taken off to the Caribbean and sold to a Royal Navy officer. Sold on twice more, it wasn't until 1766 that Olaudah purchased his freedom. Through his efforts and those of the abolitionists, Granville Sharp, the Zong massacre became a national scandal, highlighting, like never before, horrors and moral repugnance of the Atlantic slave trade. It would prove to be a crucial turning point in the long struggle towards the abolition of slavery across the British Empire. Equiano's own memoir remains a fascinating and disturbing insight into Christian Europe's willful blindness to moral horrors in its own backyard, but also testimony to the inspiration found in Jesus Christ to fight for justice, to establish dignity for all people, regardless of race, and to break the chains of oppression. We've been made more acutely aware of our collusion in the oppression and denigration of people of color this summer, not least in the Church of England, both historically and in the present. But as we've examined our past, we're also being made aware of those across our world who remain enslaved and oppressed by the forces of racism, corporate greed, homophobia, sexual predation, or even the forces of government. Many of you watching this, for instance, many like me have discovered this week that you own clothes from companies who've bought cheap cotton from China. Cheap because it's manufactured at knockdown prices by Uighur Muslims barbarically held against their will in Chinese government camps. In a chilling reminder of Nazi Germany, the US earlier this month seized 13 tons of human hair, almost certainly from Uighurs in China's labor camps. In December 1941, the Bishop of Chichester, George Bell, called upon all Christian churches to unite in the battle against the evil that was engulfing Germany. In a speech in Belfast, he proclaimed, The evils are rank and vigorous and full of power. They can only be defeated by an even more vigorous concentration of spiritual forces against them. Like Equiano and the abolitionists, we must speak out. We must summon their courage, the courage of Bell and Bonhoeffer, or the courage of the great Christian civil rights leader, Congressman John Lewis, who died last week. Above all, let us not let the vigor of evil in our day lead us to despair for this, as we've seen little too quickly to fear, to violence or worse, collusion. The kingdom of God has drawn near. Let us pray for its life and its witness to break in as a storm over those who would enslave others, in the Communist Party of China, in the boardrooms of our leading retailers, in our own cities and towns. May every child of this planet come to know the freedom of the children of God.