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.