Romans 6.12–23, Matthew 10.40–42
The Fourth Sunday after Trinity, 28 June 2026, Austwick, Clapham
When the slaves were released, they came out singing.
In 1873 a group of freed slaves from North America came to the UK to sing. Newspaper adverts announced that The Jubilee Singers from Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee would be giving a rendering of their “Marvellous and heart-stirring melodies” in concert halls, cathedrals and churches across Britain, including an appearance before Queen Victoria herself. [1]
They sang Spirituals, songs that convey both the hardships of slavery and the freedom the singers find in Christ. Having been emancipated in 1865 these Singers were on a mission to raise funds for Fisk, America’s first black university, proclaiming the right of all African Americans to education.
Touring the world the Fisk Singers introduced audiences to their “songs of sorrow” like Swing Low Sweet Chariot, Steal Away to Jesus, and Nobody Knows the Trouble I See, which went on to become anthems of freedom and equality across the world. It was reported that Queen Victoria and the Prime Minister Gladstone ‘treated the Singers like equals’ – a very telling turn of phrase.
For Victoria they performed “Go Down, Moses”, a song drawing on the ancient Hebrew scriptures which reminded the singers and their audience that just as slavery has a long history, so does liberation, as enacted by Moses, who was tasked by God to set the enslaved people free:
When Israel was in Egypt’s land – let my people go
Oppress’d so hard they could not stand – let my people go
Go down, Moses, way down in Egypt’s land
Tell old Pharaoh, let my people go [2]
Musician Harvey Brough, who recently brought the story of The Jubilee Singers to the London stage, said of those who sang the Spirituals, “They had the most shocking terrible inhumane treatment for all their lives as slaves, but there is not a word of anger or revenge in the songs. It’s about: ‘We are going to get to a better place and it will be different’.” [3]
This echoes the words of African American theologian James Cone that “Through all of the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes a hope — a faith in the ultimate justice of things.” Even when being treated most fearfully, through their songs the enslaved were able to say, “I’m no longer a slave to fear. I am a child of God”. [4]
A century after The Jubilee Singers visited England, another musician rose to prominence. Bob Marley, the son of Norman Marley, an English colonial army captain, and a Jamaican woman, Cedella Booker, a descendant of the Coromantee slaves who had staged the strongest uprising for freedom in Jamaica’s plantation era. In ‘Redemption Song’, Bob Marley sang: “Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery; None but ourselves can free our minds.” [5]
Mental slavery, Marley suggests, is the real slavery, the fundamental slavery from which one must free oneself. This emancipation is something towards which the enslaved peoples of the Americas were constantly reaching, as they sang their sorrowful, spiritual, songs.
And this leads us into another discussion of slavery – that of St Paul in his epistle to the Romans. He wrote about the slavery of sin, which seems to have a lot in common with the mental slavery Bob Marley sang about. “Do not let sin exercise dominion in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions,” Paul wrote.
What were the passions of the colonisers who developed and drove the transatlantic slave trade? The passion to explore the world and discover lands new to them, to derive as much wealth as possible for themselves from these places by fully exploiting the natural and human resources, as they saw them, which they found there.
And what was the sin which exercised dominion in their colonial hearts and minds? The sin of white supremacy, the belief that white people are superior to those of other races. One slave owner, future American president Thomas Jefferson, wrote in 1785 that blacks were “inferior to the whites in the endowments of body and mind.” Lawmakers created codes which socially segregated white colonists from black enslaved people, creating divisions which would hinder their ability to unite. [6] The enslavers who were themselves enslaved – to the sin of segregation – formed the modern world, its inequalities of social structures and of spirit their legacy which we carry with us.
Paul asks his readers, “Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness?”
Those who seek to live a spiritual life understand the need to search ourselves, to ask the question – to whom are we enslaved? Living a spiritual life often requires a change of heart, a conversion. [7]
And Paul is writing to those who, in seeking to live a spiritual life have experienced a change of heart, a conversion. “But thanks be to God,” he says, “that you, having once been slaves of sin, have become obedient from the heart to the form of teaching to which you were entrusted, and that you, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness.”
Slaves of righteousness – this is a different form of enslavement altogether. It is a willing giving-over of oneself to the God of righteousness. Those of the colonial mind who experience a change of heart, a conversion, give over our passion for wealth and status for a passion for goodness and justice; we gave over our belief in our superiority over those of other races to discover the joys of travelling in unity with all people; we give over the angers and fears which fuel division, for love and peace.
There is still in our society a widespread reluctance to truly grapple with colonialism and its legacy, and so the colonial mindset lies deep within each one of us, and in our communities and institutions, and it is not dormant. ‘Othering’, the way we separate ourselves from peoples unlike us, is ever-present, driving anxiety and fear, weakening and destabilising society.
But redemption songs are for everyone, they are for the sons and daughters of former slaves and of former slave owners willing to gather at the table of fellowship. [8] They help us all to say together joyfully, that ‘We are going to get to a better place and it will be different.’
When the slaves were released, they came out singing. Paul, in his theological Greek, and Bob Marley in his Jamaican patois,together ask us to humbly acknowledge that we all carry something of the Pharaoh within us: whilst also celebrating that, by the grace of God, we can also all be Moses. The question they pose to us provokes a change of heart, a conversion: “Won’t you help to sing these songs of freedom… [these] redemption songs?”
Notes
[1] Emma Bartholomew, Fisk Jubilee Singers: Amazing story of how freed slaves sang in Hackney 150 years ago. Ham&High, 21 February 2019.
[2] Wikipedia: Go Down, Moses.
[3] Emma Bartholomew, Fisk Jubilee Singers: Amazing story of how freed slaves sang in Hackney 150 years ago. Ham&High, 21 February 2019.
[4] Bethel Music, Jonathan David Helser, Melissa Helser, No Longer Slaves.
[5] Bob Marley, Redemption Song; Horace Campbell, Bob Marley and Emancipation From Mental Slavery. United Reggae, 25 May 2011.
[6] Wikipedia: White supremacy.
[7] “Living a spiritual life requires a change of heart, a conversion. Such a conversion may be marked by a sudden inner change, or it can take place through a long, quiet process of transformation. But it always involves an inner experience of oneness.” Henri J. M. Nouwen, The Spiritual Life: Eight Essential Titles by Henri Nouwen.
[8] “I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.” Martin Luther King Jr, I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches That Changed the World.
