Sermon-Multiplying Freedom

Am Not I A Man and A Brother, 1800 - International Slavery Museum

A sermon given during a service of Holy Communion (BCP) at St Giles-in-the-Fields on Sunday 3rd August 2025, the Seventh Sunday after Trinity, based on the texts of Romans 6.19-23 and Mark 8.1-9

This week in its calendar, the Church of England remembered three towering figures in the fight against slavery: William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson, and Olaudah Equiano.

Equiano was born in West Africa, captured as a child, and sold into slavery. Traded across the Atlantic, he eventually came to Britain, where he purchased his freedom. His autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, became a bestseller—and a cornerstone of the campaign that ultimately led to the abolition of the British slave trade.

Equiano lived nearby—on Riding House Street and Tottenham Street—and was buried in 1797 just off Tottenham Court Road. Though the burial ground has long since disappeared, it’s believed that his final resting place lies somewhere beneath Whitfield Gardens. A plaque near the American International Church now marks the spot.

At St Giles-in-the-Fields, we should also remember another man who gave his life to the abolitionist cause. Someone not included in the Church’s official commemorations. Whose story is lesser known—but no less important.

Robert Wedderburn.

His book, The Horrors of Slavery, was dedicated to Wilberforce, a frequent visitor while Wedderburn was imprisoned. He was branded one of the most dangerous reformers in England.

Born and raised in Jamaica, Wedderburn arrived in this parish in 1778 at the age of seventeen, after serving in the British Navy. He lived in the infamous St Giles Rookeries—the overcrowded slums around this very church—as part of a community known as the “Blackbirds.” Most worked as low-paid actors, labourers, street-sweepers, or prizefighters. Many earned a living through illicit means.

While a number of the Blackbirds were former slaves who had fought for the British in the American Revolutionary War in exchange for their freedom, Wedderburn was born free. But he was no stranger to suffering. He was a witness to—and victim of—the slave system. His writings speak of the brutal world into which he was born.

Robert’s freedom came through a deal struck by his mother Rosanna, who had been physically and sexually abused by her master – the plantation owner. In one harrowing account, she was beaten while pregnant. Eventually sold back to Lady Douglas—her previous, more benevolent owner—Rosanna agreed to work only if her son, later christened Robert, would be born free. Lady Douglas remained a support to him throughout her life.

As a young man, Robert lived in Kingston, Jamaica with his grandmother, known as “Talkee Amy”—an enterprising enslaved woman who had gained her owners’ trust and worked as a fixer in both legal and illegal dealings. Robert inherited her fierce survival instinct and her will to resist—qualities that surely helped him endure life in the St Giles Rookeries.

And yet, despite living in the shadow of this church, Wedderburn would not have felt welcome within its walls. His writings reveal deep suspicion toward the Anglican Church and its entanglement with slavery and Empire. For him—and for many like him—the institutional church had been part of the machinery of oppression, not a place of refuge.

“Beware of the clergy [he wrote]……listen to them as far as your reason dictates of a future state, but never suffer them to interfere in your worldly affairs; for they are cunning, and therefore more capable of vice than you are.”

Inspired by a street preacher in Seven Dials, Wedderburn became a Unitarian minister for a time, before establishing his own independent chapel in a loft on Hopkins Street, near Soho Square. Hay bales served as pews, and the walls bore slogans demanding the abolition of slavery, universal suffrage, and the rights of the working class. His sermons were fiery. His theology, unorthodox. His message, uncompromising: true freedom does not come from earthly power but from God alone.

He was eventually listed among thirty-three of the most dangerous radicals in the country. The Home Secretary called him a “notorious firebrand” and he was imprisoned for blasphemy.

Robert knew what it meant to give up everything for the Kingdom of God. He knew hunger and hardship. But he also knew the hope and riches of the Gospel. He lived a deep truth: that faith and justice cannot be separated. That the spiritual harvest which sustains us must be rooted in the ethical soil of liberation and love. He gave his life to that truth.

In his writings to Wilberforce, he argued that the same hands held out to receive the bread of eternal life are the hands that must also break chains. He believed the Gospel demanded nothing less.

When Paul’s letter to the Romans was first read aloud—most likely by a female voice – that of the Deacon Phoebe—it was heard by a church community deeply familiar with the horrors of slavery. Some of its members were enslaved. Others had bought or negotiated their freedom—just as Equiano and Wedderburn would, centuries later.

Yet Paul doesn’t speak of slavery in merely physical terms. Rowan Williams has noted that Paul’s framing of being “slaves to Christ” began to reshape how people in the ancient world viewed slavery itself. Rather than directly condemning what many then saw as normal—before the very idea of universal human rights—Paul subverts it. He speaks of everyone, even the imperial elite, as bound to a higher power. He uses the language of economics and ownership to provoke a new kind of morality: if we all belong to Christ, then to treat another cruelly is to damage what belongs to God.

To be a servant of sin, Paul writes, leads to death. But to be a servant of God leads to holiness—and life.

Equiano and Wedderburn read these words not as poetic metaphor, but as a call to action. The choice between death and life was, for them, quite literal. The question was whether the world would stay cruel and unjust—or be transformed.

In our Gospel reading today, we find Jesus with a great crowd. They have followed him into the wilderness. For three days, they’ve had nothing to eat. And Jesus, moved with compassion, asks his disciples: what food remains?

"Seven loaves and a few small fishes," they say.

The disciples, understandably, don’t believe what little they have will be enough. And they’re right—it won’t. This is not a lesson in the redistribution of resources. This is a miracle of multiplication.

When the disciples give what little they have to Jesus, it is transformed by his abundant grace. When we offer what we have in his name, everything changes. We change. We may not understand how. But it happens.

Jesus sends the disciples out to feed the crowd, and they return with more than they started with. Somehow, they have become part of the miracle. The multiplication has happened through them.

Like the disciples, we often feel inadequate. We think we don’t know enough about the faith, the bible and can’t speak in a complicated theological way. We stumble over the right words. We want someone else—usually the priest—to bring more people to faith, to grow the church, to speak the right message.

But when we think like that, we deny the miracle of the multiplication. We forget that when we kneel at this altar—bringing with us all our limits, all our doubts—we are transformed. We are nourished, and we grow. We diminish the value of what we’ve received, and what we can offer. We forget that God can take our small offering, bless it—and multiply it beyond measure.

Do we want to believe that this church—and every church—can be full? That people might gather, not just to receive bread, but to taste the kingdom of God?

Do we dare believe in the miracle of multiplication?

Jesus is calling all of us today—to come to him and lift up our hands.

And as Wedderburn wrote, those hands—raised in worship—are also the hands that can break chains. That can bring real, lasting change in the world.

We live in a world filled with hunger.

There is physical hunger—children going to school without breakfast, the famine in Sudan, the suffering in Gaza.

But there is also another kind of hunger. A spiritual famine. A longing for meaning. For truth. For justice. For love. It shows up in addiction, loneliness, violence, anxiety—in the deep ache of being unseen.

We are a well-fed society that is starving on the inside.

So let those of us who receive the bread of life become agents of its multiplication. Let us break the chains that still bind so many today.

And let us be the kind of church where chains are not only broken out there—but also in here. Let us break the very chains that once kept Robert Wedderburn from walking through these doors. Let us become a community that welcomes all those like him—alive today—who long for justice, but have not yet found a home among the people of God.

As we lift our hands, may we be empowered to be agents of grace: feeding the hungry, freeing the bound, multiplying love wherever it is lacking—until all are filled.

Amen. 

Image : Am Not I A Man and A Brother, 1800 - International Slavery Museum