Sermon-Hidden in Plain Sight

The Black Boy, William Lindsay Windus, 1844

A sermon given during Holy Communion at St Olave Hart Street on Sunday 8th February 2026 based on the texts of Romans 8.18-25 and Matthew 6.25-end on the day the church marked Racial Justice Sunday.

The street outside, beyond the wall behind me, is called Seething Lane. History records a number of its famous residents, particularly in the seventeenth century: Sir William Batten, Admiral William Penn, Samuel and Elizabeth Pepys.

 

It also records another name living here at that time — one we never hear.

 

William Champion.

 

William was fourteen years old. He was Black. And he was enslaved.

 

We know his name not because someone chose to document it in a diary or put up a memorial to celebrate his life, but because someone tried to reclaim him. A notice was placed in a London newspaper describing what he looked like and calling for his return.

 

William had run away — to seek freedom. His owners wanted him back.

The historian Simon Newman has published a remarkable account of the lives of enslaved people in London during this period. His research draws on parish registers — records of baptisms, marriages, and burials — and maps every instance where a person was described as “black” in London churches between 1600 and 1700.

 

The very fact that race was recorded in these church records sets these individuals apart as different. But perhaps the fact that they appear at all also tells us something else: that they were here — living, working, worshipping, and seeking God in the heart of this city.

Many of these records are baptisms.

 

At the time, the law around slavery in England was uncertain and contested. There was a widespread belief that baptism might bring not only spiritual freedom, but legal protection as well. When we baptise people today, like baby Clio who was baptised here yesterday, we speak about hope. About new life. For an enslaved person like William Champion, baptism could be an act of profound hope.

By cross-referencing baptism records with newspaper advertisements for escaped enslaved people — so-called “runaways” — Simon Newman is able to tell us more about William Champion.

 

A notice published in the London Gazette in October 1685 describes “a blackamore boy by name Champion, about 14 years of age, very black and handsome, with a scar in his forehead over his nose.” He had escaped from the home of Winifred Brooking, widow of a wealthy merchant, and was to be returned to Mr Nicholas Hamburgh in Seething Lane — the street next door.

 

Simon Newman discovered that two weeks earlier, parish registers elsewhere in the city record the baptism of “William Champion, a black aged about 14 years.”

We cannot say for certain, but it seems highly likely that this is the same young man. Newman’s research is the only example of approaching the historic documents in this way, and to date no one has had the resources to independently verify all the connections he proposes.

 

So often, economics shapes whose stories are told — and whose are relegated to the margins.

 

We cannot know precisely why William chose to make that journey. We don’t know what he hoped would happen next. We don’t know whether baptism brought him the freedom he sought. But we can imagine a fourteen-year-old walking several miles across this city towards a church, seeking God — and seeking a life beyond fear.

 

We know nothing about William’s daily life while he lived here in Seething Lane — the life he sought to escape, on a street we all still walk down. We only know about him because he ran away. And because someone more powerful wanted him back.

This same hiddenness still exists today.

 

Injustice hides in plain sight.

Today, we know that many people are living and working nearby who, because of their race, are not truly free. They are not truly seen — known to the system only when they try to escape it.

 

Racial justice is not only about correcting the past. It is about whether we have learned to notice the present. About whether the Church will be a place where hidden lives are seen, and where each of us can flourish in the freedom God gives us through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ.

 

In St Paul’s letter to the church in Rome — the first reading we heard this morning — he describes the whole of creation as groaning, longing for freedom, longing for liberation. The natural world. Human lives suffering under injustice. People treated as property.

 

Paul does not try to hide the injustice that surrounds us.

 

But he insists that this is not God’s final reality. There is another way of being. The way of Jesus. The kingdom of God.

 

So we — along with the whole of creation — groan, yearning for freedom, waiting not in despair, but in hope.

 

That hope is visible in William Champion’s decision to run from a house next door, to seek freedom through baptism — freedom in Christ.

 

In our Gospel reading today, Jesus says, “Do not worry about your life — what you will eat or drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?”

 

“Look at the birds of the air and the flowers of the field,” he continues. They do not worry. They are still loved, still sustained, by God. How much more, then, will God love and sustain those who worship him?

When William Champion lived next door, the world put a price on his body. He was treated as an object to be owned.

 

Today, we live in a world where what we wear, where we shop, and what we consume are often used to measure our worth – to place a value on ourselves and others.

 

Jesus says we are worth more than those things. Much more.

 

Jesus does not pretend that worry and anxiety do not exist — that we do not worry about money, food, or shelter. But he refuses to let fear have the final word. He points instead to another reality, another way of living.

 

What he calls the Kingdom of God and its righteousness — a world of right, or just, relationships.

Our journey towards that kingdom — striving to live in right and just relationship with God and with one another — is part of our calling here, in this church, and in every church. It is not about retreating from history or smoothing over uncomfortable truths.

 

It means that when we gather to worship, surrounded by memorials of stone and glass commemorating powerful lives, we learn to notice whose stories are not carved into stone, whose lives do not easily enter our awareness.

 

God sees them.
God hears their cries.
God loves them.

 

And God longs for them — and for all of us — to live in the freedom made possible through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

 

As the Church marks Racial Justice Sunday today, let us remember William Champion — a young enslaved person who ran from the life he knew in a house next door, towards freedom through baptism in Christ. May he inspire all of us, young and old, to see, to hear, and to love as God sees, hears, and loves.

 

And may we live patiently, truthfully, and courageously, in hope while we wait for his Kingdom to come. When all will be seen for what they are. Beloved creatures of God.

 

Amen.

Image: The Black Boy, William Lindsay Windus, 1844

Links: For more information about the lives of people like William Champion, do read Simon Newman's book 'Freedom Seekers : Escaping from Slavery in Restoration London' or take a look at the many blog posts on Runaway Slaves in Britain, such as this one from the University of Glasgow.