I am always grateful for the invitation to come and share what USPG is doing, or rather what other churches in the Anglican Communion are doing which you can support through USPG.
But before that, let's look again at this morning's Gospel (Luke 18: 9-14), the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector.

As we come towards the end of this year in which the Sunday Gospels have come from Luke, we see again many of his familiar themes:
prayer, and, at the end, for one of them, joy;
the contrast between two people - but a duet which, when you bring God in, becomes a triangle.
inclusion and exclusion - one thinks he's in and the other thinks he's out.
power and poverty - for in both religious and social ways these two men come from opposite sides.
reversal - by the end of the story their situations have been turned upside down.
and above all, freedom: what God's saving love in Jesus can do.

Which of these two men is really free?
At the beginning it is the Pharisee, or so he thinks.
He congratulates himself on being free from guilt, free from condemnation, free from self-doubt, free from criticism by others, and certainly free from any need to associate himself with the other person who has come into the Temple to pray.
Thus the Pharisee prays, not so much to God as to himself.

The tax-collector has no such belief in his own goodness.
By virtue of his occupation he is entrapped by a social and religious system which makes him an outcast,
and so, seeing the Pharisee, he stands "far off".
And deep in his own self he knows that he is enslaved by his own sinfulness.
He cannot even bring himself to raise his eyes and plead for forgiveness.
All he can do is to beat his breast and hope that God will be merciful.

And yet, says Jesus, it is the tax-collector who goes home justified.
Not the self-righteous Pharisee.
So which of them is really free?

It is easy to be nasty about Pharisees.
It is easy to forget that we religious people are often much more like them than we care to admit.
As the unfortunate preacher once said "So let us thank God that we are not like the Pharisees" !
Self-righteous people often do very good things.
Our problem is that sometimes the effort we make, and the self-satisfaction we gain from it, blinds our eyes to two other things:
our continuing need for God's saving and forgiving love
and the people outside our own circle whom God may love even more.

USPG traces its history back to 1701.
For the first hundred years we were, together with SPCK, the only way in which the Church of England related to the rest of the world, to what was to become the Anglican Communion.
In the year 1710 the Governor General in Barbados died and left the Society his sugar plantations and the three hundred slaves who worked them.
For the next 120 years the Society was a slave-owner,
it used the profits from the plantations to build the Anglican Church in the West Indies.
The bishops who made up the Governing Body in London sometimes saw it as a moral problem, but generally did not.
They were more on the side of the Pharisee than the Tax Collector!

I tell you this story because I know that during this autumn period you are focussing on the Bicentenary of the Abolition of the TransAtlantic Slave Trade.
I tell you this story because it illustrates how Christian people can live in their own religious circle, often doing much good, but failing to see the larger picture...
believing that we are good, yet failing to see that we are part of systems that keep other people enslaved
believing that we are doing good to others, but failing to see the other person in his or her entirety
believing that we have God in our pocket, so failing to see that the saving love of God in Jesus is so much greater.

So it is good that this year we remember the history and legacy of slavery.
It is good that we recognise the continuing existence of slavery
explicitly in migrant labour and sex trafficking
more implicitly in economic systems which work to keep the poor, poor.

But there is also some better news:
here are just a few headlines from around the World Church today
some places where the legacy of colonialism has given way to local and growing churches which it is USPG's privilege to support around the world.

I think of Myanmar (Burma), much in the news of late, where despite the restrictions imposed by the military regime, the Anglican Church stays faithful to its calling. Your support for USPG helps us support them to the tune of £100k pa, assisting Diocesan youth work and training new priests.
I think of Malawi where I was in September, where a church hospital serves 50k people and USPG supplied the one and only doctor.
I think of the Philippines where I was last month, and USPG's financial support for the Anglican Churches' support for indigenous communities displaced by foreign-run mining companies.

But most of all - and this is my last point - as we gather for this Eucharist, with the issue of Slavery on our mind, I think of a visit last year to the Diocese of Brasilea. In one of the shanty towns where landless people people live in flimsy huts of timber and black polythene, with no water, no sanitation, USPG help support the local Vicar who comes in every week to celebrate the Eucharist, lead Bible Study, and help the protest movement for better conditions. These people know what slavery means today. But they also know that God hears the cries of the poor.

Let us celebrate this Eucharist in solidarity with them.
And may God free us from the slavery of self-righteousness
so that all people may know the glorious liberty of the children of God.

Links:

USPG

Cathedral slavery events

More sermons, modern and historical, available in Norwich Cathedral Library

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