Good morning, Friends! Thank you all for coming here to worship this morning. I appreciate the effort you took to be here!
Later today we’re going to welcome a special guest, a Quaker actor from Greensboro. Her name is Diane Faison, and for many years she has portrayed the life of Harriet Tubman.
There’s an insert in your bulletin this morning about Harriet Tubman. It shows you her picture, and it gives you some of the basic facts of her life. It’s just to kind of get you ready for this afternoon, so you’ll understand it better.
One of the things we can never get away from is that for hundreds of years, there was slavery here in America. It’s not something we would set up today. But it’s part of our history, and we can’t pretend it wasn’t.
Slavery was all up and down the Atlantic colonies. And it wasn’t just in the South. There were enslaved people in Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts.
Even Quakers owned slaves in the early 1700’s. We’d like to pretend we didn’t. But some did.
Quakers were about the earliest church to make up our minds and agree that slavery was evil. Before the Declaration of Independence, you couldn’t be a Quaker and own slaves.
In the early 1800’s, almost half the Quakers here in North Carolina picked up and moved to the “free states” of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois in order to disentangle themselves from an economy which was tied up in slavery.
Over the next few years, you couldn’t even be a Quaker and use products that were made by slave labor. You couldn’t benefit from human slavery in any way.
There are a lot of places in the Bible which condemn slavery. There’s Moses going to Pharaoh and saying, “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: LET MY PEOPLE GO!”
Escaping from slavery is the whole point of Passover, which is the Jewish holiday that Easter is built on. Passover celebrates God freeing the Jewish people from slavery.
Easter, in a way, is a new version of Passover. If you were a Jewish Christian, you couldn’t escape the parallel. At Passover, God set the people free from death and physical slavery. At Easter, God sets everyone free from death and slavery to sin.
But there’s still a problem. How should we treat other people? What do we do, when they’re treated badly? What if we are the ones who treat them badly?
Let’s take a look at this.
When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them.
The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God.
Leviticus 19:33-34
What happens when the shoe is on the other foot? What if we’re not the slaves, but other people are?
If they’re children of God, we can’t keep them as slaves. If they’re our sisters and brothers, we can’t do it.
If they have the same rights as everyone, and if those rights are God-given, then no one can keep them enslaved.
Quakers had that figured out, a couple of generations before the rest of America. We knew that enslaved people were our brothers and sisters, and that God would hold us accountable if we pretended otherwise.
For more than 125 years, this was the front burner issue for Quakers here in our very own meeting. It was the reason behind the Underground Railroad. It was why members of Springfield like Solomon Blair gave secret reading lessons to enslaved people, in the attic of his shop, years before the Civil War.
Teaching slaves to read was illegal here in North Carolina after 1831. It mean fines or prison to the white person teaching them. And it meant whipping or death to the slaves. Slaves weren’t allowed to read the Bible, because then they might read how God freed the Hebrew slaves, all those years ago.
Churches were ripped in half over slavery. Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists and Episcopalians all across America had huge fights and separations over it.
Some people felt that slavery was wrong, but they also felt they had to obey the law. Many Quakers felt that way. Other people felt that God had made a higher law, and that God was calling them to disobey the law of the state. And there were Quakers and other Christians like that, too.
One of the things that the Old Testament said, over and over, was, “Remember what it was like when you were slaves in Egypt. Treat other people now, the way you wish you were treated back then.”
Today’s Scripture is just one of those many places. God says, “When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God.”
The word “foreigners” can also be translated as “strangers” or “aliens”. It can mean “the people who were here before you”, or it can mean, “the refugees who are among you.”
This isn’t my opinion. This is in every copy of every Bible you will ever read. Go and read it for yourself!
We know that in Bible times, slavery was part of the landscape. That doesn’t mean it was good.
I’m sure you’ve heard Jesus saying, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” That’s Mark 12, verses 30 and 31. Jesus was quoting the same Scripture we read this morning. Jesus went on to say, “There is no commandment higher than this.”
You’ve probably heard of the Golden Rule. It’s something Jesus said – “Do to others, what you would wish others to do for you.” That’s Matthew 7:12, and Luke 6:31.
That’s another version of the same thing. If you wouldn’t want to be a slave, don’t make anyone else a slave. If you want to be free yourself, don’t take away anyone else’s freedom.
It has nothing to do with one group of people being superior to another. That was one of the fake arguments people used to use in favor of slavery. It’s fake, because superiority is always in the imagination of people who think they’re superior. Everybody else knows they’re not.
But in any case, that’s not what God says. God says, “Do not mistreat them. . .treat them like your own people. . . love them like you love yourself. . .you were slaves once.”
See, that’s the other part of it. Treating other people well isn’t just a matter of kindness or charity. It’s justice. It’s remembering what we have been like, ourselves.
And this is where it goes way beyond the issue of slavery, even though slavery was one of the greatest evils our country has ever had.
- If you’ve ever been hungry, remember what it felt like. If you ever couldn’t make the rent, or been scared you were going to lose everything, don’t forget that experience!
- If you were ever new on the job, and wished someone would help you learn, help the new person!
- If you’ve ever been a stranger or a foreigner from another country, help someone not to feel lost and afraid!
- If you ever made a mistake, and you wished someone would forgive you, or give you another chance, remember that, too. When it comes your turn, treat other people the way you wish you had been treated!
- If you wish someone had listened, then listen to them!
- If you wish someone had opened a door for you, then hold the door open for them!
This is huge! Jesus called this “all the law, and all the prophets” – every rule and every challenge in the entire Bible.
And it’s not based on how good I am. It’s based on how good I wish I’d been treated. When it’s our turn to hurt someone or to help them, what do we do? How would we like to be treated?
Whether it’s respect, or forgiveness, or assistance – what would we want, if we were in exactly the same position ourselves?
Choose whatever example you want, and then ask, “How would I like that, if we had to switch places?”
The answers may not be easy. The answers may cost a lot. The answers may keep us up at night, or make us change our ways.
But this is where we start, with every problem. And always, remember. Somewhere in the past, not too far away, we were slaves once. Or we were slaves to sin.
Remember what it was like. And treat the other person the way you wish you’d been treated then.