Cathedral Modern Slavery Day 2026 Sermon

Isaiah 35:3-6, 2 Timothy 4.5–17, Luke 10:1-9

Today is a very good day on which to have a Sunday roast.  For today we celebrate St Luke, the patron saint of butchers.  He is also the patron saint of Bookbinders, Lace Makers, Artists, Bachelors, Physicians, Surgeons, Notaries, Doctors, Glassmakers, Goldsmiths, Jewellers, Painters, Sculptors, and Brewers.

Many have rallied Luke to their cause.

Some of these you will have known about, others, perhaps not.  But Luke is most famously revered as a doctor, an artist and a historian.  He is the patron of artists because a very early icon is attributed to him – an image of the Virgin Mary.  Luke, it is believed by some, was the first Christian iconographer, and his picture of Mary is deemed to be the picture of Mary, copied faithfully for centuries.

And Luke was, of course, a painter with words.  He was a profound writer and accurate historian, one of the evangelists – an author of a Gospel.  Luke wrote both the Gospel that bears his name and The Acts of the Apostles.  He is likely the only Gentile – that is a non-Jew - whose writing appears in the New Testament, perhaps even the whole Bible.  The earliest existing biographical evidence about him comes from a very early fragment which was included in a 4th or 5th century introduction to his Gospel, which says that he was:

“a native of Antioch, by profession a physician.  He had become a disciple of the apostle Paul and later followed Paul until Paul's martyrdom.  Having served the Lord continuously, unmarried and without children, filled with the Holy Spirit he died at the age of 84 years.”[1]

So Luke is a key historian of the New Testament period.  The eminent archaeologist Sir William Mitchell Ramsay, who died in 1939, did not agree and went to Asia Minor (Turkey) to refute Luke's biblical record.  After years of field study, Ramsay changed his mind and wrote:

“Luke is a historian of the first rank; not merely are his statements of fact trustworthy, he is possessed of the true historic sense...in short, this author should be placed along with the greatest of historians.”[2]

As we heard, St Paul wrote to Timothy that Luke was with him, and tradition holds that that Luke was a confidant of Mary the Mother of Jesus, which accounts not only for the portrait, but for the exclusive details of the Birth Narrative.  Women are particularly important in Luke’s Gospel, where he emphasizes the role of Mary, Elizabeth, Anna; Mary and Martha, and Mary Magdalene.  Luke shows Jesus’ compassion for the widow of Nain, a bent woman, and the widow who gave her mite, as well as a widow who nags for justice.  He shows us clearly how much the poor, the marginalised, and those whom no-one notices or cares about, matter.

So in the tapestry of the New Testament, Saint Luke stands out as the evangelist of compassion.  He spent his life seeing human suffering, diagnosing pain, and ministering healing - of mind, body and spirit. Healing of the seen and the unseen wounds and traumas of the vulnerable, the damaged and the abused. 

For master storyteller Luke was one who saw, remembered, ordered and wrote down what others missed. His Gospel is uniquely tuned to the unseen and marginalized: the forgotten woman, the despised Samaritan, the destitute beggar at the gate.

And slaves.  For there were many slaves in those days.  It is estimated that enslaved people made up around 15% of the total population of the Roman empire (which was around 50 to 60 million people). So there were around 8-9 million slaves in the Roman Empire at the time of Jesus: roughly the population of London today.

Enslavement is not a relic of the past; it is a present reality and a current tragedy. Today, as well as being St Luke’s day is also marked as a day to realise, remember, reflect, pray and act about - to notice - modern slavery.  Today, over 50 million men, women, and children around our globe live in conditions of modern slavery. The percentage of world population may be lower than in Roman times but the numbers are eye-watering.  50 million is likely an underestimate but is nevertheless the equivalent of the population of South Korea. Modern slaves are caught in forced labour, debt bondage, human trafficking, organ harvesting, sexual exploitation and forced marriage. They might pick the fruit on our tables, stitch the clothes on our backs, or mine the minerals inside our phones. Some live among us, invisible in plain sight. Those of you who are cathedral volunteers will know something of this awful reality as you study the course in Awareness of Modern Slavery which we ask you to take.

Or even someone in this Cathedral today could be caught up in modern slavery.

Here we want to raise awareness, reach out and offer whatever assistance and support we can into a situation and context which is dehumanising, dangerous and degrading. We want to strengthen the weak knees, to proclaim good news to the captives, to rescue them from the lion’s mouth.  This is not easy.  But it is vitally important and has its roots in a calling direct from Jesus Christ. And this is where Saint Luke’s compassionate heart speaks Christ’s words of redemption directly to our modern conscience.

The word ‘redemption’ is itself is a word relating to the freeing of slaves from bondage, and St Paul uses that concept extensively to give us an enduring metaphor for salvation.  So much so that it is so easy to forget its literal meaning and ever-present meaning and relevance.  Like a physician, Luke would have understood that you cannot heal a disease if you refuse to diagnose it.   As an evangelist, he understood that redemption in Christ is not merely a spiritual concept—it is a physical, social, and liberating reality.  The church is still in the business of redemption, literally as well as metaphorically.

In Luke’s Gospel we are reminded that God sees the slave when the rest of the world sees only cheap labour or a convenient supply chain or even nothing or nobody at all. We are called first to notice. Modern slavery thrives on invisibility.

It relies on blindness—the quiet convenience of not asking where a product came from or who suffered to produce it.  Luke challenges us to open our eyes to the hidden chains on our streets, in our cities, and in our global economy.

And like Luke, we must bear witness. Luke gave voice to the voiceless by writing down their stories. We inform ourselves and must lend our voices to shout down the silence that allows modern slavery to persist.  So in Luke we find a patron saint. A patron saint whom we would not so much rally to our cause, but who rather calls us to rally to his. His cause for the impoverished, the downcast, the oppressed. Remember the Magnificat we sing or say here every day: it may be Mary’s song, but it was Luke who gave it us.

It expresses a plea that can rise from the bottomless depths of the despair and neglect that accompanies modern slavery.  But first, like Luke, we must notice – notice the unnoticed.  For the person others overlook – hidden in plain sight - is already seen and loved by God.  May we learn to see them, and allow what we see to change what we say and do.

The Reverend Canon Dr Gordon Giles, Rochester Cathedral, 18/10/26

[1] Anti-Marcionite Prologue, 4th century

[2] The Bearing of Recent Discovery on the Trustworthiness of the New Testament (The James Sprunt Lectures at Union Theological Seminary in Virginia, 1913). W. M. Ramsay. Hodder & Stoughton, 1915.