The BIA annual conference brings together a wide range of people – senior politicians and government officials, businessmen and women, academics, faith leaders, writers, former paramilitaries and community workers – to discuss matters of mutual concern.
Archbishop Michael Jackson gave the sermon during Sundays service in Pembroke College Chapel.
The Archbishop looked at some of the problems faced in society today and the civic virtues needed to address them.
Drawing on the reading from Proverbs [22:2] ‘The rich and the poor have this in common; the Lord is the maker of them all …’ he suggested that this basic maxim pointed to the fact that there were “glaring systemic failures from which with utter predictability we walk away”. He highlighted the situation of homeless migrants and people whose places of worship are attacked because they worship God differently from us.
“Public religion aside, we are the privileged and unaffected bystanders. But we are also the people graced by perspective, which some of us call God, to see that there are specific ills in our societies, that there are changes that are a reasonable expectation of political, religious and societal leadership and that scapegoating particular communities regarding the perpetration of violence and destruction, as if they themselves are the sole cause, is naïve, brutal and fruitless. It is unhelpful and unjust, superficial and irresponsible not to face the fact of what the rich and the poor, the indigenous and the immigrant, the native and the newcomer have in common: the gift of human being, the equivalence of life itself. When you have no access to services, such as housing, health and education, you can rely only on the generosity within a shared humanity or go to the wall,” he said contending that status, money, power and policy continued to fail to respect the words of Proverbs 22:2.
He asked: “From the high ground of our influence and our privilege, from the level ground of our commitment and compassion, from the under ground of our consultation and preparation: where are we to go, what are we to find and what do we need to see gone from our societies if we are to be and to remain mature communities of inclusion, joyous communities of curiosity and functioning communities of action?”
Archbishop Jackson suggested that the source of our values mattered less than the sustenance of our virtues saying that people dug deeper for civic virtues because their violation harmed us more viscerally.
“A religious society never had all the answers. A secular state does not have all the answers either. We are all in this quagmire together. Integration, environment and regulation affect us all both in church and in state. They can each and all be the handmaid of society and of service. They can also all, used badly, become the destruction of every one of us. And even though we may not care to follow the Lord of the Reading from Proverbs, and that is our own decision, we are still faced in some shape or form with that clunky, pedestrian statement: Proverbs 22.2: The rich and the poor have this in common: the Lord is the maker of them all,” he concluded.