10.09.2017
Archbishop of Dublin Preaches at British Irish Association Service
Archbishop Michael Jackson preached in Downing College, Cambridge, this morning (Sunday September 10) as part of the British Irish Association’s annual meeting.
The British Irish Association invites people involved in politics, society and churches to meet for a forty–eight hour period residentially in a college in Cambridge or Oxford each year.
It provides an opportunity in a safe space and a trusting environment to discuss contemporary issues of concern to people in England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.
The Archbishop preached on the subject of leadership. He suggested that leadership could come from everywhere but must be connected to service.
The text of his sermon is reproduced below:
BIA, Downing College Cambridge September 10th 2017
sermon preached by the archbishop of Dublin, The Most Reverend Dr Michael Jackson
Always remember to put on your own mask first…
There is an interesting and fairly extensive story embedded in the Second Book of Kings. It concerns some characters who might well have come from a play by Samuel Beckett, whether written in French, English or the language of silence. These characters are four lepers huddled at the gate of the city of Samaria. It is a city heavily besieged by Ben–hadad king of Aram. Their gallows humour cannot but inspire us with the insight (an insight that repeatedly defies political pundits in the same way as the outcome of most modern elections also seems to defy them) that most institutions and policies, churches and governments often survive and flourish by sheer luck. The philosophy of the enemy (and, although we would rush to deny it, we all are enemies to some others and we all have enemies in some others) held and acted upon by these four lepers as they and everyone else face into starvation and death is a pragmatic one: If they spare us, we shall live; if they put us to death, we can but die. (2 Kings 7.4b) It may not be scintillating but, in contrast with much political discourse, it at least faces reality and looks it in the eye. Their community has rejected them as persons by virtue of their illness, their being unclean and therefore they become non–persons forced to live in No Man’s Land.
Like so many disenfranchised, and in consequence structurally disengaged, people in our societies today, they have nothing to gain and therefore nothing to lose. Their own plight and their resolution of the corporate plight for the whole community teaches us something we ought never to have forgotten as we look on a post–establishment world. This world that we have created shows signs of being both neo–totalitarian and post–authoritarian at the same time. It shows us that the tradition as we have inherited it could never deliver for us unless delusion has taken us over completely. It matters little at this point whether the tradition is post–Troubles or pre–Brexit. It is a construct desperately devoid of the energy and the creativity that it urgently needs. This story of the lepers, a story from below, teaches us that leadership can and does come from anywhere; we may not like it; we cannot control it; we simply have to get on with it and find our feet once again in both the new and the old because both of them march together and neither of them goes away.
The four lepers, who are nobodies in the power politics of a city under siege, decide that they are, in the more modern and less Scriptural phrase, damned if they do and damned if they don’t. If they sit it out at the gate of a city where, in that mellifluous phrase: a donkey’s head was sold for eighty shekels of silver, and a quarter of a kab of locust–beans for five shekels (2 Kings 6.25), they will not make it to the next morning, let alone the next week. Showing personal initiative is worth a try; and the initiative they showed turned out to be the very thing that connected the king of Israel and the people of Samaria directly with the providence and the protection of God. As outsiders to the system, as non–entities, they showed a great deal more initiative than the cautious leader inside the city gate who saw a conspiracy under every Coke Can, so to speak. It was the outcast who broke the deadlock.
And here again Scripture catapults us into a very contemporary world: what had in fact put paid to the very tight siege of Samaria by the king of Aram and his army was rumour, so beloved of politicians and the media working either in harmony or in dissonance, that great motive force of cynicism and diminishment which turns fiction into fact and leaves its victims to pick up the pieces of their own lives and the lives of those that matter to them, as it moves on. It was on the strength of rumour that the mighty Assyrian army fled, jettisoning all their valuables and their armour the whole way along the route to the River Jordan. The four lepers had a wonderful time. Just listen: They ate and drank, looted silver and gold and clothing, and made off and hid them. (2 Kings 7.8)But listen also to their change of heart and to the restoration of integrity to the realm of public life: What we are doing is not right. This is a day of good news and we are keeping it to ourselves. (2 Kings 7.9) It is from those who are rejected by their society that the disclosure of delight, the recognition of good news and also the return of public principles in fact come. They become the brokers of the common good.
Leadership can come from anywhere. My only plea is that it be connected with service. We live in a world of information overload; and this very overload is beginning to become the handmaid of injustice because it has become the motive force of selectivity and truthlessness rather than the tool of discernment. This is a time when all of us need to dig deep in order to continue to look beyond narrowing self–interests. This is a time to transcend narrowing self–understandings, to undertake creative thinking such as none of us has ever needed before – primarily for others who look to us but also for ourselves – if we are all to flourish rather than simply stagger on, again like characters from Beckett.
What has caught up with us is time itself. And in the sort of timeframe that is being offered to us, the sort of timeframe that we have created for ourselves, and in a context were facts are few and a sense of direction is elusive if not chimerical, we pray for peace, for wisdom and for altruism.
Finally I offer another phrase with which air travellers are equally familiar:
And remember that your nearest exit may be behind you.