08.09.2025
‘Remould the clay in the pottery of politics’ – Archbishop’s Sermon to the British–Irish Association
Those involved in shared decision making, policy formation and practical implementation in Ireland must “hold the picture of power and control offered to Jeremiah to remould the clay in the pottery of politics and to deflect us all from the shattering of the stuff that we need for tomorrow and the loss of which we know only when it is gone”. So said Archbishop Michael Jackson in his sermon to members of the British–Irish Association yesterday morning (Sunday September 7).
The service in Pembroke College Chapel in Oxford was part of the annual conference of the British–Irish Association (BIA) which took place in Oxford over the weekend. 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.
In his sermon, the Archbishop drew on the reading from Jeremiah [18:1–11] which tells of Jeramiah going to a pottery workshop to hear the word of the Lord. There he watches the potter remould something that has not worked out as he intended. “For the potter, the fluid and the living form the potential for a future thing of beauty or usefulness,” he noted.
He said that history teaches us that there is a “polytunnel of a different type of political expression, susceptible to suggestivity, prone to paranoia, ripe for racism, open to unravelling – potentially all four seasons of discontent” and it was incumbent on them to remould the clay in the pottery of politics.
Archbishop Jackson said that the annual conference offered a precious opportunity to members of the British–Irish Association. “We are successors of The Troubles; we are successors of The Peace; we are watching the potter exercize patience and give direction to the stuff that will be both beautiful and useful. Let us step out of our offices and out of our comfort zones of real or virtual trinkets, and let us watch others operate (that is, do the work) with materials that are other than ours,” he concluded.
You can read Archbishop Jackson’s sermon in full below.
The British Irish Association Pembroke College Oxford
The Twelfth Sunday after Trinity September 7th 2025
Jeremiah 18.1–11; psalm 139.1–5, 12–18; Luke 14.25–33
Preached by The Most Reverend Dr Michael Jackson, archbishop of Dublin
Jeremiah 18.1: These are the words which came to Jeremiah from the Lord, Go down now to the potter’s house, and there I will tell you what I have to say …
Jeremiah the prophet is taken out of his office block, away from his desk, outside his comfort zone. It is where he has all of those comfort–trinkets that any of us might have on our desk: Paddington Bear, a photo of our dog, something we picked up on holiday when we were finally able to leave it all behind for a while – in other words, something to keep us sane in the workplace. Such things give us security of place and inspiration of purpose to carry on when we are facing the sheer hell of organizational paralysis which is the ‘dividend’ of system which we serve, now as then and for evermore. This is part of the genius of systems. Jeremiah is taken bodily to a pottery workshop in order to hear the word of the Lord. A couple of things are worth delaying over here: first that Jeremiah is probably more accustomed to giving out the word of the Lord; secondly that, unlike the sophisticated literary culture to which he belongs and which he controls, the potter’s workshop will be a place of illiteracy; thirdly that the gift Jeremiah is offered is one of discernment: he is to watch power and control in action as it glides through the hand of an expert and a master who shares none of Jeremiah’s interests, angers and obsessions. And the potter probably cares nothing for Jeremiah the prophet …
Such power and control, we find, wastes nothing. The potter is able through skill, dexterity (with apologies to those who are left–handed, like myself) and experience to remould something that does not work out as he intended while it still lives in his hands. For the potter, the fluid and the living form the potential for a future thing of beauty or usefulness. This is because a life of creativity is a life of experimentation, structure. It is tense yet nonetheless mobile and improvizational. Jeremiah is taught through a visual image and the plastic media a new ethic of critical containment of dissident energy. It involves patience and concentration. It requires more relaxation than overcommitment. It offers a way forward rather than a way downward, as is the way of obsessionalism. All of us can ‘learn loads,’ as they say, in such situations of role reversal when the spotlight is not on us and when there is nobody for us to impress, when nobody is interested in us …
One of the other things we really can learn in this cameo is that fragility is nobody’s enemy. It is, in fact, in the potential for open disaster that the thing of usefulness and of beauty is fashioned. And, as we move away from the image as an end in itself and into the theological and the societal application of it, we see that conscious or unconscious failure to act for the good of the nation will result in an expression of a side of the potter that Jeremiah has not seen as yet but which lies within the scope of the potter – that is to dash his creation to the ground, to shatter it completely and start again with different materials. We learn from this too that we are unwise to play off our own inertia, our own incapacities to engage in cul–de–sac mind games in order to act against and in defiance of the patience of others. That patience may not hold out to our advantage for all time. People may just, again as they say, ‘get sick of it.’
Time after time, the rhythm of engagement we find in The Prophets is based in action that displeases God, a warning not to ask too much of God when we put God under pressure and then the hope that God will relent. For us the word: relent is interesting and it brings us back to what I said earlier about the potter. Relenting has to do with bending back, with being pliant and a bit slower; it points us in the direction of a gradual dispensation of the leniency and the compassion needed to get something that might break or snap moving again and functioning. Perhaps, listening closely to Jeremiah 18, we get a sense of such a hope of relenting in repeated phrases like: think again, as found in two verses in quick succession, verses 8 and 10.
No longer do we today look for Diego Maradonna’s hand of God in the making of political and societal policy. In fact, many of us would rightly be alarmed at such language and such imputation of motivation and authorization. We have all seen and heard of too many totalitarian regimes for religion ever again to be given the ring of control of policy and its crafting. I make one plea, however, and it is this: that we take with us from this meeting of the British Irish Association those ideas of rethinking and relenting now that we ‘carry the can,’ as they say, about shared decision making, shared policy formation and shared practical implementation. In an Ireland that changes slowly and quickly at the same time, in both of its divided and fractured parts, people are unlikely to revolt or rebel en masse because for each and all there is too much at stake; this is the Russian Roulette of conventional politics after all; but all of this, at any given moment, may fade into an irate inertia and shatter because the tension is too great. We never really wanted to own up to the sectarianism. Now we don’t really want to own up to the racism. History teaches us that such is the polytunnel of a different type of political expression, susceptible to suggestivity, prone to paranoia, ripe for racism, open to unravelling – potentially all four seasons of discontent. It is incumbent on us, by which I mean that it lays its hand on us, to hold the picture of power and control offered to Jeremiah to remould the clay in the pottery of politics and to deflect us all from the shattering of the stuff that we need for tomorrow and the loss of which we know only when it is gone.
This, then, is the precious opportunity that a weekend in Oxford as Members of The British Irish Association offers us. We are successors of The Troubles; we are successors of The Peace; we are watching the potter exercize patience and give direction to the stuff that will be both beautiful and useful. Let us step out of our offices and out of our comfort zones of real or virtual trinkets, and let us watch others operate (that is, do the work) with materials that are other than ours. We cannot do what they do but from them we can always learn, perhaps to our own surprise and to our great delight.
Jeremiah 18.5,6: Then the word of the Lord came to me: Israel, can I not deal with you as this potter deals with his clay? says the Lord.