The Rev Dr Burchell Taylor, one of the country’s most respected pastors, yesterday cautioned Jamaicans against placing emphasis on material gains at the expense of social and moral values that provide a solid base on which to build the nation.

“Sometimes when you listen, you do wonder if there are not people more concerned about superstructure than they are about foundation,” Dr Taylor said in his sermon at a Scotiabank thanksgiving service at the University Chapel, Mona.

The Mona service was one of 17 held in churches across the island to mark the 115th anniversary of the island’s largest bank.

Basing his sermon on the Matthew 7 parable showing the importance of building on rock rather than sand, Rev Taylor said the story was relevant to Jamaica because “we are at variance about the fundamentals and the things that need to be first principles”.

He questioned which of the two builders Jamaica would copy in facing its challenges and “facing the social household in which we live and build”.

The foolish way of building a country, he warned, was to place more concern on the superstructure than on the foundation, more emphasis on wants than needs, to place more priority on what props us up than on what gives us strength.

“All of us corporately, institutionally, individually are called upon to build this social household….” Taylor said. “If we are going to engage in this collective instructive exercise we must shun foolish strategies of building the easier way, the less costly way, building in a dry river bed which will not stand.”

He recommended that all Jamaicans unite and build with “an ethic of discernment, an ethic of mind and spirit, (and) an ethic of the inner life”. We need an ethic, he said, that will offer shaping, forming and instructing the kind of attitudes that will develop the necessary constraints for our behaviour that go beyond the strictly legal, conventional, and the popular in the daily conduct of life.

Rev Taylor also suggested that a culture of benevolence needed to be created if the society was to be built wisely. But he made it clear that benevolence in the sense of handouts and patronage was not what he meant. “The culture of benevolence works for healing and forgiveness… and gives each person a social right,” he explained

Corporations and institutions, he insisted, must also be governed by ethics of constraints that go beyond the strictly legal, economic and technical.

“There are issues of human dignity, human worth, human well-being, human welfare, human sense of meaning and purpose in life that cannot be dictated by what is strictly legal,” Rev Taylor said. “There are values that cannot be legislated, but values which are absolutely necessary for the building of a meaningful and wholesome human community.”

He said that it was important for institutions to embrace the notion of stewardship which, he believed, was more than getting things done out of a sense of competitiveness and for show. It involved responsibility and accountability because “in the long run, if the secretary goes under, the institution goes under”.

Stewardship, he added, gave rise to a social conscience and was grounded in “heavenly vision”.

Rev Taylor congratulated Scotiabank, saying that it belonged to an important segment of our history as a people. “One can think of Scotia’s adaptability, its cultivating a sense of belonging, its professional competence, its interest not only in the material resources of the land but of its confidence in its human capital,” Dr Taylor said.