Revd Roger Holloway Obe Ma: A Collection of Favourite Sermons Preached in the Chapel of Gray’S Inn 1997 - 2010

By Roger Holloway

Holloway preached a powerful and very personal brand of sermon at Gray's Inn, and elsewhere, between 1997 and his death in office in 2010. Such was his following that it went without question that a selection of the 190 sermons he left should be published, not only for the benefit of those who heard them delivered, but to reach the much wider audience for whom these unique essays will provide guidance and entertainment, as well as human and spiritual wisdom.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: May 22, 2012
• ISBN: 9781468579420

Roger Holloway

Roger Holloway read theology at Cambridge in the 1950s and, instead of going in to the Church, spent the next 40 years in commerce, including appointments as Managing Director of Jardine Wines and Spirits International, selling whisky in China and Japan, for which he was awarded OBE , and as Appeals Director for Cancer research in UK. Only in the 1990s did he finally take Holy Orders and was appointed Preacher to Gray's Inn in 1997.

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FAITH AND BELIEF

 

Bradshawi

Sermon Preached on Sunday 27 April 1997

Most of you will remember or know about Bradshaw. But perhaps some won’t; so for the benefit of the younger British and those of all other nationalities, I must explain (as I did once for some parliamentarians) that Bradshaw wasn’t a nineteenth century atheist politician of some constitutional significance-that was Bradlaugh; nor (as I had to explain, one summer term, to schoolboys) was he a famous cricketer-that was Bradman, happily (unlike poor Compton) still with us.

Bradshaw was a railway timetable, much famed and much loved in its day. But it was more than that: it was a national institution. Clergymen and lawyers, especially, used it like a book of crossword puzzles: in country vicarages, in barristers’ chambers, in cathedral closes, and within the ramparts of the Inns of Court some of the finest minds of the nineteenth and earlier part of the twentieth centuries thought up diabolically complicated journeys the length and breadth of the land-and then (believe it or not), for the sheer intellectual pleasure of it, would accomplish these imaginary journeys with Bradshaw. The Bible, said one irreverent wit, the Bible, Shakespeare, and Bradshaw. It was classed with the imperishables, and itself only perished with the Attlee government’s nationalisation of the British railway system.

What, you may well ask, has Bradshaw got to do with us this morning in this chapel? And I have to tell you (which you may not at first believe) that it’s because of Bradshaw’s relevance to the Bible-the Bible as the principal source of our knowledge of our Lord’s life within a particular cultural environment; and because we must never forget that Christianity is an historically-based religion and not an abstract (even if admirable) philosophical system. Yet the Bible isn’t hard-fact history, any more than it can provide the kind of detail on our journey through life that a railway timetable might provide for our rather shorter journeys. This distinction is of ever-increasing importance at a time when emotional Christianity is the worldwide fashion, and biblical fundamentalism has more and more sympathisers or adherents in high places. Such fundamentalism can often be clothed in what appear to be the most reasonable terms. The recent plea of a group of eminent churchmen comes with real conviction: We must avoid amendment of biblical teachings to fit cultural demands.

But back to Bradshaw. In the second half of the nineteenth century, in the prime of Bradshaw, men and women came to look in a new way at the Bible. There was the same devotion, the same true piety; but a new day had dawned. Within the mercy of God, new light was breaking through. The fearless study of the Bible was here to stay, and biblical criticism was for more than a generation to be the spearhead of the search for truth. But the bitterness of the argument was appalling. Punch, the most important and influential satirical magazine-the Private Eye of its day-had something deeply serious to say of the divisions among clergymen over these matters when it asked, with a giggle: Should railway porters criticise Bradshaw?

This isn’t, of course, the proper occasion to attempt to re-live and re-fight the biblical criticism battles of the past hundred and more years. But history tends to repeat itself, and there are these increasing numbers of Christians-all over the world, and not a few highly placed-who demand inspiration and find safety and peace in the uncritical literal acceptance of the biblical narrative, with a strong suggestion that our God-given intelligence, if applied to the scriptures, isn’t only a betrayal of our Christian heritage, but an insult to God Himself.

There are devout Christians to whom a serpent-tempter, a donkey speaking with a man’s voice, the universality of the Flood, the flying of angels, and the audibly spoken words both of a very personal Devil and of God, let alone a rocketing Ascension, are nothing but literal history. Today, as in the turmoil years, there are those who believe that without such literal acceptance of the Bible,

Christianity must fall to pieces. And there are a lot more people-perhaps, even, some here today-who are willing to do intellectual somersaults, accepting that much of the Old Testament may be taken other than literally, but fighting tooth and nail against critical judgement applied to the New Testament.

Modern scholars unite in believing that the great discourses of St John’s gospel are not Jesus’ actual words; but they are almost universally accepted as inspired reflections-meditations-on His teaching. This morning in our Gospel reading we had those wonderful words: I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot hear them now.

It’s with this encouragement that we should regard mankind’s God-given new knowledge and God-given zeal to understand. One of the contributors to that pivotal book Essays and Reviews, published as long ago as 1860, put it in a way that can hardly be bettered. The Bible, Benjamin Jowetti wrote, must be interpreted like other books, with attention to the character of its authors, and the prevailing state of civilisation and knowledge, with allowance for peculiarities of style and language, and modes of thought, and figures of speech. Yet not without a sense that as we read there grows upon us the witness of God in the world, anticipating in a rude and primitive age the truth that was to be, shining more and more into the perfect day in the life of Christ, which is again reflected from different points of view in the teaching of His apostles.

This moderate, reverent, wholly sensible argument-far-reaching in its implications-has been memorably reinforced in the present century. There are no questions, said Bishop John Robinson, which may not be asked about Jesus Christ"m. And there were the wise and liberating words of the late Professor Hodgsoniv of

Oxford, who insisted that, in our continuing search for truth, it is our Christian duty to seek to understand what it was that men were saying or trying to describe ‘who thought and wrote like that’.

However much we may rejoice in the language, we have to step decisively out of the thought forms of the Ancient World. The duty of the Christian is to proclaim the risen, glorified, triumphant, and living Christ-not to box Him up in the intellectual luggage of two thousand years ago. We ourselves mustn’t be imprisoned in an antiquarian religion. The writers of the gospels, and St Paul, were marvellous men: their love of our Lord shines timelessly through their writings; but their world view was totally different from ours, and their metaphors were the final fling of the Ancients.

Mankind’s knowledge and understanding of the world has changed through the centuries-and never more so than in the scientific revolution of modern times. We begin to realise how little we know. But change can never be a comfortable process: it would be so much easier to settle back and say: This is what I believe-and nothing, no new knowledge, no new understanding, no new perspective is going to alter it, or unsettle it, or deepen it. But it can’t be like that: those eternal truths can’t be imprisoned in closed minds.

Whether or not it would have been appropriate for those railway porters to ‘criticise’ Bradshaw, we in our generation, we here in this chapel, belittle the central position of the scriptures in Christianity if we treat them as if they were a railway timetable. Through the scriptures, through the activity of the Holy Spirit of truth, through the often bumpy life of the church, the Christian proclamation is of the action of God in purposeful human history. We should read the Bible not as if it had been written at divine dictation, but with a very real sense that we too are required to play an active part in God’s continuing and unfolding purpose.

Our Christian profession commits us to following the truth wherever it leads. Each generation, within ‘the sundry and manifold changes of the world’ (as today’s Collect put it), can see

God afresh-from a new perspective. ‘The new theology’, wrote Bishop Charles Gorei, ‘but the old religion’.

To those who would put the clock back, we’d do well to point out that it is no good using our critical faculties with integrity during the week, and abandoning them on Sundays. We’re all of us required to entrust our lives-our actions, our emotions, and the use of our God-given intelligence-to Him who is the source of all love, and all beauty, and all truth.

Jesus

Sermon preached on Sunday 6 July 1997

Who are you? What do you do? Where have you come from? Tell me about your children.

Questions like these, sometimes appalling in their repetition, are in practice the lubricant of almost every social occasion. But we all know people who won’t be bound by convention and refuse to be hemmed-in by the often useful social platitudes. Revolt takes many forms. One friend of mine always begins a conversation with a challenge: I loathe Beethoven. Or it may be Rembrandt, or Shakespeare, or the Book of Common Prayer, or the Taj Mahal. And he follows up brightly with: What about you?-never failing to provoke an animated response, and quite often the bonus of a really interesting exchange. In much the same way, there was a man I read about whose opening shot at drinks parties was always the same: Tell me, he’d say, what’s your favourite colour?

For anyone coming into an Anglican, Roman Catholic, or Orthodox Church during the next twenty-plus weeks, it must seem that the Church is wedded to green. For green is the liturgical colour for that long season of the Church’s year, outside the dramas of Christmas and Easter, which we call Trinity. Green altar frontals, green bookmarks, green stoles for the sacraments, green vestments for those who like that kind of thing. You name it: in the long season of Trinity, we have it all-in green. Sometimes we can suffer from visual boredom-too much green.

But the Church, in its wisdom, has a good reason for the ‘sameness". We have a great succession of readings as the Gospel for the day, Sunday by Sunday (which, more often than not, on our few Sundays here, we shall be reading as our Second Lesson). Through the months of the Trinity season, the Church guides us, enthrallingly, through the teaching of Jesus’ ministry. Today we’ve had the stern warning about the corrosive effect of contempt for those around us; and a strong suggestion by our Lord (which may be received with mixed feelings in this gathering) that it’s better to settle out of courti. And in the Book of Common Prayer for coming coming Sundays we’ve got Jesus on feeding the hungry; obedience and justice; ignorance and hypocrisy; healing and the virtue of mercy. I commend these so easily accessible readings to you all.

They show that whatever else he was (and Christian believers and Christian doubters and non-Christians alike can unite on it) Jesus was a genius. As an ethical teacher he stands alone-the greatest in all recorded human history-with some of his stories unique, others astonishing re-workings of older folk-tales, he is unsurpassed.

Those simple stories, taken from the familiar real-life of his contemporaries in a rural economy, are timeless. The so-called ‘parable’ requires many skills in the making-not just the skills of precision and concision (many a journalist has those) but the inborn gifts of the poet. And it’s with Jesus the teacher, Jesus the storyteller, Jesus the poet that we can be more at ease than with Jesus the sometimes alarming man of action, Jesus the wonderworker. And indeed some of his more dramatic alleged actions may well have been parables, easily memorable, passed on by word of mouth, which eventually got written down as miracles.

Can one really think of Jesus ‘blasting’ a fig tree?i-or, as honoured guest at a bucolic wedding, obliging his hosts by saying ‘abracadabra’ and so conveniently turning the water into wine? But we can without too much difficulty think out the implications of failing to fulfil our intended purpose (in this example, the fig tree giving no fruit). Or the best (in this instance, the best wine) so often coming when all resources seem to have failed.

Much of what appears in the written word, and which is dismissed by the hostile outsider as ‘magic’ and viewed with unease even by committed Christians, may have begun as a life-giving parable. And, inevitably much has been embellished: many who have seen the fierce storms come and go within minutes on the Sea of Galilee are content to see the ‘miracle’ of the Calming of the Storm as a wondrous calming of frightened men. Indeed, the lesson to be learnt as we move into this long and illuminating season of Trinity is that we should be reading or listening to all these accounts of our Lord’s teaching and ministry not only with open eyes and open ears but with open minds.

We might also profitably give time to reflect that while the New Testament tells of Jesus’ life and the Old Testament places him in his cultural, religious and historical context (the inhistorization of Jesus Christ, as old Professor Farmer" at Cambridge used to describe it), the entire Bible, with its so many books, was written at widely spaced intervals a very long time ago. The books of the Old and New Testaments were written by and for people whose thought forms and worldview were totally different from our own. And scholars are still arguing about who wrote the four gospels; and when they were written; and for what readership each was principally intended.

The extraordinary thing is that whatever the differences, whatever the contradictions, whatever the well-established mistranslations (Jesus walked by not on the water), whatever the hazards of words being remembered and passed on by word of mouth and only written down years later, we get a totally coherent picture, looked at from many different angles, of that one man and his teaching.

It is this coherence, and not the difficulties, which should be our concern. It should fill us with a joy deeper than the reassurance to be scratched from literal acceptance of the written record. Why should the Christian fear truth? Our Christian profession commits us to follow truth wherever it leads. I am the Way, the Truth, and the Lifei may not be Jesus’ actual words, for those great discourses of St John’s gospel are in a style too different from that of the poet-teacher-healer of Galilee; but they are widely accepted by scholars as authentic reflections of his teaching.

We must seek truth, in our life of faith as in everything else; and each generation will see God from its own perspective and reflect back into the Christ-figure the best in its own life. In our own time, we can find in Jesus’ teaching the Way through all the difficulties presented by scientific discovery; and we can take from it courage, at a time when there is bound to be much honest questioning whether the entire phenomenon of religion belongs to the childhood and not to the maturity of the human race.

Quietly and calmly, through this long (and in many senses green) season of Trinity, we can rejoice that at a given moment of human history God spoke and acted through the man Jesus as through no one else. We can try to grasp, without getting up-tight about it, that the gospels aren’t biographies of Jesus-too much is left out, and too much added. We can try to come to terms with the consensus of biblical scholars that a lot of what is attributed to Jesus, both his doings and his sayings, comes from later interpretation and reflection. And we can, if we’re reasonable, accept that there is quite a lot in the New Testament which doesn’t stand up to historical and scientific scrutiny. We can do all this only if we have the confidence that (whether it is Jesus’ voice or the echo of his voice; whether it’s his actions or his words relayed as actions, or his actions embellished with the symbolism of the Ancient World) we have in the gospels so much of his teaching that on it we can build our lives. Jesus is still the Way.

It’s in the simple metaphors, the poetic stories, uttered to a simple people in a by-gone age, that-thrillingly-we can glimpse Jesus not as a strange figure of the past, but as our contemporary. And we can see the Jesus who can, as he did before, transform the coinage of everyday lives and turn it into the currency of eternal truth. Who are you? We must ask him. And we might well add: What do you do? Where have you come from? What about your children?

These now become profound, not trivial, questions; for through the gospel readings offered to us in the Prayer Book week by week during this season of Trinity, we can walk with that teacher and storyteller and healer. And in our prayers, as ourselves children of God, we can each come to know more about him-and what he wants from us.

In Memoriam

Sermon Preached on Sunday 1 February 1998

There’s a story told-and, like quite a lot of such stories, it maybe true-of a young Anglican curate seeking the advice of his vicar on the matter of sermons. The advice was short and sharp-all the shorter for having no verbs: About God, and about three minutes. Today I shall be be even briefer than is my custom.

But this morning, when we’re thinking of the life and achievements of John Megawi, and also remembering others from this place so recently departed, it seems right to spend some minutes on the great and inescapable fact of life: our own death. I remember years ago a schoolmaster telling a group of us: There’s only one certainty... and then he told us, pulling no punches and in French, what it was.

It happened that some months ago I was given (and, after a moment’s hesitation, accepted) an invitation to officiate at a funeral where the man who had died had insisted, with a stern integrity, that he wanted no Christian observance. And this set me hunting for words outside the Christian tradition to provide structure to the event and comfort to the mourners. There were two passages I used, in the manner of the ‘Sentences’ at the beginning of a Christian funeral; and because I myself find them comforting, I quote them to you now. The first is from the Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation: Man dies daily when he sleeps, and yet he is not dead; and that death which comes at the end of every lifetime is merely a longer sleep than that which comes at the end of every day. The second came from Socrates: The fear of death is indeed the pretence of wisdom, and not really wisdom; and no one knows whether death, which men in their fear apprehend to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest goodi.

Perhaps what we should most fear is the fear itself of death-whether for others or for ourselves. Our Christian faith is that the birth and life and death and resurrection of Jesus brought about the triumph of hope over despair; of love over hate; of God’s purpose over cruel chance and the cruelty of men; and of life over death. What our Christian faith does not open for us is the mystery itself: how, for us, this thing shall be. But through the darkness there comes a new understanding of what is everlasting (time going on like an endless piece of string, taking us with it); and what is eternal (outside time, you and me, in an eternal present-time wrapped in eternity). Here, once again the physicists are beginning to catch up with the insights of the Christian philosophers and saints and mystics through the ages.

We ourselves can clutch only feebly at this mystery. But the wisdom of all human history points to the great hope that the souls of the righteous are in the hands of God".

Much of the world’s most sublime prose joins in the chorus: So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written: ‘Death is swallowed up in victory. O Death, where is thy sting? O Grave, where is thy victory?’ And from the Roman missal: Those who bewail the certainty of death may be comforted by the promise of immortality to come. For to thy faithful people, O Lord, life is changed, not taken away. The poets, too, from the dawn of human literary inspiration, come back ceaselessly to the topics of death and eternity. Blake held that there is no birth and no death, no beginning and no end, only the perpetual pilgrimage within time towards eternity. Nearer to us, Rupert Brooke wrote about it-he had rebelled against his Christian upbringing; yet his phrase about his own future a pulse in the eternal mindiii I’ve found unforgettable. All through our lives we come back again and again to the mystery of God and of the shortness of our time on earth. About God, and about three minutes" might be thought to encapsulate all our fears.

So what indeed we should most fear is fear. Churchill once famously remarked that one might be killed by the next mouthful, repudiating fear. And the other day I came upon the typescript of the address I gave at the funeral of that same schoolmaster who had heartened for a lifetime those little boys to whom he had spoken, without fear, of death. What I said of him was this: He had no fear whatever of death. Except for the newly married, or those with young children, he regarded death as a progression. He was calm in his faith.

Calm, as we face up to the shortness of our days, isn’t the monopoly of the conventionally religious. That wonderful woman Joyce Grenfell wrote these words: If I should go before the rest of you, break not a flower, nor inscribe a stone, nor, when I’m gone, speak in a Sunday way, but be the usual self that I have known. Weep if you must, parting is hell; but life goes on, so sing as well.

Many there be who reject religion but find in those words a fount of charity and commonsense: to the Christian, they resonate with Christian hope.

Spirits

Sermon Preached in 1999

‘You look as white as a ghost’. So said my mother during the brief period in my life when I was thin and pale. I’ve always thought that she didn’t use the more frequent ‘white as a sheet’ in order not to embarrass a 15 year old boy. But ‘white as a ghost’ was still very much in the language-and shows how deep in human psychology is the folklore of ghosts. Popular fallacies emphasise the ‘whiteness’ of ghosts; and, at celebrations like Halloween the easiest form of dressing up is to this day a big white sheet. ‘Ghosts’, to many people, mean something unknown, possibly vindictive; and it was, I suppose, this association which caused the liturgical revisionist to banish the word from the modern services (though we continue unrepentantly to use it in this Chapel). It was an absurd and arrogant fear that the term ‘holy ghost’ would confuse the ignorant. ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ is often seen as a question to be put alongside ‘do you believe in fairies?’ and is often greeted with the same derision.

Yet there is strong evidence of ‘presence’ (whatever that presence may be) of something or somethings beyond our normal sight and understanding. It’s interesting that the accounts of Jesus’ presence after the crucifixion and the resurrection event, go to great lengths to protest that he most definitely wasn’t some strange ethereal spook, not some alarming disembodied spirit, as the story of doubting Thomas is laid on thick to make abundantly clear.

The New Testament as a whole takes seriously the power of spirits, ranging from the benign to the horrific. ‘Possession by devils’ may, with twenty-first century hindsight, appear as epilepsy; and the Gospels abound with modern sounding stories of the physiologically disturbed being ‘cured’, or at least calmed, by a reassuring but authoritative voice.

Yet even in our secular scientific sceptical world, it is hard to deny the invasion of the unknown-I hesitate to say ‘other spirit world’

as this implies an objective presence; but I do find persuasive the strong evidence of independent, unconnected witnesses who describe in alarming detail exactly the same phenomenon. In my own family, I recall my father, confined to his room and in steep decline, protesting that one of my sisters had appeared in the small hours, bent over towards him ‘with an angry face’. This was dismissed as a delusion in that twilight in between sleeping and waking. Then, in that same house, my own then small daughter was upset over ‘a cross lady.. .and I cried’ in the same early hours. The experience of another sister in the same house but unaware of these two earlier reports does sometimes give me the shivers. She saw a woman leaning over the bed in an hostile way; but this sister is a determined lady and she said: ‘go away at once’ in a tone that is never disobeyed, and, she told us ‘the woman disappeared from below upwards leaving at the last only her face’.

I’ve always thought that Jung would have had much to say about these three episodes described by three different and reliable witnesses. Is there, deep in our race memory a usually buried fear, visually expressed, of a hostile presence appearing as we sleep? And this disappearance ‘from below upwards’ may well relate to the myth, as old as the human race itself of the Genie.

How can we know? In Hamlet’s words (the only Shakespeare that anyone seems to know nowadays) we have real wisdom; ‘there are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy’i. We can perfectly well understand how, in the infancy of mankind, the unexplained was rationalised by reference to a benign or, often, avenging God or Gods; and the activity, evil or otherwise, was a convenient blanket explanation of all sorts of oddities. Now, of course, we think we know it all-but we confuse a rational belief that for everything there is an explanation with a conceited, precise and bogus clarification of what is, or is not possible. St. Augustine saw this in relation to the miracles. We should, he taught, be careful not to brand as ‘against nature’ what is, in reality, ‘against what is known of nature’.

We think we know it all: but we don’t. I chanced the other day to come upon an essay written by a then Anglican Priest about his being someone to ‘deal with’, what had been indentified, by the atheist occupants of the building concerned, as a ‘poltergeist’. His Bishop had given him clear instructions: ‘there can be no harm in saying prayers but do not address words to any possible spirits’.

To the priests’ question ‘may I use holy water?’ the brisk answer was ‘yes’. Was it something ‘real’ the Priest asked himself, or was it a clever fake? Days later, after a stoup of holy water had explicably been spilt on the floor, and a crucifix left in a prominent place had fallen, or been cast to the ground, the disturbing phenomena were no more. Most people, wrote