[1] Upon finishing Sermons: Biblical Wisdom for Daily
Living, a collection of forty sermons preached by the Reverend
Professor Peter J. Gomes, to the multicultural, cosmopolitan
congregation of Harvard's Memorial Church, my soul spoke to me
saying, "Peter Gomes may be a twenty-first century Don Quixote,
daring to 'Dream the Impossible Dream,' of the coming of the
kingdom of God on earth, and to preach it at Harvard!"
[2] In 1974, Peter Gomes was the first black pastor/preacher
ever called by Harvard University to become the Plummer Professor
of Christian Morals and the Pusey Minister to the university. His
mandate is therefore to provide moral guidance in both his
preaching and his teaching. The primary aim of these sermons is to
guide us, through the wisdom of the Bible, in practical, daily
living of the Christian life.
[3] "Eschatology is the basis of ethics," says Gomes, "for the
Christian models himself not upon the discredited models of the
past human experience, but rather upon things that have not yet
been." (Advent III: "Humbug and the Christian Hope," p. 21)
[4] "The only place worth aspiring to, is in the future, and it
is given flesh and blood and bone and purpose in the form of Jesus
Christ." (Advent 1: "The Art of Impatient Living," p. 7)
[5] Gomes believes that "the essential word and wisdom of the
biblical experience both survives and transcends our world." And
that, "It is the preacher's task and the function of the sermon to
make this clear." (Introduction, p. xvi)
[6] Earlier this year, at the invitation of the Division for
Ministry of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Gomes (an
ordained American Baptist minister) delivered the Hein/Frye
Memorial Lectures at several Lutheran theological seminaries in the
United States. Through this lecture series, he became a familiar
figure to many readers of the Journal of Lutheran Ethics, who were
stimulated and charmed by the wit, wisdom and insight reflected in
his hermeneutics and his homiletical facility to say the nastiest
things in the nicest, most compassionate, way. He has an impressive
ability to engage his listeners in the content of his text and the
substance of his lecture.
[7] Gomes is an African American Baptist preacher who transcends
denominationalism, culture and ethnicity by reaching out beyond his
own heritage and embracing and including others. He refuses to
allow "the denominational map-makers" to tell him what part of
Christian history is his and which is not. Why, he asks, should he
be limited to the confines of his own "truncated tradition"?
(Remembrance: "The Fellowship of the Incomplete," p. 228). He
claims the right, as a corporate member or "fellow" of the body of
Christ, to enrichment by all denominational traditions and
fellowship with all Christians. "Am I not one with all who know the
same Lord I do?" he asks. "It is a community of cooperation in
which the dead, the living and the yet-to-be-here share in that
glory which is the presence of Christ and the perfect will of God."
(Ibid., p. 229)
[8] In his insightful forward to Sermons, Dr. Henry Louis Gates,
Jr., chairman of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American
Research at Harvard and a self-described agnostic, says that "In
Sermons, he [Gomes] has met head-on the challenges of
opening the pages of the Bible and offering to contemporary readers
a relevant and useful set of texts for their daily lives."
[9] The book is beautifully structured, containing forty sermons
equally divided into two categories. Part One: Seasons, is based on
the liturgical church year, Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Palm
Sunday, Easter, Ascension, etc., and is likely to be of special
appeal to Roman Catholic, Episcopalian, Lutheran, and even Russian
and Eastern Orthodox congregations. Part Two: Themes, is a
collection of "topical/textual" sermons for the practical, daily
living of the Christian life, compatible with the style of the
non-liturgical churches.
[10] Each sermon is firmly rooted in a biblical text, which
Gomes relates to a topic such as Death, Perfection, Opportunity,
Friendships, Identity, Negotiation, Mystery, Stewardship, etc. With
insight, skill, and compelling clarity, he dissects and unfolds the
meaning and the message of his texts, leading us out to see and
understand with our hearts. Nor does he limit himself to what the
Bible says in dealing with the topics. One of his texts is taken
from the Apocrypha, "The multitude of the wise is the welfare of
the World" (Wisdom 6: 24), and he illustrates his points with
references to, and quotations from other Wisdom literature, T.S.
Eliot, C.S. Lewis, Woody Allen, and even the Wizard of Oz.
[11] Peter Gomes has broken new ground in this beautiful
collection of sermons. He has "gone where the brave dare not go,"
by drawing inspiration and guidance from sources generally shunned
by the religiously orthodox and the intellectually
conservative.
[12] He brings a spiritual and transcendent perspective to his
hermeneutics that is rooted in a quest to find wisdom for daily
living, and affirm durable truths. He is ruthlessly iconoclastic in
his ability to strip away non-essentials and get to the heart of
the matter. "I wish I could make all this disappear," he says of
the trappings of Christmas, in his opening Advent sermon on "The
Art of Impatient Living." (p. 3). "The world is welcome to
Christmas; we Christians hardly have any claim on it at all any
more." (Ibid., p. 4). In Gomes's opinion, Christmas has become "an
organized effort to make us feel good, do good and spend money."
(Advent III: "Humbug and the Christian Hope," p. 17) Similarly, he
attempts to liberate Thanksgiving from what he calls "the
'count-your-many-blessings-name-them-one-by-one routine.'"
(Thanksgiving: "Redeeming the Familiar," p. 232)
[13] Beyond the political, educational and economic gains won
for African Americans by the Civil Rights movement, Dr. Gomes
questions whether full freedom has been achieved. "What, though, is
freedom when we are simply enabled to pursue with everybody equally
free the already discredited and ephemeral playthings of our time?
Is it true freedom for blacks now to be able to indulge at will all
of the anxieties and inanities of whites?" He asks and urges us all
to seek the "freedom not of action but of being, the freedom to
fulfill our destiny as an essential, holy, complete part of God's
creation." (Advent III: "Humbug and Christian Hope," p. 21)
[14] He acknowledges and confronts difficult questions: "One of
the reasons for the Bible and the Christian faith's lack of
credibility to most of us, one of the reasons they are both
unbelievable and uncompelling, is that they ask us to do things
that are manifestly undoable. They ask us to believe things that,
if not believable or true, are at least unlikely." ("The Are of
Impatient Living," p. 4) Yet, he is able to refute the skeptic and
reassure the faith of the doubtful. With wit and humor he gently
prods us to challenge our assumptions and overcome our unconscious
prejudices: "Part of our problem with Mary, I suspect, is that we
know her to be a woman, and we suspect her to be a Catholic."
(Advent II: "Hail Mary, Full of Grace," p. 10)
[15] A master of irony, he makes fun of our vain attempts to
make sense out of religion. "Instruction is what we are about, and
we would be tutored in matters of religion as in a foreign language
until that blissful day when we will know precisely what the Virgin
was not, exactly what happened on Easter day, and what was the
ultimate plan behind the plan of creation. Once we have discovered
these things, then we will be prepared to be completely religious.
We will then be able to explain to our skeptical friends and our
skeptic selves just what it is that we do and do not believe, and
why or why not." (Mystery: "The Mystery of Our Religion," 210) "We
sit, well-armed, in our well-lit churches, ready to swat into
oblivion any hint of transcendent mystery that might have managed
to survive the eighteenth century." (pp. 219-220)
[16] Dr. Gomes is uncompromising in his affirmation of the
essential mysteries of the Christian faith. "At its heart," he
states, "the religion that we profess is neither reasonable nor
relevant, and every effort to make it so has proved disastrous."
(p. 224) "We are, as Paul reminds us in I Corinthians, 'servants of
Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God.' We confront a mystery
that confounds the world and our own ability to understand and
contain it. We might wish to be 'colleagues of Jesus and masters of
the knowledge of God,' but we are not." (p. 224) "We can do nothing
less than affirm, and indeed confess, how great is the mystery of
our religion." (p. 218)
[17] "Preaching," he tells us, "is the making of small points
large so that small people like ourselves can understand them."
(Palm Sunday: "Beyond Tragedy," p. 69) This collection of sermons
was first published in 1998, between the first and second volumes
of Gomes's monumental trilogy on the Bible and living the Christian
life. In the trilogy, he is freed from the limitations of time and
structure imposed by the sermon format, and is able to explore and
develop more fully and deeply the themes touched on in Sermons:
Biblical Wisdom for Daily Living.
[18] The first book in the series, The Good Book: Reading
the Bible with Mind and Heart, was published in 1996, and
remained for many weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list. In
it, he comes to grips with the positions expressed in the Bible on
many ethical issues, such as race, women, and homosexuality. He
demonstrates how biblical passages have often been misinterpreted
and misused in order to justify anti-semitism, racial segregation
and more. While he received considerable praise for this book, he
was severely criticized for his scriptural interpretations on some
of these issues by a number of "evangelical zealots and born-again
literalists." (Sermons, p. ix)
[19] The second book of the series, The Good Life: Truths
that Last in Time of Need, published this year (2002) by
Harper Collins, is startlingly up-to-date, touching on subjects
such as the Enron scandal and the fall of the Twin Towers.
[20] Dr. Gomes is not afraid to "fight the unbeatable foe" in
contending vigorously against "the false values and wisdom of the
world, the flesh and the devil," in relation to failure, success,
discipline and freedom. He teaches us that our daily determination
must be to "bear the unbearable sorrow" we may encounter in this
life with the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, temperance and
fortitude, and the "trinity of Christian graces," faith, hope and
love. He believes that "this generation of young people has been
cut off from its own moral tradition, deprived of a tradition of
virtue, leaving it both stranded and dissatisfied in a cultural
environment that has neither limits, nor end, nor center."
[21] He argues that, in order to live truly by faith, we must
recover the moral knowledge that will guide us to make the right
choices in order to live the "good life" virtuously and well in
this world. He quotes Harry Emerson Fosdick, "It is cynicism and
fear that freezes life; it is faith that thaws it out, releases it
and sets it free." (The Good Life, p. 233)
[22] "Hope," Gomes writes, "hallows the future and moves us from
here to there." And he quotes G. K. Chesterton, "As long as matters
are really hopeful, hope is a mere flattery or platitude; it is
only when everything is hopeless that hope begins to be a strength
at all. Like all the Christian virtues, it is as unreasonable as it
is indispensable." (The Good Life, p. 268)
[23] In his section in The Good Life on "Love: Being and Doing,"
Gomes quotes Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen: "God does not love us
because we are valuable. We are valuable because God loves us."
This is a tremendous affirmation of human worth. The Imago Dei
(image of God) is inherent in all males and females created by the
Ground of Being.
[24] Perfect love casts out fear, and Gomes teaches us that,
especially in the face of the politics of fear that has prevailed
since the fall of the Twin Towers of Babel. We must recover the
moral knowledge and biblical virtues of faith, hope and love that
will enable us to live the truly Good Life. The New York Times
heralded The Good Life as "a clarion call to embrace the deeper
truths that will guide us in an uncertain world."
[25] The third book in Gomes's "trilogy of the good," is planned
for publication in 2003 and will be entitled, The Good News: From
Bible to Gospel.
[26] In his words and his works, the Reverend Professor Peter J.
Gomes guides and inspires his congregation, his students and his
readers to rise above the particular and "reach the unreachable
star," which is the perfect will of God in the world, but not of
it.
© October 2002
Journal of Lutheran Ethics (JLE)
Volume 2, Issue 10