[Dialogue] 4/28/11, Spong: Peter J. Gomes, 1942-2011, Preacher Par Excellence

Tue May 3 13:28:42 CDT 2011

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Peter J. Gomes, 1942-2011, Preacher Par Excellence
Both the United States and world Christianity lost one of its more preeminent voices recently with the death of Peter J. Gomes, the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals at the Harvard Divinity School and the Pusey Minister of Memorial Church at Harvard. He was a friend, a prophet and a remarkable human being. The public obituaries have covered the outline of Peter’s life, I would like in this column to relate some personal stories about the man.
Peter Gomes was born in Boston in 1942 and grew up in Plymouth. Destined for the ministry by the influence of his Cape Verdean father and by his mother, who had graduated from the New England Conservatory of Music, young Peter preached his first sermon in an American Baptist Church at the age of 12. He went on to receive his undergraduate degree in 1965 from Bates, a college started by Abolitionists, and his Master of Divinity degree from Harvard in 1968. After a two-year stint teaching Western Civilization at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, he returned to Harvard in 1970 as the assistant minister of Memorial Church. In 1974 he was elected to the Senior Minister’s position, succeeding the Rev. Dr. Charles Price who returned to his alma mater, the Virginia Episcopal Seminary in Alexandria, to teach systemic theology. From that moment on Peter’s stature as a great preacher and public orator grew until he received both national and international acclaim. In a feature story, the “New Yorker” called him “a combination of James Earl Jones and John Houseman.” On that campus only the University President was a better known figure than Peter Gomes, who became not just a fixture on the Harvard landscape, but the public face of Harvard for 39 years.
Peter Gomes was a man of unique and formal personal tastes. He regularly appeared in a bowler hat, an umbrella on his arm, wearing rather Anglican-looking clerical garb and with a boutonniere in his lapel. His sermons Sunday after Sunday were masterpieces of composition. They were well thought out, well delivered and well illustrated. On most Sundays Memorial Church was filled to its capacity. Peter Gomes was respected by faculty and students alike and he became so deeply familiar with the history of that university that he became the primary interpreter of Harvard to the world at large.
For those not familiar with the campus Memorial Church faces the Widener University Library across what Harvard insiders call “The Yard.” Its centrality fed its vocation to inform Harvard’s life. Each morning, Monday through Friday a brief worship service begins the day in the adjacent chapel, led by one of the ministers on the Memorial Church staff, but featuring a five-minute talk, no more and no less, from one of the Harvard faculty, one of its array of distinguished guests or a person well known in literary circles or in public life. In that daily service, at which the chapel is always full, I have listened to senators like Alan Simpson, Republican of Wyoming, theological professors like Sarah Coakley and Gordon Kaufman, Harvard science professors like astro-physicist Owen Gingerich and many others. Most people would be surprised to discover that in this citadel of intellectual competence a brief service of worship opens each day of the week at Harvard University. Peter Gomes was instrumental in developing and nurturing this tradition.
For Harvard students Peter was the first university spokesperson to speak to the incoming class of freshmen each year and, in order to complete the cycle, the last to speak to them before graduation. Harvard’s commencement begins with a stop in Memorial Church before those gowned graduates process across “The Yard” to receive their diplomas and hoods.
Peter was a very conservative man, in his tastes, his politics and even in his religion. Do not, however, read conservative in religion to mean fundamentalist or uneducated. He was anything but that. His style, dress and attitudes, however, were quite traditional. He was a man of books and one trip into his on-campus, yellow-painted home, to which he issued an open invitation to the entire community for tea once each week in the late afternoon, made that abundantly clear. Books were everywhere, on the piano, on the floor and on shelves that seemed to be present in every room. His sermons reflected those books filled as they were with material drawn from history, classical and modern novels, science and even recent popular and learned magazines. He earned respect with the thoroughness of his life of scholarship.
Peter was a visitor to my diocese on one occasion during my career as a bishop when he preached at the ordination service for a longtime friend of his named Dorothy Austin. Dorothy had once been an ethics professor on the faculty of Harvard’s Medical School. When serving as a professor in the Theological School of Drew University she decided to become an Episcopal priest. Shortly after I had ordained her in this service, Peter called her to be his assistant at Memorial Church. She is at this moment carrying out the continuing ministry of that church.
About a year before I retired as the Bishop of Newark I was appointed, I suspect largely through Peter’s influence, to be the William Belden Noble lecturer at Harvard for the year 2000. I retired as bishop on January 31 of that year and was at Harvard on February 1. When my presence on the campus was certain, Peter also asked me to teach his classes at the Divinity School while I was there, which I did with great joy. I saw him almost every day during that time, listened to him almost every Sunday and came to appreciate deeply his constant friendship.
He was a man of broad spirit, supportive of all religious traditions, including the humanist voices on that campus. He was a deeply private man at least until his witness was demanded in the interests of justice, as it was in 1991, when he addressed an angry crowd demonstrating against homosexual persons in front of Memorial Church. “You are protesting what I am,” he said in a courageous act of coming out of the closet personally and professionally. Many felt that he had placed his position in jeopardy in this public witness. The fact is, however, that he actually gained additional respect for both his courage and his honesty with faculty, students and above all with the administration.
Peter was politically a rock-ribbed Republican, who was regularly invited to pray over national Republican events, including the inauguration of President Ronald Reagan and the Republican national nominating convention. A black, gay Republican was so rare that he attracted considerable notice. He saw the Republican Party as the preserver of traditions and he supported its goals, its values and its candidates quite publicly. In 2006, however, in what must have been a painful act for this man, he resigned from that political party. George W. Bush with his culturally driven, anti-intellectual stance, his southern fundamentalism, his campaign for “creation science” and his campaigns against homosexual persons were more than he could abide.
During the time I was on that campus, I watched Peter‘s charm and took in the potency of his message in a number of settings. At commencement that year the graduates filed into Memorial Church for Peter‘s final words to them before their gowned march to receive their degrees. Once they were settled and quiet, Peter emerged bedecked in academic splendor. He began by saying “I feel today something like Zsa Zsa Gabor.” That opening line immediately secured their attention. Then he quoted Zsa Zsa, who in a very different set of circumstances: said: “It is not as if I haven’t done this before, but I do hope to make it interesting.” The audience roared with laughter after which Peter spoke on the need for personal integrity.
After I left Harvard, my path crossed Peter’s in a very different, but significant way. I was invited to Morehouse College to be inducted into the Martin Luther King Honor Society of Preachers. On that occasion, it was my privilege to preach to that traditionally African-American student body. I chose to speak on the subject of prejudice in general and on homosexuality in particular. To my surprise the sermon was greeted with enthusiasm, including a standing ovation led by the president himself. Little did I know at that time the context in which I was speaking. Shortly before that sermon, a male student on campus had been severely beaten by a group of fellow students. The cause of this beating was the suspicion that the victim was a homosexual. The campus, following that tragedy, had been torn in debate. My sermon, I was told later, galvanized the administration’s response, which was to invite Peter Gomes to come to Morehouse College to work with students and faculty alike to change the school’s culture and attitude toward homosexuality. In that process Peter Gomes changed the history of that school. I had opened the door and he entered it with powerful effectiveness.
One final note, Peter always had warm connections with England and the Church of England in general and with Cambridge University in particular. It was John Harvard, a graduate of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, who endowed Harvard University in 1637. So the Archbishop of Canterbury was regularly invited to be a guest speaker in Memorial Church. On one of those occasions, Peter had just published his book on the Bible entitled “The Good Book.” which became a national best seller. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, was speaking at Memorial Church shortly after its publication. When the Archbishop, prior to the sermon, read the lesson from the Bible that Sunday, he announced that he was reading not from “the good book,” but from “the better book.” He brought the house down.
Peter suffered a massive stroke earlier this year which rendered him voiceless. His death followed a few weeks later. One could not imagine Peter Gomes unable to speak since with the elegance and power of his voice he had changed the world.
The Christian world will miss Peter Gomes. So will I. As Shakespeare once had Hamlet say, “He was a man…I shall not look upon his like again.”
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.

Question & Answer
Phil Smedstad of Unity (Church) of the Keys in Florida writes:
Question:
I am a big fan of yours and the work you have done over the years. I met you in Charlotte when you lectured at the Gay and Lesbian Center and then arranged for you to speak at Unity Church of Greater Hartford even though I was unfortunately unable to attend as I was there on a one-year assignment as Transitional Minister. I am also a big fan of Rocco Errico and the understanding he brings to the Bible from being a disciple of George Lamsa, who grew up in Kurdistan and spoke Aramaic as his native language. It seems that Rocco makes a big point of his belief that the New Testament was written in Aramaic first and then translated into Greek. I don’t think that’s true but I do find enormous help from his understanding of the Aramaic language and his understanding of Semitic thinking, customs and culture. As a small example, according to Dr. Errico, the phrase “a burning bush which would not be consumed” is a Semitic idiom which means having a big problem which won’t go away. I’ve always interpreted that to mean that Moses knew it was his mission, his guidance to get the Israelites out of Egypt and humanly he didn’t want to accept this guidance.
Answer:
Dear Phil, 

I have read some of Dr. Errico’s work and have learned from his insight. Basically, however, I do not accept his premise of an Aramaic original for the various books of the New Testament. Neither, might I add, does any reputable New Testament scholar I know. 

This is not to say that Christianity was not born in an Aramaic-speaking world. That was clearly the language of Jesus and his disciples. One should therefore expect to find some connection between the original Aramaic of the formation and the Greek gospels that form part of the New Testament. There is, however, no evidence that suggests that these books had Aramaic originals. No such Aramaic original, not even a fragment of one, has ever been discovered. 

Much can be learned from locating the formation of the gospel tradition in the Synagogues as I have demonstrated in my book, Liberating the Gospels: Reading the Bible with Jewish Eyes but not by idle speculation about Aramaic originals about which there is not a shred of historic evidence. There have been other scholars like C. C. Torrey who sought to gain access to meanings which might have been lost in translation from the oral Aramaic to the written Greek by translating the gospels back into what might have been the oral Aramaic. Though this is a highly speculative process I have found some of his insights to be helpful. 

Give my best to the people of Unity of the Keys. 

~John Shelby Spong

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