“Peter Gomes was an original,” said Harvard President Drew Faust. “For 40 years, he has served Harvard as a teacher in the fullest sense – a scholar, a mentor, one of the great preachers of our generation, and a living symbol of courage and conviction.”
But it was not only at Harvard where Gomes was acclaimed. An African-American preacher of great power and renown, Gomes probably came as close as anyone in the 21st century to being a kind of “circuit rider,” a minister who traveled the country and the world delivering sermons of commanding eloquence and magisterial power.
The New York Times said of Gomes: “In clerical collar and vestments, he was a figure of homiletic power in the pulpit, hammering out the cadences in a rich baritone.” At the same time, Gomes had an actor’s sense of presence and a comedian’s sense of timing. One observer at Harvard said Gomes was a combination of “Shakespearean actor and the sitcom character Frasier” (or “a blend of James Earl Jones and John Houseman,” as the New Yorker magazine put it in a 1996 profile).
In a tribute today by the National Council of Churches, the nation’s largest ecumenical body, the NCC noted that “Gomes’ outsized personality and keen intellect also made him a controversial figure throughout much of his life.” The NCC also noted that Gomes, an ordained American Baptist minister, “straddled a wide gulf of the political spectrum” during his career.
Once a Republican who delivered the benediction at President Ronald Reagan’s first inaugural in 1981, in later life Gomes became an outspoken advocate on behalf of gay rights. He publicly declared his own homosexuality in 1991 during protests and furor at Harvard over incidents of “gay-bashing.” At the time, Gomes told colleagues and students that he was “a Christian who happens as well to be gay.”
Among Gomes’ best-selling books were “The Good Book: Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart,” and “The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus: What’s So Good About the Good News.” These and other books under-girded Gomes’ argument that biblical texts were liberating, not oppressive, to gays, blacks and women. At the same time, he argued for readings of the Bible that take into account the complexity of biblical texts. “The Bible isn’t a single book, it isn’t a single historical or philosophical or theological treatise,” Gomes said. “It has 66 books in it. It is a library.”
Gomes was the son of a musician mother and a father who worked in Massachusetts’ cranberry bogs. Gomes first publicly preached at age 12; he graduated from Bates College, received his divinity degree from Harvard, and eventually became Harvard’s Plummer Professor of Christian Morals.
