Published March 1, 2011
Rev. Professor Peter Gomes delivered a sermon at Boston's Old South Meeting House ahead of the inauguration of Gov. Deval Patrick on Jan. 4, 2007. (Pool photo by Janet Knott via AP)
He was a black, Republican, openly gay man of God. He assumed a bow tie and that wonderfully pedantic Harvard accent. Rev. Peter Gomes, the Harvard Divinity School professor, died Monday night after suffering a heart attack and brain aneurysm. He was 68.
The Crimson first reported Gomes had planned to deliver the Easter sermon at Memorial Church, which he oversaw for three decades. His health deteriorated in December 2010 after suffering a stroke. WBUR’s CommonHealth proclaimed then: “Now is a good time to pray that stroke will not silence one of the best-known orators of our time.”
Gomes was a man who practiced what he preached, the New York Times reports, denouncing any interpretation of the Bible that forgives intolerance. His career was voluminous:
He was a thundering black Baptist preacher, and for much of his life was a conservative Republican celebrity who wrote books about the Pilgrims, published volumes of sermons and presided at weddings and funerals of the rich and famous. He gave the benediction at President Ronald Reagan’s second inaugural and delivered the National Cathedral sermon at the inaugural of President George H. W. Bush.
Gomes announced he was gay in 1991, during a speech protesting homophobic articles in a campus magazine. He said, to everyone’s surprise, he was “a Christian who happens as well to be gay.” He ignored calls to resign.
“What distressed me was that among people and in a culture which professes tremendous excitement and loyalty to Jesus, there seems to be so very little attention paid to what Jesus actually had to say,” Gomes said in a talk aired on NPR in 2007. He was discussing his new book, “The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus.”
“Everybody has a view on the humanity, of the divinity of Jesus. Everybody wants to know about the historical Jesus, but it’s all about Jesus, and it would be as if he came to be the celebrity — or worse, the great Bible teacher.”
In 2009, WBUR’s Here & Now interviewed Gomes about his Plymouth roots and fascination with the pilgrims. Gomes recited Arthur Guiterman’s 1935 poem “The D.A.R. lings” in a WBUR video.
You can stream Gomes’ many sermons at the Memorial Church website.
Radio Boston interviewed colleague Harvard colleague Diana Eck about Gomes.