Washington National Cathedral

Lloyd: Good morning everyone, and welcome to the Sunday Forum as we continue this conversation at the intersection between faith and public life. Today it is a great pleasure to welcome an old friend who happens to be one of America’s finest preachers and a prolific author of a number of best-selling books about Christianity, The Good Book, The Good Life, and most recently, The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus. We are going to find out more about the scandal in a bit.

Peter Gomes has been a fixture at Harvard University for almost 38 years, where he has engaged generations of students as the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister at Memorial Church. He is also the holder of some 36 honorary degrees, although we have not checked this week if there are any more added yet. And, if Harvard were not enough, Peter Gomes is an honorary fellow of Emmanuel College at Cambridge University in England where a lectureship has been established in his name. It is a great pleasure, Peter, to welcome you here.

Almost four decades in Harvard, that bastion of secular thought. You have been there at the heart of Harvard, articulating a Christian vision at a time when the Christian vision has had some difficult years. Looking back over those 38 years, what would you say about what would have been the particular challenges, have they changed from the early years when you became a minister as things moved along, or have there been a fairly consistent series of things you have had to grapple with there?

Gomes: Well, my view is… Fortunately for me, however, is a lot less rigorously secular than the world thinks, so I got a lot more credit than I deserve. When I went there, there was, it wasn’t a hostility to religion that was interesting, it was—

Lloyd: I am going to fix this [microphone], it has slipped around. There you are.

Gomes: Oh. Aha. It wasn’t hostility toward religion. I mean, one could deal with that, but it was sort of an indifference: that benign tolerance that the secular people say, “Well, if you need that sort of thing, good for you.”

(Laughter)

Lloyd: Slightly condescending.

Gomes: Very condescending, very condescending. I was much more looking forward to the sort of struggle in mud, you know, St. Paul at Mars Hill. It was a kind of, “Oh, you are over there at the church, how nice.”

(Laughter)

Gomes: So I found, though, beneath that, there was what I would call a sort of manifest need for the God experience. People didn’t quite know how to talk about it, but as Harvard’s admission policies became increasingly diverse, it meant that more and more people of varying religious convictions came.

Since we stopped admitting just Eastern prep school kids who had been forced to go to Episcopal chapels every day of their lives, we had many more people who were interested in religion, and I just happened to be there at the right time. There was an interesting—and remains an interesting—moment that the benign indifference has passed, and now there is great curiosity and I am going to retire before the next phase, whatever the next phase is.

(Laughter)

Lloyd: Would you say that—among the students—that religion is a lively topic of conversation?

Gomes: I would say that it is a very lively topic of conversation. I often have said that my experience at Harvard has been being present at the discovery of religion in the lives of the first truly secular generation. These are kids who did not go to college to rebel against the religion they learned at their mother’s knee. They did not learn any religion at their mother’s knee, by and large. They came to discover it through the fine arts or music or literature or some existential experience while they were in college, which was quite different from my generation of kids.

We rebelled and we went to college to lose our religion and our virginity more or less in that order. I cannot account for the virginity of these undergraduates, but religion is not something that they came with. It is something that in many cases they discover while they are there, so probably more people engage in some kind of regular religious activity now that at any point in the last 100 years—which surprises people.

Lloyd: Over the last few years you have taken to writing a series of very well received books beginning with The Good Book and culminating recently with The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus. What was your sense, was it time to take 30 years’ worth of sermons and pack them into a few books, or did you have a cause in mind, something that needed to be said as in that first volume, The Good Book?

Gomes: Well, unlike many, I did not have to take my old Ph.D. dissertation and turn it into something. I did not have a Ph.D. and I did not have a Ph.D. dissertation, so for the first 10 years of ministry I wrote sermons. I did not write books. I wrote lots of articles and so on, but The Good Book came about having dealt with lots of very educated people over a long period of time, which brought me to the conclusion that these very smart people—most of whom were smarter than I—knew next to nothing about the Bible, and that they were leaving the Bible to a group of people whose views of it I thought were dangerous and uninformed. And so I decided that I had better write a primer for intelligent people needing to know something about the Bible, so that is where The Good Book began.

There were a lot of words being thrown about, and a lot of people that I ministered to were first-rate historians, first-rate physicists, first-rate this, that, and the other, and a second-rate Sunday school education as far as the Bible was concerned. I thought that maybe I could do something about that.

Lloyd: Now you have written about the Scandalous Gospel of Jesus… Scandal, Peter. What is going on here?

Gomes: Well, first I have to… This is a house of God, therefore confession is in order. This was not my choice of title. I had written The Good Book. Then I had written The Good Life and this was supposed to be The Good News. The people at Harper’s said, “Boring, boring.” I wanted a book that went from what I call the Bible to the Gospel and that is the central thesis of this book. They said well The Scandalous Gospel, well that sounds interesting and I said that the trouble with that is scandal in America means sex and if I write a book called The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus, people are going to think that I have discovered some new relationship between Jesus and somebody and they said, “Yes! Right! That is why they will buy the book.”

(Laughter)

Gomes: And so I used to think that authors wrote books, and publishers did as they were told, and it doesn’t work that way at all. Authors write books and then they do what the publisher tells them. So they told me, “You write the book, we’ll sell it and we’ll title it.” That is how it became The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus.

The scandal which was suitably important for me was the fact that we all in theory know what Jesus was about, we just don’t dare accept it or take it seriously. We all know that Jesus was a disturbing revolutionary preacher who would probably disapprove of so much that we do in his name, but we don’t dare say that and so the scandal is that we know the truth but we can’t handle it and that is what this is about.

Lloyd: What do you think was the scandal about Jesus? What made him someone who would cause offense if they looked very closely at him?

Gomes: I think that the exciting and scandalous part of Jesus is that he has always said to people in situations, “Things do not need be and they appear to be. You don’t have to be what you think you are. The world is not what it appears to be. There are things that transcend these circumstances. You think that you are the Lord’s elect and you may not be the Lord’s elect. You may think that you are the scum of the earth and you may not be the scum of the earth. I have come to give you sort of a new life, a new lease on life, a new take on this, and if you have any courage or imagination, you will be willing to give it try.” I think that is what is most scary and profound about Jesus, and the scandal in a sense is that he has told us everything we need to know, but we have not acted upon it, and that is the scandal.

Lloyd: You talk about the domestication of Jesus, how from every philosophical, ideologic position imaginable, people find their Jesus and find an endorsement of Jesus for their way of doing things. How do we recover the raw, creative, provocative edge of what Jesus had to say?

Gomes: It is very hard to do. I grew up in a tradition which constantly talked about Jesus as “my personal Lord and Savior.” My own little rabbit’s foot. And there was a sense that—

Lloyd: Your rabbit’s foot?

Gomes: Yes. Jesus is mine. Jesus belongs to me. Remember that plastic Jesus country and western song three or four decades ago—and I must say that I wanted to reconsider both the radical social Jesus and the majestic Jesus enthroned. Those are two images that were sort of out of [sync] with this little private Jesus on the dashboard, or in my pocket, and was there to do my bidding.

In this morning’s sermon, Leslie ventured too close to divine service, the glory of the ascended Christ seated at the right hand of the Father. That is a serious image and you better take that quite seriously. Christ in majesty is a little more of what makes sense to me, as opposed to this private little guru who helps me through my math examination or my tax audit or whatever it is. We need something other than that, and that is what I was trying to say. The domesticated Jesus who verifies every one of our agendas is not really quite what is in the New Testament.

Lloyd: It has to be said, though, that Jesus did not manage to build much of a church in his time, and some of the pragmatic-oriented clergy need to build churches, so we have a marketing job to do to take this difficult fellow you are describing and make him useful to build churches.

Gomes: I think that Jesus might be profoundly disappointed with what we did do, and I am not altogether sure that Jesus would recognize what we call the church of Jesus Christ as his own. I think that he would recognize it very much in the context of the religious institutions that he found sorely wanting and lacking, and I think that he would hold us to a very strict accounting. I think that judgement would be leveled against us just as it was against synagogue and temple in his own time. So I am not altogether sure that the best argument we could have made for Jesus when we stand before him on the Day of Judgement, “Well we kept the church going.” He might say, “Hmm, yes you did, and I am going to hold you accountable.”

Lloyd: “Shame on you,” that’s right. “Is that the best you could do with the job?”

Gomes: “Is that all you could do?”

(Laughter)

Lloyd: Right. You use the G. K. Chesterson’s great line, “Christianity is not something that has been tried and found wanting but found difficult and now tried,” or something like that.

Gomes: There is a lot to that. It is not that we are in ignorance. We know what the Gospel requires. It is that we have chosen in many ways not to go that way, and that is part of the difficulty, it seems to me. I once was with a group of clergy in North Carolina and one of the men stood up—a Methodist bishop—and said, “Why can’t the church be at the front of something good for a change instead of always being dragged kicking and screaming at the end of some social reform or some moral cause? Why is the church always the last place to figure out where we ought to be going and what we ought to be doing?” And that is a serious indictment. It is not entirely true, but it is true enough to make a servant of the church anxious.

Lloyd: Just to touch on a couple of topics that you focus on in your book. One is trying to get people to see that their God has often been too small, and you raise the question about—and people talk quite a bit about—who is saved and who isn’t; who is in and who is out; about the true claims of Christianity and how much they count for everyone across the world. You pose the question, is God a Christian? That is to say, do we Christians have a special hold on God, or is God bigger than our own particular piece of the world?

Gomes: I always answer that question with a remark of many, many years ago. J. D. Phillips, whose famous little book was called Your God is Too Small, and I shock congregations when I say, you know, it is amazing to realize that God is not Christian, God is not even Episcopalian—

(Laughter)

Lloyd: Now wait a minute! You’ve gone too far!

(Laughter)

Gomes: Pretty close to the bone here, I know. But if God is what we claim God to be, the creator of everything, not just the local private deity, then somehow God has taken on board areas of which we know next to nothing. God has a plan, a design for what the Bible calls God’s beloved people, the Jews. God must have some view in mind for Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and other people; and the notion that God is just our little western Christian and even Protestant invention is conceit of the highest order. It reduces God to a tribal deity.

Everything that I read in the Bible tells me how God is seeking to be understood as more than a mere tribal deity. And to proclaim that is to magnify the greatness of the Lord, to magnify the universal identity of the Creator, and that is important. That is something worth worshiping, it seems to me. If God is merely a projection of my little local set of interests, that is no more than having created a celebrity, and God is not a celebrity.

Lloyd: So for Christians, actually to worship the God whom we encounter in Jesus is to worship a God whose endless love is for the entire creation. In a way, Jesus is our window into this expansive love, and Jesus acts that out everywhere he goes, doesn’t he?

Gomes: Jesus is good for us because Jesus manifests God to us. He may not manifest God to others, and I do not presume to speak about that. One of the problems with Christianity is that we have no appropriate sense of modesty. We tend to think, well, it is ours and that is the way it is. If it is true for us, it is true this way for everybody, and that is not true. It seems to me that God speaks many more languages than we do, and it is important to recognize that. It is important to worship a God in whose mystery, majesty, and power are far more than we can understand and contain, and that makes God worthy of a house like this, it seems to me.

Lloyd: One of the important things in your book is Jesus the social reformer, and you write about this as a kind of fresh emphasis and something that has been overlooked for too long. It has certainly been paid attention to by some parts of the church, but the broader Evangelical mainline Christian traditions have not fully embraced this, and you say that is something that we need to pay attention to.

Gomes: I grew up with what used to be called the social gospel. It was the latter days of the social gospel, but it was a notion popular at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, that the Christian mission was something to be worked out in social terms in the world. It was not an other-worldly enterprise. We didn’t just endure trials and sufferings in this world in order to best be received in the next, but it called for moral and social reform. It was politically engaged, and it suggests that we had to care for the least and marginalized, way across the crowded ways of life, and all that sort of thing, and then that sort of thing faded.

I think that partly it faded because of the traumas that Christian idealism experienced in World War I and certainly World War II, and I think that it faded in the sense that social reform was eventually thought to be something that governments did or social enterprises did, and religion was increasingly a private thing. But I think that there is a need to recover the energy of a social gospel which says Christ has to be manifested in the tenement, in industry, in the field, in international relations, in the peaceful, and this is all part of the Gospel and we should not relegate that to either private enterprise or purely government actions.

Lloyd: Following that into the contemporary events unfolding as we speak in these days, one particular area that calls for social focus and social reform is the area of race relations in America. And one significant black pastor has been injected into the heart of that discussion in such a way that it is affecting significantly a certain presidential campaign going on now. I would love to get your reflection on Pastor Jeremiah Wright, what his intentions are, as best you can read them from what is happening, and what you make of the response that has been going on over the last couple of weeks.

Gomes: Well that will take up the next hour.—

(Laughter)

Gomes: I happen to be one of those who thinks he understands what Jeremiah Wright is about, and I think that what he is doing, publicly now, which many other people are catching on to, is what he has been doing what most black preachers have been doing all of their careers in their churches but have not been overheard. That is to say, he has been trying to reconcile the black experience with the American experience and the Christian experience, the three universes that to some coincide quite easily, and to others really don’t quite work together.

And what Jeremiah Wright has been trying to do, as best as I can tell by his preaching—his preaching to African Americans—is to find their peculiar place in this matrix. How can you be black, American, and a Christian at the same time? The edges rub on that, and it does not work in the same way that it would with white people or other ethnicities, and when you listen to that conversation you are not quite sure what you are hearing, and I think that is what is going on here. I asked a friend, what do you expect in a black preacher whose first name Jeremiah? Come on now, that is pretty powerful stuff.

(Laughter)

Lloyd: So we are hearing Jeremiah.

Gomes: You are hearing Jeremiah, that is right. You would say the same thing of a Jewish Jeremiah. If you went into any black barber shop or hair dressing parlor, you would hear a lot worse than what you are hearing from Jeremiah Wright every day of the week. It surprises some white people that some black people don’t like them, and this surprises them. Well how could this be? Where have you been for the last 150 years? And there is a lot of unfinished business out there and if you are preaching to a large black dispossessed congregation and you don’t speak to the suppressed anger and frustration and disappointment in the great American promise, you would be failing in your duty, it seems to me.

It is only when other people listen in and hear that they say, “How could he be saying these things?” that the conflict begins. Now Jeremiah Wright and Barack Obama have two completely different agendas. Barack Obama wants to be president of the United States, and he needs a lot of people to help him become president, and I hope he does become president—and how is that for violating this space?—I hope he does.

Jeremiah Wright is not running for public office. He is a pastor, prophet, a preacher to a particular kind of congregation. He says what he wants to and does what he has to do to be effective in that office. They are not the same, which is why prophets of Israel and the kings of Israel were never the same person and they were usually in some form of conflict. Now how those two sort out their relationship, I am not being paid enough to figure that one out—

(Laughter)

Gomes: But they will, they will I am sure. They have different functions.

Lloyd: When Barack Obama responded in his Philadelphia speech to the first set of YouTube broadcasts of Jeremiah Wright, he talked about the need for a public conversation about race in America. Can you imagine such a conversation happening, and what it would look like? Clearly a festering wound has been revealed.

Gomes: Such a conversation needs to happen, but I worry if it can possibly happen. It is too raw and acute for white America to participate in, and there is a lot of unfinished business from the Civil War onward. I think that an honest conversation about race would confront some of the conceits with which we all have managed to get along for the last 100 years.

We need in many ways our illusions and one of those illusions is that we are marching to Martin Luther King’s drum, and the dream is becoming realized or in the case of some persons has already been realized; and that is far from true in the minds of many, many people. I wrote a piece—and Emily Post was right when she said never discuss religion or politics, and she may have included race, at a dinner party, as that frail framework cannot sustain the passions that will be unleashed. And I think that for Jeremiah Wright to conduct that conversation is terrifying for a whole lot of people.

I think that, in many ways, people hoped that it was all put to rest after Dr. King was killed and after Malcolm X was killed: all the worst parts of that racial conversation were boxed up and put away. No one realized that conversation had been interrupted and it had not been ended. We have not moved in any significant direction even though people who look like me appear to be every where but that is not the conversation really.

I think that the country is not yet ready to face that because it would mean maybe there has been something wrong with what we have been doing, and no one is really ready to face that. What was the movie where that actor said, “You can’t face the truth”? There are certain things where we want the truth, but I am not sure we have the resources with which to deal with it.

I remember that somebody asked—I forget what president—was asked to issue an apology for slavery, and they could not do it. The politics of that were just too raw 150 years after the Civil War. It does not surprise me that Jeremiah Wright holds the views that he does, and that hearing those views causes people, many white people, to react as they do. It causes many people to worry that his frank expression of these views will damage Barack’s chances, which would move us beyond the old racial divide, and then there are others who think that maybe Barack really holds those views himself. Once he comes into power the great revenge will be exercised, and some are a little nervous about this.

Lloyd: One of the things that the polls seem to indicate is that, by and large, Americans simply do not want to have the conversation. They have in many ways seen this candidate as a candidate who transcended race, and now all of a sudden race is on the table. We are gathered in a church, and a church is supposed to be a place of reconciliation and bringing people together. Here in the fall we are hosting the Episcopal Churches Service of Repentance for Slavery that is something that was called for in this last General Convention, so that is one symbolic step. And the real question is, what is the kind of work both within our own denomination but across the board that churches can do to contribute to the kind of honest conversation that needs to happen? Do you have any ideas on that?

Gomes: I wish I knew more than I do. My sense is that there is a kind of moral fatigue. I think that churches are sort of tired of facing tough issues and we have been dealing with race, oh my God, week in and week out, year in and year out, in one fashion or another, for a very long time. I do not think that anybody has the appetite to take it up again. It would be nice if someone solved it once and for all, but I have no sense that there is a real hunger to say, okay, now is the time, let us deal with this. My sense is that people say, look, the cities are not burning, there are no riots in the streets, nobody has been badly wounded on this issue, so let us just sort of stumble along as best we do. We will have a white preacher here and a black preacher there—

Lloyd: So you are not hopeful this is going to happen in any systematic way.

Gomes: I am not very hopeful.

Lloyd: We want to go to the audience for some questions. Let me shift to another topic entirely as we wait for microphones to make their way around. On a much different note, you, through[out] your book, use hymns again and again to make your points, and it is as if, as you are writing this, the hymns begin pouring out onto the page. Singing hymns—you are a musician yourself, I know—must be an important part of your own spirituality, so would you say something about the role of hymns?

Gomes: I was brought up… my mother was a church musician, and I first came to know the Bible as it gets formed in hymn paraphrases, and my guess is that if I am conscious in my last hours, it will be fragments of hymns that come pouring forth rather than the prayer book or the Bible. I think in hymns. The verses just come naturally. I know the second verses of long hymns, but as far as I am concerned the most efficient theologic expressions tend to be in hymn form, which is why I think hymns are terribly important in church. I tell my seminarians and others, if you have taken care in the choice of hymns on Sunday morning, you will cover a multitude of sins, including your sermon—

(Laughter)

Gomes: It is these people who would manage to compress great thoughts into small poetic flowers.

Lloyd: I always want to urge people to really to pay attention to the words because they will carry, on many Sundays, far more power than the other words that get said.

Gomes: I have no responsibility for the hymns in this morning’s service, but I am quoting from what I think is one of our greatest hymns, which is “Come Labor On,” as I make my point about what you do after the ascension. I think of that and images come to mind. I hum them. We had them in Sunday school. I played the piano for the evening service, so hymns just are my sort of popular form of theology.

Lloyd: They provide a kind of spiritual reservoir as we begin to internalize some, so they just bubble up along the way.

Gomes: There are hymns that I did not know that I knew, and under a certain set of circumstances—oh, that is a nice line—and then I realize it is not mine, and it must be Isaac Watts or somebody else.

(Laughter)

Lloyd: I want to begin with a question from the website and then we will go to our first questioner there. This one is from Alexandria, Virginia: As a university minister and professor of religion, where do you see the future of the church headed, particularly given the number of students who are now attending divinity school with little or no interest in traditional ministry?

Gomes: Well I do not have my data screen either at Harvard or at Duke where I am teaching this term. The notion that divinity students are less and less interested in traditional ministry… in fact, what surprises me is that more and more of them seem to be interested in traditional ministries, but the problem is that they cannot find traditional ministries. It is not that they do not have the interest, but everybody I am teaching at Duke is going into parish ministry, and they are looking for churches that will receive them and will allow them to be shepherds and pastors, such as you and I will remember from our youth.

So I do not have a sense that there is a great poverty of pastoral models for the seminarians. What is difficult, however, is the fact that the people to whom they minister—congregations—seem to know less and less and less about the Gospel. Our parents, grandparents, many of whom lack the educational experiences that we have, knew a good deal more about this, and provided a much stronger context for ministry than many of the technologically acute people that our kids are dealing with.

Yet, at the very same time, there is a tremendous spiritual hunger, spiritual appetite, and so how you put that together with the world seems to me the problem. I am not discouraged by the state of divinity school because they are full. There are problems, but they are full, and they are full of very bright and able people, many of whom will not be able to be accommodated out there in the world. And that is the more interesting problem as far as I am concerned.

Question #1: Hi. You made me think about another type of scandal of the Christian faith. On one hand the people I know who are most Christian—I am thinking in particular of one family which includes a priest and a nun and the whole family is devout to the church—Christians can be very narcissistic and selfish, but on the other hand, in terms of social work and work in the community, Unitarian Universalists and the Society of Friends, Quakers, while they come out of Christianity, do not really accept generally the divinity of Christ or the Trinity, etc., seem to be much more doing the work of Christ in the community in proportion to their numbers. Could you explain that contradiction that mainstream faiths do not seem to be as active in the community as these two smaller faiths that are not Trinitarian or have a different approach?

Gomes: I get the question. I think that you are pretty accurate, and it goes back a very long, long way. You know, I once had a wonderful conversation with Eubie Blake, and he was in his nineties, and he said, you know, if I knew I was going to last this long, I would have taken better care of myself. And there is something to be said for that. The early church did not expect to be around for very long. Reform was not social reform by in large was not their chief agenda. They expected the Lord to come, and they would be carried away into the skies, and there is a lot of expectation of something else to come through the doctrines that we have, which I still share, which accounts to some degree of a sense that this world is not my home and this place is not my place. It would be nice if it were better but that is not where I am going to spend eternity.

Whereas there have been other very strong traditions, particularly grown out of our own American culture, which says, Look, this is all that I can testify to and I am going to do the best that I can right here and right now. And the Quakers and Unitarians are among them. I am not sure that either ever will convince the other that one is right and the other is wrong, but I think that we are fortunate enough to have both of these very strong strains, and I think that they are complementary, quite frankly. I want to do the best that I can in this world, and I am very much involved in matters of social reform, and I will not defer to the Unitarians or the Quakers on this, but my motivation is because I want this world to anticipate the world to come. It is my other-worldliness that forces me to take this world seriously.

Now, I do not fault people who take this world seriously who do not have another world vision, but I think that, for better or for worse, we work together, and there can be a beneficial side to these two points of view functioning in the same place. An interesting question, one of my late colleagues at Harvard was Henry Joel Cadbury, who was a very distinguished Quaker and one of the founders of the American Friends Service League, but also one of the great translators of the New Testament. And during World War II he spent most of his time rolling bandages with the American Friends Service Committee, and somebody came up to him and they said, “Dr. Cadbury, don’t you think it is a sad thing you have given up translating the New Testament for this?” Dr. Cadbury’s reply was, “I am translating the New Testament.”

There is a sense that I understood what he meant by that, and I think that the world is richer for both of those traditions. Even Evangelicals have most profound other-worldly view—Jesus is coming to Amarillo, Texas, tomorrow—even they care about who wins the next presidential election now. They are very much involved in the affairs of this world, so things are less clear than they might be.

Lloyd: Next question.

Question #2: Peter, it is good to see you. We shared a floor at West Parker at Bates College together.

Gomes: So we did, and you are still here.

Question #2: And so are you.

(Laughter)

Question #2: So are we. This is a question about politics, and I hope that your mother has stopped spinning. It seems as though you have chosen a second time to vote Democratic as opposed to first part of your life when you were Republican, and both of your choices have been for black candidates, so what, I wonder, is… how much has race driven you to the Democratic Party?

Gomes: I think that race has brought me full-bodied into the Democratic Party as race kept me in the Republican Party when the Republican Party was the party of Mr. Lincoln. I didn’t leave the Republican Party; to quote the late Ronald Reagan, “It left me.”

My mother always told me that Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves. Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, q.e.d., and, well, so it was. It isn’t that way and hasn’t been that way for a long time, and when I discovered that somebody I admired greatly, a black man, was running for governor of Massachusetts on the Democratic ticket, I thought I had better help him and I will do all that I can.

So I went to the Town House in Plymouth and I changed my registration. I asked the town clerk, “How do I go about switching from the Republican to the Democratic registration?” The town clerk said, “Does your mother know you are here?” and I said to him, “Have you heard that rumbling as I came up the steps? That was my mother turning over in her grave.”

I would like to say that it is a purely rational, political, strategic assessment, but it’s not. I am a race man and I can’t help it. Race is very important. It is the unacknowledged reality in which we all operate, and in order to encourage my race to participate fully in the life of the country, I want to do all that I can to help a worthy—I wouldn’t support [just] any black candidate, and I didn’t, and I have had lots of opportunities, but I didn’t. We could name some of them, but I won’t bother doing that now, but I have been very choosy, and I think that I have chosen wisely so far. I hope that is a reasonable answer.

(Applause)

Question #3: Good morning, my question is more about the broader issue of diversity and inclusion and the scandal in the Gospel of Jesus really surrounding himself or sending the message out to women in particular. There are many stories we all know about the women that he especially singled out as well as really revealing the risen Christ to the women rather than to the disciples. So my question is, where did the early church go wrong in carrying through that message of inclusion, especially for the thing on women, and where can the current church really address that problem, because we still have a long way to go with diversity and inclusion as far as gender is concerned?

Gomes: Well, I think if I were a woman, I would be even more enthusiastic for women candidates or this, that, and the other. I think that it is important to remember that, indeed, the first apostles of the Risen Lord were women, and you are quite right and remember where it says in the Gospel, “They reported what they had seen to the disciples,” and it said that the disciples said that it seemed to them an idle tale. So early on in the Gospel the testimony and the authority of women was not taken all that seriously.

Paul gets a bum rap because you read a lot of the stuff of Paul, and Paul has women friends and women in authority and women teachers, even though he offers certain restrictions on certain women in certain places, and those are particular injunctions and not universal injunctions, but as things move along in the West, it becomes increasingly clear that what I would regard as the path-clearing tendencies that Jesus represented, not just with women but in almost everything else, tend to be compromised. And women are by no means the weaker vessel, as they have been historically described, but they didn’t have the clout to change the way the world is being organized and managed. It has only been in our time that there has been a sufficient body of women speak, to remind the rest of us that Jesus had a much more enlightened view of the world of women than most of us have had, and that has only been within our lifetime.

Lloyd: It took so long though, Peter, 2000 years, for that, and in many ways the secular society pushed the church into that.

Gomes: Then there is another case where, if it were left to the church, the church wouldn’t do anything. It would say that this in the Bible; this is the way it is; and this is what we have received from our fathers, and you know we are not going to mess with this, and of course there are still theological pronouncements in major American denominations to this day, which have institutionalized the submissive and dutiful and obedient role of women. And many women put up with it and many women don’t, but, you know, there it is. It is another reason why a misguided optimism about the human ability to do the right thing is not in place. I think that we end up doing the right things as human beings only after we have exhausted every other possible option, and that is the case here.

(Laughter and applause)

Question #4: Going back to your point on the social gospel, it seems that one of the most effective ways of achieving a social agenda is through political activity and through politics. Should Christianity have an agenda, and how do we reconcile that with Jesus’ call to be in this world but not of it?

Gomes: Well, I think Jesus’ call to be in this world but not of it was premised on a slightly delayed time table. Jesus did not expect this world to be around as long as it has proven to be, and I think that we therefore have to adjust to that rule somewhat. I am much more Augustinian in this field. I mean that this world is not my home. It happens to be where I am, and while I am here, I really ought to represent as best as I can the values of the other Kingdom to which I belong. Although I do believe that Christians should be involved in politics, and I do believe that Christians should try to effect the principle of the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

That means here and now with the resources that we have, and we shouldn’t simply wait on the fence post for Jesus to come for the second coming and let the world go to hell in a hand basket. That would be irresponsible. I think that we have an enormous tradition of kingdom building in our Christian tradition, and that is something we ought to be free to exercise. Should Jesus come tomorrow, we could stop, but until he comes, we have a lot of work to do.

Question #5: I would like to move away from politics for a second and back to earlier in the conversation and I want to word this carefully. You said that Christ was our door to God and opening the avenue to heaven, and I believe that with all my heart. And you also emphasized the importance of the Bible, and my generation seems to go away from the Bible as an authority over our life, and today it seems that many of our Christian leaders will say that there are many ways to heaven and that there are alternative routes to heaven. I do not believe this, and it is not what the Bible says, and I wonder about your opinions on this and also the effects on the church in the modern day as a result of not believing in an absolute truth?

Gomes: Well, I spent most of my career trying to teach the Bible to people who needed to know about it and to try and make sense of it, and one of the first things that I have had to come to terms with is that we speak of the Bible as the Word of God, the Bible is essentially our word about God directed toward God. They represent our effort to try and contain within a text the enormity of the mystery and the magic and magnificence of who God is. To think that God can be described in words and in text is a human conceit but it is ours; therefore that book is precious to us because it represents how inspired human beings have tried to speak about God and speak to us, therefore, we ought to know it but alas we don’t. We don’t know it as well as our ancestors did and so we need to rediscover it. That is why I love Marcus Paul’s title Discovering the Bible Again for the First Time—

Lloyd: Meeting Jesus [Again] for the First Time.

Gomes: —that sort of thing. We have a familiarity with this. There is some vague sense of, hey, this is our book, and any motel in America has it in the top drawer. Yet, on the other hand, what is it and was it a library of books? It is not just a memoir of Jesus. It is not a book of philosophy. It is not a book of theology for that matter. It is a range of everything from Jewish history and poetry and mythic tales to sermons to theologic letters to treatises to visions, and you have to be able to understand what that is, and it is our role as teachers, preachers, and clergy to try and communicate that wonderful complexity to the laity. And I think that we probably have not done as well as we could, because there are still an awful lot of silly notions about it out there, and we should do something about that.

Lloyd: Final question, I would like to ask, and that is, one of the themes of the latter part of your book is that Christianity has too often been backward looking, and remembering a more perfect time, or a time when the church had its act together, or a time when things were clear, and trying to hold onto that and bring it into the present. But you say that the church should always be forward looking, that Christianity and Jesus himself beckon us forward. Are you hopeful about the prospect of Christian faith and followers of Christ as you gaze forward?

Gomes: I am not by nature an optimist as far as the church is concerned. I have been in too long. I know it too well. We tend to have a dangerous kind of nostalgia, and I mean that this building is a magnificent exercise in nostalgia. We build Gothic churches because they remind us that, once upon a time, we ran things, and our architecture shows that we were in charge, and our way of thinking about the world, if we could only go back when we ran things. You get a new minister or a new congregation, the first thing they tell him is, well, when old Dr. So and so was here, they did this, they did that, and they did that, and they did that, and they did that, and they did that, and everything since then has been on the slippery slope southward. So we tend to look back at our glory days, and we really don’t look ahead very much.

We are not altogether sure what the future holds, and there is a sort of fear about the future that [we] would be even less influential than we are today. There is a fear that our institutional life is turning to mush, and there are other claims upon our people, and we seem to be nervous about visions, and one of the things that we have to remember is where it says in the Old Testament, “Where there is no vision the people perish.”

If our greatest hope is in the past rather than the future, then I really do worry for us. We tend to do a lot of that backward glancing rather than that forward looking. Now it is true that some of those forward visions are not altogether appealing. David Koresh and those other visionaries—what I think we call crazy people—who build these communities in the desert on the texts of the Book of Revelations are not all that encouraging. Most of us don’t want to give up what we are familiar with, which is one of the reasons why churches tend to be as conservative as they are.

People are always asking why are churches so conservative. Well, we hold onto that which we know and not necessarily that which is good, but that which we know, because there is some reassurance there. And yet, what made Jesus so disturbing to people was, he says, “What you know, what you’re holding onto, is not necessarily the Good News.” The Good News may be something that you have not yet considered. Eye has not seen nor ear heard the things prepared for them that love God, the whole thrust of this is something new, something different.

You try to get a young pastor in a church fired, the best way to do it is to have him mess with the order of service. I say you can preach the most outrageous heresy, but if you rearrange the order of service, you are going to knock into some serious difficulties. People like what they know, and what they know is what they have had, and that is where the vision, I think, fails. You get these visioning meetings. They tend to be rather depressing—let’s think about the church in the 22nd century and what not—it is sort of tedious, boring, and uninvested. Let’s go back to what we know, what we can hold onto. Seems to me that we have been always in tension between the now and the not yet, but we spend most of our time between what was and what is and I think that is the wrong valley of tension. If you have to have tension, let it be between what is now and what we might anticipate, what we might look forward to, what we might expect.

Lloyd: We have to stop this. I want to thank you all for