"A Scandalous Gospel"

READING

Peter J. Gomes, a Harvard professor and minister to Harvard’s Memorial Church, is known as one of the finest preachers in the country. An American Baptist with deep roots in the African American religious tradition, Gomes makes his faith come alive with eloquence, humor and contemporary relevance. His book, "The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus: What’s So Good About the Good News?" is the third in his series of books about the Bible.

“I write another Bible book,” Gomes begins, “with the radical suggestion that we use the Bible to go beyond the Bible and embrace that to which it points: the gospel, or the good news. In a time when it is easier to write about doom and gloom than about hope and promise, I suggest that Jesus came into the world not as a Bible teacher directing us back into a text, but as one who proclaimed a realm beyond the Bible. He proclaimed his good news against the conventional wisdom of his day, taking up with unacceptable people and advancing dangerous, even revolutionary, ideas, nearly all of which remain to be discovered and acted upon. I have always been persuaded of the truth of the aphorism attributed to G. K. Chesterton, that "Christianity is not a faith that has been tried and found wanting, but a faith that has been wanted and never tried.”

SERMON

Anyone who comes to services here – even for a short while – must notice how rarely we use the Bible for teaching or inspiration. One reason is that we, like other Unitarian Universalist congregations, do not restrict ourselves to drawing on the wisdom of one tradition alone. Everything is fair game, from secular literature and poetry to science and mythology to sacred texts from East, West, and earth.

Another reason is that I am not and never have been a biblical preacher. I have a long history of avoiding the Bible. I took only the required Bible courses at Divinity School. Because I studied Greek in college, I’d already read the New Testament, which may sound impressive but hasn’t helped me much as a preacher. At Harvard, Peter J. Gomes taught a popular biblical preaching course. Though I regret never having studied with him, I am fairly certain that I wouldn’t have done very well under his discerning tutelage.

During my last year at Divinity School, I decided I needed to improve my Bible study skills, so I enrolled in a course on the Gospel of John. I found myself in a seminar surrounded by evangelicals who knew their Bible forward and back. Within three weeks I was so far behind I just knew I had to drop out or fail. When I submitted a request to drop the course, my professor tracked me down and lectured me on the meaning of commitment. “There are some things in life you cannot drop,” he said to me, “some incompletes that will always be part of your record.” And are.

Guess what my anxiety dreams are like to this day. I’m being chased around Divinity Hall by my professor, who is refusing to let me out of his class. I cannot graduate until I understand the Gospel of John. Then I wake up in a sweat. So picking up this book by Peter Gomes, reading it, enjoying it immensely, and deciding to preach on it is a risky undertaking for me. And possibly for you. Someone has already pointed out to me that I’ve been focusing on Christianity more than usual – that is, if you count Christmas Eve.

But it’s not Christianity that Peter Gomes asks us to consider. It’s Jesus. And that opens up all sorts of possibilities.

Peter Gomes comes at his subject from an individual perspective that is worth noting. Gomes is a native of Boston and an African American, scion of one of the oldest Black families in Massachusetts. His father came from the Cape Verde Islands. He was destined to become a minister, he says. By 1974 he was installed as the preacher at Memorial Church at Harvard University, where he has been ever since.

An American Baptist, Peter Gomes is an evangelical Christian who has preached to the British royal family, and at the presidential inaugurations of Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush. He is also gay; when he came out in 1990, it made the news. He is a man of the world, of diverse and lasting loyalties, and with a provocative message.

In "The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus," Peter Gomes tells a story about preaching on the Beatitudes, as written in the Gospel according to Luke, to a congregation of wealthy Californians. “The lesson starts out well enough,” Gomes writes. "Jesus looked at his disciples and said, ‘Happy are you poor; the kingdom of God is yours. Happy are you who are hungry now; you will be filled. Happy are you who weep now; you will laugh.’

“The usual haze of familiarity covered the faces of those in church who were used to hearing the same verses over and over, to the extent that they sound like the scriptural equivalent of white or ambient noise. As the lesson went on, however, people began to sit up and take notice: ‘But how terrible for you who are rich now; you have had your easy life; How terrible for you who are full now; you will go hungry! How terrible for you who laugh now; you will mourn and weep! How terrible when all men speak well of you, because their ancestors said the very same things to the false prophets.’” Yes, all that’s in there too. Gomes remembers, “An old Sunday school teacher of mine used to refer to these as the Woebetudes, because in the King James translation each bit of bad news begins with the word 'woe.'”

He continues, “The sermon was not hard to preach, in the sense that the meaning of the text was quite clear. Those who appear to win by worldly standards, who are now the haves and not the have-nots, have every reason to be anxious about tomorrow, for the good news, the gospel, is that worldly victories are only temporary and subject to reversal, then those who win today will lose tomorrow. . . . It is the ultimate redistribution of wealth, and one can see why a certain kind of socialist would find it appealing, and a certain kind of capitalist find it appalling.”

That was unsettling enough for the comfortable Californians. As it also happens, Gomes preached this sermon the Sunday after the November 2004 presidential election. “The Republicans thought I was trashing their recent victory in general and George Bush in particular,” he remembers, “and complained to the rector that I had ‘brought politics into the pulpit.’ The Democrats were delighted by the prospect of a biblically mandated reversal of fortune and felt that I had come to comfort them. Both were wrong. I preached simply what the gospel presented and, alas, situational listening did the rest. . . . Good news to some will almost inevitably be bad news to others.”

What the gospel really teaches is what most people do not want to hear, let alone live by. That is the uneasy truth at the center of Gomes’s book and it has implications for all of us. As someone who has always had problems with the Bible – to this day I find myself tampering with even the simplest stories before I can bring myself to tell them to children – it makes me ask myself what I have been missing. Because Gomes’s Bible is a pretty good book.

Going deeper into his analysis of the “scandalous gospel” Jesus actually taught, Gomes lifts up its radical social message. Think about the “woebetudes,” leveling the playing field for winners and losers. Think about challenging the smug idea that if you are rich you must be better than other people – an idea many have used the Bible to justify, from the Calvinists to the prosperity preachers of today. Gomes reminds us that in the verses that follow this passage, “Jesus tells us to love our enemies, practice the Golden Rule, love those beyond our comfort zone, and be merciful to others as we hope God will be merciful to us.” There is some distance between these simple teachings and the actual practice of the Christian church – or any group of flawed human beings anywhere. But don’t those teachings point us in the direction of becoming someone we might want to be?

For Peter Gomes, the truth of the gospel is about where it points, not what the church has done with it. He writes, “We as believers were never meant to be frozen into a historically biblical point of view . . . . Jesus, after all, did not come to teach the Bible: he came, as the Bible says more than once, to preach the good news.” That is good news for everyone, no exceptions – all are worthy of living fully in the possibilities Jesus preached.

This message is similar to the word that our Universalist forbears brought, that a loving God would save all souls, no exceptions. It is the message that brought us to our modern affirmation of the “inherent worth and dignity of every person,” and our commitment to inclusiveness and hospitality. These ideals are difficult to live consistently and fully, but they give us a direction; they point us to a way of being in the world that would transform the world itself if we could be more faithful.

While I was working on the Sunday service this week, I searched for a lesson from Jesus that I could share with the children. I have several children’s bibles in my library, but when I went to them this time, I noticed something I had not noticed before. The stories people tell about Jesus are about miracles: birth, healing, raising from the dead, walking on the water; death and resurrection, appearing to his followers, and so on, They are a series of events that strain credulity, raising children’s questions, doubts, and ultimately rejection of a story that could give them something entirely different: Jesus’ teachings about justice, love and hope that are there for those who go directly to the source. Peter Gomes takes us there. He shows us that the search for truth may lead us where we never thought we’d look. When we approach in that spirit, we may find much more than we ever thought we could. That may be a surprise, but it is certainly no scandal.

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Peter J. Gomes. "The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus: What’s So Good About the Good News?" (New York: HarperCollins, 2007). All quotes are from this book.