Strength for the Journey

Christian Century, Dec 27, 2003 by Peter Marty

By Peter J. Gomes. HarperSanFrancisco, 303 pp., $24.95.

PETER GOMES presides over a great preaching tradition at the Memorial Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts. From that pulpit he has inspired Harvard sophisticates and tender undergraduates for more than 30 years. But Gomes seems to be as aware of the ears of the nation as he is of his local congregants. This eloquent Baptist-bred minister, often hailed as one of America's best preachers, commands national attention through his provocative style, depth of mind and high-profile books.

How does Gomes deliver so consistently? His erudition is unmistakable. Then, too, he reads voraciously. But more important than anything else except perhaps his personal faith is his mastery of prose. His sentences, while not short, flow engagingly. They are fill of common sense and thoughtful observation, always delivered with a fresh twist. Even Gomes's dry humor is not so much predicated on jokes as it is oiled by cleverly worded phrases and meticulously woven language.

Like most of Gomes's recent books, Strength for the Journey relies on single-word chapter headings. Attractive concepts for daily living like goodness, abundance, innocence, commitment, happiness, desire and respectability not only make for good book marketing but also happen to be how Gomes thinks. He describes his sermons as usually having "something to do with a biblical story, a point of doctrine, a point to take seriously, or a moral exhortation to either do something or stop doing something." More often than not, Comes focuses on the last of these.

He turns regularly to the apostle Paul, whom he regards as a reliable guide for the Christian life. Paul's writings give Gomes ready access to conversations about character and virtue, the moral life and human straggle. These ideas form the heart of preaching for an individual fascinated by human possibility lived within the framework of Christian belief.

For Gomes, the essence of faith is our relationship with God--a relationship free of achievement and immediate satisfaction. The idea of seeking or desiring God, as opposed to having or possessing God, inspires one of the best sermons in the hook. As one would expect in a collection of 40 sermons, some are more compelling than others. Mediocrity gets mixed in with excellence. But Gomes gives us some magnificent testimonies of scripture intersecting with life. His well-known sermon "Outer Turmoil, Inner Strength," preached just two weeks after September 11, 2001, is reason enough to acquire the book. He takes on potentially testy subjects like patriotism, prosperity and theodicy with remarkable ease.

If Gomes is a preacher to the nation, he is also at distinctively Harvard phenomenon. If you read him long enough, you begin to get a good sense of the layout of the Harvard campus, the latest administrative searches and recent admission trends. But just when you start seeing crimson, Gomes turns his parochialism inside out and recalls the thoroughly public nature of his own vocation and the larger Christian calling. "We are here to remind Harvard of a dimension beyond its own self-interest and self-perception," he seems to say, as much to himself as to his hearers.

Frustratingly, the book does not date these sermons. The reader is left to guess the original context by trying to decipher the clues within the text. Some sermons, like the ones preached in the weeks preceding the Iraq war, are quite recent. Others, like the one that assumes we still send telegrams, are clearly dated. A couple of times the same illustration appears in separate sermons that may have been preached years apart. Yet none of these disappointments detract from the larger beauty of the collection.

Since seats are hard to come by on a Sunday morning at Memorial Church, this book might be your best bet for gaining a heart of wisdom, a la Peter Gomes.

Reviewed by Peter Marty, pastor of St. Paul Lutheran Church in Davenport, Iowa.