NEWS FEATURE: Preaching as a `precise tornado’

c. 1998 Religion News Service UNDATED _ The Rev. Peter J. Gomes, for the last 28 years the minister at Harvard University’s Memorial Church, has become an American expert on preaching. Gomes, 55 (he turns 56 on May 22), was ordained in the American Baptist Churches in the U.S.A. and became assistant minister at Harvard […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ The Rev. Peter J. Gomes, for the last 28 years the minister at Harvard University’s Memorial Church, has become an American expert on preaching.

Gomes, 55 (he turns 56 on May 22), was ordained in the American Baptist Churches in the U.S.A. and became assistant minister at Harvard in 1970. He has been a professor and the minister at the Cambridge, Mass., institution since 1974 and has spoken in pulpits across North American and the United Kingdom.


When he’s not preaching or teaching, Gomes lives in Plymouth, Mass.

He gave the benediction at President Reagan’s second inauguration and preached the sermon at President Bush’s inauguration. He also serves as an adviser to”Pulpit Digest”and”The Living Pulpit.”The author of the recently published”Sermons: Biblical Wisdom for Daily Living”(William Morrow), discussed his thoughts on the art of preaching with RNS.

Q. You spoke in the introduction of your book of the”Aha!”experience that brings the Bible to life for preachers. Is that an experience that comes as you prepare for most sermons or is it only an occasional experience?

A. It’s episodic. I mean, I can’t rely on it. If you only wait to preach when you’ve had an”Aha!”experience, preaching would be very spotty and sketchy indeed. … But every once in a while you’re reading along … and suddenly you’ll say, `That’s what that’s about! It’s not this, it’s that.’ And it reorients your whole point of view and I’d say that those happen with some regularity but not to be relied on but they happen often enough to make you realize that those are one of the delights of doing that kind of work.

Q. You also spoke of preaching as being exaggeration, an enlarging of small points. Is it your hope that preachers illuminate what seem like small biblical points into what may be their larger effect?

A. We make a connection. I think preaching is not so much cleverness or being original. It’s helping people to see what’s already there, maybe what they already know, but putting it into a context in which they themselves can have an”Aha!”experience that they can sort of recognize. `Ah, that’s what that’s about.”But … I think preaching is more like cartooning than it is photography. Photography is exact, precise. What the camera sees is what the camera records. Cartooning takes certain aspects of what’s there and exaggerates it so that you see it in a new way. … So, in that sense, I think the kind of preaching that I do is cartooning and sketching as opposed to photography and map making.

Q. Your book was divided into season and themes. After preaching for more than 25 years at Harvard, is it hard to come up with new sermons for the special days in the Christian calendar?

A. Well, I would have thought so. … When I was a young man I used to think after I preached my first Easter sermon, `Well, what else is there to say?’ I said he rose, he’s not dead and that’s it. Well, I tell you I have never repeated a sermon at Memorial Church in 28 years. I have never recycled a sermon. And that’s not out of a sense of virtue. It’s out of a sense that having stepped there, you can’t step there again. It has moved on and you have moved on. …


Q. Do you see humor as an almost necessary part of sermons?

A. Essential. I find it essential for several reasons. One, it gets people’s attention, wakes people up. … People are at their most relaxed when they laugh. Their hostilities and their defenses are down and you can then sort of drive a truck in if you want to, which is what I try to do. … It’s not (like being) a stand-up comedian. It’s not a shtick. But judiciously used, like any good spice, I think it helps enhance the taste of the matter. So I hope I’ve cultivated the art of using that.

Q. You spoke in a Lenten sermon about people disliking Donald Trump and being annoyed by Martha Stewart. Is there a greater need for sermons of the ’90s to touch on popular culture than in the past?

A. Well, popular culture is the only culture we have nowadays. … I was brought up with high culture, which meant that you could afford to be ignorant of popular culture because it was inferior and second-rate. But there is no more high culture. If you don’t know who Leonardo DiCaprio is, you’re out of the … cultural loop. What a sad thing that is, but there it is. Especially preaching to students, I have to indicate that I have some vague knowledge of what’s out there. … You want them to know that I may be dealing with another world but I have some knowledge of this one.

Q. I have read that you describe your preaching style as a”precise tornado,”a hybrid of black preaching and the best English sermons. Could you explain that a little bit more?

A. Tornadoes always hit what they’re going to hit. They look random but there’s a logic to the funnel. And it doesn’t go to the right. It doesn’t go to the left. It hits that little house on the plains of Kansas and that’s that. … There’s a lot of energy and there’s a lot of enthusiasm and a lot of wind and a lot of motion and movement, but it’s heading toward a precise target.

Q. Has your style evolved from the time when you were ordained as an American Baptist to your days at Harvard?


A. … What has evolved in my 28 years at Harvard is a growing sense of confidence and freedom. I think I’m a much more fluid preacher now than I was when I began. When I began, I think part of the burden of my preaching was to sort of justify myself, to prove this little black boy could do this job. It wasn’t a mistake or an accident. I also … did not want to let the faith down. Here I was at this godless place full of very smart people who didn’t care much about religion and the Christian faith was entrusted to me to interpret. Therefore, I just couldn’t rely on charm and personality. I just had to make sure it was the best case I could make.

Q. Do you think that Harvard is still a godless place?

A. I think it’s much more godly than anybody gives it credit for and I’d like to take credit for it but I can’t. I think godless is a bad rap. There’s a lot of spiritual vitality going on there, not just at Memorial Church.

Q. Certainly, preaching is different in different settings, but are there some essentials that should be there, no matter where the pulpit?

A. Clarity and conviction. You have to be clear you can’t assume people are going to be able to, like Hansel and Gretel, follow your little breadcrumb trail to wherever you are going to go. You have got to assume that clarity of objective and structure is paramount and give people signposts, light posts whatever they need. And then conviction. You have to be convicted of what you’re saying and you have to be able to convict others and that has to be manifest in what you’re doing. You can’t just be giving information. You have an objective.

Q. You mentioned in one sermon that preachers often preach the Bible too simplistically. Is your general sense that preaching is not as good as it has been in the past?

A. That’s hard to say absolutely but that’s certainly my impression. And I think there are several reasons for that. One is that our age has less and less of an appetite for complexity. Our people, flooded with information and claims on their time, are less and less willing to look at complexity as something that is worth taking seriously and trying then to unravel. People want simple answers to complex questions. …


Q. And are preachers falling into this?

A. And preachers, because preachers want to be heard, tend to go where the market takes them. I think that’s a market requirement. In many cases, preachers will follow it. I do not, I am happy to say, but if I depended upon my congregation to be paid, I might. But I’m in an exalted position. I don’t depend on my congregation to be paid so I give what I think is good for them.

Q. You’ve said what’s wrong with preaching. Is there anything right about it these days?

A. I think that every time a preacher has the opportunity to try to interpret reality and provide meaning and attempt a reconciliation between the material and the spiritual, the preacher is doing a good service.

Q. Do you have much of an opportunity to be preached to rather than to preach?

A. Not very … it’s like being a surgeon. You don’t often get operated on.

Q. On the rare occasion when you get to hear someone else, are you able to settle back and relax?


A. No, no.

Q. Do you find yourself thinking about how you might have preached the message?

A. I’m always critiquing. It’s one of the curses of the job of being a professor of preaching. I’m always anticipating _ `I see what you’re doing with that. Oh, you’re going to fall into that big hole. Oh, you better watch out for that.’ Sometimes I’m happily surprised; often I’m not. I just have to recognize that they’d do that to me, too, if they were listening to me.

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