Midweek Message – June 3, 2025
While Oakland and LABC honor Pride Month in September in most other places it is celebrated in June. Further, Pride Month is especially important this year as the GLBTQ+ community is under political and religious attack. Thus, as the month begins allow me to lift up the life and ministry of the late Peter Gomes. His message is one we do well to return to frequently.
Background from Q Spirit– Peter Gomes was a gay black Baptist minister at Harvard and one of America’s most prominent spiritual voices for tolerance. He came out in 1991 and used his national celebrity as a “gay minister” to make the religious case for LGBTQ people, even though he reportedly disliked the label. He died at age 68 on Feb. 28, 2011.
A man of many contradictions, Gomes became a Democrat in 2007 after decades as a conservative Republican. He even gave the benediction at President Ronald Reagan’s second inauguration in 1985 and preached at the National Cathedral for the inauguration of Reagan’s successor, George Bush.
Gomes (May 22, 1942 – Feb. 28, 2011) was born in Boston to a black African immigrant father and a mother from Boston’s African American upper middle class. He shares a birthday with LGBTQ-right pioneer Harvey Milk. Gomes grew up in Plymouth, Massachusetts. He studied at Bates College (where a chapel was named after him in 2012). After earning a divinity degree at Harvard University, he taught Western civilization at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama for two years before returning to work at Harvard in 1970. Four years later he became the first black person to serve as chief minister to Harvard. He held the positions of Pusey minister at Harvard’s Memorial Church and Plummer professor of Christian morals for the rest of his life.
He came out publicly as “a Christian who happens as well to be gay” at a student rally in 1991 after a conservative student magazine at Harvard published a condemnation of homosexuality. “I now have an unambiguous vocation — a mission — to address the religious causes and roots of homophobia,” he later told the Washington Post. “I will devote the rest of my life to addressing the ‘religious case’ against gays.”
In his 1996 best-seller, The Good Book: Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart, he showed how the Bible was misused to defend homophobia, racism, anti-Semitism and sexism.
His 2007 book The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus: What’s So Good About the Good News?
This Week on LABC Zoom
Tuesday 6:00 and Wednesday 10:30, Public Witness Bible Study with Pastor Allison
Saturday 10:00 A Time For Prayer with Pastor Carolyn
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This past Sunday I offered the benediction at an Ecumenical Prayer Service at Allen Temple for Oakland’s new mayor, Barbara Lee. I promised her that LABC would pray for her daily. Please join me in fullfilling that promise. jh
