In a season of tradition, hard questions about hope

The Rev. Peter J. Gomes preaches at Harvard's Memorial Church.

The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus: What’s So Good About the Good News?, By Peter J. Gomes, HarperOne, 264 pp., $24.95

American Poetry: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth CenturiesEdited by Davis S. Shields, Library of America, 952 pp., $40

There is something rather ambivalent about Advent, the anticipatory season in the Christian year.

Liturgically, its four weeks are used to prepare for the coming of Christ. But for the secular world it corresponds to the Christmas shopping season. There are the charming old customs like placing Advent lights in front windows, and then there are garish lighting displays.

But for Peter J. Gomes, Baptist minister and preacher at Harvard's Memorial Church, Advent is one of his "least favorite liturgical seasons" because of "the note of false rather than authentic hope that is imposed upon people."

The ambivalence of hope is an important theme in Gomes's discursive homily, "The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus," a homily leavened with entertaining accounts of sermons that have sometimes missed their mark. For Gomes, there is also the problem of the gospels' "good news" - that what's good for someone "must necessarily be bad news for somebody," as it is in some of the best-known gospel parables, those of the Prodigal Son and the workers in the vineyard.

When Jesus speaks of the good news in a key passage in the Gospel of Luke ("I must preach the good news of the kingdom of God to the other cities also; for I was sent for this purpose"), it is a message, Gomes writes, that "he comes not to confirm but to confront."

Turning to the Advent season as it morphs into Christmas, Gomes writes that preachers "struggle mightily . . . to make sense of the Advent hope," having concluded that it is also the Dickensian season of humbug. But, Gomes writes, "people prefer hope to humbug, and are invariably disappointed when humbug prevails and experience triumphs over hope." Each year, writes Gomes, "we tell ourselves - and the conventional wisdom encourages us to hope for such things - Christmas will see the wonderful reunion of families and our dreadful relatives will be less dreadful, but the facts tell us another story," - a comment that would resonate with his Cambridge student congregation.

Gomes draws upon Longfellow, in whose Cantabrigian literary circle Gomes would certainly have been welcome, commenting that his hymn "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day" "spoke to the ambiguity of hope, a hope that seemed precarious, even mocking" when it was written during the Civil War.

Christmas, even ambivalently, was not a subject for Longfellow's Puritan predecessors whose works are included in the Library of America's "American Poetry: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries."

Suggesting just where their interests lay is editor David S. Shields's comment that Michael Wigglesworth, minister at Malden for 49 years before his death in 1705, was "the most popular poet of 17th century New England," having "captured the public's imagination" with the ominously titled "The Day of Doom."

Relief can be found in other writers represented here. Anne Bradstreet, daughter, sister, and wife of Massachusetts colonial governors, wrote deeply personal poems on events in her life. A bit of a surprise is Samuel Sewall, the Salem witch-trial judge, who poetically celebrated, not Christmas, but New Year's Day, 1701:

Once more! Our GOD, vouchsafe to Shine

Tame Thou the Rigour of our Clime.

Make haste with thy Impartial Light,

And terminate this long dark night.

Sewall's diary entry for the following day records that "just about break a day Jacob Amsden and 3 other trumpeters gave a blast with the trumpets on the Common near Mr. Alford's. Then went to the Green Chamber and sounded there till about sunrise."

Michael Kenney is a freelance writer who lives in Cambridge.