I have known few preachers with more reverence for the homiletical arts and almost none who were more grateful that God had called him to preach. He once told me that he was ready to “robe up for the game anytime Harvard wants something said in a way that adds weight, no matter how trivial the occasion.”
When I got Peter [Gomes] to speak at my alma mater, Wofford College in SparÂtanburg, South Carolina, Peter adÂdressed a packed house in Wofford’s Old Main, a building built by slave labor with bricks made by slaves on campus.
“I am not unmindful of the significance of this building, nor my presence in this pulpit,” he said. “As a preacher, I’m accustomed to answering to the claims of the dead. I am acutely aware, at an occasion such as this, we are accompanied by the dead, anonymous and remembered, surrounding us, wanting to speak to us. Yet the voiceless dead cannot speak without us. Thus I speak to you . . .”
–Will Willimon in “Harvard’s Preacher” (on Peter Gomes 1942”“2011), Christian Century, April 5, 2011, edition, page 11
I have been up in the bell towers of that building with dead birds and seen them just as they were built in 1851. I have crawled between the floors with my tripping classmates on the original beams. There are about ten of us now who really know and understand Old Main.