"I am the resurrection and the life" – John 11:25
"Death has been swallowed up in victory. Where o Death is your victory? Where o Death is your sting?" 1 Corinthians 15:54-55
This Sunday is Easter, a day in the Christian year when the Resurrection of Jesus is observed. Jesus, a first century revolutionary, was arrested by the Roman Imperialist authorities, tried without due process, and executed by the state for threatening the social order. His death was gruesome, public, and dispiriting to his followers. Somehow the death he suffered, which was designed to humiliate him and his followers, was overwhelmed by a power that could not be suppressed by the state. Though Jesus the revolutionary was killed, Jesus the lover was resurrected, inspiring subsequent generations to believe that love is stronger than death.
It was my privilege to work in the Castro District of San Francisco as pastor of the MCC church from 1986-2001, and to serve on and sometimes chair during that period the Mayor's HIV Planning Council, which distributed an average of $36 million in federal funds annually to HIV programs in the city. I think of those years as "the AIDS years" and all these years later I am struck by the heroic example of people whom I knew during that period, many of whom perished, who demonstrated the same power of resurrection that Jesus modeled, of love that was stronger than death.
Why I survived while others did not remains a mystery to me and to others like me. Survivors from my generation can never take life for granted. We remember a time that we can still barely describe to those who did not live through it. A few years ago I was privileged to travel to an HIV/AIDS orphanage in Motuko, Zimbabwe with the Reverends Yvette Flunder and Penny Nixon, where we brought HIV medications to a community that was over 60 percent HIV infected, and I was able to talk about my years in the Castro, and to stand before them and tell them that I had lived for many years with HIV/AIDS in my body, and that these medications we were bringing wound make it possible for them to do the same. If I had remained alive solely for that opportunity it would have been worth it. Since then I have had many opportunities to testify about the value of all human bodies, and the power of resurrection, life before death as well as life after death.
I currently work in a university setting where I am the pastor of a "gay and straight together" church, located on a seminary campus, a different model than the stand-alone gay church, and which I believe has great promise for the future. I am frequently interviewed by students here who are interested in the AIDS years in the Castro and who can't imagine what it was like then. I tell them as best I can about a community that lived daily with death and yet which steadfastly refused to be defined by it or to capitulate to it. Love kept us alive; solidarity sustained us. They can't believe that Proposition 64 was ever on the ballot, which provided for the mandatory quarantining of people with HIV/AIDS, and they are inspired when I tell them we were resolute never to surrender to its demands without a fight, armed resistance if necessary, if it had passed. Resurrection power held us together during those threatening times.
I recently preached at Most Holy Redeemer Catholic Church in the Castro, and was reminded of that history as I strolled the streets beforehand. In the AIDS years I would never have been invited to speak at the Catholic Church, and I was grateful for how times have changed. Earlier that day I had been included in a private dialogue with Catholic leaders in Oakland about how they had discussed gay people in their anti-gay marriage discourse during the Proposition 8 battle. While I can't claim enormous progress in that meeting, I can see how the seeds of resurrection were planted. Sometimes the changes that seem remote and unattainable are achieved by steadfast relationship over time.
I believe that resurrection is still possible. I will proclaim it in my own life and in my community as we gather for our Easter celebration this Sunday. I will invite us to remember the resurrection of the body of Jesus, and to demand that our own bodies be seen as sacred and worthy of reverence. I will remind us of the bodies awaiting resurrection who are not included in the current heath care reforms. I will invoke the memory of those whose bodies were considered disreputable or dispensable during the early years of AIDS: of IV-drug users, of Haitian immigrants, of hemophiliacs, and sex workers and homosexuals. I will implore us to remember the bodies of civilians and soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the U.S. continues to engage in a war that no one is talking about, and in which we are all implicated.
The celebration of Easter is not a period piece for me. This year I will marvel that I am still here. I anticipate wonderful music, lilies, an Easter egg hunt for children on the quadrangle of the school where our church meets, and indescribable hats that communicate our whimsy and our joy at being alive. I look for the resurrection of the body – of all the bodies – of all the sacred human bodies that inhabit the world, and for abundant life, and life eternal, and for love that is stronger than death.
The Reverend Jim Mitulski is pastor of New Spirit Community Church in Berkeley (www.newspiritchurch.org), which is affiliated with the United Church of Christ, the Disciples of Christ, and Metropolitan Community Churches.