Of all the places I've lived, Christmas in the Castro �" even if that Castro no longer exists �" will be the place that I learned about miracles and hope and the power of the Word of Love Made Flesh, not just in the ancient story but in the ways it still echoes in our lives today. For years all I ever wanted for Christmas was an end to AIDS as we knew it then. It seemed like an elusive miracle.
Three years ago I left the comfortable cultural and political bubble of the San Francisco Bay Area where I have lived and worked most of my adult life in order to do the liberation work I love in other grassroots settings. I take the best of what I learned and experienced in my years in San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley wherever I go. It's a permanent part of me. I have loved these three years in both Dallas and Denver, but there is something about Christmas that makes me acutely homesick for the Old Country, as my Polish grandmother used to say.
I am reminded of Christmas echoes in current events. As I watch the flood of immigrants risking and sometimes losing their lives in order to flee to Europe from Syria, I am reminded that Mary and Joseph were refugees seeking a place to have their child in safety, and that even after the child's birth they sought refuge in Egypt from Palestine/Israel to escape certain death at the hands of military death squads. Two years ago I visited El Salvador and saw first hand the violent legacy of U.S. policy over the last 40 years. That same summer I witnessed how many Texans reacted violently and malevolently toward unaccompanied minors whose parents sent them northward for protection. When I hear how Texas Governor Abbott and many of his governor colleagues declare that no refugees will be welcomed in their states, I wonder how so many Christians gather in churches at this time of year and sing about a holy family seeking sanctuary and yet harden their hearts to the same story unfolding here and now.
On November 27, a Christian gunman opened fire in a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs and killed three people in an effort to intimidate and punish women seeking contraception and abortions, as well as other necessary health services provided to both women and men through that agency. A week later when I gathered with several hundred supporters, mostly women, in a solidarity event held in a private secure location, a church, with heavy police presence, and heard the stories of women seeking reproductive justice, I wondered how at this time of year we remember an unwed mother named Mary whose delicate situation earned her the disdain of religious people, and how little has changed since then.
That gathering where women's lives were honored and the need for secure, stigma-free access to health care was more sacred than any Midnight Mass will be this year held in churches where the full equality and dignity of women are not upheld.
Many Christmas songs proclaim peace on earth, which compel us to look at the earth itself and pray and work for this planet, which has been our sanctuary, and for its future. When we gather to sing about goodwill toward all how can we not commit ourselves to ending the ready availability of guns and assault rifles? When we sing about that same goodwill how can we afford to indulge in the xenophobia and Islamophobia that seems to be mounting all around us?
The power of the Christmas story is not in its sentimental re-telling of something that happened 2,000 years ago. Its true power is revealed when we pay attention to the details and exhibit compassion for people whose lives parallel the same situation today. The Christmas story is not a period piece. It's a mirror and a challenge, and we retell it not to dull our senses but to sharpen awareness of the present and the future.
I recently came across my Christmas sermon at the Metropolitan Community Church in the Castro in 1989. It was a dire time in relation to AIDS, and I quoted the late, great, gay Christian poet W.H. Auden, from his poem "A Christmas Oratorio:"
We who must die demand a miracle.
How can the eternal do a temporal act,
how could the infinite become a finite fact?
Nothing can save us that is possible.
We who must die demand a miracle.
And I concluded the sermon with a plea to believe in miracles on this holy night:
"We demand a miracle and we deserve a miracle. This is Christmas in the Castro like Christmas in Palestine 2,000 years ago. This is the highest concentration of lesbian and gay people in the world. And in this place, the pink and purple church, the humble place where Christ is born anew ... We who must die demand a miracle. And we are that miracle. This church, this community, each person in this place, this night, for tonight, and every night if we chose to. We are that miracle that can redeem the world."
The particular circumstances have changed in 2,000 years, just as they have changed in the 25 years since I appealed to us to believe in the power of miracles. We have lived to see effective medical treatment, PrEP, and marriage equality. Today we pray for immigration justice, an end to racism, protection of women's reproductive rights, for gun control and an end to capital punishment, for care for the earth, and for peace among nations. As then, so now: In the words of a Christmas carol by Phillips Brooks written in Boston in 1867: "The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight."
Jim Mitulski, a longtime Bay Area resident, is currently the interim pastor of MCC of the Rockies in Denver, and prior to that of Cathedral of Hope UCC in Dallas. He was pastor of MCC-San Francisco from 1986 to 2001. To contact him, write [email protected].