7 December 2025

Advent is the church’s ancient practice of living inside holy tension, presence and absence, hope and dread, peace and turmoil, joy and suffering. To take up Advent is to stand with our Black ancestors in a paradoxical posture: waiting for someone who has already arrived, and celebrating a reality that has not yet fully come to pass. Advent trains our souls to tell the truth about the night without surrendering our expectation of dawn.

That is why World AIDS Day belongs in Advent. HIV/AIDS is not only a medical reality; it is a moral archive. It records who received tenderness and who received theology as a weapon. It exposes how stigma is often maintained not only by ignorance but also by religious certainty, by communities more committed to appearing “pure” than to practicing justice. Yet HIV/AIDS also holds testimonies of holy courage: care networks built under pressure, grief carried in community, and activists who insisted that Black queer and trans life is not an exception to God’s love but a canvas on which God’s love must be made visible.

So remembrance becomes ethical work. To remember is not merely to recall; it is to re-member to gather what has been scattered, to restore dignity where it has been denied, to insist that the dead are not disposable and the living are not alone. On World AIDS Day, remembrance also becomes confession: naming the ways churches have treated HIV as punishment rather than suffering, and the ways silence has functioned as abandonment. Confession is not self-loathing; it is truth-telling that makes repair possible.

In this Advent frame, we remember Archbishop Carl Bean and Dr. Ibrahim Abdurrahman Farajajé as sacred witnesses, faith leaders who did not wait for religious institutions to “catch up,” but organized love as a public, embodied response to the HIV/AIDS crisis.

Archbishop Carl Bean’s declaration is both theology and protest: “My life is testimony to one statement and one statement only: God is love, and love is for everybody.” That sentence refuses every attempt to rationalize divine affection. And Bean did not leave that claim floating in the air; he built structures to make it real. As the AIDS crisis erupted, Bean responded to the needs of African American gay men with AIDS, many of whom were ostracized and left alone. He called his fledgling community to serve people with AIDS when few Black clergy would. (LGBTQ Religious Archives Network) His ministry helped birth the Minority AIDS Project (MAP) as an educational and service mission rooted in communities of color. (LGBTQ Religious Archives Network) In Unity Fellowship Church’s own telling, MAP was not a side project; it was “born as the main outreach ministry” and became a community-based response designed to educate and serve communities disproportionately affected by HIV/AIDS. (UFC Los Angeles)

And Bean’s activism reached beyond one congregation. Bean was a founding member of NMAC (formerly the National Minority AIDS Council), an indicator of how his leadership connected faith-rooted organizing to national HIV advocacy. (HIV.gov) Even the practicalities of survival—food, delivery routes, distribution hubs were part of the gospel he preached. In Bean’s ministry, “love is for everybody” meant you could locate love in education sessions, in hospice visits, in fundraising, in the relentless insistence that care belongs to the people most pushed to the margins. (LGBTQ Religious Archives Network)

Remembering Dr. Ibrahim Abdurrahman Farajajé widens our vision of what HIV/AIDS activism inside religious communities can look like. They embodied a contextually rich life of interfaith, artistically embodied, intellectually rigorous, and unapologetically ethical praxis. Farajajé was a pioneer who helped faith communities of color develop compassionate responses to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. (LGBTQ Religious Archives Network) Crucially, they treated HIV not as a “special topic” but as a theological crisis demanding moral action. They “addressed HIV as a religious and theological case” and developed a course at Howard University School of Divinity (HUSD) on how African American religious leaders should respond to HIV in their communities. (LGBTQ Religious Archives Network). While he left HUSD before I became a student there, finding his writings and work transformed my language for my call in the world as a transdisciplinary scholar-activist.

Farajajé understood that stigma operates through ritual: who gets mourned, who gets buried, who gets named as worthy of public grief. They created a gospel performance piece confronting Black communities that refused to bury those who died from AIDS-related complications; an artistic intervention that was simultaneously pastoral and prophetic. And they organized beyond the classroom: they were active in ACT UP D.C., held leadership in the DC Black Queer Coalition, and helped form groups focused on direct action around AIDS from explicitly liberatory perspectives. (LGBTQ Religious Archives Network) Their writing, too, carried the spiritual labor of the moment; their article “Invocation of Remembrance, Healing and Empowerment in a Time of AIDS” shows how remembrance itself can become a practice of healing and empowerment. (LGBTQ Religious Archives Network) Even their commitment to accompanying people in death and preparing bodies for burial, offering a “positive and affirming” last religious message, reads like an answer to the very refusal his performance critiqued: nobody should be denied dignity at the end of life. (LGBTQ Religious Archives Network)

Together, Bean and Farajajé teach us what Advent ethics requires.

Advent calls the church to proximity rather than projection: replacing rumor with relationship, shame with accompaniment, and avoidance with pastoral presence. Advent also calls for public lament, a form of justice that tells the truth about who we lost and how we failed them, without romanticizing suffering. And Advent demands material care: access to health resources, housing, food security, and stigma-free community support, because “God-with-us” must eventually become care-with-us.

This is the tension and hope we hold: that the world is still not what it should be, and God is still not finished with us. In the glow of Advent candles, we remember our dead, we honor our living, and we take up the charge of these witnesses: to make “love for everybody” not only our confession, but our practice.

Reverend Terence L. Mayo, CLGS African American Roundtable Director