La Capilla del Barrio and the National Boricua Human Rights Network celebrated Oscar’s birthday Sunday, Jan. 5, 2014, braving over 18 inches of continuous snow and rapidly dropping temperatures. The birthday celebration and Three Kings Mass, in its 6th Annual Year, began with Pastor Windsor’s welcoming and the invocation. The Capilla kids performed an original Three Kings skit. Then a delegation from Adalberto Methodist Church read a gift, a message from Rev. Coleman, which Tanya Coleman Lozano read, “Just as in the time of Jesus, a government kills and locks away in prison those who refuse to compromise with injustice because they fear their example will inspire an oppressed people also stand on their Today, we remember that Joseph acted on faith when he married a single mother. We recall that
Mary acted on faith when she received the gift of a child that would come to save her people. And we recall that they risked their lives to protect this child. So today we honor those who struggle in faith to form the family of families, the communities in resistance, from which will come a new generation of struggle, a “messiah” generation, which will inspire the world to stand against injustice and oppression. Malcolm said, we are all in prison and all of us will continue to live in the shadow of the compromise of human potential as long as we submit to a system in which Puerto Rico is denied self-determination, as long as 11 million people and their families are denied equality under the law, as long as Latin America is kept in dependency – for these are all just symptoms of a diseased society that refuses the Kingdom of God, offered freely to those who will open their hearts.
Yet those who stand on their faith, who walk in the footsteps of Jesus, who accept the mission to organize communities of resistance so that a Messiah generation can be born, – these are living already in the Kingdom of God. Like Oscar, they are already free. No prison walls, no borders, can separate those bound together in faith and freedom. Today we are with Oscar – today we are free!“
