You can find them in almost every big, old downtown church: the pictures of the pastors of that congregation. They are lined up in a rogues’ gallery of clerics. And they look down at us over their names and dates. As you walk down the hall and move back through the decades, some things are easy to notice. The collars get out of date, and then simply strange-looking. Sideburns march up and down as if matched to the stock market cycles. Above all, the farther back you get, the sterner they look in those stiff collars. Religion must have been a sober project back there in the "gay ’90s." And have you ever thought, as you looked at a particularly- forbidding saint, "I wonder how he ever celebrated Christmas?"

Scene One

The question is an appropriate one today, on the first Sunday of Christma…