World
AIDS Day. 2007
I
thank you for the honor of addressing
this special group of people at this special time.
I
will be speaking from the language and perspective
of my religious tradition.
My
purpose is not to impose my tradition on you.
I
am just speaking of these things in the only way I know.
I
ask those from other faiths to work with me,
to try to translate what I say into the language
and images of your tradition,
to look through the icon of my religion
to see the One Truth we all share.
We
are all stripes of a rainbow
refracting the light of a single Sun,
which some of us call God.
We
Christians see God in the life of Jesus Christ
who
healed, forgave, and befriended the outcast.
We
call God's healing, forgiving, and friendship in Jesus
Incarnation – divine presence in human form.
We
believe that we continue that incarnation,
carry on God's presence in human form
when we heal, forgive, and befriend.
We
call that being the Body of Christ.
That's
what the first Christian teacher, St. Paul,
meant by
the Body of Christ.
It
is something like being Sangha,
something
like being Israel.
The
body is our metaphor of being together in a mission.
Paul
said:
The
body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts;
and though
. . . its parts are many, they form one body.
So it is
with Christ. For we (are) . . . one body
whether
Jews or Greeks, slaves or free. . .
The eye
cannot say to the hand, I don't need you!
And the
head cannot say to the feet, I don't need you!
But God
has combined the members of the body . . .
so that
. . . its parts should have equal concern for each other.
If one
part suffers, every part suffers with it;
if one
part is honored, every part rejoices with it.
That
means: No one can say “AIDS is not my problem.”
It
touches us all together.
My
last funeral was for a woman who struggled with AIDS
for
years along with addiction and homelessness.
It
is still hard to imagine I won't be hearing her voice on
the phone.
One week ago, I was having dinner with the Presiding Bishop
of the
Episcopal Church, Katherine Jefferts-Schori.
We
were the guest of a clergy couple in Nevada.
They
told us about their first ministry.
It
was to AIDS patients back when AIDS patients had no names.
They
were all called John Doe plus a number.
The
priests described holding the patients
and the patients had said it was the first time
they had been touched
in months.
And
at our dinner table, the two priests,
the man
and woman alike, cried openly.
And
Bishop Katharine in a profound silence connected
with
each of them in a way I cannot describe.
HIV/AIDS
came to mean something different to me
some years ago in New York when one of my best friends
confided in me that he was HIV positive.
It
is one thing to minister to someone with HIV
from a bogus one-up position of pastoral care-giver.
It
is another thing to share the experience with a friend.
The
woman I just buried, the priests in Nevada, Bishop Katharine,
my friend, and I, we are one body.
“If
one part suffers, every part suffers with it.”
So
much good progress has been made
in the battle with HIV/AIDS
that the government and the media
are tempted to forget the part that suffers.
That
will not do and we must not allow it.
There
are 2-3 cases of AIDS reported
every
2-3 days in Bibb County.
1
million are infected in the United States.
40
million people infected world wide.
8,000
people die every day from AIDS.
That's
3xs the number of victims on September 11.
That's
5 people every minute.
Some
demographers say the current rate of transmission
in Sub-Saharan
African is so overwhelming
that the
entire region can simply be considered lost.
If
one suffers all suffer, and 40 million are suffering.
We
cannot look the other way.
So
what on this World AIDS Day should each of us
resolve to do?
St.
Paul taught that we are each given different parts
to play in the one mission.
Some
are doctors and nurses.
The
folks at Diversity House provide a home
and social supports to those who need it.
Some
of us advocate for funding of research for a cure
and
for the Millennium Development Goal
of
reversing the rate of transmission by the year 2010.
Those
of us in the religious community,
lay
and clergy alike,
Jews, Christians,
Muslims, Ba'hai, Unitarian,
Hindu, Buddhist, and
Wiccan alike,
all
of us have an obligation to make our religion
a blessing to those
afflicted with HIV/AIDS – and not a curse.
Religious
tolerance is a good thing – up to a point.
But
there is no room in my heart for any religion
that calls AIDS
God's punishment.
Such
talk is blasphemous and cruel.
It
will not do. We will not abide it.
When
Jesus healed lepers, the same judgmental voices
condemned him for it because they said
leprosy was the will of God.
This
isn't a difference between Jews and Christians.
Good
Jews don't say that kind of garbage.
But
bad Christians do.
It
is a difference between kindness and cruelty,
either of which can wear a religious robe.
All
of us need to be crystal clear that the divine,
call it God, Allah, Brahma, or Tao,
is a force of life and healing – not death and destruction.
Finally,
all of us in the one body have two obligations,
two mitzvah if I remember my Hebrew.
We
are called to be tender in the presence of suffering
and fierce in the face of injustice.
HIV/AIDS
is an event of suffering,
and as the memory of those days of John Doe remind us,
it is also a case of injustice.
It
is a form of what Dylan Thomas called the dying light
an eclipse of joy, a darkening of life itself.
And
Dylan Thomas told us how to be fierce against it.
He
wrote:
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.
Those
words are stitched onto the AIDS Quilt
-- the part hanging in the Smithsonian Institute.
And
they are half of our mission.
In
the face of each others suffering,
let us aways be tender.
In
face of the injustice of HIV/AIDS,
let us
unceasingly, unrelentingly,
giving no quarter,
Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.
Amen.
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