HIV: Keeping the church from utter silence

I had some hesitations about posting this now. That is, World AIDS Day can become a token occasion to talk about AIDS, or better put, it can become the day we bring up AIDS so we can ignore it the other 364 days of the year. It's like Black History month, it is there so we don't forget it entirely yet can equally lock all our conversations and celebrations of African Americans in our history to the block of time that has been delegated to them - which totally misses the point. Funny enough, the church also does this with stuff we don't always want to talk about. How often does Stewardship become something only seriously raised during the two-three weeks in Oct/Nov dedicated to the Stewardship drive?

But none of this should be. Stewardship to be taken seriously needs to happen more often than at budget time. Black history should be seen as far too essential to American history to be ignored 11 months out of the year. And AIDS should be as big an issue on December 2nd or June 2nd as it is on December 1st. We must not convince ourselves that these things only need a day, a few weeks, a month. And so, I don't post this today so that it can be forgotten tomorrow.

In the Lutheran church especially, but far as I have seen in the greater church as well, AIDS is not a regular topic and rarely an illustration in church and theology. Although I imagine among global Christianity it has a bigger place, because there are places in the world so widely touched by AIDS to relegate it to a day would be societal suicide. Pastors there probably talk about it more. But the truth is much of African Christianity I know little about, since in America it seems African Christianity only exists to serve the purpose of offsetting our losses in Western civilization. I only hear it talked about when we are discussing how Christianity is booming there (in contrast to the increasingly empty sanctuaries here), but I know little of their theology. I've only heard one real critique of African churches in regards to theology, I can only name one or two African theologians from the last 1500 years of Christian history. So how much AIDS is discussed there, how it is, I cannot say much. I am only aware of one particular controversy around this issue from a sermon where a pastor made a claim (theologically not scientifically) that "Jesus had AIDS".


Here though, especially in the Lutheran church, I do not encounter it much. I imagine there are a variety of reasons for this: for one, AIDS is not seen (especially since the turn of the new millennium) as the big issue to tackle in the lives of the people. The "scare" is over (or so we're told, yet people living with AIDS day in have something different to say), but as new medicines have greatly improved the lives of the AIDS community, the issue is losing national attention in the greater culture. But I can say, it shouldn't. People are still dying. People I love. My own father passed away from AIDS related complications in the early '90s closer to the height of the AIDS scare, but my mother did as well, far more recently (2010), well after we were supposed to no longer be afraid of dying from AIDS. I just a month ago was at the funeral of a friend of the family who passed away. Friends of mine share their health struggles day to day, as social networking has opened this possibility. And while many communities have now dealt with AIDS for some time, others never have, and I find they are still today engaging it for the first time. That, and even when we know all we know from a book or a class, the "lesson" becomes far more real when it directly affects people in our lives. For how far medicine and education and acceptance for the AIDS community has come, it is still an issue.

The other reason is the church has been historically bad about dealing with AIDS. Especially early on, when AIDS was almost universally attached to homosexuality (even as a homosexual friend of mine recounts, it was in its very earliest days regarded for a time as 'gay man's cancer') theologians took the opportunity to decry homosexuality, marking AIDS as nothing more than God's judgment. Although I do remember a seminary professor challenging this notion, noting that the passage in Romans (1.27) cited to support this claim separates AIDS and the so called penalty for their error by almost 2000 years. Nevertheless, the AIDS community remembers very well how the public voice of the church was by and large damning and opportunistic in that it sought to use human suffering for little more than furthering the church's stance on homosexuality. And this cannot just be blamed on the loud public voices. The AIDS community has their stories too. My friend was as a child kicked out of her church on Easter morning when they learned she was HIV positive. My mother found herself separated from the congregation (a Lutheran one mind you) she called home. Yes the church has publicly, and in many individual lives had a bad history in regards to AIDS.

Before I continue on though, I must say that is not the case everywhere. And I am greatly thankful for that. The church my mother finally ended up in especially, a small struggling inner city Lutheran congregation became the wellspring of life for her, and the people and community truly were little Christs to her daily. The church still has a place in my family's life because there are churches that have been good. There are churches that have opened their doors and been absolutely supportive. I needed to say this, because while AIDS may not be a great issue in the church, for some churches it has been, and from my own experience, I've seen the difference.

I think another reason AIDS is not a large issue in the church has been the fact that AIDS education and the church have often found themselves with conflicting messages. Having been a part of both I've experienced and seen this. A lot of it comes out of issues related to sexuality, homo or hetero. Many in the Christian community since reserving sex for the marriage bed is such an important issue can't take on the discussion of safe sex. Part of this I get, that is, it is important to hold to one's religious values around this, so when one believes abstinence is the expectation, that should be said. The truth is the AIDS community also speaks about abstinence, but they are also realistic. That is, while the church should hold to its guns, we should not pretend that premarital sex is only happening outside the church. Simply because we want people avoiding sex outside of marriage altogether does not mean we should wage a war on condoms, because the truth is I want people who break that expectation to still be safe. I'm not sure everyone in the church does. Or rather, we don't like that safe sex removes some of the risks that one engages in while engaging in premarital sex, as if it destroys the argument to save sex for marriage. This issue is even greater in churches like the Roman Catholic church who oppose contraceptives (although condom use in particular has been discussed more positively at times in the RCC than other forms because of the particular preventative nature of it). Also, homosexuality and how the AIDS community talks about it and indeed is a part of it I think has made it hard for many churches to connect, because this issue is one of the greater ones in the church today. It has made it difficult for the two groups to engage hospitality and affection and the education as to how one contracts the disease. This is on the church and on AIDS educators to find ways to not let different agendas and different ethical standards impede the needed conversations on HIV.

But apart from the issues of AIDS itself, is the fact that AIDS is chronic. It is a lifelong struggle and illness. It can affect daily living for the rest of your life. It interrupts, affects, even ends relationships. It can carry into people's lives constant fears related to death, disability, and alienation. Even people who need not fear ever being alone because of AIDS, there is still the constant fear that someone will react some way that is negative. You are never too popular to be hurt by someone spurning you because of your health. And for people with AIDS, this is a day in thing. But all the struggles, both physically and emotionally, do not go away. And chronic illness is something the church has not in my experience engaged enough theologically. Even though it is a pastoral issue that just about every pastor tends to, even though it often comes with great spiritual questions by those affected, not enough has gone into a theology of chronic suffering. Or better put, those theologies have not been public enough. When we are talking about healing, new life, deliverance and so on, there are people out there asking "what about me?" Miracles and healing, hope, these are messages we can struggle to articulate for those who feel trapped in their chronic illness. This issue transcends AIDS but is necessary for a good theology for AIDS.

And this is what the church needs, along with making sure we are not breeding fear or letting fear of AIDS or ignorance to the disease brood in our churches, we need a good theological voice, because by and large the voice the AIDS community, the world in general has heard from the church on AIDS has not been good. It has either been opportunistic theology, AIDS used to draw sympathy or attack, but we must not imagine that this is a non-issue, or be so afraid of our poor history or the issues around sexuality that we have no gospel word for AIDS. We need one. There are groups and people interested in promoting good education and awareness about AIDS and the AIDS community, but theology is our business, and so to neglect this is our failure. To take it up is our calling and our role for a people of AIDS. The people - that is why we must not leave this to silence, or even a single day in the year. Because people, our people, God's people, are longing for the tender compassion of God.

Yesterday I finally watched the movie The Cure. I've heard about this movie for some twelve or fifteen years now, but I never got around to seeing it. I finally did. The premise is two boys become best friends, one of them is HIV positive. So his friend commits to helping him find a cure. What is great about the movie is that this medical issue, is given a human quality as it is happening between these two boys and the outcome of the cure is invested in the characters themselves. There is one moment in the movie where the boys get cornered by a guy who threatens them with harm. The one boy (who is HIV negative) pulls out a small pocket knife to defend them. The man responds by pulling out a large butterfly knife. The boy who is HIV positive takes the small pocket knife from his friend and gets in between them. He dares the man to stab him, inciting "my blood is poison", he cuts a small gash on his own hand and chases the man away shouting "MY BLOOD IS POISON!" The moment is fairly comical. But when the boys are safe and the energy fades, he collapses under the weight of his own threat. He cries and laments quietly "my blood is poison." It lifts up a great pastoral issue that people with AIDS face, how one understands the disease. His friend replies, "It's a virus." He looks and he sees that his friend is not a weapon or a dangerous chemical...he's a person who is being attacked. He's not the poison.

Do we have a theological voice for disease, especially ones that carry such lifelong burdens? How do we articulate theologically what a virus is? AIDS particularly carries like lung cancer (in relation to smokers), this assumption that one deserved what they got. Because of how preventable the virus is from catching, it turns the virus into some unsympathetic cosmic justice (especially since sexual contact and IV drug use are primary means of contraction), but our theology of viruses, of chronic illness, of AIDS can and should be better than that. How does forgiveness relate to healing (for Christ certainly links them - Mark 2.9) or how does forgiveness get us past cosmic justice and into a proclamation that the curse has been lifted (even when it seems so present)? Lutheran theology which is so caught up in the already-not yet paradox should be especially interested in how that relates to illness and healing.


Left to the experience of AIDS, people can see curse, blame, or ask why they deserved it (or what was God's will in it all). The absence of firm authoritative voices will leave more moments where people lament "my blood is poison" with no cry in return. But we ought be there, not only to say as the friend, as the medical community does that it is a virus, but to lift the curse from their burdensome shoulders and place it at the cross, the one place where the will of God is revealed for all people, a will that we not perish, but have life, and have it abundantly. But for this to happen we need to not let our voices be silent. I should say, I always appreciate those moments when in church I hear a prayer for people or families suffering from AIDS. Sometimes we knock general prayers, or prayers for wider issues, but perhaps we ought remember that in each of those prayers, someone is hearing "they just prayed for me". If something like that is so powerful, it stands as a glimpse at the great hope God provides for us when we long to be remembered by him. In Exodus we hear that God heard the voice of the people crying out (2.24). To be remembered by God is no small thing. Prayer is no small thing. To hear what God has then thus done and is doing, is no small thing.

Don't let the church be silent. She has far too great a voice to not speak up.