World AIDS Day Reflection.

So yesterday, if you didn't know, was World AIDS Day. The day is a wonderful way to prayerfully care for those in our global community that have been stricken with this pervasive disease. Yes, everyday we should pray and care for these people but World AIDS Day allows us to really spend time talking about an issue that is taboo and rather hidden typically. In fact, the World AIDS Day campaign is taking the initiative to de- stigmatize this disease so we may continue to openly educate and hopefully eradicate the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
KU's Canterbury House opened their chapel doors to their campus and community to gather for a prayer service yesterday. The intern at KU, Mary Rose Linker, had this to say during her sermon...

"The Body of Christ has AIDS” is what the Anglican church in Ireland calls its AIDS response effort. The Body of Christ has AIDS calls us to the reality that AIDS is not just “their” problem, whoever they are. AIDS is our problem, mine and yours, whether we are infected with the HIV virus or not. AIDS belongs to all of us. A full 5% of the population of Sub-Saharan Africa in HIV-positive, and that is not just “theirs”; it's ours, because we are all part of the body of Christ. And I hope we all understand that the real victims of AIDS are women, who are infected at truly alarming rates, and children who are often born infected and whether or not they actually have the disease are often orphaned by HIV-positive mothers.

We are called into unity and communion with the world, not just in times of celebration but in times of deep sorrow and pain. In the United States, because we can speak more freely about sex, because we are aware and educated, we can prevent infection. We can prevent mother to child transmission. In the United States, 90-95% of HIV-infected mothers can have children without passing it onto them, and in fact, the opposite is true in Africa, where an infected mother has a 95% chance of passing the virus onto her unborn child, because she cannot get the drugs necessary to treat her own infection and because, often, she does not know that she even has it.

Chapter 64 of Isaiah is clearly a lament. Verse 6 is uniquely appropriate to the day: We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like an empty cloth. We all fade like a leaf... And then in verse 8, Isaiah gives us all hope: Yet, O Lord, you are our father; we are the clay and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand. Isaiah is telling us what we all know: we are all the children of God, we are all part of the problem, we can all be part of the solution. We all have AIDS.

In our gospel reading, Jesus heals the lepers. Today, AIDS is often equated with leprosy in Biblical times. I imagine that our AIDS patients, especially when the disease has progressed, are treated very much like those lepers. To this day, AIDS patients are completely separated from other patients in many places, and having AIDS has the same stigma. Someone with AIDS must have deserved it in some way, someone with AIDS is unclean, and even in our educated culture there are people who say that AIDS is divine retribution, that God is punishing them. People in Biblical times treated the lepers in much the same way, but not Jesus. This passage remind us that disease is NEVER divine retribution, and that, as Jesus healed the lepers, so the body of Christ can also be healed. As a body, we have all become like one who is unclean, and we must all heal each other.

So, what do we do? We speak. Open your mouth. Youth are on track to be the fastest growing population of HIV-infected people world-wide and in the United States. Before their lives even get started, they have to deal with something that we hardly speak about. The more we talk about it, the more we educate each other and our friends, the more we can do to prevent it in the people we know and love the most.

And we pray. Prayer is underused and underestimated, and if we are Christians, it is possibly the most powerful force we have access to. And we don't just pray one day a year.

We are people of hope, and we are people of the resurrection. As we live through the global horror that is the AIDS pandemic, we know -- because God is faithful, even when we aren't -- that death is not the final word. Amen.

Awesome, right? right. So speak. and if you are so inclined...walk! This Sunday in fact! The KU Canterbury House is sponsoring a TakeTheWalk event (takethewalk.net) in Lawrence this Sunday. Check out the facebook page here and then join us at 1:30 at the South Park Gazebo!!