July 31, 2008

I arrived in Mexico City last night after a long day of travel from San Francisco.  The organizers of the conference offered a wonderful packet of useful tips to attendees.  It made the process of landing in a different country with a limited grasp of the language a lot easier.

I was immediately impressed to discover volunteers from the conference in easy-to-spot t-shirts moving through the crowds outside of customs and immigration.  They were very capable and supportive in the process of getting the proper taxi service lined up and making sure that we all knew where we were going for our next day’s activities.  This level of hospitality bears noticing and complimenting.  It made a huge difference.  I dropped off my belongings at my hotel and headed to the conference location to meet up with colleagues.

This is the 3rd Ecumenical Pre-Conference of the International AIDS Conference.  Details are listed below from the previous two events.

The 1st Ecumenical Pre-Conference happened in Bangkok in 2004.  It was the first time that the faith-based conference occurred for Muslims, Buddhists, and Christians concurrently before the International AIDS Conference.  300 people from more than 40 countries participated.

The 2nd Ecumenical Pre-Conference happened in Toronto in 2006.  These sessions drew 500 people from more than 35 countries.

This year the conference is packed with people from all over the word.  There are an estimated 450 people in attendance from all over the globe.

I was blessed to share part of the morning with Donald Messer, Executive Director of the Center for Church and Global AIDS and Metropolitan Community Churches partner at the Ecumenical Pre-Conference 2008. 

During the plenary session I also got to meet up with Rev. Paul Mokgethi, an MCC pastor from Johannesburg, South Africa and powerful activist in the African AIDS efforts.  He is attending as an active member of the African Network of Religious Leaders Living With and Personally Affected by HIV and AIDS (ANERELA+).  He will be one of the featured speakers at the official launch of the newly formed International Network of Religious Leaders Living With and Personally Affected by HIV and AIDS (INERELA+) which will take place on August 2, 2008.

In another session later in the day I met a member of the MCC in Copenhagen, Denmark who has been an HIV activist for 19 years and a member of MCC for 20 years. In that same session I had a wonderful reunion with a powerful and insightful colleague from MCCDC in Washington, DC who is serving on two coasts as an HIV activist and advocate.

Rev. Elder Darlene Garner wrote me last week to share the outstanding news that ICM Casa de Luz in Monterrey, Mexico is sending their pastor, Rev. Fernando Frontan, and seven members and partners of the church.  These are just a few of the people who have stepped up to take seriously the call to put our “Faith In Action Now”.  I ask you to pray for their safe travels and support during this time of powerful action and spiritual leadership.   

Spirituality Column #16 – www.TheBody.com
http://www.thebody.com/content/art5913.html

By Rev. A. Stephen Pieters

July 1996

I had bittersweet feelings as I returned from the XI International HIV/AIDS Conference in Vancouver. On the one hand, I witnessed a prayer being answered. I realized a mission fulfilled.

“Your mission,” my doctor told me after my AIDS diagnosis in 1984, “is to stay alive long enough for us to find a way to make the virus manageable, to make it stop destroying the immune system.” And I have lived to see that day. Many of us have lived to see that day. Triple combination therapies are working to bring HIV under control, allowing the immune system to restore to near normal levels.

On the other hand, people are still dying, and only 10% of the persons infected with HIV around the world will benefit from these advances, primarily because of economic inequities. Most people with HIV in the world will not be able to access the drugs that can make the infection “chronic and manageable” because they, or their government, will not be able to afford the $15 - 30,000 a year it will cost, in drugs alone, to keep each person with HIV alive. It bears repeating: only 10% of the people infected with HIV in the world will be able to be treated for HIV infection. For the other 90%, the infection will still rapidly progress to AIDS and death. Most of the people with HIV in the world live in countries where aspirin is hard to access, let alone crixivan.

HIV further illuminates all the justice issues of our globe: the widening gulf between the “have’s” and “have not’s” between rich and poor, between developed and developing countries, between men and women.

For me, this conference could have been called, “Global HIV: Hope and Injustice.” There are concrete reasons to have hope, and there are real reasons to be angry. There was genuinely good news, finally! And there was too much bad news, still.

On the good news side, researchers announced the resounding success of triple drug “cocktails”, combining two antivirals and a protease inhibitor (PI). In 90% of patients tested over six months, viral load has dropped to undetectable levels, and CD4 counts have risen to normal levels. This means that if you take these drugs with great discipline and compliance, you can live with HIV in your body for many, many years with no destruction of the immune system. It was noted again and again, that these are preliminary results, and long term effectiveness has not been established.

My eyes overflowed with tears as I realized that for many sisters and brothers, we are actually, really, honestly going to live normal life spans. I even heard Larry Kramer on the news speak optimistically about HIV for the first time.

And there are countries where HIV education and prevention is working. In countries where frank sex education is allowed, the rate of transmission and the percentage of adults who are infected are as low as in Denmark, with 0.1% of its adult population living with HIV, contrasted with Uganda, where 50% of all adults live and die with HIV. Thailand, Pakistan, Australia and Brazil were all cited as countries where successful risk reduction education has happened, and rates are actually declining in some populations in those countries.

On the flip side, the inaccessibility of treatments is just one injustice. In most of the world, HIV is a “family disease,” and there are increasing hoards of uninfected orphaned children, who have lost not only their parents, but all their brothers and sisters. There are few, if any, provisions for these orphans, and they suffer the stigma of being known as “AIDS orphans.” Not enough is being done to help them.

In Zambia, one out of five women are infected with HIV before they reach the age of 20. Girls leave their birth families at puberty, and “sugar daddies” adopt them, give them HIV, then throw them out, blaming them for bringing HIV into the house. It can take 3 days to see a doctor, if you live where there are doctors. The woman who gave this particular report thanked the conference for the scholarship which brought her to Vancouver, but demonstrated the economic inequities of this world by pointing out that the registration (around $1,000) would pay her rent for three years, and the plane fare (one can only guess how much that was) would feed her five children into adulthood.

A man from India told me that the government there is not motivated to do prevention education, because they see HIV as the answer to their population problem. Indeed, the country with the most persons with HIV in the world today is India. And even efforts that have been made have had little impact, because Indian men consider homosex to be “mischief” rather than sex, so why should they worry about STD’s like HIV? Sexual activity with men is not sex. So how could someone get a sexually transmitted disease? And why would their wives or children be at risk from their “mischief”

Several speakers addressed the urgent need to empower women to control their own bodies, to be able to protect themselves from HIV and other STD’s. We were told that the technology will be in place by the year 2,000 for women to be able to protect themselves without their partner’s knowledge, and still allow for conception, by using microbicides. The female condom is already available in many areas, of course. Indeed, the “Reality Condom” booth was a very popular exhibit at the conference.

The female condom can also be used by gay men to protect ourselves during anal intercourse, although the FDA will not allow the testing necessary to license it for that use, or even to issue instructions. I asked the exhibitor about this, and she said the FDA wouldn’t allow them to do testing for use in anal sex, and then she reached under the table and handed me a booklet with fully illustrated instructions.

The U.S. came under fire for a number of injustices that our government perpetrates. For example, numerous speakers read a litany of some of the countries who will not allow HIV positive travelers to enter their borders: Russia, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. It was chilling to hear my country included with the others who have restrictive immigration laws.

The U.S. was also repeatedly chastised for our failures in HIV prevention efforts. It has been clearly demonstrated in countries like Pakistan, Thailand, Australia, and Brazil that regular, blunt and frank education on reducing risk in sexual activity reduces STD and HIV transmission rates. Furthermore, there is now proof that needle exchange programs work in dramatically reducing transmission rates, with no increase in drug use. But the U.S. government continues to deny the reality of these studies, and so our transmission rate continues to climb.

It’s clear that we’ve turned a corner in treating HIV, and yet there are so many who didn’t live to see it happen. I have to qualify every shred of hope now with the reality of the justice issues, the access issues, and the grief issues. I can’t get away from it after being at this conference. At the same time that I was crying with joy because I lived to hear the announcement I prayed for, I cried with grief for Fitz, and John, and George, and Nancy, and Linda, and Herbert, and Ron, and on and on, because they didn’t.

As if to remind me that we cannot be complacent with the good news, I got back just in time for the deaths of three important people in my life. One of them was Connie Norman, who died July 14. She was a transgendered AIDS diva/warrior, with an angry column (”Tribal Writes”) in a popular gay paper in Southern California (Update), and an angry radio talk show. She was a leader of ACT UP LA, and was involved in most everything that went down politically around AIDS in LA since the beginning. I remember being on some commissions with her back in the mid-80’s, and being quite in awe. She always had a kind of contempt for me… I just wasn’t angry enough.

Then she came live at the hospice, and I became her chaplain. She began to see my function in life, and she helped me to understand the importance of my own rage about AIDS.

When she died right after the AIDS Conference, it was almost as if there was a transfer of anger from her to me, that I hope I can use positively. I’ve heard the news I’ve been waiting to hear for years, and it doesn’t bring back all the people this virus has already murdered. It sure didn’t do Connie any good. These new advances do not correct the human rights violations that are being perpetrated against women, and the poor, and the sick. The new drug cocktails won’t save the lives of more than 1 in 10 of those who have the virus. They don’t empower women to control their bodies and their lives. They don’t prevent pharmaceutical bureaucrats from making huge fortunes by saving the lives of the rich, and damning whole families of poor people to death.

Yes, it’s become chronic and manageable for those of us privileged enough to be in the top ten percentile (and there are plenty of folks with HIV in the U.S. who will not be in that top percentile) but what good does it do when it is still spreading like wildfire, and it will still kill 90% of the people it infects? We’ve got to eradicate the virus, or it will continue to mow down the population by millions.

So what do we do? We take action. Hopelessness feeds on helplessness. Hope comes alive when we start doing something. And we must live with hope as we work for justice. We will create hope for ourselves and for all those affected and infected when we take the actions necessary to bring justice to this pandemic.

Every person of faith is called to address justice issues. As Christians, Jesus clearly calls us to demand justice. Demand a repeal to the restrictive immigration laws in the U.S. and other countries. Demand that governments worldwide empower women to control their own STD prevention. Demand that governments worldwide heavily tax the pharmaceutical companies on their profits, to begin to pay for drug access in poor countries. Demand that your government support and fund more effective prevention education. We must continue to educate and to motivate everyone we can to protect themselves from further infections. We must continue to care for the sick and dying.

If you’re at risk for HIV, get tested. It can be treated now.

If you’re infected, follow your doctor’s orders religiously! Your success with these drugs has a direct relationship with how well you follow the instructions on the bottle.

Thank God we’ve found a way to control HIV. At last, we have really good news from the medical world.

At the same time, we cannot forget that HIV/AIDS throws a spotlight on all the injustices of this world. For 9 out of 10 persons with HIV in the world, being infected with HIV still has a pretty hopeless outlook.

And that’s why we have to take action. That’s where we’ll find hope. That’s where we’ll find God.

�

(Originally Published at http://www.religion-online.org, 1988)

by Kittredge Cherry and James Mitulski

This article appeared in the Christian Century, January 27, 1988, p. 85. Copyright by the Christian Century Foundation and used by permission. Current articles and subscription information can be found at www.christiancentury.org. This material was prepared for Religion Online by Ted & Winnie Brock.

______________________________________________________

“Heaven has as much to do with life before death as with life after death.” Steven Clover was able to voice that vision in the last months before he died of AIDS, as his body fought off rare forms of cancer, pneumonia and other disease. Once dapper and golden-haired, he was the essence of a refined gentleman, the sort who might own a couple of jewelry stores in Boston — which he did. He also served as an assistant pastor of a black church, Union Baptist Church in Cambridge. He left all that behind in August 1986 to attend Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley and Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco (MCC-SF) , a predominantly white church in a denomination that ministers to the lesbian and gay community.

In October of that year he was diagnosed with AIDS, and as Christmas approached he was hospitalized. Thirty children from a black Baptist church in San Francisco showed up at the hospital to sing carols for Clover and other people with AIDS (commonly referred to as PWAs). In the ensuing months he was able to bring together the congregations of Double Rock Baptist Church, which condemns homosexuality as a sin, and MCC-SF, which preaches that homosexuality is a gift from God. These seemingly irreconcilable churches sponsored events together, including a gospel music concert that raised more than $1 ,000 for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation Food Bank in July 1987. Clover died a month later.

Clover’s church is our church, MCCSF, which is encircled by San Francisco’s biggest gay and lesbian neighborhood. And in many ways, Clover’s story is our story. What he and others have experienced individually, we have undergone and still undergo as an institution. We believe that our drama is having an impact on the larger body of the whole Christian community, especially churches whose members include parents, relatives and friends of PWAs.

Currently, we know of 30 congregants who have AIDS, and the number threatens to keep rising. About two-thirds of the men in the congregation are “antibody positive,” a sign that they have been in contact with the AIDS virus. Every week our worship service attracts at least one person who was just diagnosed. Death also attends weekly — the death of a member or a member’s friend. Moreover, we perform several memorial services each month for people with AIDS who have never set foot in our church. Their friends and relatives, who come from churches all across America, turn to us because they know we will welcome them, honor gay relationships, and provide acceptance that they cannot expect from most mainline churches.

Just as our members with AIDS suffer discrimination in housing, employment and medical care, our church suffers anti-AIDS discrimination. For example, a Roman Catholic retreat center said we could not use its facility unless we informed other groups that people with AIDS would be there. We regard this as denying us equal access. For the retreat center, the bottom line was the presence of PWAs in our group. “And what about the bathrooms?” the center coordinator persisted, revealing her ignorance of how AIDS is spread.

We have come to understand ourselves as a church with AIDS. This doesn’t mean that our church will soon be dead and gone. No, in fact it means that we live more deeply. The whole gay male community is undergoing a parallel transformation. A lifestyle characterized by carefree promiscuity has given way to dating and friendship. Many people are seeking intimacy and spirituality, which has had the effect of a revival. Thus, despite the deaths of many members, our membership has actually grown by a third in the past year.

The Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches (UFMCC) was founded in Los Angeles in 1968 by Troy Perry, a former Pentecostal minister who aimed to spread the new gospel that God loves gays and lesbians. “All we had time to do was to celebrate and to grow,” recalled Howard Wells, who founded MCC-SF in 1969. Grow we did: today there are more than 30,000 MCC members in more than 200 churches worldwide. But our innocent sense of celebration has died of AIDS. Wells, himself a PWA, says we now live with the end in sight, a state, he calls “eschatological living.”

“The specter of AIDS catapults us into accelerated spiritual growth — or toward early death — and it all depends on the model of eschatological living we choose to follow,” he said. On good days, being a church with AIDS helps us to see how fragile and important every moment is. We rediscover images — such as heaven — that we used to dismiss as anachronistic or overly sentimental. We claim for, ourselves the model known in Scripture as “the realm of God,” which Wells defines “an alternative way of living.”

It’s not easy. Institutionally, we suffer the stages of grief on a grand scale, ricocheting through denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Long-range planning is difficult for the church, just as it is for people with AIDS, who are overwhelmed by having to make plans about wills, medical care and finances. Yet never has planning been more crucial. Promoting church growth feels almost macabre, but without it we cannot meet the challenges ahead.

Sunday worship is marked by tears, laughter and unforgettable singing. One of our favorite hymns was written by UFMCC members Jack St. John and David Pelletier in 1980, before we were aware of AIDS: “We are the church alive, the body must be healed; where strife has bruised and battered us, God’s wholeness is revealed.” Like Clover, we find that our struggle with AIDS. has brought us insights into what it means to build heaven into our everyday lives, to try to realize the realm of heaven here and now.

Our most intimate, intense worship service is the monthly AIDS healing service, at which 15 to 20 people affected by AIDS request and receive laying-on-of-hands prayer from each other. To listen to their stories is to enter into the enormity that is AIDS: A doctor sobs over his inability to heal his best friend. Someone who recently tested antibody-positive confesses that his anger has separated him from his friends and his God. A withered man prays simply for an appetite. Another person with AIDS proudly proclaims he is “living with AIDS, not dying of it. A nurse who has accidentally jabbed herself with an AIDS contaminated needle says she feels numb now that ten of her co-workers have died of AIDS. We also hold special services, such as AIDS prayer vigils and the blessing of banners for the NAMES Project quilt that was part of the Lesbian and Gay Rights March on Washington last October. The quilt will be touring 25 U.S. cities later this year.

In a sense, all of our worship services are AIDS healing services. Every Sunday we provide a gay-affirming environment where Scripture is related to lesbian and gay experience and same-sex pairs can receive, as a couple. communion and laying-on-of-hands prayer. Our very existence challenges the often-held Christian position that AIDS is God’s punishment for the sin of homosexuality, a position that breeds a self-hatred that many of us still struggle to overcome. Recently a young man confessed to the pastor before church that, under parental pressure he had vowed sexual abstinance if God would cure him of AIDS — a typical response and one that reveals the heart of gay self-hatred.

Community prayer is the phase of Sunday worship when the impact of AIDS is most tangible. We join hands and share words and phrases that crystallize our concerns and joys. Every month we hear more petitions for “my friend who was just diagnosed” or “my lover in the hospital” or “more government funding for AIDS research” or “help with my diagnosis.”

Peer support groups provide a spiritual context for people to discuss what they have in common — in this case, a life-threatening illness, or being “antibody positive” or being a caregiver to a person with AIDS. In addition to these groups that are obviously related to AIDS, our men’s retreats and Men Together discussion/worship series approach the subject indirectly by encouraging men to make and deepen friendships away from bars, the traditional gay male meeting ground. All of these become opportunities for dealing with AIDS-related grief. For example, at the spring 1987 retreat, men wrote, read and discussed their experiences of touching other men. One of the readings discussed was this:

Scott and I spent hard and precious times together from the time he was diagnosed with AIDS in 1983 until he died in 1984. . .I was at work one day — my great escape from the illness was work — when I suddenly felt the need to be at home. . . I lay with Scott, all the while telling him how much I loved him. I mentioned every person I could think of and made sure he heard that they loved him as well. Scott’s labored breathing continued with long lapses between breaths. Each lapse, I thought, would be his last. At 4:42, Scott’s breathing stopped and never began again. I held him in my arms and softly told him again and again how precious he was. We spent 45 minutes alone, with Scott in my arms for the last time. His body grew cold before I was finally able to release my hold of him. That most precious touch was to be our last.

People turn to us for counseling at every stage of the AIDS crisis. Most of this is handled by clergy with support from student clergy and the AIDS Ministry Team. Touching is one of the most important ingredients in all AIDS counseling. Although AIDS cannot be spread through casual contact, people with AIDS tend to be treated as untouchables, which adds to their pain.

A congregant’s first AIDS-related counseling often revolves around being tested for AIDS antibodies; a positive result means people can transmit the AIDS virus and may develop AIDS themselves. Just deciding to take the test is excruciating. Even those who imagined they were prepared to face a positive result are often devastated by feelings of grief, guilt and betrayal when the verdict is presented.

AIDS-related counseling also means providing home and hospital visitation, funerals, memorial services and bereavement support. An unforgettable example occurred in summer 1987 when one of us visited an AIDS hospice to take communion to a member, his parents visiting from the East Coast and a few close friends. The man, obviously near death, urged everyone to pray not just for him but for their own needs — a reversal of the angry response he expressed earlier in his illness. “I can see heaven,” he told them. “It’s a beautiful place, the place you’ve always wanted to go to, and anyone who wants to can go there.” The boundaries of heaven and earth seemed to shift that afternoon, so that they no longer corresponded to birth and death; it felt possible to reach into the skies and tug heaven into the present. Death became “a foretaste of the feast to come.”

The man died a few hours later. His mother spoke at his memorial service, with tears in her eyes: “He was the best son a mother could ever have.” But she and her husband dreaded going back to their home church, being reluctant to tell anyone in their United Methodist congregation that their son had died of AIDS. They didn’t think anyone there would understand.

Another set of parents, also United Methodists, asked one of us to come to their son’s hospital bedside to join them in prayer. There the mother asked, “Why are people so mean?” She was referring to unsympathetic church members back home. The next question was even harder: Was it OK to pray for their comatose son to die soon? The whole church is coming to see that physical death is not necessarily something to avoid; it can even mean healing.

MCC-SF also strives to educate people outside the gay and lesbian community about AIDS, through letter-writing campaigns, public presentations and workshops on AIDS, which have been given in a variety of settings, including the San Francisco AIDS Interfaith Conference, the United Methodist Consultation on AIDS Ministries, the Presbyterian Ministers Association, and Pacific School of Religion’s AIDS Awareness Week. In addition, MCC-SF members enrolled at Pacific School of Religion continually pressure the seminary to live up to its policy of fair treatment for students with AIDS. Joint activities with Double Rock Baptist Church have been educational, too. While we have confronted our racism, the Baptists have had to surmount unfounded fears about catching AIDS. One Double Rock usher described holding hands with gay people during prayer time as “the most growing I have ever done.”

In our church, AIDS has also brought reconciliation between the sexes, a rift that has been especially deep between lesbians and gay men. Like other women, lesbians face economic disadvantages. But in the case of lesbians, their resulting anger at men is untempered by romantic involvement with the opposite sex. Most lesbian feminists feel it is a waste of energy to spend it in the traditional female role of helping men, their oppressors. However, that feeling doesn’t prevail in our church. When the topic of lesbians ministering to men with AIDS came up during a reception the women of our church held for Karen Ziegler, pastor of the Metropolitan Community Church in New York, Ziegler responded this way: “I don’t feel like I’m sacrificing — I receive energy by ministering to men with AIDS.” She told us how “some men I love very much — my friends David and Tim — began to die of AIDS. I had the experience of coming closer than I ever had come to a man before. David and then Tim opened a door to their souls in a way that I had never experienced before and my heart has been opened in a way it never was before, too. We’re all experiencing that transformation together.”

We have also connected with Congregation Shahar Zahav, a Reform synagogue with a lesbian and gay congregation, located a few blocks from our church. Together we sponsored a reading by award-winning lesbian poet Adrienne Rich. That evening Rich told us, “Lesbians and gay men have confronted mortality. We have mourned our friends and lovers together and we have stitched an extraordinary quilt of memory together . . . I think that the coming together of Jewish and Christian, lesbian and gay and straight congregants is an important part of this. I also think that the coming together those of us who are non-congregants with you is very important.”

Making this kind of connection — between Jew and Christian, female and male, gay and straight, black and white, parent and child — is what eschatological living is all about. With the end in sight, we do more to savor and value life, including the people we once viewed as hopelessly different from ourselves. As a church with AIDS, we try to embody eschatological living. AIDS is killing us at the same time that it heals us.

This must be the vision Steven Clover was talking about when he told us, “Heaven has as much to do with life before death as with life after death.”

And it must be the vision Rich meant to convey when she wrote the poem that has become a kind of creed for our church:

My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.

This must be what Jesus meant when he said, “Behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you.”

�

By (Rev. Elder) Ken Martin
Pastor, MCC in the Valley
June/July 1983

First Published in Journey (a magazine of the UFMCC General Conference) 

First, a very close friend, who is also a clergyperson in UFMCC, called to tell me he had been given a “preliminary diagnosis of AIDS.” Less than two weeks later I conducted the funeral service of a 29 year old victim of AIDS.  His family chose not to even acknowledge the service.  Two days later an active member of our church came into my office to tell me he had AIDS.  On Easter Sunday a long time friend, and partner in ministry at Good Shepherd Parish MCC in Chicago, came to me and said, “I just came to say ‘good-bye’ and tell you ‘I love you.’”  Three weeks later he was dead of AIDS.  I participated in his funeral service at MCCLA.   

What do we in UFMCC say in response to this threat and horror called AIDS?  In addition to keeping ourselves informed regarding the information from the Center for Disease Control, other research programs, the sensitivity and awareness of medical professionals in our respective areas, and the local and national AIDS support groups within our own communities, should we as a unique and spiritual body begin formulating an equally unique and spiritual response?  I believe the answer is yes.  As a people whose every action and decision must be guided by the Good News that God was present in Jesus Christ and continues that presence with us through the Holy Spirit, we must bring the same innovative and creative energy to this issue that we are attempting to bring to so many others with which we are faced. 

I would like for the remainder of this article to be seen as nothing more than a beginning.  The four points of departure which I shall discuss are, to me, crucial.  However, they are in no way exhaustive.  I invite other persons within UFMCC to revise and augment them.  Seeing this, therefore, as the beginning of a process, I would like to suggest that we internalize and actualize at least the following four awarenesses in our response.  

First, we must remain a sex-positive people. 

AIDS VICTIM:  “I should have known that God would punish me for having too much fun.”

One of the most tragic mistakes we could make would be to become a sex-negative people, even inadvertently.  Both in language and attitude we must avoid any indication that AIDS is in any way a “plague” or “punishment” being visited upon us because of our sexuality.  Instead, it is a time for an intense and personal evaluation, on the part of Gay males, of our sexual patterns, and caution and restraint in activities known to put one at increased risk. 

Two thousand years of ignorance, fear, guilt, and shame regarding human sexuality (to say nothing of homosexuality) is just beginning to be reversed within Christian thought, writings and practice.  I believe that the existence and witness of UGMCC has been an inextricable factor in this reversal.  To abdicate that influence now, an influence I God has clearly called us to, would constitute sin on our parts.

Second, we must create spiritual support systems for victims, spouses, families and friends.  

SPOUSE OF AIDS VICTIM: “Our friends were afraid to come to the hospital.  Toward the end, they wouldn’t even come to the house.  They didn’t even call but I think that was because they felt guilty.” 

The Ministerial Staff of our church has notified local media and AIDS support groups that we are available for visits and counseling to AIDS victims, spouses and families.  One of the most tragic things surrounding this illness is the designation of the AIDS victim as a “contemporary leper.”  Even professional health workers have expressed their apprehension at dealing with those who have AIDS.  I believe our model for ministry here is Francesco Bernadoni, later known as St. Francis of Assisi.  Born into a wealthy family aristocratic family, Francis confessed a repugnance and revulsion for lepers.  After a profound personal Christian faith commitment, Francis encountered a leper on the road outside Assisi.  He dismounted his horse, threw his coat over the leper, kissed him and began to ride away.  When he looked back there was no one there.  To his death, Francis believed that he had encountered Christ.  (Hebrews 13:2)

For the families and friends of many persons, a diagnosis of AIDS becomes an unprepared-for disclosure of sexual orientation.  While responses are most often uninformed and frequently cruel, they are eventually Biblical and spiritual in nature.  OPPORTUNITY FOR MINISTRY!  Don’t miss it. 

Third, we must provide financial support for AIDS research.   

Dr. Joel Weisman:  “How many people have to die before there’s an all-out effort?”

Several governmental health officials have now acknowledged that their response to AIDS has been “too little and too late.”  Some have even acknowledged the homophobic basis for this lack of action.  We know that while fewer persons died of “Legionnaire’s Disease” or “Toxic Shock Syndrome” (which in no way diminishes the severity of these or the appropriateness of response to them) both public concern and research appropriations were much more rapidly forthcoming.  Therefore, we must remain persistently active.  First, we must continue to insist upon large single grants from public and private sources, and second, we must mobilize every organization and institution within our Gay and Lesbian communities to raise funds. 

Fourth, we must seek a standard by which to evaluate our sexual behavior during and after this crisis.   

Parishioner to Pastor:  “Please tell me what is OK and what’s not OK for me to do sexually.” 

Talking about sex is not easy for most of us.  When we try to talk about it in the context of our understanding of Christian responsibility and freedom it usually becomes even more difficult.  Even after two years of doctoral study in human sexuality I usually find that I am eventually ask more questions than I am prepared to answer!  However, I have been able to settle upon three certainties which are, as of yet, unshakable to me.  First, being sexual is good and sex is fun.  Second, sex is not just a biological instinct in women and men.  It is a gift, a part of our createdness as the children of God.  It is not just procreative, it is creative.  It is a serious and wonderful part of us, and therefore involves responsibility and must be taken seriously.  Third, genital sexuality, i.e. sex acts, are, in and of themselves, morally neutral: they are good or bad/right or wrong/moral or immoral according to the quality of the experience.  So, even though it is the right thing I am often asked to do, I refuse to create lists of “dos and don’ts, cans and cant’s, shoulds and should nots, etc.” That has been done by almost every denomination and tradition within Christendom.  And, the results have never been any too positive for us or many others!

Realizing then that there is no easy answer, it there any scriptural standard for us?  Is there a guideline, a test by which we may consistently evaluate our sexual behavior?  I believe there is and I believe it is found in Galatians 5:13: 

“…you were called, as you know, to liberty; but be careful, or this liberty will provide an opening for self-indulgence.  Serve one another, rather, in works of love, since the whole of the Law is summarized in a single command: Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Within Christianity, then, the new principle which determines everything – including our sexual behavior – is love.  Can our sexual behavior submit to the test of love? 

We are free (“at liberty”) to acknowledge and explore our sexuality.  We are free from graceless moralism, codified sexual ethics, and antiquated myths.  We are not free to minimize or disregard our sexuality is a wonder-full part of ourselves.  It has inordinate constructive potential and considerable destructive potential.  What we are free to do is love:  submit our every action and expression to the test of love. 

Perhaps we, more than many, realize that we have been created by Love, that we have been sought and called out by Jesus Christ and empowered to live in Love.  When our actions as sexual beings cannot submit to the test of love we know that God is more concerned about us that what we do.  God is more concerned about the estrangement, fear, frustration, anxiety, and especially the loneliness that leads to an unloving sexual encounter that what may happen afterwards. 

While I am in no way trying to say that AIDS is the consequence of encounters which cannot submit to the test of love, I am trying to take seriously the preponderance of research which indicates that those who are most at risk are those who are “sexually intimate with many partners.”  I am also taking the opportunity – which many have expressed as long overdue – to call for a reevaluation of sexual patterning which may characterize a significant portion of the Gay male community. 

AIDS and its related problems and issues is a serious concern which is now affecting populations other than just Gay males.  The approach I have attempted to outline here is just a beginning for all of us who believe that the Gospel calls us to be present whenever the quality of life is at issue for any person.

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