Purely by coincidence, this morning I came across two stories concerning churches and their handling of parishioners who have HIV or AIDS. The first concerns a pastor in a rural South Carolina town with a disproportionately high population of people with HIV or AIDS:
Pastor fights HIV stigma in Southern town
I can only imagine the stigma that people with HIV or AIDS face in the rural Deep South, people like Tommy Terry, who is quoted in the article.
Tommy Terry has a love/hate relationship with religion and the pastors who preach it in Dorchester County. A faithful man, he attends Byrth's HIV/AIDS meetings as a tribute to his partner, Michael, who died in 2005.
The couple spent 10 years together. Terry could do nothing as he watched Michael fade away, losing weight and friends at an equal rate.
Sitting on the concrete porch outside the Bibleway Holiness Church, Terry struggles to keep tears from falling as he talks about the last few months of Michael's life. Terry called pastors from around the county to come pray at Michael's side in the hospital. They all refused.
"When somebody has AIDS, they just walk away from you," Terry says in his gentle drawl. "They don't want nothing to do with you."
If you can't minister to "the least of these," as Christ did, if you can't minister to the sick, as Christ did, you have no business calling yourself a minister.
Then there's this:
It's a fine line for Byrth, who avoids preaching outright to those she helps but won't shy away from provocative Scripture in the pulpit. She disagrees with the lifestyle, she says, not the person.
I don't agree with Rev. Byrth's characterization of homosexuality as a "lifestyle," which implies that one's sexuality is somehow distinct from one's person. Sexuality simply doesn't work that way. Drawing this distinction between lifestyle and person is a convenient device that allows Christians to claim to hate "the sin" but still love "the sinner," which is usually complete BS. Do they ever claim to hate any other sin? "Fred, I really hate the way you cheat on your wife, but I still love you." The next time I hear such a claim will be the first.
That being said, I admire Rev. Byrth for ministering to people with HIV/AIDS despite facing the scorn of others in her community. But it's not as though she's doing anything extraordinary. She's a pastor. She's supposed to minister to the sick. And yet CNN has hers as the lead story on their Web site, as if it is extraordinary news. That actually saddens me for what it implies about what many people must think of the church.
The second story is much more disturbing and is about a group of churches in England and Scotland that attempted to spiritually heal parishioners with HIV or AIDS and then compelled them to stop taking their medications:
Six HIV patients die after alleged spiritual healing
There is no defense for such churches.
The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis is not among my favorite books, but in it he does highlight one eternal truth: some people prefer a self-inflicted, self-contained misery to an experience of grace. As an extremely brief synopsis, the main character is taken on an eschatological bus ride, during which he meets many fellow travelers, each of whom carries a perpetual cloud of cantankerousness over themselves. The bus departs from a land of dreary grays and eventually arrives at what is basically the Microsoft Windows wallpaper--rolling hills, green fields, blue skies--rich colors and lush scenery all around. Despite the improvement in their surroundings, his fellow travelers continue to find things to complain about. In fact, their bodies cannot physically adjust to the beauty of their new surroundings. While wandering through the greenery they discover that they are, in fact, ghosts who lack corporeal bodies. They cannot acclimate to the weightiness, the substantiveness of this new rea...
Tough stuff!
ReplyDeleteYesterday, as I was learning the new liturgy (along with my dorm mates), I thought about you. I just want to say, I truly appreciate the catholic mass, and I look forward to seeing you again in the winter.