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.
This sermon was delivered at Yale Divinity School in 2020 for the class Sacred Moments in African-American Preaching. I begin with a simple observation. Of the four canonical gospels, Matthew is the only one that ends with the words of Jesus. Mark, Luke, and John all end in the narrator’s voice, but Matthew closes with the words of Jesus. Mark ends at the tomb, with the women fleeing in terror and amazement. Luke ends with the disciples in Jerusalem, praising at the temple. John ends on the shore of the Sea of Tiberias, with a dialogue between Jesus and Peter. And here Matthew ends with the disciples in Galilee, meeting Jesus at the mountain where he had directed them. Matthew gives Jesus the last word. But before we get to those last words, there are three other words in this passage that I call to our attention because I find them astonishing. Let me read verse 17 once more. “When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some do...
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.