Scripture: Isaiah 64:1-12
World AIDS Day takes place each year on December 1, has taken place on December 1 each year since 1988. This year because of where Christmas falls, December 1 is also for Christians the first Sunday in Advent.
World AIDS Day of course is not a religious observance, has nothing to do with Advent or Christianity. To the contrary World AIDS Day is a reminder, a painful reminder, that at some levels of our lives we are just human—not Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, or Muslim. HIV does not ask what beliefs we hold or what holidays we observe before wreaking havoc on human bodies. It does not devastate Christians less than it does people of other faiths. It cuts across the separateness of our religious lives in brutal mockery of the love that we wish would transcend those boundaries.
But while World AIDS Day is not a religious occasion, it does come face to face with the beginning of Advent this year. I wanted to somehow observe both these days today. I decided that I would do that not just by making mention of World AIDS Day and including those concerns in our prayers, but by seeing what it is, if anything, World AIDS Day may suggest to us as we begin our season of Advent.
For one thing World AIDS Day may help us keep Advent from becoming too religious. There’s been a lot of talk, as you know, about putting Christ back in Christmas and remembering “whose birthday it is, anyway” and in general trying to recover the spiritual meaning of Christmas amid all the crass commercialism and all the secular, sentimental, and superficial garbage that surrounds our celebrations. That’s all well and good. And necessary. I fully support all our efforts to combat commercialism. And I’m not against having Christ at the center of Christmas—as long as we don’t turn this whole thing into something spiritual and otherworldly, or just plain vague.
Advent is supposedly a time to prepare and wait. The traditional understanding I suppose would have us be preparing by reflecting on the Biblical stories of Christ’s birth, on the beautiful hopes and visions of the Hebrew scriptures, reflect on our need for a savior, on our need of being saved, on our need of God coming among us, and if we take time and make space in our lives to duly understand and appreciate such things, then we will be ready to receive the gift of God’s son, properly celebrate the gift of God’s son, renew our faith in the messiah whose birth we celebrate. We are waiting and preparing in other words for Jesus. We are engaging in our yearly ritual of faith renewal, recalling, we hope, not so much the true meaning of Christmas but the true meaning of our lives, with Jesus somehow at the center, and resisting not the commercialization of Christmas but the trivialization of our lives.
As I say that’s all well and good. But while we wait and prepare for Jesus, talk about Jesus, talk about the need to talk about Jesus, remind ourselves that Jesus is the reason for the season, meanwhile there are people who are waiting, not for Jesus, but for a cure for AIDS. Forty million people reportedly who are living with AIDS, plus uncounted other people. Mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, sons and daughters of those 40 million plus uncounted others, waiting for a cure for AIDS. Whole communities devastated by the illness and by people who cannot work and need to be cared for and cannot help produce food for the community, leaving children untended and eventually orphaned. There is nothing vague, nothing otherworldly, nothing, if I may say it this way, religious about that. This is where World AIDS Day comes in to keep us from being too religious.
Religion is fine, talking about Jesus is fine, as long as it is not separate from, as long as it does not distract us from, talking about the concrete down-to-earth, human things we find ourselves actually waiting, hoping, and praying for. Jesus, I believe, would not have us just be waiting for Jesus. World AIDS Day may help to keep us honest about this. Jesus would have us wait, Jesus would be with us as we wait, for a cure or a vaccine for AIDS, and for cancers, and for Alzheimer’s. Jesus would have us wait, would be with us as we wait, for word about the job, the operation, the result of the tests. Jesus would have us wait, would be with us as we wait, for someone we care about to stop drinking, or to get out of an abusive relationship, or find some source of joy in their life. Jesus would have us wait, would be with us as we wait, for a peacemaking miracle to happen in the Middle East. There are lots of very earthly things to wait and hope and pray for. Advent is not all about Jesus. Keep the waiting concrete. There are very specific, human things we wait and pray for and it is a holy waiting that we do, quite as much, more than as much as any waiting for Jesus that we might do.
World AIDS Day is also meant, as I understand it, to bring the enormous, horrifying reality of AIDS to the front of our consciousness and not let it be simply there as part of the scenery of our lives that we learn to live with and implicitly at least accept. World AIDS Day says that AIDS is not under control, not cured, and not acceptable. Advent is not, of course, the same thing as the Christmas season, and the point is not the good cheer nor even the well-meaning generosity that we can too easily associate with the Christmas season. It is about the unredeemed nature of our world and our unwillingness to resign ourselves to it. Advent calls on us to call upon God to intervene. “O that You would rend the heavens and come down.” It also calls on us to call upon ourselves, not to make our peace with realities such as AIDS.
And this is a spiritual matter. We do this, we make our peace with too many things, not because we are bad and don’t care, but because we are hopeless, too easily convinced of our own powerlessness, too eager for the inner peacefulness that seems so desirable, and too willing to assign too many things to the catalogue of “things we cannot change.” You know the Serenity Prayer: “God, give me the willingness to change the things that can be changed, the grace to accept the things that cannot be changed, and the wisdom to know the difference.” We accept too many things too easily as things that cannot be changed. In asking us not to accept AIDS as something that cannot be changed, World AIDS Day asks us to be spiritually in a state of discontent in relation to the world we live in. It is the spiritual state of Advent as well.
World AIDS Day also challenges us to acknowledge that the world we live in is a whole world, which is, of course, what we are wanting to affirm in our ways of decorating and structuring our Advent observances this year. It is what David and Padma have helped us to do this morning and what others will help us to do in weeks to come as we lift up some small portion of a reality from other places in the world to remind us that our realities are not the only realities. The fact that there are fewer reported new cases of AIDS in the United States and that improved treatment has meant people living longer, does not mean that this is the reality in other parts of the world and that we can just go on to the next issue. Of course even improvements in the U.S. are tenuous and cannot be taken for granted.
Looking over my collection of resources I ran across a poem by Maren Tirabassi which said:
It is not, you see, that they are very far away—the weeping children of other lands.
It is rather, you, see that we can ignore or turn our heads from massacre, starvation, cholera, AIDS.
Wisely it has been said that one should not believe everything one reads in the papers—that, irrefutably, is true.
Rwandans do not die because there are insufficient tankers in Zaire to carry clean water to refugee camps.
They die because in Boston we wash newsprint so easily off our hands.
Advent spiritually is meant to be in our face about this, the parochial insular nature of the way we live. Or at least that is part of what it is for me. Part of the unredeemed nature of my life is the unredeemed me, living too much confined in my own realities, turning my eyes away, wiping the newsprint off my hands and minding my own business. This, of course, applies to my too small awareness of the realities of life in other portions of the world. But then it also applies to my too small awareness of the realities of the person’s life who may be sitting next to me, or living next door to me, or standing in front of me at the grocery checkout. Not that I am supposed to have an intimate appreciation of everyone I encounter, but it is true that I can carve out my own little world to live in and tend not to venture too far away from that comfort zone. Advent confronts me about this, not with a guilt trip about my natural self-centeredness but with a calling to live somehow in a larger world. Prepare shepherds to leave your fields. Prepare magi to leave your homes. Prepare to enter some different reality from your own.
Which leads me to the last convergence of meaning between Advent and AIDS. This year World AIDS Day has the theme “Live and Let Live”, which is meant to address the stigma and discrimination often associated with the disease. This is a problem of profound proportions in some societies and cultures, but we also know it to be true in our own as well: that the painful and life-threatening physical problems associated with HIV/AIDS are often compounded by painful and spirit threatening problems of isolation and discrimination. The stigma associated with AIDS doubles the affliction and reminds us of our capacity to make other people into “others”, people who live in some different world that mercifully we are spared from having to live in.
Advent calls us to try in some way to make that other a little less other—those other worlds and the people inhabiting them. Those other worlds, whether they are on some other continent, or some other part of Charlottesville, or constructed out of the different realities imposed upon us by a disease such as AIDS, these other worlds are our worlds. In some small way we are called to enlarge our world so as to include someone else’s, quite as much as we are called to make a place for Jesus. May we take some steps in this direction during Advent, some steps—baby steps maybe, but steps—in the direction of making others less other. May our prayers be specific. May they have some new horizon. And may we put on our spiritual table some things to deal with that will not go away once Christmas is over. For Advent is not so much a season as a dimension of the life of our faith. And the need to overcome the “otherness” we live with will be with us even after, especially after, we have retold and celebrated the stories that proclaim God’s intention that we not be “other” to God. In the light of that, how can we be not be discontent with remaining “other” to each other? Amen.
Jim Bundy
December 1, 2002