Remind me again, who is it that is focused on sex? ed.
Via VirtueOnline:
"Love thy neighbor as thyself:-Use a condom," says Robinson
"Don't be Judgmental." No calls for Biblical abstinence by homosexual Priest
Sermon preached to students at St. Paul's School, Concord, NH
by The Rev. Canon V. Gene Robinson
October 29, 1992.
Luke 10: 25-37 ("Love your neighbor as yourself' and Good Samaritan")
It is a real treat to be here with you--though I wish with all my heart that it was not AIDS that brought us together. This upcoming month-long focus on AIDS here at St. Paul's is very exciting. While most everything you do here is important, this will be absolutely crucial to your life and to the world you are inheriting. My generation was the first to grow up under the threat of nuclear annihilation--and it did some rather /Tightening things to our self-confidence and our outlook. Yours is the first generation to grow up facing this disease--both on a very personal level AND on a societal and global level.
I come here tonight with two hopes: On the one hand, I want to scare you a bit about the possibility of your getting this virus and about the millions of your fellow human beings who will die from this disease; AND I hope to inspire you just a bit--to empower you to take responsibility for your own life and health and challenge you to look for some way that you can make a difference with your friends and in the world--in response to AIDS.
The story of the Good Samaritan which we heard tonight asks the question "So who IS my neighbor?" Even if one is not a Christian, the story and the moral that "everyone is my neighbor" are perhaps familiar and are echoed in virtually every great religious tradition--perhaps so familiar we think of it as mere schmaltz. I'm here to tell you that truly believing that kind of schmaltz is the key to a compassionate response to AIDS. For me, as a religious person, it is a call to be God's loving arms in the world. Tonight I want to direct your concern to three kinds of neighbors at risk for AIDS and about whom you may want to do some thinking in this next month: those at risk in America those at risk around the world, and those at risk here at St. Paul's School.
We in this country have been very slow in our response to AIDS. I think I know why. This society works well, really well, for a lot of people--like you and me and most of your parents--and it works especially well if you are white, male, able-bodied and medically-insured; if you are smart, attractive and heterosexual-appearing; if you don't use illicit drugs. But if you fall outside one of these categories, you probably know, or will soon experience, that it is considerably more difficult in this society. If you fall outside several of them, you are in BIG trouble. To look into the face of AIDS is to look into the faces of those people for whom this society is NOT working. Along comes this disease which, in this country, affects those people: gay and bisexual men, IV drug users, people of color in increasingly disproportionate numbers, the poor, women, babies and prostitutes. It's hard to admit that this society hasn't cared for ALL its people equally--but it simply hasn't. And there is no way to deal with AIDS and not be confronted by that reality. No one likes to look at their failures and their injustices; so, it's no wonder we don't want to look at AIDS.
And with great shame, I would suggest to you that we are way behind in our response to AIDS--as Americans and as religious people--bv choice. Within the first six days of someone getting a tampered-with bottle of Tylenol MILLIONS of dollars were spent and an all-out effort made to protect and educate the public--and only a few people were affected. Legionnaires disease got swift, thorough attention from every resource available in the Federal government, though only a handful of American Legion patriots were affected. Yet more than 40,000 people were dead of AIDS before the President of the United States ever said the word in public or spent significant money for research or treatment. The President and Congress congratulate themselves on passing the Ryan White AIDS Care bill, and then only partially fund it.
So why have we been so slow to respond? I believe with my whole heart that it's because AIDS first appeared--and continues to appear--in people considered to be dispensable, "throwaway." I can hear the shrill voices now: "Hey, the world would be better off without all those faggots anyway. Nobody forced those drug addicts to stick a needle in their arms. So what if this disease threatens to wipe out an entire generation of Black and Hispanic, people they're a drain on us anyway: at least they won't be forever on the welfare rolls." Though most people are politically correct enough not to articulate such cruel and obviously bigoted sentiments in public, I wonder if they aren't just below the surface for many.
But if there is one thing I want you to remember from this sermon it is: THERE ARE NO THROWAWAYS IN GOD'S KINGDOM. NOT ONE. And we are called by the One who made us to be merciful loving, and compassionate NOT judgmental. You and I must not call ourselves good Jews or Christians or Muslims or Hinduism nor even good members of the human race and then go about our 911 business doing nothing and "passing by on the other side."
As you begin your study of AIDS this month. in addition to learning all the facts about the disease and how it is transmitted, I challenge to you to include some tough questions about yourself and your society questions about AIDS and justice. Some of those questions should make us damned uncomfortable. If I am white. I need to explore my own racism not the kind of redneck hatred and personal distrust of people of color. but the kind of institutional racism I participate in as a white person every day of my life simply by putting one foot in front of the other. The kind of racism that allows me and my government not to be terribly worried that we're about to lose an entire generation of African-American and Hispanic kids to AIDS. I am reasonably well-off financially. I can avoid asking why poorer people don't have jobs, adequate housing equal education or accessible health care--never mind why they might turn to drugs or prostitution or crime as ways of coping, and find themselves especially at risk for AIDS. I am male, I can continue to refuse to see how I benefit in countless ways in this society simply from the fact that I was born male and refuse to see the incredible burden, including HIV infection borne by women in this society and around the world. If I am heterosexual. I can continue to devalue and degrade gay and lesbian people in public without fear of condemnation so some so-called "decent" people Patrick Buchanan just did it at the Republican Convention without so much as a word of rebuke or even disavowal from the President of the United States. That kind of homo hatred encourages us to ridicule and discriminate against gay and lesbian folk and to the deaths of over 100.000 gay men as if it were no big loss. As you study AIDS during the month of November don't forget to ask those kind of questions.
But the neighbors we are asked about in today's Bible reading are not just those neighbors nearby. As you well know, AIDS is no longer an epidemic, confined to one country or continent but indeed has become a pandemic infecting and affecting every nation and continent on earth.
I had a frightening and wonderful experience this summer, when I went to Uganda to do AIDS work. Uganda sits on beautiful Lake Victoria straddles the equator, and is the country that Winston Churchill called "the pearl of Africa." And it was, until Idi Amin and his ruthless successors turned it into a twenty year nightmare. Now, as they emerge from this reign of terror into the world community, another nightmare has begun.
In this country of 16 million people, 2 million are already as we speak, infected with HIV. In the capital, Kampala. one-third arc infected. And in the Rakai district down near the Rwandan and Tanzanian border where HIV first reared its ugly head as a new disease in the world, 50-70% are infected_ I was in one village where there were a couple of eighty-year-old women and a couple of four-year-olds; all the rest were dead. The sugar processing factory has shut down because there is no one left to work in it.
I spent a day in a local clinic with a young doctor whose patients sat or stood in line for hours, the line stretching out into the red clay street. When they finally get in to see him he offers them a kind word, some basic education, and a compassionate touch, since he has little more than aspirin for medicine. I sat with some people living with AIDS, who were eager to know "the latest" about various treatments for their disease--AZT, and the like knew and so did they that AZT cost thousands of dollars per year and that the average annual income in Uganda is $240 and I realized that as far as these people are concerned, those drugs might as well never have been invented.
Perhaps it will be one of you sitting here who discovers a treatment or a cure for this horrendous disease which is devastating the world; perhaps it will be one of you who forges a compassionate governmental response and makes that treatment accessible to all the world's peoples. The parable of the Good Samaritan goes far beyond taking care of our own.
The AIDS projections for the global community are difficult to comprehend, I hate to quote statistics, but try to get your minds around these numbers: The World Health Organization projects that by the year 2,OOO that most of you freshmen will graduate from college--40 million (.) people will be infected with HIV, 10 million of them children and another 10 million children will be orphaned. And Jonathan Mann, former head of the World Health Organization, now at the Harvard AIDS Institute. believes those numbers to be grossly underestimated, putting the projected total of HIV infections by the year 2000 at over 100 million. When you remember the profound effect on our global community of the death of 6 million Jews during World War II, it is hard to comprehend the effect this will have on the world in this age of AIDS.
But finally let's come closer to home. Remember that Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan in response to the question, "what must I do to inherit eternal life'?" The answer is to love God and to love my neighbor as myself.
It seems to me that loving my neighbor begins and perhaps is only possible when I love myself. So what does loving myself mean in the age of AlDS?
First. it means getting the information you need to protect and save your life. It means overcoming the temptation we all have but especially when we're young to assume that none of this applies to men only to someone else. It means taking this virus HIV seriously for your friends and for yourself.
Second, it means remembering that choosing not to have intercourse is an honorable, positive and life ensuring option in this age of AIDS. It's a choice which allows you to relax and enjoy your safety-not just safety from AIDS and pregnancy but safety from the kind of emotional hurt that can so easily happen in a sexually intimate relationship. Even if you have already been sexually active, you can honorably return to this choice of abstinence. It's the only way to be absolutely safe.
Third, if you are physically sexually active with someone whether with a person of the opposite or the same sex, you can remember or discover for the first time all the wonderful ways of being sexual with another person without having intercourse without risking your life. We parents and we in the church have been so busy preaching "just say no," that we have forgotten to celebrate this God-given gilt of sexuality and to rejoice in this incredible means of communicating with a beloved. But there are many ways of communicating physically and sexually with another person short of intercourse.
Fourth, if you are having intercourse or oral sex with someone, whether of the same or the opposite sex, love yourself and love your partner enough to protect yourselves from this virus. I'm still waiting for the Episcopal Church or any church--to produce a poster which says: "Love thy neighbor as thyself:-Use a condom." As Joan Rivers is fond of saying. "Can we talk here'?" Is the Church or St. Paul's School courageous enough to talk with you about reality'? That indeed is my fervent prayer for you as you enter this month-long focus on AIDS.
Because I believe in this work so passionately, you can easily see that I could go on forever and I'll be back on November II to talk with you more--in a setting which I like a lot better, where we can actually talk with each other, rather than this monologue. but let me close by saying that "loving self and loving neighbor" can help us fashion a response to AIDS:
1. Love yourself Take this seriously. Make your choices carefully and know that your life depends on it.
2. If you are sexually active or whenever you do become sexually active love your partner enough to protect you both and don't let anyone talk you out of it.
3. Find a way to respond to this disease beyond yourself. There are lots of people with AIDS out there who need your help and there will be many, many more. It begins with something as simple as objecting to someone telling the latest AIDS joke, walking in an AIDS walk to raise money for research and care or becoming part of a support network for someone living with AIDS: and it doesn't end until we have justice for all people. Do anything-but do something.
4. And finally, be aware that the human community needs your help in this tight against AIDS. Keep the people of the world on your minds and in your hearts as you study here at St. Paul's. Before long, you will be in leadership positions in the world of research, medicine, business, and public affairs. Don't forget that there are millions of your neighbors in this country and around the world who will contract this disease before the year 2000. And some of them are sitting right here in this chapel tonight. Love them, and love yourself: be God's loving and His in the face of this disease; it is our most powerful medicine and our most profound hope against AIDS.
Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment