June 2005

A Call to Exercise the Power of the Church

Christopher Haley-Walden, NEAC Chair, delivered an expanded version of this sermon on Mother’s Day, the Seventh Sunday of Easter, at St. Paul’s on the Hill Episcopal Church in Minneapolis, MN. Chris is a member of St. Mark’s Cathedral in Minneapolis.

“You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses…to the ends of the earth.”

I have heard repeatedly from people in the church and in the community at large that HIV just doesn’t affect them anymore. We tend to forget, or not think, about what we do not see regularly. I am here to remind you today that our church still has AIDS.

As Chair of the board of directors of the National Episcopal AIDS Coalition—NEAC—and a member of the Executive Council Standing Commission on HIV/AIDS for the national church, I have the privilege of visiting congregations and dioceses throughout the country. In major cities over the past few years, I have noted that from city to city there is stigma, shame, increasing numbers of new infections among young people, misinformation, rejection (or simply silence) on the part of the church, and blame.

In Atlanta, members of NEAC and the HIV Commission heard from a 27-year-old man, “John.” John is intelligent, white, middle-class, from a small town in the Deep South. A young gay man he thought he was sufficiently educated about how HIV is transmitted. His own cousin had died of AIDS a few years earlier, although the family was not very open about it. In any case, he had witnessed death from AIDS firsthand. He simply did not believe that he was at risk for infection.

John was an undergraduate at the University of Georgia. Life was going well for him. He had a good job lined up for after he graduated. Then suddenly one night, John awakened in a drenching pool of sweat. From then on he would wake up and sometimes twice a night he could wring the water from his sheets with his hands.

For days, he got progressively weaker. He thought it was the flu. Finally, he called his mother and she told him to go to the emergency room immediately. He drove himself to the hospital—not the smartest thing he could have done. When he entered the waiting room, he collapsed from severe dehydration. When he regained consciousness, the attending physician was asking him lots of questions, including his sexual history. He finally asked John if he had ever had an HIV test. John said, yes, he had been tested for HIV—seven years ago. Within two hours the doctor informed him that his T-cell count was in the low double digits (a healthy person has T-cells in the 500–1200 range). He was diagnosed with AIDS.

John spent the next several weeks in the hospital suffering from Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, PCP, an infection that killed many people with HIV in the eighties and early nineties. John himself nearly died twice. His mother, ever by his side during his struggle, said “no.” She told him he was strong and she refused to let him die.

John gradually became stronger but when he was released from the hospital, he was so debilitated he had to learn to walk again, and he was told he would never be able to work a regular job. The bedroom he returned in his parents’ house was like a hospital room, full of tubes and monitors.

John has now fully recovered and is a full-time employee with AID Atlanta. What kept him alive and made him stronger, he said, was his powerful bond with his mother. To be sure, he is still HIV-positive, but he lives with hope.

John’s story spoke to us in a way we hadn’t experienced in some time. Many people in the room were around in the early days of the HIV epidemic, when scores of young men lay dying in hospital beds in urban areas throughout the country. But this is the 21st Century. This just doesn’t happen any more.

Obviously it does still happen. And shockingly, at least half of all new HIV infections in our country occur among people under 25. Many of them were likely infected as teenagers. We heard from another young man in Atlanta who is only 21, a white male undergraduate student at Emory University. He, too, believed that HIV infection wouldn’t happen to him, yet he had found out just a month before our meeting that he was HIV positive. He has yet to tell his parents or many of his friends, and he doesn’t have the love and support of a faith community. He is suffering alone. This could be the son or grandson of someone here today.

Where is the Church in this?

As Christians, we are empowered by God’s Spirit to be witnesses to the gospel of Christ.
“You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses…to the ends of the earth.”

In the words of the Baptismal Covenant, we are called to “seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbors as ourselves. And to strive for justice and peace among all people, respecting the dignity of every human being.”

HIV is a justice issue. It deserves our prayerful Christian response. We may hear people ask, why does HIV deserve special treatment? Why is it different from cancer or diabetes or any other disease? Well, people are not thrown out of their homes or shunned by their families because of cancer. People are not refused a proper Christian burial because of diabetes. After all of these years, the stigma surrounding HIV still very much exists.

Thankfully, there are things we as Episcopalians can do to fight HIV. We can contribute to the work of NEAC, which is the Episcopal Church’s national response to the HIV pandemic.
We can support this important work with our prayers in spirit and our prayers in action. I invite you to pray with me in this struggle—as mothers and fathers, as sisters and brothers, as daughters and sons, as people, HIV-positive and HIV-negative.

An AIDS Walk is a public prayer in action. It isn’t often enough that people living with HIV know that God’s people are praying for them, particularly in a good way. It is my hope and prayer that we as the church may give witness to God’s infinite love through our prayers and presence. May we remain steadfast in our love, like Mary the blessed mother. May we be strong for those who are weak. May we claim the power of that is given to us by God’s Spirit in baptism. And may we serve as Christ’s witnesses to the ends of the earth.