Now What? A Homily for World AIDS Day

Here's the homily that I preached last Friday. I used the manuscript as a jumping off place and riffed a bit more in the actual spoken homily.

Now What?
A Homily for World AIDS Day 2006

Tonight, friends, we are here together. That is important! Tonight, even if only for an hour or two, we are in community. Tonight we have sung songs, prayed prayers, and we’ve listened to beautiful music. We have raised our voices against injustice. And all day long we’ve been exposed to horrible, mind-numbing statistics. Statistics that remind us that there are 39.5 million people living with AIDS and that 2.9 million people have died of AIDS related illnesses this year. We have heard that there have been 4.3 million new infections this year. But beyond that, we remember the faces that those statistics represent. Those numbers, and the faces we remember, can cause us to feel the heaviness that all too often engulfs the world. Tonight, we might be caught in the darkness that shrouds our planet.
But the good in this is, for tonight, at least, we are together! And our togetherness should give us hope. Because it is in our togetherness that we remember our dead, we mourn our friends, and we miss our family. But we don’t grieve alone, because tonight we are together. This is a good thing because God never wants us to be alone.
I want to get local with you for just a moment. This church has not always been a place that was about compassion, and dignity and respect for all. This church had a bit of a reputation for exuding jugement when it should have been exuding love, compassion, and working for justice. But now, it is doing those good things, as are many churches across the world.
In churches and in religious communities across the world where just ten to fifteen years ago HIV/AIDS was a horrible stigma for anyone to have, many of those same communities are now working to be in solidarity with those who have AIDS and to be in community with them. The church is working on treating everyone with dignity and respect.
As the sun rose in Washington D.C. this morning there was a live feed on CNN from Foundry UMC in Washington D.C. where their prayer vigil for World AIDS Day was beginning. As the sun passes from the east to the middle of our country, we have had events, prayers, and remembrance here at this church. As the sun continues its journey to the west, churches and religious communities from Texas to New Mexico, to Arizona, to Nevada, to California, and to Hawaii are having services to mark World AIDS Day and to remember those who have left us. Truly, the church and religious traditions of all kinds from all over the world are raising their voices to the heavens this day: this should give us hope as well!
But, if you are at all like me, you find yourself asking the question, now what? Some of you have been in this struggle since the beginning, over twenty-five years ago, and some of us are here for the first time.
All I can tell you is this: what we are doing tonight makes a difference and we need to continue this work. We must continue to lift our voices with our friends from around the world. Certainly we do this in remembrance of those who we have lost, but we also raise our voices to say that HIV/AIDS is the greatest pandemic humanity has ever faced. We raise our voices to remind the world that it is not o.k. to compartmentalize AIDS as just a “health” issue for “those people” because it is truly a “human” issue! We raise our voices to say that AIDS, along with global poverty, are the defining issues of our generation. We must remind the world that the global AIDS pandemic will not and cannot be solved without solving global poverty. It is a tragedy of the first order that thousands of children, women and men will die today because the world refuses to give them medicine! Together we have to remind the world that it cannot ignore these issues!
Let us remind the world, not only with our voices, but with our hearts, with our minds, with our hands and our feet as we leave this place. Let us show the world what it means to love unconditionally and to work for justice. Let us shine light into a world that is all too often filled with darkness.
We need to continue to open people’s eyes, so that they may truly see the cost of this horrible disease. The world needs to be reminded constantly that we are about to lose a generation of people in Africa, that AIDS is a very real pandemic in the United States and around the world. Not only do we need to educate, to teach, and to prevent this terrible disease but we must also remind the world of the intrinsic goodness of God’s creation.
We must remember that, in the words of the prophet Isaiah, that God, who is good, created us, all of us, that God has formed us, and that God loves us and redeems us. When we pass through the waters, when we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, God is with us. God has made you, and you are precious in God’s sight. Let us take this word into the world to love our friends and those who would oppose us. Let us shine light into the world, because God is with us!
Let all of God’s children say: Amen!