Sermons

---

When You See ...
September 28, 2003
Pastor Dan Baumgartner
4th in a series on “Tough Issues”
Mark 1:40-45, Isaiah 58:5-9

Goodness, it’s nice to be back with you. As most of you know, Jane Frissell (one of our outreach elders) and I have been on a trip with 10 others, sponsored by World Vision…to Uganda, pretty much in the middle of Africa. We just returned on Thursday night. It was an amazing, amazing trip, and I’ll be telling you more about it this morning.

One thing this means is that just last Sunday, I was in a wild, dancing, drumming, jumping, singing, shouting Ugandan Pentecostal worship service that lasted well over 2½ hours, and that included two different sermons that each lasted over 40 minutes…which leads me to this morning’s sermon!

We’re continuing our series on “Tough Issues for Faith,” and today we’ll talk about HIV/AIDS…which was the focus of the trip we took. The scripture passage that we’ll add to the Isaiah one that Kelly read earlier…is in the first chapter of Mark, verses 40-45.

Leprosy was a greatly feared disease in Jesus’ day. The list of regulations to adhere to in the Old Testament is long, and the additions put on in Jewish culture and documents were even longer.

If you had leprosy, you were to make yourself stand out…to willingly take on the stigma of the disease. You were “unclean,” physically and socially and spiritually. So the book of Leviticus tells those infected with one of these horrible skin diseases: “Wear torn clothes. Grow your hair long and let it be disheveled. Cover your mouth. Cry out “Unclean, unclean” when other people are around. Stand 50 paces or more away from other people to ensure that you don’t infect them. And, you can only go to worship if the synagogue has a screen behind which you can be hidden.”

The instructions, in other words, were to wear a sandwich board around you that shouted out: “Don’t come near me.” And so lepers were isolated: from their jobs, their families, their friends, their community. They were horribly alone. And the call of God to his people, through Isaiah, that Kelly read earlier: “Share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house. When you see the naked, cover them, and do not hide yourself from your own people in need.”

On our trip, we stayed nights in the cities of Kampala (the capital) and Masaka (east), both bordering Lake Victoria. Uganda is pretty much in the middle of Africa, slightly to the east, and landlocked.

During the days, we would drive out to some of the countless rural villages. And there, in the middle of Africa, in Uganda, we met a girl. She lives out in a small village, in a house that is in total about the size of your living room. She just turned 19 years old. She raises a few vegetables, and helps cook at a nearby school. She is unmarried, and pregnant. Since she was 12 or 13, she has been the sole head of her household. Since both of her parents died of AIDS in 1996, she has been responsible for raising her four younger siblings. There are no family members left to help her.

When you see the naked, the hungry, the homeless, those in need…care for them. I confess to you that I have spent a great deal of my adult life not seeing. Now I have seen. I don’t know if you understand the crisis that is going on with AIDS. In our country, AIDS has affected 800,000 people in the last decade or so, mostly males and has been spread mostly through homosexual sexual activity; 400,000 of those infected have died. In other parts of the world, the spread of AIDS has been mostly through heterosexual sexual activity, though not exclusively. Needles, blood transfusion…Babies have also contacted HIV/AIDS in the birth process, and through breast feeding as well. Seventy to 80% of AIDS cases are in Africa.

• In the last decade, 22 million people have died from HIV/AIDS related diseases.
• As we speak, 42 million people are infected, with thousands of new cases every single day.
• Right now…there are 14 million orphans under age 15 due to AIDS. By the year 2010, that number will easily top 25 million. Imagine New York City filled to the brim with orphaned children, not one single adult.
• The life expectancy in some African countries has dropped by over 20 years (and wasn’t that high to begin with).
• There are 8,000 people dying every day from AIDS. What does that number really mean? In the Vietnam War, the U.S. lost a total of 58,000 troops in about 10 years. That is one week's worth of casualties in Africa.
• 3.1 million people died last year alone from AIDS related causes.

When you see the naked, the hungry, the homeless, those in need…care for them.

Last week, I saw a another woman, in a different village in Uganda. She was 45 years old, a year older than me…she looked 70. She lives with two of her own children who are teenagers, and four grandchildren she is raising. Their parents (her other children) have died of AIDS. After we talked with her, we walked around the back of the house, through the banana trees and coffee bushes…and looked with her at mound after mound covered in rocks…graves. “There is my son, there is my daughter…here are some grandchildren.” She has lost six out of 11 children to AIDS in the last four years. In this area, over 50% of the people are under 18 years of age.

Uganda is lucky. They have made great progress. In fact, Uganda has made more progress than almost any other country in Africa. There is a government that has taken a stand for direct communication and teaching…and so you see billboards and posters everywhere dealing directly with how AIDS is transmitted.

World Vision has done a wonderful job of providing education and resources, and mobilizing communities to help themselves. Churches have begun to take an active role in educating and caring.

These efforts have emphasized abstinence, faithfulness in marriage and the use of condoms. But the scope is unbelievable. The Pentecostal church that I attended on Sunday…had about 300 members. In the last year, they have had 22 people die. From these 22 deaths, 65 orphans were left. There are children everywhere. Everywhere. Churches and families are scrambling to try and provide for these kids.

When you see the naked, the hungry, the homeless, those in need…care for them.

Uganda has made more progress than almost any country. The percentage of adults living with HIV/AIDS is way, way down…to about 6%. In Malawi, it is 15%. In South Africa it is 20%. In Zimbabwe and Swaziland, it is 33%. In Botswana it is almost 40%. Whole towns have disappeared, states are left without workers or leaders. By 2005, half of the professional workforce in Malawi will have died of AIDS. Two entire generations will be lost. Lack of surviving leaders in many places creates additional problems…no food, no clean water. Friends, this is not just a crisis among many. It is THE greatest disaster of our time. It is worse than the droughts and famines, worse than the wars, worse than the Black Plague of the Middle Ages, worse than the influenza epidemic of the early 1900s which killed 20 million people around the world.

But these are just numbers. When you see the naked, the hungry, the homeless, those in need…care for them.

The hardest time I had on this trip came on Saturday. We had left our little hotel in Masaka, and drove down the highway a ways. Eventually we turned off the highway onto a dirt road. The dirt road became more of a path…and eventually it narrowed to the point we parked the van and got out to walk. It was a hot day on the equator, and we walked down a long trail through the banana trees, passing grass-roofed little houses, and children…everywhere.

We walked maybe a quarter of a mile, until we came to Justeen’s house. Justeen is 14 years old. Her father died in 1991. Her mother in 2001. Their graves are 10 yards from the front steps. Justeen raises her brothers, Paul who is 10 and JohnTheBaptist who is 7. There were no close relatives for them to go to. The village is already filled with children, and so they stayed in their family house, and Justeen, at 14, is the head of the household. A neighbor woman looks in on them frequently. The house is falling apart. Inside, there are two thin mattresses that lean against the wall. Of course, no electricity or running water. The fresh water is a ¼ mile hike, and the two youngest kids regularly take the beat-up old containers to get water and try to lug it back up the hill to home. Justeen probably has malaria, and her face shows such little hope.

It felt like we were at the ends of the earth…and the end of hope as well.

Beyond all the horrible statistics, and the pain of the stories I’m telling you…there is the stigma that comes from AIDS. The word in many African languages for AIDS is literally translated “slim.” Because it is a disease which makes one slimmer and slimmer until death. The stigma of being sick is so very great, that many people hide it. They won’t talk about it, won’t seek help, won’t tell others how they contacted the disease…though of course these are the very things that will help to defeat it. But who wants to live as an outcast? Who wants to have one’s children watch them die?

And so people like Mary, a woman in her thirties that we visited… pretty much climb onto a mat and lay there, wasting away and wondering if their relatives will be able to care for her children. Who wants to be shunned as unclean? Who wants to be set off from the worshipping community, standing 50 paces away shouting, “Don’t come near to me…I am unclean!” Lepers and those with AIDS have much in common. Isolation, shame, a ruined life, and eventually a lonely death.

When you see the naked, the hungry, the homeless, those in need…care for them. We knew we would see hopelessness…we wondered if we would also see hope.

The church I worshipped in has a group of teenagers who take a musical drama around to churches and villages and schools. In their amazing, beautiful a cappella voices, they sing about this horrible disease. They sing about a loving God who still cares for them. While they sing, two of their members are pushed out of the group…acting the part of those who discover themselves to have AIDS. They crumple onto the ground, devastated and outcast. And as the group continues to sing…others leave the group, to go to these two. They are embraced, they are raised up, they are welcomed back to the community. The singers are teaching communities to face up to the horrible disease…but also to work as a community to care for one another.

When you see the naked, the hungry, the homeless, those in need…care for them.

The last house we visited belonged to Pauleen. Pauleen has lived in the same area since 1946. She is short, her skin is gnarled like a tree that has seen many winters. She is 75 years old, a classically beautiful Ugandan grandmother. Her husband died years ago. In fact, she didn’t know the year…many of the Ugandan people track things by events, rather than dates. Pauleen said her husband died “the year Idi Amin was overthrown.” That would be 1979. She had 10 children, 6 sons and 4 daughters. Beginning in 1986, eight of the ten have died of AIDS. There are two left, a son who is off being a soldier, and a daughter who lives with Pauleen.

The children who died left many of Pauleen’s grandchildren parentless. Some live with various relatives…six still live with her. After we had talked for awhile, we asked the question: “How, Pauleen? How do you endure so much pain?”

Here is what she said: “We don’t go very far alone. God gives me the strength. When I don’t think I have the strength, God gives it to me. And so I praise God.”

We asked what we could pray for. Only two things came to mind. “That the new house would get finished, and for God to prolong my life to care for these little ones.”

We prayed together. And after we said, “Amen,” we were all teary and ready to get out of there. But Pauleen said “Wait.” Pauleen wanted to sing. And so one of the kids ran to get a percussion instrument (a can with rocks inside)…and then Pauleen and her six grandkids sang and danced before the Lord. Sang and danced before the Lord, a song of thanks…like David must have danced before the Lord.

I went to Africa, expecting to see hopelessness. I experienced plenty of that, though I don’t think anything can prepare you for these kinds of things. What surprised me were the signs of hope. The testimonies of faith so much stronger than my own. The gathering of the community to care for each other, the welcoming in of children to new families. The involvement of World Vision staff, the reaching out of the local churches, the repeated invitations to be part of the community, to neither live nor die in isolation.

You see, then, don’t you…what a significant thing Jesus did with the leper? It moves beyond the healing of his disease. Jesus reached out his hand and touched him. Bridged the 50-pace gap of shame and isolation and the total absence of touch…and restored him to the community.

It is not so different than what we have received also from Jesus. Our diseases may not look like leprosy, nor like AIDS. And yet we can find ourselves behind barriers of our own constructing, sin that keeps us from God and from other people. And yet in Christ, God has reached out to us and touched us. He has restored us, and brought us back into community…with God, and with one another. And in doing so, has allowed us to become part of His ministry…available to reach out to others.

When you see the naked, the hungry, the homeless, those in need…care for them.

What does all of this mean for us? In the long haul, I don’t yet know. At Bethany, our elders have prioritized AIDS in Africa as a ministry area in the next year. We will be praying about specific ways we might be the hands and feet of Christ in the face of the plague of AIDS. I have several times recently imagined myself one day standing before the throne of God, and hearing the questions asked of me:

“What did you do when scores of millions of people were dying of AIDS?”

“What did you do about the greatest crisis of the age you lived in?”

As a person, as a Christian, as a pastor…I don’t want to hear that question and have to answer “Nothing.” And so we will talk again about what we as a community might do.

In the meantime…Jesus invites us into this ministry of restoration to the community. And as I watched the ways in which our African brothers and sisters walked with one another, bore one another’s burdens, adopted their children, buried their dead, checked in on the children…I wondered about our community. I wondered what we might learn about reaching out to those isolated, or alone, or ashamed in one way or another. And what it might look like to stretch out our hand, and touch them.

When you see the naked, the hungry, the homeless, those in need…care for them.

Let’s pray:

Dear God. Help us to see. Help us to see. Amen.