Moment for Mission Archive

This past Wednesday was World AIDS Day, and the UN released its annual report on the global epidemic. The numbers remain mind-numbing: about 40 million people living with HIV, 5 million newly infected in 2004, over 3 million dead of AIDS this year, over the course of the epidemic. Most of us know and love at least one person among those many millions. We may have a friend on HIV medication taking extra-good care of their health; we may be HIV-positive ourselves; we may have lost a loved one to AIDS. This morning we remember and pray and perhaps grieve for those dear to us who have been touched by the epidemic.

But the numbers, and our own experience, give us only the faintest idea as to what it’s like to live in a country where HIV has hit hardest. In some parts of Africa nearly 40% of the population is HIV positive, without medicine. And unlike other diseases, which tend to take the very old and the very young, AIDS kills adults in the middle of life. Adults who are raising children, teaching school, working in hospitals, growing food. When these adults die children are left orphaned, the elderly go without care, fields go untended, and schools and hospitals can’t function. Things fall apart.

And this year, like other years, the world-wide response to this enormous pain, suffering and destruction has been pitiful. I won’t go into the ways or the reasons we’re so far behind the curve, but John the Baptist is surely speaking to us this morning: Repent! For the Kingdom of Heaven is near. And there is also good news: stopping AIDS is not rocket science. We know what works. Programs in Uganda and Haiti have been successful in slowing the epidemic; we have medications that work and which are no longer so prohibitively expensive.

I have three suggestions to help us repent:

• Learn more and mark your calendars: on Monday, February 28, the Peace and Social Justice Network and the Christian Education Committee will be sponsoring a forum on the Church and the AIDS pandemic. Details will follow.
• Pay up your pledge! Rutgers is committed to giving 1% of its total budget to the struggle against AIDS, and in the last couple of years we’ve given more. Consider giving to another organization that fights AIDS.
• Now this one is fun. One reason countries are so devastated by HIV is that they’re burdened with odious debt. Fifteen billion goes OUT of Africa each year to the IMF and World Bank in interest payments; less than that comes INTO Africa in foreign aid or investment from all countries. So Jubilee USA and other groups are asking us to write holiday cards to President Bush and Treasury Secretary Snow, urging them to support debt cancellation. The administration is moving in that direction – and piles of holiday cards calling for debt cancellation will help them to do the right thing.

There’s information on that table which you can take home to write cards (www.jubileeusa.org). If you want to do it right now, we have holiday cards just like these on the table.