The aWAKE Project : Uniting against the African AIDS Crisis

Rich Stearns

President, World Vision

Speech at Forum 2002

Widows and Orphans-the Hidden Faces of AIDSMay 18, 2002

How does one try to 'put in perspective' a tragedy with the dimensions of the AIDS crisis in Africa? How does one say something comforting about the needs of thirteen million orphans, the deaths of twenty million victims, the despair of ten million widows, and the relentless spread of a virus that infects fourteen thousand new people every day and more than five million every year. Almost any conclusion I might offer tonight would be trite, inadequate and unsatisfying.

And how can we return to our lives with any sense of normalcy, given the knowledge we now have? What must we do with our worldviews to accommodate such an enormous reality? How can the Christian community continue to be relevant and legitimate in a world that holds such horrors and poses such grand questions?

It is not overly dramatic to see the AIDS epidemic as the enormous white elephant sitting in the corner of every Christian church and every Christian's living room demanding to be acknowledged and not ignored, demanding some kind of response theologically, emotionally and practically. How will the church deal with the knowledge of something as apocalyptic as AIDS, indeed how will the world?

I believe that we stand at one of those few crossroads in history. A crossroads after which nothing will again be the same and toward which historians will someday point as a fundamental turning point in world events. This is not just another social problem like racism or war or poverty-this is something we have never seen before . . . something without precedent . . . and in one hundred years, the twenty-first century will be studied through the lens of the AIDS pandemic, and by how the world responded.I don't know about you, but when I am confronted with an issue that is so much larger than I am, I find that I have to break it down into simple and practical concepts in order to process it. And I also find that the Scriptures are the place where I usually find my confusion turned into clarity. Tonight I want to use one of the simplest and yet most profound parables in all of scripture to help each of us come to terms with the AIDS epidemic: the parable of the Good Samaritan. I want to look at the main characters in this story: the victim, the priest and Levite, and lastly, the Samaritan himself.

Let me say up front that just as Jesus used this parable to challenge the religious establishment of the day, we too, must be willing to let it challenge our community of faith today. But we also need to acknowledge that many churches and Christians are doing the right things in the fight against AIDS, even as we also acknowledge that they are in the minority and that the body of Christ still needs to hear and respond to a call to greater action.

The story begins in Luke chapter 10 verse 25 when we are told that an 'expert in the law' challenged Jesus with a theological question: What must I do to inherit eternal life? My picture of this encounter is that of a scholarly theologian challenging and testing the rather unorthodox and controversial Jesus to a battle of wits and intellect. It is doubtful that he really wanted an answer to this question but rather wanted to expose Jesus' theology as, in some way, defective.

He was not really asking what he could do to be a better person at a practical level, but as we will see, Jesus quickly took this man from the arena of intellectual knowledge and theology to the realm of practice and action. The Pharisees of the day were quite adept at creating elaborate legal systems that had no love or compassion at their heart, the letter of the law, but without a sense of the spirit of the law.

Jesus in return asks this expert in the law, What is written in the law? His answer was a conventional reference to the Old Testament law from Leviticus and Deuteronomy-Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and Love your neighbor as yourself.

Then Jesus says, You have answered correctly, do this and you will live.

Here Jesus brought the debate from the thinking to the doing. In other words, right thinking must be accompanied by right doing. This troubled the man enough to follow up with another question. The passage goes on to say "But he wanted to justify himself and so he asked Jesus, "And who is my neighbor?" It seems to me that he was trying to fit Jesus' answer into his system of belief and behavior. He wanted to justify himself, meaning that he wanted to justify his current beliefs and current behavior. Apparently he was troubled by Jesus' suggestion that he must do something differently.

This question-Who is my neighbor?-is perhaps one of the most profound in all of Scripture, and even today it is one of the defining distinctive of truly Christian communities around the world. Who is my neighbor? Jesus' answer, in the form of the parable of the Good Samaritan also reverberates across the centuries as one of the most foundational and universal tenets of moral law.

Let's first look at the victim in this story, the man who was beaten by robbers. One thing that is clear is that he was in dire need: beaten, wounded and bleeding, and possibly in jeopardy of dying. We don't know his ethnicity or nationality for sure-and we don't know how he came to be beaten.

This is an important question that we need to ponder for a moment. Was he an innocent victim who was unjustly attacked, or was he himself perhaps a robber who had been beaten by his fellow thieves? Perhaps he was engaged in some illicit activity and was beaten as a result. Or perhaps he was just careless and had irresponsibly traveled alone at night along a dangerous road. The point is that we do not know. Jesus did not feel that it was relevant whether the man who had been beaten was at fault.

Here is raised one of the critical moral questions with regard to the victims of AIDS. Should we distinguish between those who became victims because of sinful behavior-and those who were innocent victims? One of our goals this week was to draw attention to what we have called "The Hidden Faces of AIDS" - the widows and the orphans, the millions of victims who have become the passive victims in this holocaust through no behavioral conduct that we might deem sinful or irresponsible.

We have done this intentionally because we wanted to remove the stigma of judgment from the HIV/AIDS debate. Sadly, one of the reasons the Christian community has not taken the lead in the fight against AIDS is this issue of judgment. When AIDS burst into our consciousness in the 1980s, it presented itself as a disease confined to the homosexual and intravenous drug user communities. Some Christians saw this as a judgment of God upon sinful lifestyles and behaviors-and they faced off in what was seen to be another battle in the culture wars. As they judged the sins that had led to AIDS, they failed to show any compassion toward those who suffered from it.

Many in the Christian community largely turned their backs on this issue in the 1980s and now, almost twenty years later, are waking up to see that millions of innocent women and children have become victims and that an entire continent is perishing. As we will see in the story of the Good Samaritan, the only judgment pronounced by Jesus was not upon the victim himself, but was a judgment upon those who failed to help.

Let's now turn our attention to the priest and the Levite. These two represented the religious establishment of the day. Today they might be a pastor and a seminary professor, practitioners of the faith and well-schooled in the law. We are told that they saw the man and yet they passed by on the other side of the road, unwilling to help.

Here is the crux of the issue for the expert who posed the question to Jesus. Here is where the rubber meets the road between belief and knowledge, and behavior. Here is the moral difference between knowing what is right and doing what is right.

Peter Singer is the highly controversial ethicist at Princeton University. Mr. Singer holds some of the most radical views of any modern-day philosopher-views that are morally shocking to a Christian audience. Yet, while many of Mr. Singer's views are morally repugnant, writing challenges us to think through the ethical implications of our behavior, particularly where there are in the inconsistencies between our beliefs and our actions-between knowing and doing.

Listen to his own reasoning as he tells a parable very similar to that of the Good Samaritan: He uses the issue of poverty in his reasoning, but I would like you to substitute the problem of AIDS as you listen.

The path from the library at my university to the Humanities lecture theater passes a shallow ornamental pond. Suppose that on my way to give a lecture I notice that a small child has fallen in and is in danger of drowning. Would anyone deny that I ought to wade in and pull the child out?

This will mean getting my clothes muddy, and either canceling my lecture or delaying it until I can find something dry to change into; but compared with the avoidable death of a child this is insignificant.[You can see the similarity to the parable of the Good Samaritan.]

A plausible principle that would support the judgment that I ought to pull the child out is this: if it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral significance, we ought to do it. This principle seems uncontroversial."

Singer goes on to suggest that failing to save the child is morally equivalent to killing the child. He then writes:

Nevertheless, (this principle) is deceptive. If it were seriously acted upon, our lives and our world would be fundamentally changed.

For the principle applies, not just to rare situations in which one can save a child from a pond, but to the everyday situation in which we can assist those living in absolute poverty. Not to help would be wrong, whether or not it is intrinsically equivalent to killing.

Peter Singer here is wrestling with the questions Who is my neighbor? and What is my responsibility toward him? And, he is advocating the same radical thought that Jesus did, that is, to walk by on the other side of the road, would be wrong. This linking of belief to action seems simplistically obvious to us as Christians. Singer is not saying anything new. But bear with me.

Last year World Vision commissioned a study through George Barna Research to gauge the willingness of the Christian community to get involved in fighting the AIDS epidemic. When Evangelical Christians were asked whether they would be willing to donate money to help children orphaned by AIDS, assuming they were asked by a reputable Christian organization that was doing this work only 7% answered that they definitely would and 56% said that they probably or definitely would not help!

These were evangelical Christians!

When asked if they would donate to Christian programs helping with AIDS education and prevention overseas only 3% of Evangelicals said they definitely would help and more than 64% said they probably or definitely would not! Sadly, non-Christians in the survey were significantly more likely to say that they would help.

How can this be? How is it that 2000 years after the parable of the Good Samaritan was given to the church, that we still ask the question Who is my neighbor? and get the wrong answer?

Here again is the gap between knowing and doing. My pastor in Seattle, Gary Gulbranson, said this one Sunday: It's not what you believe that counts. It's what you believe enough to do. The priest and the Levite had the right beliefs, but they were unwilling to do what those beliefs logically dictated.

The little book of James says it eloquently and succinctly: Do not merely listen to the word and so deceive yourself. Do what it says. A chapter later James is more explicit when he says:

What good is it my brothers if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such a faith save him? Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him, "Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed," but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.

Show me your faith without deeds and I will show you my faith by what I do.

In light of this, how should the Christian community respond to the victims of HIV / AIDS? Let's look at the Samaritan, the hero of our story, for the answer. The Samaritans were despised by the Jews. They were considered heretical and unclean. Jews would not associate with them.

The introduction of the Samaritan into this parable by Jesus would have been shocking to the expert in the law and the contrast between the compassion of the unclean Samaritan and the supposedly righteous priest and Levite scandalous.

We are told that this Samaritan saw the man at the side of the road and took pity on him. That he bandaged his wounds and poured oil and wine upon them as a salve. That put the man on his own donkey and that he transported him to an inn and left money for his care. And that he would return to check up on the man again. His was not a minimal response, but a complete engagement.Jesus pointed to the Samaritan's attitude of compassion and love and his tangible actions as epitomizing just what it meant to love one's neighbor as oneself. He then turns the question back at the expert in the law asking, Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers? The expert in the law still cannot even bring himself to say the word Samaritan, and answers instead "The one who had mercy on him."

Two thousand years later the Samaritans in the story of the HIV / AIDS crisis are just as unlikely, and they should make us in the Christian community feel just as uncomfortable as did the expert in the law. If we honestly ask who are the ones who HAVE taken the lead in fighting against AIDS and showing compassion to its victims we find a surprising list.