Mary, Mary | A Sermon by Jan Carlsson-Bull

MARY, MARY

by Jan Carlsson-Bull

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December 1, 2002

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Even the great King Solomon was once a baby. Now I hope for your sake, little Solomon Bergquist, child of this morning’s dedication, that you don’t grow up to be a king, but the name you have been given assuredly conveys great expectations, not the least of which is budding wisdom. King Solomon himself lived during the 9^th century BCE. While he is popularly remembered for his wisdom, he came to the throne of Israel through a coup d’etat that displaced both of his brothers, and his reign was marked by "prosperity,…. grandiose building projects, and a cultural transformation." I trust that the reign of this morning’s Solomon will be marked by the prosperity of enough, by building projects that begin with blocks or Lego, and by a cultural transformation that doesn’t wreak undue havoc in the household in which he is a new arrival.

It was a full millennium after the reign of the original King Solomon that the author of our responsive reading on The Spirit of Wisdom penned his thoughts. Using a literary device common at the time, he writes in the Apocryphal book known as the Wisdom of Solomon as if he were that other Solomon and speaks of his earthly heritage:

I am mortal, like everyone else, a descendant of the first formed child of earth, and in the womb of a mother was I moulded into flesh ….

It was a far different time than a thousand years earlier. Here was a Jew writing in Greek from Alexandria, the largest city in the Diaspora, or "dispersion" of Jewish communities. He writes to other Jews in the Diaspora, all suffering the social alienation of exile. While learned, he was by no means aloof from the rest of humankind.

When I was born I began to breathe the common air, and fell upon the kindred earth. My first sound was a cry, as is true of all.

Yet his nurture is kingly.

I was nursed with care in swaddling cloths, no king has had a different beginning of existence.

So establishing his linkage with all others and with those who stand above others, he speaks of that common ground that is birth and death, and from this ground he evokes the spirit of wisdom.

There is for all one entrance and one way out. Therefore I prayed, and the spirit of wisdom came to me.

"…one entrance and one way out." Humility is indeed the beginning of wisdom.. This thought is pervasive throughout the Psalms and Proverbs. "The fear of the Lord is instruction in wisdom, and humility goes before honor," it is written. (Proverbs 15:33)

Now we liberal religionists don’t do well with "the fear of the Lord," but humility we might consider. We are all mortal. We all breathe the common air. We are all humbled by the realization that there is one way in and one way out. When we bring a child into the world or take responsibility for the life of a child through adoption or through the promises that we make as a congregation, we are humbled, for we know deep down that our children are not our children. Kahlil Gibran saw clearly that, "They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself."

Is there anything more humbling than this euphoria with which we greet our children and the energy with which we commit ourselves to nurturing and instructing them tempered by the overwhelming realization that they are ultimately not ours? Humility is the beginning of parental wisdom. Humility is a prerequisite for those of us who would nurture one another’s children, because the terms in which they come to us, the terms of the gifts that they are, simply aren’t clear to us at the outset. The lives of our children seldom unfold according to our terms.

I trust that the life of our own little Solomon will unfold with all the health and beauty of the flower that we presented to him and with the abundant love and care with which he is embraced. Yet I am humbled on this World AIDS Day by the knowledge that the lives of far too many children in our larger world have unfolded with an illness that has broken bodies, communities, nations, and millions upon millions of hearts.

I wear a red ribbon this morning. It is the international symbol of HIV and AIDS awareness, hope for a cure, and support for all the sons and daughters of life who count as the 41 million children, women, and men of this world who are living with HIV/AIDS.

The theme of this year’s World AIDS Day, first observed in 1988, is Stigma and Discrimination. In this faith community we affirm the dignity and worth of all among us who are HIV positive or living with full-blown AIDS. How is it that for so many nations of our world and yes, for too many individuals in our own country, those of us suffering with HIV and AIDS are still burdened by social stigma and moralistic discrimination?

I recall the history of our own AIDS Task Force, now known as the All Souls AIDS Initiative. Formed in 1985, only four years after the Center for Disease Control issued clinical evidence of a new disease, now known as AIDS, it was the first faith-based AIDS task force in our city. And in direct response to the stigma and discrimination that are the theme of this year’s World AIDS Day, the first major action of All Souls’ AIDS Task Force was a public education campaign in which 10,000 placards were placed in this city’s buses and subways. You might be among those who once looked up from your seat on the Lexington Avenue line to read:

AIDS is a human disease
and deserves a humane response.

or

AIDS: the more you understand,
the more understanding you’ll be.

or

Treat a person with AIDS with kindness.
It won’t kill you.

Our work isn’t over. Writing in the progressive Christian journal, The Other Side, Mary Hunt asks what constrains religious people from speaking out and acting on the issue of HIV/AIDS? Her answer? Sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll. It’s an unlikely trinity that corresponds to the first three stages of the AIDS pandemic as she sees it.

Sex — because HIV/AIDS was first identified in this country as a sexually transmitted disease specific to the gay community. Within many religious circles there is more than a residue of homophobia, though the virus is increasingly transmitted heterosexually.

Drugs — because the disease has spread significantly through non-prescriptive intravenous drug use, because infected needles are the lot of the least privileged among us, and because we miss the reality of Hunt’s observation, "that when life is better with drugs it must be pretty awful without them."

And rock-n-roll, because rock-n-roll is a metaphor for globalization, and as of the 1990s AIDS is a global phenomenon. While some nations suffer far more than others, no nation is immune from its ravages. Yet the drugs that have extended the lifespan of so many who suffer are completely out of reach for the vast majority of the 41 million currently infected.

For any of us who consider the crisis to have spent itself, "Nothing could be further from the truth," proclaims Hunt, "if we understand ourselves as part of a global community." Once again the voice of the first century writer of the Wisdom of Solomon sounds:

When I was born I began to breathe the common air, and fell upon the kindred earth. My first sound was a cry, as is true of all.

We are bound to one another by our first breath and our last, by the air that we breathe and the cries that we utter. On this World AIDS Day, as we hold up a child to love and to nurture, it matters that we wear our red ribbons, reminding us that;

of the 41 million people living with HIV/AIDS, 3 million are children;

that of the 5 million newly infected last year, close to a million were children;

that of the 22 million who have perished form AIDS since its identified beginning, well over 4 million were children under the age of 15 years;

and that of the 5 million newly infected with the virus, 90%, or 4.5 million are from sub-Saharan Africa or Asia and the Pacific islands, areas of our world whose virulent poverty carries minimal access to the antiretroviral drugs that extend life and bring relief from pain.

I consider the stigma and discrimination and homophobia as they are pervasive today in the context of the recent statement by Dr. Peter Piot, Director of the United Nations AIDS program in Geneva, who notes, "’Heterosexual transmission is on the rise in every continent.’" I consider the globalization of AIDS and its virulence in southern Africa and realize that our work has just begun when AIDS and lack of rainfall conspire to threaten "more than 14 million people" in the nations of "Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe," for those who are infected are unable to plant, weed, or irrigate, and their plight is heightened by lack of rainfall. I consider the globalization of AIDS and the stigma and discrimination that have translated into official denial by some of our world’s largest governments. A reality frighteningly similar to that of southern Africa is playing out in China, though for somewhat different reasons. Only days ago, The New York Times op-ed section included the bold observations of Nicholas Kristof, writing from Zhengzhou, China.

"Chinese officials," claims Kristof, "are killing peasants every day through their denial and cover-up of the AIDS crisis…. Already peasants are going hungry because adults are too frail to plant crops or work for a living."

I consider the globalization of the virus and am reminded of a very large city on this planet, where the AIDS crisis continues to matter deeply. Of all the metropolitan areas in this country, our own city has the highest density of AIDS cases. One of every 16 New Yorkers is reported to be living with HIV or AIDS! The closest runner-up is Washington, DC, with one of every 60 residents infected.

While statistics might cause us to glaze over, stories awaken us to the jarring reality of how personal it all is. I wear a red ribbon for Tokello, a 25-year-old South African woman, who writes:

…. I have been HIV+ for 3 years. I had even forgotten that I had the disease until I became sick this year. That's when the reality of the whole thing struck me. … for when you become sick it comes back to you with the notion that the immune system is becoming sick. …. now whatever I want to have I strive so hard to get it, the reason being I don't want to be sick or die before I have achieved all my goals.

….There is one thing that I would like to say to the youth out there who are still careless with life: life is too short to take for granted. All my dreams of having a child are shattered and gone. The only way is to love other people's children…

The only way is to love other people’s children. We can do this as we nurture our young Solomon. We can do this as we heed the call of our own congregation’s AIDS Initiative and volunteer to mentor children affected by HIV/AIDS living in foster care. We can do this by raising our awareness of the globalization of AIDS and the disparities of access to treatment. We can do this by renewing our energy for advocacy. We can do this because we care, and caring matters.

Writing in 1987, the late Stephen Jay Gould describes the AIDS pandemic as

"… a more striking proof that mind and technology are not omnipotent and that we have not canceled our bond to nature," for "AIDS represents the ordinary workings of biology, not an irrational or diabolical plague with a moral meaning."

"AIDS," he continues, "is a natural phenomenon, one of a recurring class of pandemic diseases. Yes, AIDS may run through the entire population" and "may make no biological difference to Homo sapiens in the long run: there will still be plenty of us left and we can start again. Evolution cares as little for its agents–organisms struggling for reproductive success–as physics cares for individual atoms of hydrogen in the sun. But we care. These atoms are our neighbors, our lovers, our children and ourselves."

These atoms "….are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself." The gift that each of us brings upon our arrival in this life comes with no guarantees. We can love and nurture the children we bring into this world and the children who receive our attentiveness as a community of faith. But humility stands firmly at the portal of parental wisdom and congregational promises, for we are mortals. We are vulnerable to the foibles of one another and to the natural phenomena of the planet we inhabit.

As a mother of three adult daughters and a minister privileged to dedicate an irresistible baby called Solomon, I wonder at the holding on and letting go that come with the territory of parenthood. On this first Sunday of Advent, I recall that other mother of two thousand years ago. Mary had good reason to ponder in her heart all that legend tells us was shown to her. All the gifts given to every child were given in abundance to that child of Bethlehem: courage, compassion, joy, imagination, wisdom, and love to name a few. So I say: Mary, Mary! How your heart surely brimmed with love and longing as your son followed a path that could not have vaguely resembled those things that you pondered in your heart at his birth. And the words of Wendell Berry come to mind, through a poem that he entitled simply, "To Mary":

A child unborn, the coming year
Grows big within us, dangerous,
And yet we hunger as we fear
For its increase: the blunted bud
To free the leaf to have its day,
The unborn to be born. The ones
Who are to come are on their way,
And though we stand in mortal good

Among our dead, we turn in doom
In joy to welcome them, stirred by
That Ghost who stirs in seed and tomb,
Who brings the stones to parenthood.

Our children are not our children. Yet we continue to love and nurture them. We continue to wear our red ribbons and light candles of hope for them. We continue to dedicate them to the ways of right living both for themselves and for humankind. While we may shake our dubious heads and utter, "Mary, Mary," we continue to revel in the wonder of each new child. And we encourage each of our children to unwrap the wondrous gifts given them at birth–strength, beauty, courage, compassion, hope, joy, talent, imagination, reverence, wisdom, love, and faith. For the children we love, the children we have loved and remember, and the children we have yet to greet are the very lifeblood of our longing for ourselves. This is cause for hope. It is cause for joy. It is cause for Thanksgiving. And it is simple wisdom. Amen.

Sources:

Lawrence K. Altman, "Women with H.I.V. Reach Half of Global Cases," New York Times, November 27, 2002, A1, 8.

Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997, Counterpoint, Washington, DC, 44:

The Bible (Revised Standard Version)

Charlotte Costanzo, The Twelve Gifts of Birth, Featherfew, 1999.

Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1963.

Stephen Jay Gould, "the Terrifying Normalcy of AIDS," New York Times Magazine, April 19, 1987. Reprinted by permission in The AIDS Reader: Social, Political, Ethical Issues, Edited by Nancy F. McKenzie, Meridian, 1991.

(Homily for the 27th Sunday in Ordinary Time, October 15, 2000, At St. Martin de Porres) at http://www.gbwilson.homestead.com/files/Homily_for_the_27th_Sunday_in_Ordinary_Time.htm

Mary E. Hunt, "Speak Now," The Other Side, May-June 2000, Vol. 36, No. 3.

Nicholas D. Kristof, "China’s Deadly Cover-Up," New York Times, November 29, 2002, Op-Ed, A39.

Alan Moss, "Does the Book of Wisdom Call Sophia God?" Alan Moss, New Testament scholar. From http://www.mcauley.acu.edu.au/theology/alan_moss.htm

The New Oxford Annotated Apocrypha, New Revised Standard Version, Edited by Bruce M. Metzger and Roland E. Murphy, Oxford University Press, New York, 1991. iii , 57.

http://gbgm-umc.org/health/aids/timeline.html

http://www.unaids.org/hivaidsinfo/faq/ribbon.html

Statistics: published by UNAIDS in the "Report on the global HIV/AIDS Epidemic, July 2002."

http://www.avert.org/usastatc.html

http://www.avert.org/worldstats.html

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