That the blind may see

World Aids Day (December 1)
Isaiah 40.1-5, 25-31; John 9.1-11, 35-41

Rev Dr Barbara A Anderson

Minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA) and a co-pastor with her husband, Rev Dr Mark K Smutny, for over twenty years. Since 1998 she has been co-pastor of Pasadena Presbyterian Church, Pasadena, California, a multi-ethnic congregation which worships regularly in English, Spanish, Korean, and Persian. She is known for her work with families, children, conflict resolution, and survivors of violence.

I live in a nation of abundance, in a country that has one-tenth of the world's population and consumes 90% of the world's resources. I live in a house that is warm in the winter and cool in the summer. Each night as I go to sleep, I hold my husband in my arms and know the comfort of loving and being loved.

I live in a home of abundance, where even as I prepare for World Aids Day, deeply aware of the heartache and hope of those whose lives are touched first-hand by this pandemic, I am also shopping for Christmas presents.

I live in a community of abundance. One month from today, the Tournament of Roses Parade will pass by the front doors of the church where I am pastor in Pasadena, California. Fantasies of dinosaurs and birds three stories tall and fifty feet long, made of seeds and nuts, carnations and rose petals will cause millions of people to exclaim in delight. Millions of dollars and hours of work will have created a two-hour extravaganza beamed to continents around the world.

Yet this year, as I hold my husband and try to wander off to sleep under my warm blanket, tears drop slowly onto my pillow. I wish they would not, but each night they come. They remind me of the water that Jesus mixed with dirt to open the blind man's eyes so he could see. The dust of the world's pain has worked its way into my heart and brought forth tears that wash my eyes and cause them to open. I see the faces and the tears, the love and the longing, the grief and the death, the struggles and the lives of those touched by HIV/Aids. Their courage and persistence, their heartache and hope have been laid upon my heart and my eyes opened to see.

In my mind's eye, I can see parents too weak to hold their children and too ill to work the fields growing food for their families. I see parents whose bodies have wasted away from Aids and whose sad eyes know they will not live to see their child's next birthday. I see the tear-moistened faces of husbands, wives and partners going to sleep with no one to hold them because their spouses are in the hospital or have died from the scourge. I see partners and friends, parents and children caring for one another as the disease takes loved one after loved one away.

In my mind's eye, I see mothers dying on hospital cots as their children lie next to them, wasting away from Aids as well, mothers who, through no fault of their own, received the virus from their husbands and passed it on in childbirth. Now instead of helping their children learn to live, they must help them face illness and death.

In my mind's eye, I see the faces of young girls and grown women raped by strangers on the road and relatives at home, survivors who try to heal emotionally from the sexual assault, even while struggling with and dying from the illness their attackers passed on to them.

In my mind's eye, I see one orphan after another trying to find their way through life, trying to find food, trying to provide for younger siblings, even when they themselves are too young or too ill to cook or to work in the fields, or to know how to survive. I see children crying with no one to stroke their foreheads tenderly, children looking for hope in communities where Aids has killed eight out of every ten adults. I see children and grandparents starving in a growing famine that is caused not by the vagaries of weather, but by the lack of healthy people to work the fields in communities where soon 60% of the population will be infected.

HIV/Aids has become more deadly than war in sub-Saharan Africa, where in 1998, 200,000 Africans died in war, while more than two million died of Aids.¹ Just one year ago today, over 40 million people were living with HIV/Aids around the world. More than 20 million others had died. Fourteen million children had been orphaned so far, and about 800,000 infants infected each year. At the rate of death in Africa alone (over 11,000 per day), the entire City of Pasadena, California, with its glorious Rose Parade, would be eliminated in just two weeks. The numbers of the pandemic are even higher now than a year ago.

The scale of the disaster seems overwhelming. In the face of a disaster of this magnitude, we often feel small, inconsequential, powerless, and hopeless. How can one person make a difference? How can pain and grief, despair and injustice of such enormity ever be redeemed, or turned for good, or overcome by God? The need is so great, the financial cost so high, the structures of government and church so resistant, and the systems of denial so great that any one person's effort seems as hopeless as the proverbial attempt to empty the ocean with a teaspoon. Surely one pastor in one church in one community cannot make a difference in the face of such natural disaster and human evil? Feeling powerless and hopeless to make more than a tiny impact, we wish our eyes had never been opened. We wish we did not see. We wish we were still blind, for the need is so great, the changes necessary so enormous, and we feel so small.

In the story of the blind man given sight in John 9, the Pharisees chose to be blind, instead of seeing. "Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" asked the disciples, but the question was in the minds of everyone, including the Pharisees. According to their understanding of God and human suffering, the man's affliction could only be an unredeemable punishment for sin.

When Jesus opened the blind man's eyes, he showed the power and freedom of God's love to transform human life into fullness beyond their imagining - or ours. How disruptive it must have been, how threatening to the Pharisees' worldview, theology, and power to see, even for a brief moment, that God is different than they imagined, and that illness might have another cause than a person's sinful acts. How disruptive it is to see God working miracles in unexpected ways in unexpected persons outside our structures of power and privilege. How disruptive to see that God is beckoning us into uncharted territory where our power can be used by God for good beyond our imagining, no matter how privileged or peripheral we may feel to the powers of the world. How frightening to see the Hope of the World look into our eyes for even a moment, for as Nelson Mandela said some years ago, "Our worst fear is not that we are inadequate; our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others." Imagine the power that could have been unleashed for good had the Pharisees had the courage to see the light Jesus offered them!

"Who sinned, this child or her parents, that she was born with HIV?" we ask Jesus today. His answer remains the same: "Neither this child nor her parents sinned; she was born with HIV so that God's works might be revealed in her... I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind."

Who sinned? Certainly countless people have contracted HIV through promiscuous behaviour that is contrary to the will of God. But the vast majority of people with the virus did nothing promiscuous to bring it upon themselves, and the concentric circles of people affected in this generation and beyond did not choose this suffering either. Even those whose behaviour put them at risk are not being punished by God with this disease. As Jesus says in Matthew 5.45, God "sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous". And in Luke 13.2-3, "Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did."

God wants this tragedy no more than you or I do; but in the midst of this horror, God is working, calling us into the human community we were created to be. In the face of this spreading worldwide sorrow and generational devastation, we are called by God to see more fully than ever before that we are one world family, one creation, brothers and sisters, all, whose lives are truly interwoven in God's heart and therefore in ours.

However the Aids virus came to exist, God calls us fervently to see even this crisis not as an occasion of judgment upon those who are ill, nor a reason for hopelessness, nor a time to remain blind. God calls us to see this crisis as a powerful invitation - no, a demand upon us - that we become, in our own time, instruments of healing and advocacy, of compassion and justice, maybe as never before. God calls us to see the tragedy unfolding around us and then to hear God's clarion call to work through the suffering and denial into a life of fullness and abundance for all: building communities where the valleys are lifted up and the mountains made low, where the uneven ground becomes level and the rough places plain. God calls us to make real a vision of the world in which God will feed us like a shepherd feeds a flock, where the weak are gathered up and carried like lambs, and we are gently led to green pastures.

Remember that when the Prophet Isaiah's eyes were opened to this vision for his people, he stood in a time of exile and hopelessness. People felt overwhelmed by powerlessness and despair, much as we do as we see the magnitude of the Aids crisis today and look ahead towards what seems yet to come. Isaiah stood in a time of hopelessness, yet he saw a vision of hope, because he saw the strength and love of the Almighty God who gives power to the faint and strengthens the powerless.

Where can we find the hope that makes it possible to choose to see and work for such a vision in our own day? Our hope comes from our belief in a powerful God whose anger rages with each act of violence or hatred, whose heart breaks with each illness and death, whose eyes weep with each epidemic this world has faced. We believe in a God who therefore rages and weeps with us now. We believe in a compassionate God who sees the pain of the world and longs for us to open our eyes and work together, side by side with God, to redeem the atrocities and deaths and tragedies that are too great for any of us to bear alone.

We believe in a God whose works can be known through us each time we change a bedpan for someone who hasn't the strength to get up because of the virus. God's great works are known when we care for orphans, or become a partner of someone with HIV/Aids, when we provide food for the hungry and education for the children, or put a cool cloth on a feverish forehead, or hold the hand of agony.

God's works are known through us in this pandemic when we work side by side to change national laws so medicine can be made affordable and available to those who need it. God's great works are known when we cast ballots, write letters and tell the stories of the ravages of HIV/Aids. God's great works are known through us when we press the wealthy governments of the world, particularly the United States, to make significantly more funds available to fight HIV/Aids worldwide. God's great works are known as we teach men and women, boys and girls, that all are created as valued children of God, deserving of respect and care.

God's works are known through us in this crisis when we speak for justice and work for fairness, when we educate ourselves and others about the worldwide Aids pandemic. God's great works are known as brave people teach about fidelity, abstinence and condoms, and how Aids is spread. God's great works are known through us as we remember that we have, with God's help, eradicated epidemics before and that we can, therefore, marshal the resources to do it once again.

God's great works are known through us when we keep living and fighting for life and good no matter how hopeless we feel. For each day we're alive is an opportunity to touch another's life with love, or an encouraging word, or to tell of the courage and faith of those living with HIV/Aids. Each day is another opportunity to be a window through which God's works of love can be seen and God's challenge heard.

World Aids Day, December 1, comes to us this year on the second day of Advent. During this Advent season, we pray that God's tears will mix with the dust of the world's sin and pain, so that our eyes and the eyes of the world might be opened both to the world's need and to the light that shines in the darkness and is never overcome.

In the words of Reinhold Niebuhr, "Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love."² So, with our eyes open, we proclaim our hope that God and good are greater than the deepest despair and the most despicable evil, greater even than the devastation of HIV/Aids. With our eyes wide open, we proclaim our faith in a God who turns the world upside down and calls us to act from mercy, not judgment. We proclaim our faith in a God who can redeem all pain and all evil, and who nevertheless leaves us free to choose whether or not we will be partners in that redemption. When given that very choice, the man blind since birth said yes. The Pharisees in John's gospel said no.

Let it be said, some day, of this generation that we said yes because we knew Isaiah's vision to be true: "Comfort, O comfort my people." "Those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles... they shall walk and not faint."

Let it be said, some day, of this generation that God was able to use our tears and our actions to break open the hearts of the world to this crisis and make God's glory known.

Let it be said, some day, of this generation that the eyes of the blind were opened to see the Light of the World.

Let it be said, some day, of this generation that we washed our eyes clean and claimed the power, the light, and the vision that God has already given us in Jesus Christ:

• to build communities of justice and compassion, peace and safety;
• to care for the ill, the widowed, the orphaned;
• to respond to each other's needs for food and shelter, for medicine and companionship;
• to work side by side with God, that each child of God may have life in all its fullness.

"When Aids has run its course - if it ever runs its course - it will be seen as an annihilating scourge that dwarfs everything that has gone before." This was the judgment of Stephen Lewis, the UN secretary general's special envoy on HIV/Aids in Africa, speaking to an African religious leaders' meeting in Nairobi in June of 2002.

In such a context the question before us is not: "Who sinned? This child or her parents?"

The only question before us, as Jesus said so long ago, is whether or not we will open our eyes to work, love and struggle together that God's works may be known in our own age. On this World Aids Day in this season of Advent, God grant us and our world the courage to open our eyes and reach out our hands, that God's mighty works may be revealed in us and through us, in our generation.

Notes