Revolution of Compassion

One of the big issues in my life over the last two or three years has been the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and specifically how it is affecting Africa. The numbers are disturbing and overwhelming. Millions of children orphaned, millions dead, and over 30 million and growing living with the virus. Many of these millions infected are children who contracted it from a parent, or a unwitting wife who received it from their husband, or a young girl forced into prostitution, or tragically raped.

An entire generation is being wiped away. In some places, life expectancy is dropping to 27. People are sick and can't work. Children have to provide for themselves and can't go to school. The societal and economic burden for African countries facing this pandemic, as you can imagine, is too much to bear. At the same time, the spiritual toll is equally as crushing. People face a life of despair, stigma, and hopelessness. I heard someone say that AIDS is more than a health crisis, it is a crisis of hope. Millions of people are being thrown on the junk pile of worthlessness, forgotten by the world, their neighbors, and in some cases the church.

For along time, I forgot about these modern day lepers. Afterall, they were people who had made bad decisions, lived immoraly, they were just receiving what they deserved. For a long time, the church ignored these people and their growing numbers, and so millions died and whole nations began to disentegrate. There were alot of reasons for this apathy from the western church, bad theology, ignorance, our own insularity to the pain of the world, a 24 hour ratings and marketing driven news cycle that would rather give us tabloid fodder than real news and analysis. But thankfully for me and lots of other people this began to change.

Myself, I was challenged by a rock star, who bluntly pointed out that God is about grace and love, and if we truly loved him, then we would be his intruments of grace and love to the hurting of the world. I also went to seminary and read the Bible from a non-white, middle class, consumeristic perspective, and realized that the Bible talked more about radically loving others and caring for the weak and poor, then it did about how I should dress, what music I should listen to, or what movies I should see. Professors changed my way of looking at the Bible, christianity, and Jesus. Jesus wasn't a watered down Santa Claus, he was the God/man who loved the world so much he died for their sins, to give grace and love to all people, Jesus hated injustice, unlove, pain, death and sorrow. Radical love and grace that knows no bounds and saved me from my own horrible sin, that is what Jesus is about.

So, I really had to rethink things. The narratives of the New Testaement show Jesus spending a lot of time with sinners, the sick, prostitutes, the bottom rung of society, because as he said himself, he came "to seek and save what was lost." These people desperately need God, his hope, his love, his compassion, and his healing. And if he radically loved us and saved us from a mcuh deserved condemnation, so why would we not radically love the hurting of the world? If Jesus was concerned about the poor and outcasts of the world, then why would we not also be concerned with the same types of people in our time?