In his book, The Wrong Messiah, Nick Page writes,

The story of Jesus’ birth, therefore, is not one of exclusion, but inclusion.. Joseph’s relatives made a place for Jesus in the heart of their household. They did not shun Mary, even though the status would have been suspect, and even shameful (carrying an illegitimate child): they brought her inside. They made room for Jesus in the heart of a peasant’s home.

Right from the pregnancy of Mary, God’s inclusivity is at work, and Jesus is born as the inclusive love of God for all into an exclusive world.
The religious institutions of Jesus’ day seem no better than our own–both then and now. Stigma is a social-identity devaluation of a person or group of people due to a characteristic mark or feature, whether it is real or imagined. Often the imagined stigma marker is as harmful as any real characteristic. Stigma markers or stereotypes can be transferred from one group persecuted to another. I found this to be true when fundamentalist Christians took stereotypes used against Jewish folks 1920s and 30s and applied them to gay men in the 1990s.

Two biblical scholars Jerome Neyrey and Bruce Malina have studied the labeling of Jesus with sorcery and demonic accusations by his religious critics. Jesus’ opponents accused him of performing or driving out evil spirits by demonic power: They claim that Jesus “is possessed by Beelzebul! By the prince of demons he is driving out demons.”( Mark 3:22) Neyrey and Malina in their book–, Calling Jesus Names: The Social Value of Labels in Matthew, write.

But a criminal or sinner is a person judged “out of place” and socially transposed into a new and negative place, often permanently. Thus, socially negative and unacceptable people are subject to public transformations of their personhood, the result of which is the creation of a special person who cannot be trusted to live within the purity arrangements shared by the group. Such people do not live by the rules of society. The rule-breaker is thus an “outsider,” qualitatively different from others in the group. This definition of the deviant person and his or her outsider status takes place by means of a process of labeling.

There is no question that Jesus’ religious critics saw Jesus as a rule-breaker, and even the Temple priests accused him of blasphemy. Religious institutions and people then and now use labeling as social degradation rituals, or negative stereotypes, to reject, exclude, and isolate “unwanted people” from themselves. Most religions have social mechanisms how to exclude people that are polluted, impure, or sinners. There are always people excluded if you have a religious attitude that some people are more holy than others.
Let me tackle the stories this morning and push further my observations about stigma creating religious communities.

Today’s gospel is a writing technique used by Mark. It is been called a “Marcan sandwich” by biblical scholars. It takes one story and inserts another story within the original story: Here the story of Jesus resurrecting Jairus’ daughter and the women with the gynecological discharge.

The two stories are linked together by the number 12. 12 is the age in which the young girl, the unmanned daughter of Jairus, biologically has reached the age where menstrual cycle begins and is considered ready to be engaged and be married. 12 is the number of years the older woman has been afflicted with the continuous flow of blood. Both women are dead, one dead to the community because of her impurity and the other physically dead. Were these two stories linked together by Mark because of the number 12? Or because one was symbolically dead and the other was physically dead? Probably! But there are symbolic issues here we need to unpack. These stories may be historical, but I think that they are richer in meaning if we understand them as parables. The two stories are deeply interwoven with these two women.

First, in Judaism, a woman is considered unclean during her menstrual period. Now the older woman has the added stigma and shame because her gynecological disorder causes constant bleeding. A woman could not attend the synagogue or enjoy normal sexual or social relations during her period, and with the continuous discharge of blood, people avoided her.

Fundamentalists would have judged her unclean and a sinner. Ancient Jewish physicians gave up on her; neighbors and family members would have followed religious tradition, asking what sin did she do to deserve this punishment? We can safely assume that she probably suffered from depression as well.
She heard about Jesus as a renowned healer. She seeks him out, breaking the boundaries of entering a crowd of people, and she creeps up to Jesus in the crowd, and her inner voice says, “If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.”

The woman initiates the physical contact that drains power from Jesus. She creeps within the crowd stealthily and does not want to draw attention to herself. Her covert approach to Jesus indicates her recognition of being a social outcast and looked down as a sinner.

What made her touch Jesus’ cloak? Diarmuid O’Murchu offers a possible explanation: “Has the New Reign of God caught up with her to a degree that she does not give a damn about rules and regulations? She desires one thing, and—worthy or unworthy—she is going wholeheartedly for it.”

I think she is caught up with God’s grace. She is tired of being looked down as a sinner and cut off from the community. She boldly initiates the touch. She is empowered to become visible in a religious world that made her invisible.
Jesus senses a drain of divine energy. He turns around and looks directly at her, and with a gaze of realization of her illness and exclusion, his gaze turns into compassion. It may be the first time in years that anyone has looked her in the eyes. Something has happened; it is not only a healing of her discharge but a transformation at the depth of her being. Her empowered action has transformed her image of herself. She has moved from a disempowered outsider to an empowered woman stepping outside the rules and regulations that bound her. I want to point out that Jesus now oozes out divine power as the woman’s flow of blood ceases. It is as I they traded places. Divine energy and blood are considered life force in this culture. His flow of divine energy ends her flow of blood.

I want to speak about an empowered African woman who was stigmatized by the church:

At the World AIDS Day celebration in the Roman Catholic Cathedral in Bujumbura in 1995, the priest said, in the course of his sermon, “We must have compassion for people with AIDS because they have sinned and because they are suffering for it now”. At that point something propelled Jeanne Gapiya to rise from her pew and walk up to the front of the church. “I have HIV”, she declared, “and I am a faithful wife. Who are you to say that I have sinned, or that you have not? We are all sinners, which is just as well, because it is for us that Jesus came.”

The priest condemns the sin while superficially encouraging compassion. The church and priest have stigmatized the woman for living with AIDS. But the African woman, like the women with the hemorrhage, acts up against his statement, affirming she is both HIV and a faithful wife. She asserts an inclusive claim of all of us as sinners and making it clear that she became HIV not because of her adultery or promiscuous sex. It was her husband who never disclosed his HIV status and infected her the other covert wives he has.

Now let me unpack this further. When Rev. Joe returned from Melbourne at the World AIDS Conference, he reported that AIDS faith activists have pointed to religious stigma as the number one cause of the spread of HIV/AIDS globally. I am working with Joe on a book chapter on AIDS and theology, I explored the observations of the religious stigma and AIDS.

2/3 of the twenty-eight million people living with HIV/AIDS in Africa belong to Christian churches, and the majority of cases are married women. If you are African girl, you may be safer single than married. You see churches brought their European and American sin management practices and theologies to Africa and fought against polygyny (many wives for one man) and forced monogamy upon African tribal populations. Polygyny went underground, and men continued to have several wives in different towns and locations. And they seldom told their wife about other wives. If a husband became HIV+, he also did not share his sero-status. Or there is prevalent myth of being cured HIV/AIDS, by having intercourse with a young virgin. Many teenage girls die slightly older than the daughter of Jairus. This is the conditions for a massive pandemic of AIDS.

The second destructive Christian policy was identifying AIDS with gay men, sex workers and sin. The Conference of African Catholic Bishops have just declared gays and lesbians “enemies of humanity” in response to the inroads that marriage equality has made globally. Sex workers are habitually condemned by churches when Jesus had a number of prostitutes in his movement. The churches’ narrow view of human sexuality contributes to the spread of HIV.

Sin management theologies of various churches dominated in African churches, and they have made it dangerous to disclose your HIV status in a church because you were ostracized and excluded just as the women with the continuous blood discharge. Blood status of the woman with the flow of blood and blood status of HIV/AIDS both result in exclusion from the community. May young girls in Africa like the daughter of Jairus and married women have sero-converted to HIV/AIDS when churches refuse to talk about human sexuality, HIV transmission, and prevention except abstinence. Abstinence does not work in our culture, and it does not work in a culture where women and young girls do not have control over their own bodies.

African feminist theologians have criticized the churched for ignoring any attempts to fight HIV/AIDS stigma, but it has promoted stigma with the notion that HIV/AIDS is God’s punishment for sin. This is the same strategy that most of the churches practiced against gay men in the US in the first two decades of the AIDS pandemic.

Where did the African churches learn these theologies of sin management and stigmatizing AIDS as sin? From the US and European churches that established missions to Africa. For example, Ugandan government’s attempt to impose the death penalty on gay men originated from such churches as IHOP, International House of Prayer, and its missionaries to Uganda.

When you are excluded from church and from tribal life in Africa because of HIV/AIDS, you are socially dead. And you are cut off and impoverished further with little opportunities for work. And you die. And what happens to your children? What happens when your husband dies and you are too weak to work and bring in food for your children. Where is the church? Absent and separated from the reality of suffering from HIV/AIDS.

I wrote in my first book:

A leather jacket of HIV+ individual reads, “God is HIV+.” The inscription asserts God’s solidarity with HIV-infected people, their marginalization, and suffering. Queer Christians witness in their in their love-making, “To reject people living with HIV illness is to reject God.”….

In the 1990s, I and a growing number of churches in America realized that Christ was living with HIV/AIDS and that our churches had HIV/AIDS. We acted up when churches called us sinners. Many were shunned and excluded from churches because they were gay men living with AIDS. Where was Christ? Certainly not with the churches who showed no compassion.

African feminist theologians are acting up and are claiming the Compassionate Christ. I want to read you a quotation from Dr. Muse Dube, a biblical scholar who gave teaching in the university to devote her time as activist to fight AIDS in Africa:

We, the church of this era, will ask, “When Lord did we see you sick with AIDS, stigmatized, isolated and rejected, and did not visit or welcome you in our homes? When Lord did we see you hungry, naked and thirsty and did not feed you, clothe you and give you water? When were you a powerless woman, a widow and an orphan and we did not come to your rescue?” The Lord will say to us, “Truly, I tell you, as long as you did not do it to one of the least of these members of my family, you did not do it to me.”

I say Amen to her and all those Christian feminists who act up and will not tolerate the sin management strategies of church that silence women and others about the HIV-status. It is not safe to say you are HIV+ or living with AIDS, you shunned by your community and by your church.

Dube repeats the words of the compassionate Christ in the gospel. Jesus broke all sorts of boundaries because he believed that there were no outsiders anymore in the reign of God. Nobody is outsider, everyone is to be considered included. Inclusivity is the ultimate message of God’s grace: that is, Christ is in everyone. Gospel based compassion tolerates no outsiders. As churches in the US began to hear the gospel in the lives of gay men living with AIDS, they realized the harm committed by themselves and other churches towards people living with HIV/AIDS because they imposed the stigmas of sinner, unclean, and outcast. They abandoned the moral theologies and codes as they saw the face of Christ in folks dying and the love they shared with companions and friends. Compassion cries out to look with the eyes of Christ and see those suffering and labeled sinner and see Christ. Compassion, and the compassion Jesus invited his disciples to practice, included hospitality and radical inclusiveness into the community.

The prophetic edge, and the most dangerous memory of Jesus for us today, is radical inclusivity. Gospel inclusivity tolerates no outsiders. This is difficult to practice. My prayer for African-feminist theologians is continue the path of empowered activism, to speak up against patriarch sin management strategies of churches and be as bold, to ACT UP and break the rules, no longer remain silent and exercise their power to speak against the prime cause of the spread of HIV/AIDS—the African churches.

I want to remind of the final words of Rev. Joe Shore-Goss sermon when he came back from the World AIDS Conference:

The future of HIV reduction and a better world is if we can teach everyone that there is no need for boundaries. If the world could only say no matter who you are or where you are on life’s journey you are welcome here. Then to look into our neighbors eyes, the most marginalized, the most scared and frail and say “what can I do to help you make your life better.” For these lessons, these lessons of love and acceptance can only come from within their own culture and their own community; otherwise, it is just the west imposing their liberal beliefs upon them.

But his words are not only for other areas afflicted with HIV/AIDS, they are for us if we are to prevent ever again what happened to gay men with HIV/AIDS or any other group stigmatized as outsider, branded as sinner, and excluded  The Compassion of Christ lives in you!