Candidating “fortnight”
Almost to the end now
Rev. Lissa Gundlach is our candidate
Town Hall, Saturday, May 2nd 10:30am-12pm
Preaching May 3
Congregational meeting Sunday at 11:30 on Zoom
With your vote to call
If you vote to call Rev. Lissa
She will become your minister on August 1
I will continue as your Interim Ministry through June 30
And we will spend the next two months
Finishing this church year and preparing for the next
Budget hearing on May 9
Finishing our Stewardship Campaign
That we put on hold starting March 15
Congregational Meeting on May 31
To adopt the budget
To elect Trustees and other elected positions to start June 1
We will have our rescheduled Coming of Age culmination (May 31)
Our Music Sunday (June 7)
Our RE Sunday (June 14)
And my last worship day with you (June 21)
I’ll talk more about ending the Interim
After your vote on Sunday.
Advance came out today
2) Message
We don’t know what’s going to happen
As this whole thing got started
We started to look for parallels
That’s how the human mind works to gain understanding
It’s like the flu, we heard
It’s like the influenza epidemic of 1918
We heard other less obvious comparisons
Like it’s our 9/11
Or our Pearl Harbor
Although a lot of folks living today also lived through those
As a gay man who was in his 20s and 30s during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 90s
The most obvious parallel for me is the HIV epidemic
There are some similarities
That very healthy people can get sick, and die, very quickly
The dismissive and disorganized response from the Federal Government
The lack of empathy
Dr. Fauci, who the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the 1980s
(he was not a well-loved figure at the time, by the way, in the gay community)
The confusion and lack of knowledge in the early years of the AIDS epidemic
Contributed then as now to crackpot theories
Kombucha mushroom tea and walnuts
Moralizing from the religious right
And a desperate search for a treatment
And, of course, there are a lot of ways that the COVD-19 epidemic is not similar to the AIDS epidemic.
HIV transmits in very specific and not casual ways (like coughing and touching)
So most people are not at risk
And at risk people can protect themselves relatively easily.
But there is one learning from the AIDS epidemic that I want to lift up today
While we were in the midst of the crisis.
We had no idea how it would end
Or how long it would take
No one, in the mid-80s, could have predicted the actual course of the epidemic.
Right now, with COVD-19
Everyone is putting our hopes on a vaccine
Maybe this year
Maybe next year
The New York Times had a chart going from best case (August 2021)
Stretching out (May 2036)
16 years
Here’s the thing though
We still don’t have a vaccine for HIV
40 years after the first infections
And yet we are long past the crisis.
It turns out we didn’t need a vaccine
We needed prevention techniques to protect the most at risk
(like safe sex and clean needles and eventually Prep)
Drug therapies to keep those infected from developing illness
(like the protease inhibitors of the early 90s)
And treatments for those who did contract illness
My point is
We don’t know
It’s a spiritual theme I keep finding myself coming back to over the last several weeks
Humility
We don’t know
We don’t know what
Or how
Or when
And we can stress about that
Or we can relax
We can let the people who actually have the expertise do what they need to do
And we can wait and see what happens
I’ll see you tomorrow 1pm