Exodus 1:8-2:10
I came out of the closet during the worst years of the AIDS crisis. Folks were dying, including people I knew, co-workers and members of my social circle. Some courageously went out in public with Kaposi’s sarcoma, an opportunistic form of cancer, visible on their bodies like a latter day Scarlet Letter, while others hid from public view. People died alone, or without the comfort of longtime companions, as families and hospitals refused to acknowledge same-sex relationships.
It is no surprise, then, that the late playwright Larry Kramer led others in founding ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. Socially-acceptable hemophiliacs like Ryan White aside, AIDS was most common among gay men, and gay men did not fit social constructs of gender expression and affectional orientation. Many believed the disease was divine judgment.
ACT UP followed in a long tradition of direct and disruptive action in pursuit of justice, an approach used by Suffragettes and activists in the Civil Rights movement, and still used by Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion, and the particularly controversial and diverse Stop Oils collectives.
Legal equality for the LGBTQI+ community is at-risk these days, but at least for now, legal equality is the law of the land, even in neo-fascist Florida, the state of hate, even in liberal California, where small business owner Lauri Carleton was gunned down just nine days ago for displaying a Pride flag.
There is still no cure for HIV/AIDS, though retroviral drugs have slowed disease progression and extended lives. Among those are treatments developed by the pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences, a company named after a play that is itself named after a passage in the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah, when the cranky man of God asks if there is no balm in Gilead. The balm in Gilead was a rare perfume used for medicinal purposes and derived from the terebinth tree. The prophet essentially asks “Is there no medicine for this?”
Gilead’s HIV treatments, the medicine for this, use a drug they developed called tenofovir. Like all of the antiretroviral therapies developed to manage HIV/AIDS, tenofovir came with awful side effects, was extremely expensive, and incredibly profitable for the company.
According to New York Times reporting on a current lawsuit, as early as 2004, Gilead had created a version of tenofovir that was safer for patients. They shelved that new treatment for over a decade. The existing version of tenofovir was under patent until 2017. Gilead continued to sell the more dangerous form of the drug for another decade, only rolling out the new version in 2015, allowing them to extend the life of the patent. An extended patent meant no competition, and a continued monopoly meant more profit.
Gilead Sciences knew the newer form of tenofovir was less toxic to patients, doing less damage to kidney’s and bones. They didn’t care. Corporations, originally intended as a structure to allow people to partner in business creation, now function as a facility for amoral and often immoral conduct.
If Gilead does lose in the lawsuit, they can try the Texas Two-Step. That is when a corporation, facing civil damages for murder under corporate charter, spins off a company, assigns the new dummy corporation all of the obligations from damages awarded for prior criminal activity, then has the dummy corporation declare bankruptcy.
Among the companies that have tried this recently are 3M and Johnson & Johnson, the latter to avoid damages for decades of profiting from cancer-causing talc powders. And here is where it gets difficult, for while we can agree that a company worth half a trillion dollars is not actually bankrupt, we… The Park Church… hold Johnson & Johnson bonds in our portfolio.
So how exactly are we supposed to “ACT UP” in these circumstances?
And here are healthcare providers Shiphrah and Puah, women’s health providers to the Israelite immigrant community in ancient Egypt, for the work of midwives went well beyond simply attending to births.
I can almost hear the white supremacists of Fox News complaining that the foreigners are taking over the country. So the Pharaoh did what racists and nationalist always do, what the governor of Texas has done, which is to effectively sanction the murder of people because they are not “us,” murder of the Israelite baby boys 3200 years ago, murder of undocumented immigrants drowning in barriers on the Rio Grande in 2023.
Moses may be out talking to bushes and gets all of the credit for the human side of the revolt of Egypt’s enslaved, because men pretty much always take the credit, but Shiphrah and Puah were rebels before that kid was even born. When their deception is discovered, they lie, because they are doing what they need to do to save lives. They refuse to obey an unjust order, and order that is legal under human law, but illegal under divine law, a line we continue to debate to this day, that came into play at the Nuremberg trials, that got St. Oscar Romero of San Salvador assassinated.
Now, lest we get carried away, it is worth remembering that the tale of Shiprah and Puah is told in the context of Israel’s own nationalist narrative. The Book of Joshua is one long celebration of ethnic cleansing and genocide, the ancient Israelites slaughtering men, women, and children alike in cities like Jericho and Ai. The good news is that archeologists and historians don’t think this actually happened, and scripture itself undermines the whole pure chosen race narrative, but it is there, and we should not ignore it anymore than we should ignore the ethnic cleansing and slow-moving genocide taking place there today.
Moral complexity is real, in scripture and in our lives. But Jesus healed. That’s our story. It doesn’t matter how we understand that, whether we believe broken bodies were re-wired or not, because the simple fact is people experienced Jesus as a healer, told those stories for a generation until they were written down, and we’ve been telling and celebrating them ever since.
Killing the baby boys of the Israelite immigrant community would have been wrong 3200 years ago. Ethnic cleansing and genocide was as wrong in ancient times as it is now, and we have no business celebrating it. Withholding safer treatment for profit is wrong. Convicted criminal Martin Shkreli and the Caligula-level excesses of the Sackler family may be the epitome of pharmaceutical company greed, but they are not alone. There are good people working in healthcare, but our healthcare system is a sin. The Texas Two-Step is a sin.
And our work of healing is not limited to bodies, though our only experience of the world is embodied. We are called to heal broken spirits and broken minds, and so many carry open wounds, unhealed trauma, both particular trauma that effects one person or family and the widespread trauma that effects entire communities and cultures, the trauma of the BIPOC community going to the grocery store in Buffalo or the Dollar General in Jacksonville, or for that matter, and any BIPOC momma anywhere in America wondering if they send their kid to the grocery store for milk, if they will ever come home.
We’ve got this whole apocalyptic thread running through scripture, the idea that the world is too broken to fix, that we just need to burn it all down, and that certainly seems to be a popular political opinion these days, but we have this other and different thing going on of faithful people working to heal, prophets, Jesus, even Paul, touching people and making them whole and calling for the healing of the world, a concept that would develop in the Rabbinic tradition as Tikkun Olem, the repair or healing of the world, and seen today in organizations like Repairers of the Breach, led by the Rev. Dr. William Barber of our sister denomination and named after a passage in the Book of the Prophet Isaiah.
Funny how we keep coming back to those Hebrew Bible prophets.
And unless this is your very first time here, and welcome if it is, but unless you are new in the door, you know that I am not interested burning the world down or aiming life at a maybe heaven. Shiphrah and Puah didn’t sit around waiting for God to do the work. And neither should we.
There are people who need saving. There is a world that needs healing. There are companies that are doing the Texas Two-Step, and at least one of them owes us some money. How can we, from our positions of relative privilege, best ACT UP?