Miami Herald - Monday, December 19, 1994
Leonard Pitts, Jr., Herald Columnist

What else could possibly explain the story that came out of Philadelphia last week, about the church where the HIV-positive and those with AIDS are forbidden to worship? These policies are outlined in a placard on the wall of the Old Ship of Zion Church, next to the sign that reads, "All Are Welcome."

Bishop Nathan Giddings, leader of the 38-member congregation, says his policies are based on his knowledge of God. The HIV-positive and people with AIDS, he says, are unwelcome "because they suffer from a plague." Gays too, are banned because they "have abandoned the way of the Lord." Giddings means his teachings to be a mixture of Christian and Jewish beliefs.

I was curious about that, so I spoke to a Christian, Robert Cromie, senior pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Fort Lauderdale. Giddings' teachings are "antithetical" to Christian beliefs, he said.

Then I spoke to a Jew. "We don't subscribe to anything like that," said Rabbi Simcha Freedman of Beth Torah Adath Yeshurun in North Miami Beach. "On the contrary, our tradition teaches us to open our hearts to those who are afflicted in any way."

And I spoke, too, to some of the front-line soldiers -- and sufferers -- in the AIDS fight. God's house, they told me, should be a refuge for the afflicted -- not a fortress against them. "A condemning, judgmental God is alien to me," said John Weatherhead, executive director of CenterOne, a Fort Lauderdale AIDS support agency.

"I have a loving God," said Robert, a barber with AIDS from Coral Gables who doesn't want his last name used. "I don't have a God that hates me and wants to see me dead."

Nicholas Udall, an HIV-positive landscaper from Fort Lauderdale, said simply, "Church should welcome everybody. It doesn't matter if you're blue, green, sick, well, have a virus, don't have one. It should be for everybody."

Or, as a wise friend of mine liked to say, the whole of the Bible can be boiled down to a single, essential truth: God is love.

"All else," he said, "is editorial."

But who knows? Maybe that changed when God was kidnapped. Maybe things are different now that He belongs to the Most Righteous.

I poke fun at them, but I'd be lying if I said I don't also have a certain perverse envy of them. After all, I whisper to Him often, confessing questions and confusions on dark nights when the world lies fallow and too still for comfort. As I do, I wonder what it must be like to be like them -- to have no questions or confusions. To know the mind of the Almighty.

God, says Nathan Giddings, wants him to bar the door to sanctuary. You look at the man in all his Most Righteous glory, and if your first response is anger, your second is to shake your head in disbelief at the way he is evidently able to say such things with clear eyes and untroubled conscience.

Then you look at the people on whom the bishop has closed the door, those who have come suddenly face to face with their own mortality and those already traveling the valley of the shadow of death. You look at them and remember Bible stories of Christ, loving and fearless among the lepers.

Get away from me, says Bishop Nathan Giddings to the lepers of the 20th Century.

It sounds nothing like what Jesus said, once upon a Bible verse: "Come unto me . . . and I will give you rest." But then, that was before God was taken hostage.

And if God sometimes seems the exclusive property of the Most Righteous, whose fault is that? Theirs? Or those of us who let Him go and Saturday, silent while they laid claim to Him? Either way, the failure -- of courage, sensitivity and faith -- lies not in Heaven but on Earth. Lies in the pulpit of Old Ship of Zion and the heart of Nathan Giddings, and all the other shadowed places too distant and mean for light to reach.

"The Lord created AIDS and the Lord can cure AIDS," said Bishop Giddings last week. Thankfully, the same holds true for ignorance and fear.
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