Month: November 2021

Philippians 1:3–11

It is sometimes easy to forget that Paul wrote while incarcerated. As a citizen, he had access to many privileges and rights that were not on the table for Jesus or John the Baptist, or any of the apostles or most of the people who came to listen to Jesus preach the good news. But even with all his legal privileges, Paul was a prisoner for five or six years. His “sharing in God’s grace” with other Christians was in two senses: That they all “defended and confirmed” the gospel, and that Christians in the cities in which Paul was imprisoned attended to his physical needs.

Imprisonment is, following Orlando Patterson, “social death”: an incarcerated person is cut off from friends and family, from physical or material care from others, and from voluntary meaningful work. Yet during Paul’s imprisonment, this death was absolutely refused. Christians carried and copied his letters, part of his life’s work; they visited him and attended to him; and Paul himself knew himself to still be fundamentally in community and communion with other Christians and their Lord, in a position to encourage, teach, and exhort them. Paul was known to be alive, as we all are alive in Christ; neither his bond of love with those he wrote to, nor his life, nor his faith, nor the worth of his teachings or perspective were in question.

How can we live in this way today? Paul wrote from prison not as a supplicant or one to be pitied but as a teacher and a brother. Yet how easily those of us who are not incarcerated make appeals for incarcerated people based not on siblinghood but on pity. The good news of God’s liberation and the kingdom brought near to us by Christ is not that God has felt sorry for people worse off than us, but rather that death is over and we are all and will all be freed, restored, healed. Prison is become a nothing as sin is become a nothing: this is the foundation upon which Christ works the good work being done in us. We can live this way now.

Bailey Pickens is a Presbyterian pastor who lives with her wife and dog in Nashville, TN.

Jeremiah 33:14–16

In Advent, the church focuses on the eschatological promise of the coming reign of God. The anticipation of Advent reminds us that the incarnation of God on earth is a prolepsis — an experiencing-in-advance — of the true and complete fullness of creation, of the justice God promises.

The promise of coming justice is central to the text from Jeremiah, a promise from God to bring the “righteous Branch” from David, who shall “execute justice and righteousness in the land” — justice so complete that the land shall be renamed: “The LORD is our righteousness.”

The promise made to Israel, which is a promise for the whole creation through Israel, is the promise of justice. And not only of justice as an abstract value, but of just government — in biblical terms, of a just ruler. Or, as we might put it in modern political terms, of just ways of organizing our society. Of just interpersonal relations. Of social relationships structured by justice and righteousness.

The point is that the promise is not separable from the realities of government and societal relationships. The promise to Jeremiah is not an unearthly paradise but a human society structured by God’s justice.

The challenge is to recognize that such justice has not yet fully appeared. Christian theology has tended to separate this promise from its historical context and associate it with a coming future age or the end of history.

Reading this text in Advent can be a reminder to Christians, though, that the promise of God for justice is a promise for the renewal of this world and society. For Christians, the incarnation of God in Jesus is the beginning of the age to come. We live on the edge of apocalypse. In this space, where God has become incarnate within our society but where justice has not yet won, is a profound place for transformation: a creative womb where we can build and experiment and construct new alternative ways to the death-dealing ways of the world and new ways of healing and transforming harm. In this liminal space of tension and creativity, we work alongside God, bringing to birth God’s justice and righteousness from within the societal structures where we find ourselves.

Hannah Bowman is the founder and director of Christians for Abolition.

John 18:33–37

In the Gospel for Reign of Christ, we find Jesus deep in the carceral system of his day. He has been betrayed by one of his own friends who conspired with the police to arrest him. Most of his community, particularly his disciples, abandon him in the face of his incarceration even before his trial. The trial itself is a sham, something Jesus plainly recognizes. Now, the police have dragged him before the imperial authorities for sentencing. 

At no point is there any logic to Jesus’ incarceration other than imposing the will of the powerful on him. There is no concern for justice (certainly not restorative justice) in this process. There is no concern for what’s best for the community. There isn’t even a significant concern for truth (confoundingly, the lectionary omits Pilate’s famous quotation from v. 38). 

The primary concern in this carceral system appears to be preservation of the powerful hierarchy at work in it. When Jesus testifies for himself earlier in this chapter, the police strike him and demand “Is that how you answer the high priest?” (v.22). The high priest’s power is threatened by Jesus and the police respond with violence. Jesus’ accusers defer to Pilate’s authority when they want to put Jesus to death to preserve their uneasy alliance with the Romans (v. 31). Interrogating Jesus, Pilate famously doesn’t seek truth but the best way to preserve imperial power in the face of one accused of claiming kingship. 

One of the most important things for Christians to recognize about incarceration, policing, and criminal justice in the United States and around the world is what the primary concerns of these systems are. The default assumption is that they exist to keep us safe, but that often doesn’t seem to be the case at all. Private prisons exist to preserve the profits and power of those who own them. Elected law enforcement officials must appear “tough on crime” and follow through with policies to that effect to maintain their power. Whatever the quality of actors within law enforcement and incarceral systems, the priority is preservation of those systems’ status quo. 

Christians, however, are not called to the maintenance of that status quo. Jesus explicitly appeals to a “kingdom … not from this world” (v. 36). This characterization of the Reign of Christ has frequently been spiritualized, but the whole witness of the New Testament doesn’t suggest that. The Reign of Christ has material consequences and should manifest itself in a different order of things, including cared for and freed prisoners (a consistent theme in both Jewish and Christian Scriptures). Particularly on Reign of Christ Sunday, Christians should question the reign of present principalities and powers. Is their status quo godly and holy or is it the same imperial and carceral system that rejected and executed Jesus?

Wesley Spears-Newsome (he/him/his)is a writer and Baptist pastor in North Carolina.

Mark 13:1–8

An editorial note: Conversations about this passage on Twitter have raised some additional points that I wanted to take into account in our conversation here. First, the antisemitic use of this passage by Christians historically must be recognized. The passage has been used to encourage the destruction of Jewish communities and religious sites. Christians have used it in even unintentionally antisemitic ways. 
In light of that, I think that while in this post we tried to make it clear that Jesus is not condemning the temple or declaring its destruction to be because it’s bad, we should go further to avoid comparison between the temple and bad human institutions. While Jesus’ words do present an apocalyptic vision of a future of God beyond everything that is, that newness comes at a cost, and one we as Christians must be especially careful to respect. As I saw someone comment on Twitter, the temple is not our symbol as Christians, and perhaps not ours to appropriate for the sake of comparison. 
Of particular importance to my thinking in ongoing conversation about this passage was the emphasis on the destruction of the Temple as religious trauma, and especially a religious trauma for Jews. In this context, the emphasis of the passage seems even further to be on God’s fidelity even in the face of the traumatic change that has just occurred. In this context, the coming newness of God is a promise about God’s character. As Wilson wrote, “There is injustice and hardship in this world but God is on the side of life.” The enduring fidelity and the promise of new life in God is not opposed to the temple but to the empire that destroyed it. Even in the face of trauma, God is on the side of life. 
This passage is challenging for Christians to approach carefully. But a shared promise of God’s fidelity to us and to the cause of justice offers common ground and a basis for abolitionist futures. —Hannah

We often act as if what currently is has always been. We do so especially with buildings and bridges and institutions. “Do you see these great buildings?” Jesus says of the Temple complex, but it can be said of all our human institutions. Look how big it is! Look how much support it has! Look how many people support prison and incarceration! Look how many people assume prisons have always been around!

Not one stone will be left. Not one stone of the Prison Industrial Complex will remain. Even if it seems like that is the way things are, those stones aren’t as big as the ones on the Temple Mount! Jesus challenges our assumptions about the world and offers us encouragement about what we should assume and what we should seek to change in this world. 
The Temple was the center of faith. The Temple housed the Holy of Holies, which is the location of the presence of God that can only be entered once a year by only one person. Jesus went to the Temple as a child and told his parents that he had gone to his father’s house. Jesus doesn’t speak about the stones of the temple in this way because it is bad or a bad institution — it is not! — but because God’s future is beyond what we know and what we take for granted. If even those stones of the holy Temple are overturned, what of the institutions who cause injustice in this world? They will certainly not last, so we should be encouraged about the new future God promises as we start taking them down brick by brick.

This is challenge enough from this difficult passage, but Jesus is not finished. He is with his disciples and he warns them about folks who will lead them astray. False prophets who claim faith but lead others to destruction. Claiming Jesus does not make something good or just. In fact, many of these false prophets surround us today and claim Jesus in order to continue unjust practices.

The kingdom of heaven is not a continuation of the status quo in perpetuity, but something radically new. There is injustice and hardship in this world but God is on the side of life. May we put our hope not in existing institutions but the Son of God who calls us when we are weary and heavy laden and gives us rest.

Rev. Wilson Pruitt is a Methodist pastor and translator in Spicewood, TX.

John 11:32–44

New York City’s Rikers Island jail complex has been making headlines recently. Inmate deaths; unguarded cell blocks; and detainees being denied food and medicine. Lawmakers who toured the complex described overflowing toilets and floors covered in dead cockroaches, feces, and rotting food. There is a stench, indeed.

The stench of Rikers Island is not just the literal stench of feces, food, and death, but the metaphorical stench of a death-dealing culture that meets violence with violence. The systems of policing and the prison industrial complex are systems of disposal. They remove people from society, whether it’s through dramatic actions of police violence or through everyday police activity; whether it’s through flashpoint moments like we’ve seen at Rikers or the everyday removal of incarcerated people from being worthy of care. Even before bodily death, the empire binds and entombs people. 

As Barry Friesen and John K. Stoner write in If Not Empire, What? A Survey of the Bible, “We all are stricken, as good as dead within a culture that has surrendered to violence and the threat of violence as if they are forces of nature, like gravity or Earth’s rotation. The stench surrounds us, but we are disabled by fear.” Fear drives liberals and Christians to collude with the empire and its systems of disposal, making the stench feel like a forgone conclusion. 

In this passage, Jesus arrives to join the family of Lazarus in mourning after Lazarus has already died. He joins the family and community in their grief and sorrow, even though he knows that journeying to their town moves him closer to Jerusalem, and to those opposed to his movement. The readers of John’s gospel, enduring their own persecution by the empire, would rely on “trusting in the Lord’s ability to bring life out of death.”

Jesus approaches the cave where Lazarus is buried.  According to John Petty, “…caves are places of spiritual mystery and are symbolic of the womb. … It is also a way of saying that new life can emerge only out of the death of the old.” Jesus calls, “Lazarus come out.” In calling Lazarus to new life, Jesus invites all of us to emerge from the fearful, stench-filled, death-dealing ways of empire.

Kelly Hayes wrote of the inmates of Rikers Island, “[w]e’re allowed to forget about them, because they exist within the realm of our fears. These are people who we are told are being contained for our safety, so most people wind up accepting that containment on the state’s terms, without asking too many questions. And so the monster that is the prison-industrial complex becomes more deadly and it grows.” Like Martha who warned Jesus of the stench of Lazarus’s body, many people balk at the thought of reimagining policing and prisons. The stench is as much a product of our collective fears and the ways those fears collude with the empire’s system of violence.

The story of the raising of Lazarus is recorded as a word for those living against the violence of empire. If it is intended to give the original audience confidence in the ability of the Spirit to bring life out of death,  what word might it be offering to us today? May it call us to awaken to the death around us and find ways the Spirit is working to bring forth new life. Let us not turn away from the stench of death and empire’s death-dealing ways but join with Jesus and those who are willing to roll the stone away and call forth new life.

Abolition is not an easy road. It is not a road that avoids moving through grief, fear, or oppression. But it is a road that looks for resurrection in the midst of these things. It looks for a new world that can be birthed from the cave of the old.

Rev. Dana Neuhauser is the Racial Justice Organizer for the Minnesota Annual Conference of the UMC and Minister of Public Witness at New City Church in Minneapolis.

Jonathan Stegall is a faith-rooted organizer with Reclaim the Block, and a user experience designer, in Minneapolis.