Christians for the Abolition of Prisons
Set the Prisoners Free—Luke 4:18
Abolition Lectionary is taking a holiday break. We will return after Epiphany.
During this time, I’m thinking about how rest and joy are essential to abolition work. How can we cultivate rest, joy, self- and communal-care as central to our praxis in 2022? (With thanks to The Nap Ministry for these insights.)
The words of the prophets are not just words of the past predicting the Messiah, they are words about the present need for a savior. The church has often drifted into this position of not adequately articulating why anyone would need Jesus. A lot of people are fine and dandy now. Maybe we have a supernatural end after we day. Maybe we can think about our loved ones and seeing them again.
The darkness of which the prophet Isaiah spoke was not the darkness of death at the end of a long life but the darkness found in the brokenness of this world. The people who walk in darkness are here and now people who are hurting in this world; people who society marginalizes and dismisses.
Abolition is one response to the claim of Isaiah 9 that God “will establish justice and righteousness from this time onward and forevermore.” The word justice has been entirely appropriated and hollowed out by the criminal justice system, but righteousness has not. In Greek, they are the same word.
If the child is to be born who brings light in the darkness, then we need follow that child in the authority and righteousness even now. Not just with tasks that are easy, but with tasks that are hard.
The yoke of their burden will be broken. May we work to break those yokes this today. May the Incarnation remind us that God’s light is not just for the future, but for now. May we work towards that future of righteousness in all things, especially in ways of justice, now.
Rev. Wilson Pruitt is a Methodist pastor and translator in Spicewood, TX.
The Magnificat is one of the clearest statements of God’s priorities when it comes to power, yet we frequently ignore it. None of the classic Christmas hymns sung in my tradition (and most likely yours too!) utilize the Magnificat as its biblical referent. It’s a regular feature of some liturgies, but it has disappeared from the popular imagination of Christmas in the United States. Mary’s declaration of what the Nativity will mean is very different from what American Christians frequently ascribe to “the reason for the season,” “the meaning of Christmas,” or “the Christmas spirit.” Why? Because the Magnificat is about power.
The Magnificat outlines God’s agenda for society: scattering the proud, bringing down the powerful, and sending the rich away empty. God wants to lift up the lowly and fill the hungry with good things, because that’s frequently not what is happening in our world.
The reversals of the Magnificat are inherently uncomfortable for a culture that would be subject to them. The prison industrial complex, of course, would be torn apart under Mary’s divine vision. All the authorities and powers Americans feel they depend on for their safety and security (despite how wrong-headed that notion is) would be unseated according to Mary. The police would lose their gargantuan budgets, the private prisons would lose their profits, and the politicians who support them would lose their seats.
And, contrary to the ingrained assumptions of many of us, that’s good news! With these dramatic reversals and massive upheavals come liberation, freedom, and the world God wants. Victims of the carceral system would be lifted up, those left without resources and opportunity because of it would be filled. If we listen to Mary’s song, we hear a call to abolition and liberation—one we can’t ignore.
Wesley Spears-Newsome (he/him/his) is a writer and Baptist pastor in North Carolina.
The reading from Philippians for this Sunday — from which it takes the traditional name “Gaudete Sunday,” from the Latin translation of the text — is all about rejoicing. “Rejoice in the Lord always,” Paul writes. “Again I say, rejoice.”
Joy is all over the letter to the Philippians, which is full of repetitions of Paul’s own “rejoicing” for events in his own life and for the church in Philippi (e.g. 1:18), as well as exhortations to “rejoice.” This is particularly striking given the reality that Paul wrote this letter from his incarceration.
It is important to name that the exhortation to rejoice can be an oppressive one — to demand a sort of performative joy in the Lord from those who suffer is itself an unkindness. But I find the exhortation to rejoice in this letter to be a comfort. Partly, this is because Paul’s exhortation to rejoice comes out of his own confidence and joy — it is less of a demand than an invitation. Another reason, I think, comes from what he identifies in 4:5: “The Lord is near.” Rejoicing derives from the nearness of God; from God who comes down in compassion, sharing in our sufferings so we can share in God’s joy.
And the nearness of God does not only imply God’s self-emptying compassion, but also the promise of deliverance. “The Lord is near,” bringing freedom, liberation, and healing. The very nearness of the Lord implies freedom and liberation, because freedom and liberation are God’s own nature.
This all makes me think of the role of joy in abolition and transformative justice. Sometimes it is easy, in organizing and activism and ministries of presence and solidarity with those who are incarcerated, to see the injustice and suffering of the world so much that we forget how central joy is to the work of abolition. Joy is as essential as struggle.
If abolition is about what we build, not just what must be torn down, then it is enacted in building structures of joy. Solidarity by those of us on the outside with those who are criminalized and incarcerated is based on the joy found in the communities people build within carceral spaces. Restorative justice spaces are spaces of reparation, but they can also be spaces of joy as we deepen connections with one another’s truth. Transformative justice practices build on joy too: in Beyond Survival, Janaé E. Bonsu of BYP100 writes about how “healing-centered organizing requires habitual self-care and collective-care,” naming how organizing spaces draw on “Indigenous and ancestral practices” to build those spaces of care. The work of justice begins with finding joy through practices that have been marginalized by mainstream culture.
“Hope is a discipline,” Mariame Kaba says. And perhaps joy is a discipline too, one that we find as we invest in deep relationships and caring community.
For me, this text is a necessary reminder to search for practices of joy that sustain the work of building a just world.
Hannah Bowman is the founder and director of Christians for Abolition.