Month: February 2022

2 Cor. 5:20b–6:10

We entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

As we work together with him, we urge you also not to accept the grace of God in vain. For he says,

“At an acceptable time I have listened to you,

and on a day of salvation I have helped you.”

See, now is the acceptable time; see, now is the day of salvation! We are putting no obstacle in anyone’s way, so that no fault may be found with our ministry, but as servants of God we have commended ourselves in every way: through great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger; by purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, holiness of spirit, genuine love, truthful speech, and the power of God; with the weapons of righteousness for the right hand and for the left; in honor and dishonor, in ill repute and good repute. We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying, and see– we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.

Ash Wednesday is the beginning of Lent for the Western Church and services typically focus on our vulnerability and need for repentance. In this passage Paul entreats the Corinthian church to be reconciled with God in order to become “the righteousness of God.” Paul states that there is “no obstacle” put in their way. Even though they are subject to persecution and ridicule, they remain steadfast, patient, loving, and honest. They seem like they have nothing, but they have everything; they are being punished and subject to sorrow, but they are alive and joyful. On Ash Wednesday this passage raises these questions: How does God make the way for reconciliation? Why does our reconciliation make us “the righteousness of God?” What does it mean to refrain from putting obstacles in the way of reconciliation? And finally, what is so counter-intuitive about what the Christians are steadfastly offering and embodying? 

Beginning with the call to repentance on Ash Wednesday as a step towards being reconciled–that is put back into right relationship–we might highlight the way that dehumanizing punishment represented by prison and policing stands in the way of accountability and repentance. When the wages of sin are akin to death, even taking accountability and repenting can not lead to reconciliation. God makes the way for reconciliation by God’s faithfulness to offer grace in order to remove the obstacle of death-dealing punishment. In Romans 3:25, Paul says that it is God’s grace that demonstrates God’s righteousness. When we place our faith in that grace and are willing to honestly face the ways in which we are involved in harm in our communities, then we can begin to embody God’s righteousness in the world. 

This is only true when it is made real in the world and in our communities, but the work of making it real is an uphill battle. Grace and repentance can be used by those who are strong in a community to revel in the freedom to abuse the weak. We regularly see today how grace and a concern for harsh punishment is invoked for young white male rapists, whereas law and order is invoked for Black women who have defended themselves against abuse. The call to remove the obstacle of incarceration through an emphasis on grace must never be used to remove the need for real repentance (turning away from harming behavior) and accountability (seeking to repair the damage done as much as possible). Grace, appropriately applied, makes way for the things necessary for reconciliation. It does not remove the need for honesty, behavioral change, and accountability. 

What then is “God’s righteousness” and how does it relate to the “ill-repute” that Paul speaks of? God’s righteousness is not demonstrated by ignoring our sin, but by a commitment to remain in relationship with us, working for our healing and restoration. In a world where harm is so great, the commitment to remain in relationship on a societal level and work for the healing of both victims and perpetrators of harm (both of which is all of us) seems vulnerable and foolish. We are left open to feeling deep sorrow, to being further harmed or punished, to pouring out our monetary and energetic resources into a fruitless endeavor.  Any individual who is not able to experience healing and restoration remains an indictment against God’s faithfulness to reconcile. We must remember then, that even the work of transformative justice, the work of seeking to abolish prisons and build new systems of accountability and reconciliation, is commended in and of itself because it builds our capacity to be people who are able to transform harm. This is what Paul means when he says that “they have commended themselves in every way.” Though the work seems foolish and leaves them vulnerable to harm, the work at the same time makes them more resilient and able to be a reconciling people. 

On Ash Wednesday, we must remember that the call to trust in God’s grace and repent of sin is only the beginning of the work. It is a foundation for an entirely different way of achieving justice that stands opposed to any form of justice that relies on punishment and death. If we are to be reconciled with God and become “God’s righteousness,” then we are also called to do the work that “commends ourselves” in the face of great harm. We must work to abolish punitive systems and put in place systems of accountability that allow us to remain relationally connected.

Sarah Lynne Gershon (she/her) is an MDiv/MTS student, DOC pastor, and lives at the Bloomington Catholic Worker. 

Luke 9:28–43

In jails and prisons, there are plenty of Bibles. The fat paperbacks line chapel bookshelves, dozens of translations. New boxes arrive every month. Guys I knew in a super-max facility used stacks of these hefty volumes to lift inside bedsheets when weights were taken away.

The problem with these phonebook-like bricks of recycle paper is that the wild variety of witnesses in our tradition’s collected scriptures gets flattened, reduced to: The Holy Bible (Book, from the Latin). For my friends reading and trying to pray in jails and prisons, the most radical and liberating voices in the scriptures can merge into a murkier “The Bible Says” — where often, the interpretation of what “The Bible Says” upholds the carceral, punitive status quo.

This is a bummer, a scriptural boxing and caging—which the gospel story of the Transfiguration brilliantly abolishes.

In Luke’s gospel, Jesus’ disciples follow him up the mountain where they see his divine glory unleashed, shining through his flesh, his face, his clothes. Then mystical apparitions of scriptural heroes Moses and Elijah show up. The disciples witness the embodiments of The Law and The Prophets talking with their living lord and rabbi, Jesus. 

Peter—so often the mirror of our human impulses—in his thrill offers to build three dwellings, or shelters, sukkot, for these three holy teachers. Maybe it was an act of honor, sacred hospitality. Maybe it was to commemorate this epiphany, to contain the mystery, as we do, with altars and memorials. Either way, Peter “Bibles” them: he wants to put a familiar religious structure around these voices. 

This is when a larger cloud of the Divine wraps around them all and says to all of them—not just the disciples but to Moses and Elijah as well: “This is my Son, my Chosen. Listen to him!” 

Here, the voice of God resists our containment, our boxes. The voice of God exalts the person and message of Jesus as the fulfillment of all biblical voices. In this moment of radical reorientation, both those before Jesus (the Law and the Prophets) and after (the Apostles) are instructed by God to listen to Jesus.  

No matter what we and our incarcerated friends read in the scriptures, no matter what images of God or human actions may seem to support systems of oppression, none of it can overrule or cancel out—or even be held in debate with—the liberating words and mission of Jesus. 

May we all hear God’s loud preference here—and so join Moses, Elijah, Peter, James and John as we all learn let go of what we thought we knew and listen with greatest attention to God’s chosen, liberating, healing, forgiving, Hades-abolishing, execution-undoing embodiment in Christ.

Chris Hoke is the creator and director of Underground Ministries in Washington State, which equips churches and businesses to practice resurrection and abolition through re-entry relationships alongside men and women returning from prison.

Luke 6:27–38

I never found it difficult to love my enemies until I had some. I grew up in a cozy suburb with little police presence and not a prison in sight. The most I saw of police was the inexplicably present “School Resource Officer” at my public high school. Raised among evangelicals, I remember being taught that my enemies were people whom I didn’t like or with whom I didn’t get along. The most dramatic enemy was an abstract foe in a culture war. These are not the kind of “enemies,” I think, of which Jesus spoke.

In my first years of ministry under the Trump Administration, I finally made some real enemies. One of our church members was kidnapped by law enforcement while attending what was supposed to be a routine check-in regarding his immigration paperwork. As I waited for him to come out after doing his biometrics, I received a panicked call from him that they’d put him in handcuffs and were taking him away. Then the line cut out.

I made a list of enemies over the next 45 days as we fought a losing battle against his deportation. Kelly. Kunde. Gallagher. Nielsen. Trump. Officials all up and down the authoritarian ladder, from case officers to paper pushers to the ones dictating the policy that got our friend incarcerated and ultimately deported.

The 45 days our church member spent in immigration detention should be enough to convince anyone that abolition is necessary. He was hospitalized several times because of negligence toward his medical conditions. He spent time in at least three prisons and not a care was given to his struggling body in most of them. For most of his detention, he was isolated in a remote notorious prison designed to alienate immigrants from support in rural Georgia.

But the Scripture passage this week isn’t about that. It’s about the people who made that world possible and continue to maintain it (because it did not leave office with the former administration). I can’t tell you exactly what it means to love those people. I’m still struggling to figure that out myself. But what I can say is that this passage demands we don’t wish the same depraved system of incarceration on them, even though they made and maintain it. And if we don’t wish prison on the only people who we really might think deserve it, we certainly can’t maintain that status quo for people who aren’t our enemies and certainly don’t.

For all the focus we put in this passage on turning the other cheek, I believe the answer to the vexing questions here may lie elsewhere. In v. 30, Jesus makes a remark that seems out of place when talking about enemies. “Give to everyone who begs of you.” The response to a cruel and shattered world is not to wield its own weapons against it and against your enemies. The response is abundance. The response is to make plain God’s provision and love to the world.

The project of abolition is not merely the ending of incarceration or the abolition of police. The project of abolition must necessarily involve the creation of a world that obviously has no need for such things, where the existence of these systems would seem absurd to everyone present. We need to recognize and distribute the abundance that God has given us in this world so that everyone has what they need. Then everyone can thrive and not just attempt to survive.

Even our enemies. 

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

1 Corinthians 15:12–20

In this passage from 1 Corinthians, Paul writes, by logical syllogism, to combat the belief that there would be no general resurrection of the dead. For Paul, the resurrection of Christ points to the resurrection of all; to the promise of life beyond death, the vindication of those denied justice in life, and the renewal of the creation.

Of course, Paul’s insistence on resurrection here is about victory over death and life beyond our deaths in this world. But — as in Daniel 12:2 and Jürgen Moltmann’s interpretation of that passage in The Crucified God — resurrection also points to justice and vindication. The resurrection is also the resurrection to judgment: not the criminal legal system of punishment that passes for “justice” in this world, but God’s true judgment of accountability. Belief in the resurrection of the dead is hope that justice can be done — that is one reason why, as Paul writes, if there is not resurrection “we are of all people most to be pitied” (15:19). 

Resurrection of the dead is victory for those who have perished (and vindication for those who have perished due to injustice and oppression). Resurrection of the dead is also what frees us from remaining “still in our sins” (15:17). The divine judgment at the resurrection of the dead is linked by faith, in 15:17 to our freedom from our sins, to the transformative possibilities of real accountability and divine compassion. 

Lee Griffith, in The Fall of the Prison, also reminds us that prisons in the Bible are identified with the powers of death — so resurrection is opposition to the power of the prison, and abolition is an act of resurrection. Resurrection is the freedom of those bound by death and the grave. Resurrection empowers the promise of freedom for those subject to the civil death of incarceration, too.

And this resurrection is not only a promise for the world to come but a present reality. As Paul writes in 15:20: “But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died.” While the resurrection of all, victory over death, hasn’t come about yet, it has started. Paul’s faith in the resurrection of the dead is based on the reality of the vindicated Jesus who lives. And for us, living in the presence of the living risen Christ, in a world where the resurrection of the dead has already begun, abolition becomes a sacramental act of making-present the living Jesus. The risen Christ comes close to us in every act of liberation that resists the powers of death and brings forth transformative and creative community and accountability. Abolition flourishes in the already-risen presence of the living Christ and anticipates the promise of the divine judgment of real accountability — for in fact, Christ has been raised from the dead.

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

Luke 5:1–11

In Luke’s first “call to discipleship” narrative, Simon Peter has spent the whole night fishing with no luck. Jesus asks him to cast out his nets again and Simon Peter notes his objection: “‘Master, we’ve worked hard all night and caught nothing. But because you say so, I’ll drop the nets,’” (5:5 CEB). He casts his net and it is suddenly overflowing with fish. Simon’s response is “‘Leave me, Lord, for I’m a sinner!’” This is often read as a righteous humility and Jesus’ “Don’t be afraid” as divine mercy. Is this a merciful response to Simon’s appropriate humility or is it a correction to a logic of shame and fear? It might be both, and in both ways it speaks against the logic that undergirds our prison and policing system. 

On one level, carceral logic relies on the idea that some people deserve to be dehumanized through violence, exile, or withholding of necessary resources. Ultimately this logic flows from fear: the fear that there won’t be enough, that we need to protect ourselves from the pain that comes from mistakes, that a lack of due-deference for another person should result in condemnation. This fearful logic legitimizes the policing and prison system, which exists to force the most vulnerable populations to bear the weight of the consequences of economic austerity and dysfunctional social systems. From that perspective, Jesus’ miracle and response undermine carceral logic and the dysfunctional, austerity system it upholds. Jesus creates overabundance, corrects Simon when he attempts to exile himself (after his mistake of objecting to Jesus’ request), and asserts that his authority should not evoke fear in Simon Peter. 

On another level, there is a sense that Simon’s response is appropriately humble and Jesus’ response a show of mercy. Dysfunctional systems are, at their heart, dysfunctional relationships. Dysfunctional relationships, at their heart, arise from misplaced fear. They result from imbuing temporal things and relationships with ultimate weight or what Paul Tillich calls “ultimate concern.” When we relate to experiences of suffering or acts of harm as ultimately defining experiences, then we create a reality in which a victim of harm is universally a victim and a perpetrator of harm is universally a perpetrator. The dichotomy of victim/perpetrator is also a part of carceral logic and at its heart is the fear of being either. We want the police to protect us from being victims by isolating and punishing perpetrators. We dehumanize perpetrators because we do not want to identify with them. We go to great lengths to analyze “what went wrong” that created a victim, often to the extent of victim-blaming. This is a dysfunctional reality because it is based on placing our ultimate concern on the avoidance of being a victim or perpetrator.

From this perspective, Simon Peter’s confession “Leave me, Lord, for I’m a sinner” represents a transitional space from the fear I described above. Simon can avow his identity as a sinner, but if Jesus does not show mercy he will be stuck in that identity. Jesus does immediately show mercy: “Don’t be afraid.” If Simon has placed his ultimate concern in the appropriate place, God’s regard for him, then he can be free of all the fears that perpetuate dysfunctional relationships. Consequently, Simon Peter must recognize Jesus’ ultimate authority as the only rightful object of fear. Only then will he internalize Jesus’ merciful “Don’t be afraid” and his identity will be transformed. When this is realized within himself he can also become a mediator of God’s “Don’t be afraid,” and begin to “catch” people into life-giving relationships.

From a transformational justice perspective, we must also be able to acknowledge the reality of harm that we do and harm that we experience, but we must also hear and relay God’s response: “Don’t be afraid.” Only through courageously facing the reality of harm (and our role as victim and/or perpetrator) and believing in the possibility of transformation, can we build a system that nurtures life-giving relationships. 

Sarah Lynne Gershon (she/her) is an MDiv/MTS student, DOC pastor, and lives at the Bloomington Catholic Worker.