Month: March 2022

Isaiah 43:16–21

Every year, the state and local governments in the United States pour more and more money into a criminal justice system that is fundamentally broken. Despite the fact that police fail to resolve the vast majority of significant crimes and that prisons fail miserably at preventing crime, the bipartisan American political establishment is unwaveringly committed to throwing more and more money at these failed institutions. The budget plan that President Joe Biden released this week goes out of its way to emphasize that it funds the police with “$1.97 billion in discretionary funding to support state and local law enforcement.” 

“Budgets are statements of values,” President Biden rightly said and the values his budget espouses represent the American commitment to violence. The American imagination is obsessed with violence as the solution to the economic scarcity induced by capitalism, the criminality created by our legal codes, and the estrangement we feel from one another nurtured by decades of harmful systems and policies. The American consciousness accepts largely without public critique the idea that doing violence to each other will somehow stop violence in our midst, even though this idea has been roundly criticized for millenia. 

Isaiah’s imagination is different. In the passage from Isaiah this week, the prophet depicts God as one who “makes a way” (v. 16) in the seemingly insurmountable obstacle of a churning sea. God neutralizes the weapons of war and instruments of violence — “they are extinguished, quenched like a wick” (v. 17). This God declares: “Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert” (vv. 18-19). 

Invoking the Exodus, Isaiah provokes us to imagine a new thing, to forget the way we’ve always done things. Yet the American response to its social ills is not to embrace whatever new thing God may want to do among us. The American response is to hold on to the former things and the things of old as if they are the only thing standing between us and death. 

The criminal justice system in the United States all too often does not stand between us and death. It is itself an instrument of death. Consider the ludicrous example of Arslan Guney, a 71-year-old man who faces the prospect of a felony for drawing with a sharpie on a gym floor in Colorado. Far from making rivers in the desert, our criminal justice system could send this man to prison creating death where there was life. Consider the role of prisons during the pandemic. Public health experts warned that our prison system would become an “epidemic engine,” destroying the lives of prisoners and people outside their walls. Instead of pursuing decarceration, pandemic relief money often went to funding bloated police departments and investment in even more prisons. American jails hold over 450,000 people not because they have even been convicted by the criminal justice system but because they cannot pay bail or they are being held preventatively without a trial, a system ripe for abuse. Untried incarcerated people experience damage to their families, careers, and communities as the system brings about even more death in our midst. 

What does Isaiah propose as the solution, then? Immediately before the lectionary passage, God commits to “break down all the bars” (v 14) in Babylon, a reference to the systems of incarceration and slavery in the ancient empire. It turns out God is quite the abolitionist! God promises to turn the tables on those dedicated to the Jewish people’s imprisonment and bondage. But according to Isaiah, while God promises all of these things, God’s people do not call for God to live up to those promises. In the United States, Christians do the same. We worship a God who in the first sermon of Jesus proclaims (again, in the voice of Isaiah!) a commitment to setting prisoners free, but so many of us do not pray for that God to come. Instead, we fund police and prisons with our prayers and tax dollars, convinced that $1.97 billion dollars in the hands of inherently violent institutions will keep us safe. 

Every year, we make the same mistake, but what if we didn’t?   

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

Joshua 5:9–12

All of the passages for this Sunday speak of how God is made known in and through abundance, in the bounty of God’s creation and the wideness of God’s mercy. So what is this text doing here?

Joshua is a complicated book, with a complicated history. My ancestors, like many other European settlers on Turtle Island, placed themselves in the unfolding of the story of Joshua, as Israelites entering Canaan. This whole book could be considered is a “text of terror” for indigenous peoples around the world. 

But the communities who wrote and compiled this book had at best an ambivalent relationship with these stories. Remember, it is only after Constantine that anyone who calls this a sacred text gains actual imperial power. For centuries these stories were passed down by people who knew colonization from the underside. And so, while they may have longed for a God who could act with power, destroying their enemies and giving them total control of the land, they narrated a sacred history that subtly critiqued colonization and imperial power.

Here, at Gilgal, the people of Israel sit down to eat the produce of the land. And at that very moment, God’s abundance leaves them. No longer will they eat manna. No longer will they trust in God to provide for their every need. No doubt, like my ancestors disembarking from the boat to start a new life, they were grateful to be able to provide for themselves. But the writers of Joshua warn us: You can trust in God’s abundance, or you can trust the works of your own hand, but do not confuse the two.

We often talk about abolition as an act of creation. We plant a new world in the shell of the old. But even more fundamentally, abolition requires us to tend to the practices of healing and transformative justice already alive. It begins not from deficit or scarcity, but from a lens of abundance. 

My comrades Dawud Lee and Nyako Pippen, who are both currently serving Death By Incarceration sentences in Pennsylvania, write that incarcerated people have always practiced transformative justice. Even in the belly of the beast, where scarcity is not a mindset but a daily reality, “there are some folks inside of these cages that understand the kind of love and patience that is required to help others make the transformation from living a life of perpetual pain and violence to living a life of healing and accountability.”

What could be more abolitionist than practicing love and patience from inside prison walls? What could be more abolitionist than trusting in divine abundance and tending to God’s creation? Let us abolish settler-colonialism and the carceral system, as we grow the transformative justice spirit. 

Rev. Jay Bergen is a pastor at Germantown Mennonite Church in Philadelphia, and a volunteer organizer with the Coalition to Abolish Death By Incarceration (CADBI), a campaign fighting to end life sentences and heal communities across Pennsylvania.

Isaiah 55:1–9

In her work as an abolitionist, Mariame Kaba reiterates again and again that we must continually push against our own instincts for punishment that are formed in a society where punishing those who have done wrong is normal and expected. When I first heard this idea, I had begun to be receptive to the need to end prison and policing, but had not realized the depth to which punishment had taken root in my own life and interpersonal relationships. As a partner and parent, I began to see the ways in which I was taught punishment in my own family system as a child, and how it was being manifested in the ways I worked through conflict between myself and my husband and daughter, primarily through being unforgiving and disconnected.

When I read this Isaiah passage for this week’s lectionary, I was immediately drawn to verses 7-9. These verses focus on a God who will abundantly pardon because God’s ways are not our ways. I did a little research into these verses and found that they echo a conversation in Ezekiel 18 when God’s saving actions toward the wicked were judged by the house of Israel to be unfair in verse 29. The story in this passage and Isaiah demonstrate twice over the ways in which God’s graciousness and will for the salvation of all can trip up “good people” who see graciousness toward the “bad” as reflective of an unfair God who must not value their own “goodness.”

God’s ways are not our ways. When we thirst for punishment of those who do wrong toward us or the people we love, we are being formed by our environment that says that the way we deal with being wronged is by exercising power over those who have wronged us to cause them harm. As we consider the ways in which we work to dismantle carceral systems in society and in our personal lives, may we do so with an eye toward God’s ways, where all things and people can be saved and abundantly pardoned.

Grace Kozak is an MDiv student at Christian Theological Seminary and under care for ordination with the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).

Philippians 3:17–4:1

One of the great challenges of the church in the modern world, and the church in the United States in particular, is the question of citizenship: where does our citizenship lie? Is it in the place where we were born? Is it in the place we reside? Is it in the place marked on any documents we may or may not have?

Paul was a citizen of Rome. He knew the privileges that that citizenship offered to him. In Philippians 3, though, he offers a radical critique of worldly views of citizenship. With powerful language he describes a group of people who are enemies of the cross. Their end is in destruction. Their god is in their belly. They’re never satisfied. They’re never content. They’re constantly desiring more and more.

In contrast, Paul proclaims that our citizenship is in heaven. This echoes the words of Jesus in the gospels where he says, ‘give to Caesar, what is Caesar and give to God what is God’s.’ It echoes the lines from the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus says, “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” (Matthew 6:19-21, NRSV)  

This citizenship question matters tremendously when we think about society in general and the kind of society Christians should strive for, because if Paul is right, if we are first citizens of heaven and we should first imitate the saints, then we need to strive for a world whose god is not in the belly. A world of radical transformation, where prison abolition is not seen simply as another political plank but as the bellowing call of our Lord and master Jesus Christ to love our neighbors.

It is an act of faith to claim our citizenship in heaven. It is faith like in the words of Hebrews, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11:1, NRSV). The point of abolition is not found just in its practical effects, even though there are strong arguments to be made there, and there are many secular arguments for abolition that are powerful and valid, but the impetus of the church rests on this claim is that the people in this world around us are our brothers and sisters, wherever they are from, whatever they have done. They are worthy of respect, dignity, opportunity, and transformation.

So may we be imitators of Christ, imitators of love, for the transformation of this world, so that this world can be a little more like the true place where our citizenship resides.

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

Romans 10:8–13

On this First Sunday in Lent, we are met with an ancient formula found in Romans 10: “If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For one believes with the heart and so is justified, and one confesses with the mouth and so is saved.”

Of course, this passage is about the entire promise of the gospel: resurrection, salvation, abundant life in community with God and one another. The promise of Jesus is a metaphysical promise of abundance in the midst of the ambiguities of existence.*

But if we consider abolition as a sign of resurrection, as I wrote about a few weeks ago, then the promise here is meaningful in our work toward building an abolitionist reality. I am particularly struck by the doubled motion of “believe” and “confess” in this formula in Romans. If we believe that God raised Jesus from the dead, then we also confess that he is Lord. If we believe in the power of God to accomplish resurrection, then we also must confess — in the public sphere as well as in private devotion — Jesus’ victory over the powers of sin and death, which include the death-dealing systems of incarceration and punishment. Our belief in Jesus’ victory over death may justify us but, according to this passage, it is our confession that saves. Salvation is tied to the articulation of Jesus’ lordship, of God’s power to redeem and save us from the powers and systems of oppression in our world, so that, as Paul concludes, “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.” And in our current context, abolition is one such concrete articulation of what it means that Jesus is Lord. Abolition declares that Jesus’ victory over death is real, that it has concrete consequences for our world today as well as the world to come, and that the nature of Jesus’ lordship promises the transformation of our communities and political systems from systems that bring death to those that give life. Abolition gives us a way of describing in practical and material terms one consequence of saying Jesus is Lord, and a way of expressing that fundamental theological reality in terms that make explicit its consequences which challenge us and our presuppositions about how the world works.

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

*This is what 20th-century theologian Paul Tillich called the “triumphant union of unambiguous life” — his thought on existentialism has profoundly affected my own thinking, although I cite him here with hesitation because of the allegations of sexual harassment against him which came out after his death.