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.