Month: May 2022

Acts 16:16–34

The Spirit’s work throughout Acts is easily met with skepticism. Next week we will remember the Spirit bringing 3000 souls into discipleship to Jesus who were “united and shared in everything,” (CEB). After over a decade in Catholic Worker communities, where I have shared (a portion) of my income and possessions with other members and housing in-secure guests, it is a little ironic that I was surprised by my New Testament prof’s comment that most scholars don’t think there was ever a community of 3000 who shared all their possessions in the early church. As I noted above, we only ever shared a portion of our possessions. I lived with less than 30 people and there was enough conflict in negotiating our life together that doing this with 3,000 is incredible. That moment of surprise and recognition comes to mind as I read this passage. 

Here Paul and Silas end up in prison after exorcising a demon from an enslaved girl. This part makes sense. Paul and Silas were being harassed for many days by her following them around and yelling “These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation.” Paul’s annoyance is a very relatable moment. Can you imagine putting up with that for days? The response from her owners is also believable. The girl was doubly-enslaved, both to a demonic force and the owners who exploited her for wealth. We are also living in a world governed by demonic forces and people who exploit us for wealth. In light of the most recent mass shooting, we might consider our enslavement to gun-idolatry and the manufacturers who lobby against restrictions on gun ownership and manufacturing. The only systemic response our country has seen is the increase of police presence, yet increasing the number of people with guns–whether in the hands of police or civilians–has not born the fruit of peace. This story also presents a good opportunity for the abolitionist preacher to point out how the defense of property and increase of wealth has taken precedence over people’s lives in our prison-industrial complex. Furthermore, the accusations in court also feel eerily contemporary. Nationalism, racism, legalism, and propriety regularly undergird the carceral logic that ruins so many BIPOC and impoverished people’s lives. The willingness of the crowd to gang up on them and physically abuse Paul and Silas further recalls the ongoing history of police and white supremacist gang violence against Black bodies. This section is all too real. 

So, Paul and Silas being beaten and imprisoned after an understandable (if not well-planned) action taken in psycho-emotional distress speaks realistically to the injustice many incarcerated people, especially Black people, experience in our world today. It’s the next part that we can meet with skepticism. Amid Paul and Silas’ ongoing faithfulness and hope the Spirit intervenes and an earthquake loosens their chains and opens the prison doors. In distress, the working class–just trying to make a living–jailer is about to kill himself when Paul and Silas charitably alert him to their presence. In gratitude, the jailer seeks his salvation from Paul and Silas. He and his household then enter into solidarity with the former prisoners through baptism and provide for Paul and Silas’ basic needs. 

This script is fantastical, not only because God initiated a prison-break, but because Paul and Silas–the incarcerated–were the liberators of the jailer. They were free and in that position of power they were able to offer salvation to the jailer. What we remember when we read this account in Acts is not just what has already happened in a miraculous moment, but the inception and fullness of our hope. Our hope does not begin with the conversion of jailers, capitalists, or respectable wealthy white people. It begins with people who are willing to speak against the demons that perpetuate ongoing violence and enslavement to Mammon, and with the abolition of prisons and freeing of prisoners, who can then offer everyone liberation from our demonic, capitalist, prison-industrial complex. May we all believe in this miracle and enter into solidarity with those who will bring us salvation.

Acts 16:9–15

This Acts story is confusing! Paul gets a vision of a man from Macedonia pleading with him. So he and the rest of his team get on a boat and head right on over to a major city in Macedonia. After a few days there (recovering from the trip? Trying to find the man from the vision?), they leave the city and head to the river, where they meet a group of women. And here they meet Lydia, a wealthy textile merchant and head of her household, who invites them to her house and is baptized. 

So, to recap: Paul sees a vision of a man, but he finds women. Then, he and his crew are welcomed in by a woman living in the social role of a man (the pater familias, head of household). And the story seems to take these gender and power reversals without batting an eye. A few verses later (stay tuned for next week’s lectionary!) Paul heals another woman, an enslaved woman, and gets incarcerated for it. Maybe the writer is unconcerned about the man from the initial vision. Maybe Macedonian men are really in need of God’s grace, so bad that they don’t even know it and won’t listen to Paul. Maybe the Holy Spirit is telling us that God’s good news for oppressors (men, people who enslave and oppress others) is rooted first in God’s good news for the oppressed. 

As Angela Davis said recently,

“I don’t think we would be where we are today—encouraging ever larger numbers of people to think within an abolitionist frame—had not the trans community taught us that it is possible to effectively challenge that which is considered the very foundation of our sense of normalcy. So if it is possible to challenge the gender binary, then we can certainly, effectively, resist prisons, and jails, and police.” [https://libcom.org/article/dr-angela-davis-role-trans-and-non-binary-communities-fight-feminist-abolition-she]

May our vision of God’s good news lead us to trouble the binaries of power and control. May it lead us to listen to how God is speaking to and through the oppressed. And may we recognize how the good news of liberation is good news for all of us.

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.

John 13:31–35

There are a thousand permutations of the idea that a society is measured by how it treats its most vulnerable, but the biblical variation of this sentiment is in our Gospel lesson for this week. “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” Although in the middle of John’s Gospel, Jesus was delivering his final teachings to his disciples when he said this, passing along the words necessary for them to continue his work. Jesus sets up the measurement of faithfulness for his followers: love displayed to one another.

Abolitionists in New York have been persistently and consistently pointing out how the state fails this measure, a reality that has been particularly apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic. Prisons by their very nature propagate and spread infectious diseases, exposing everyone within their walls to the danger of infection. On top of that baseline danger, some prisoners in New York prisons have been denied booster shots for months, they have not been provided proper personal protective equipment (PPE), and testing has been dismally unavailable. Addressing these problems doesn’t even begin to touch on the inadequate levels of essential medical care and services in prisons – a problem that existed long before COVID-19.

Such treatment certainly fails Jesus’ ‘new commandment’ in the Gospel lesson. No love has been shared in this catastrophic situation. Beyond it, however, a system of incarceration like the one in the United States is fundamentally incapable of showing love. When the only way to rectify wrongs is through committing more (and often more egregious!) wrongs, love cannot exist. When so many innocents are victims of this system, which does nothing to restore or promote life but only to destroy it, love cannot exist. How else can a Christian look upon such an institution than say, “This must end.”

I’ve seen criticism leveled at both police and prison abolitionists that they are not taking criminal justice issues seriously enough with demands to defund and abolish these institutions of violence and destruction. While solutions are undoubtedly complicated, when I considered our Gospel lesson for this week, I couldn’t help but think those critics are the ones not taking Jesus seriously enough. 

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

John 10:22–30

When Jesus is confronting crowds, he often has what seems to be a simple, straightforward ask of them: Believe what you see in front of you. Yet this proves to be beyond their ability. They want sometimes words, sometimes miracles on command, but always they want Jesus to be for them what they imagine, respond to them as they expect. They cannot do the most straightforward thing: Look at what is before them and judge accordingly.
Their inability or refusal to simply take him at his deed and word, to recognize a truth that doesn’t accord with the world they have grown up in and then continued to build, should be familiar to us. This is a human trait that we, too, display often. We prefer our own ideas about justice and punishment, order and propriety, safety and security, over what is quite evidently true: That prisons do not increase safety or rehabilitate people who have committed crimes, they are not humane “time-outs” until people are ready to reenter society, they do none of the good often assumed about them and much harm. Believing they must be the correct way to respond to harm or disruption, we refuse to see how much is lost and how many hurt—or what else could be, instead of incarceration.
Yet Jesus says that no one can snatch his own from his hand. His sheep are his, given to him not by a society that weighs the worth of human beings as it suits the powerful but by Almighty God, the stamp of whose image is on every person, even those who have been banished from public sight.
What if we took Jesus at his deed and his word? What if we accepted the truth when it comes before us, even if it disrupts our ideas of how a society must be run? What freedom might await us, with our eyes open to God’s Anointed and the surpassing worth of all of his sheep? What might then be possible?

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