Month: July 2022

Luke 12:13-21

This post was accidentally posted last week. I’m reposting it here, for the correct week.

The opening of this gospel passage shows someone asking Jesus to judge a family dispute over money, to which Jesus responds: “Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?”

This response points to an important lesson for abolitionists: we have the resources to resolve conflicts in our own communities. Jesus, the one who is shown in apocalyptic texts as the judge of the world, refuses to take on the authority of a judge, refusing to take the resolution of conflict away from a community.

Sociologist Nils Christie describes conflict as “property of a community” — by which he means that communities have the right and responsibility to engage in conflict and grow stronger by working productively and constructively through it. As Christie points out, one of the dynamics behind our reliance on police and prisons is a desire to avoid conflict by “outsourcing” it to professionals: rather than engage in the hard work of resolving differences or solving problems together in our community, we call the police. We look for what Mariame Kaba calls “Somewhere Else” to put “bad people” (see Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law, Prison By Any Other Name) rather than recognizing that harm occurs within our communities and that we can and must address it by transforming conditions in our communities.

(Of course, it is essential to note that this is NEVER to imply that victims of abuse are required to engage in a process with their abuser, which dynamics of abuse would make unsafe. Conflicts are property of a COMMUNITY and the responsibility is on the community to build safe spaces for survivors while providing pathways to accountability for abusers.)

This desire to outsource conflict is why housed people support cities using violence to make unhoused people invisible, so they don’t face discomfort. It is why protestors against state violence are called to be “peaceful” (which usually doesn’t mean peaceful but non-disruptive) in order not to provoke conflict. It is why churches are often afraid to take controversial stances, such as explicit support of abolition, if it might provoke conflict within a congregation. Reclaiming our right to conflict is essential to building an abolitionist world. Learning to be in conflict well is essential to build healthy communities.

The rest of this passage condemns greed and wealth. This should remind us as abolitionists that policing exists for the protection of private property, not for community safety. Part of building our ability to engage in healthy conflict within our communities is questioning our underlying assumptions about property and wealth, and the capitalist structures that immiserate so many people. Turning away from the idolatry of wealth — being willing to risk our own property for the sake of the needs of others — and building our communal capacity to handle conflict will help us build an abolitionist world.

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

Hosea 1:2–10

Edited 7/25: By a scheduling mixup, it turns out this was the correct post for 7/24, and the previous post was for the following week! Thanks for your understanding. —Hannah

I really would have preferred to skip over this reading, to ignore this dangerous metaphor Hosea uses to describe God’s wrath at the Israelite people. This is a story of a man denigrating a woman sex-worker, and then denigrating her children, all as some elaborate form of public theater. Hosea tells us that his actions should teach us about who God is. But part of being a living, breathing tradition means we get to interact with our sacred texts: They push us, we push them. 

One faithful abolitionist response to this story could be to say, “No, Hosea, this violence is not the will of God.” We can choose instead the prophetic images of God as a caring mother hen, as the bringer of abundance so great that “they will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain.” Saying No to seemingly divinely-ordained systems of violence is a radical act, one that goes back to Hosea’s time. Today we can turn to theologians like postcolonial feminist Musa Dube to embrace this faithful reading.

Another response could be to listen with care and imagination to the real people impacted by Hosea’s elaborate performance here: Gomer, her daughter Lo-ruhamah, and her son Lo-ammi. What if they’re not just archetypes? Maybe, God willing, Gomer gave her children other names that spoke to her love and care for them, that reminded them they were more than just props in the twisted drama of their abusive father. Maybe, God willing, she had nothing to do with Hosea except when they had sex and at the naming ceremony after their birth. This tradition of creative and compassionate rereading, too, is ancient, and today we can embrace alongside womanist scholars like Wil Gafney.

A third option as Christian abolitionists is to sit in the uncomfortable familiarity of this story. Certainly, Hosea’s framework is common in situations of family violence: When I hurt you, I show you how the universe is ordered. Where, and who, are we in this story? What might we have to learn about ourselves by reading a prophetic text that has shaped how our society thinks about gendered violence and the will of God? Feminist theologians like Julia O’Brien invite us into the holy troubling in this text.

Whatever faithful readings we choose, this is sacred and difficult work. As abolitionist Christians, we must be willing to say “No,” to boldly imagine, and to tease out complexity all at the same time. Our freedom depends on it.

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.

Luke 12:13–21

Edited 7/25: By a scheduling mixup, this was actually the post for Proper 13, 7/31. I’m reposting it with that date as well. Thanks for understanding! —Hannah

The opening of this gospel passage shows someone asking Jesus to judge a family dispute over money, to which Jesus responds: “Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?”

This response points to an important lesson for abolitionists: we have the resources to resolve conflicts in our own communities. Jesus, the one who is shown in apocalyptic texts as the judge of the world, refuses to take on the authority of a judge, refusing to take the resolution of conflict away from a community.

Sociologist Nils Christie describes conflict as “property of a community” — by which he means that communities have the right and responsibility to engage in conflict and grow stronger by working productively and constructively through it. As Christie points out, one of the dynamics behind our reliance on police and prisons is a desire to avoid conflict by “outsourcing” it to professionals: rather than engage in the hard work of resolving differences or solving problems together in our community, we call the police. We look for what Mariame Kaba calls “Somewhere Else” to put “bad people” (see Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law, Prison By Any Other Name) rather than recognizing that harm occurs within our communities and that we can and must address it by transforming conditions in our communities.

(Of course, it is essential to note that this is NEVER to imply that victims of abuse are required to engage in a process with their abuser, which dynamics of abuse would make unsafe. Conflicts are property of a COMMUNITY and the responsibility is on the community to build safe spaces for survivors while providing pathways to accountability for abusers.)

This desire to outsource conflict is why housed people support cities using violence to make unhoused people invisible, so they don’t face discomfort. It is why protestors against state violence are called to be “peaceful” (which usually doesn’t mean peaceful but non-disruptive) in order not to provoke conflict. It is why churches are often afraid to take controversial stances, such as explicit support of abolition, if it might provoke conflict within a congregation. Reclaiming our right to conflict is essential to building an abolitionist world. Learning to be in conflict well is essential to build healthy communities.

The rest of this passage condemns greed and wealth. This should remind us as abolitionists that policing exists for the protection of private property, not for community safety. Part of building our ability to engage in healthy conflict within our communities is questioning our underlying assumptions about property and wealth, and the capitalist structures that immiserate so many people. Turning away from the idolatry of wealth — being willing to risk our own property for the sake of the needs of others — and building our communal capacity to handle conflict will help us build an abolitionist world.

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

Amos 8:1–12, Psalm 52

The Revised Common Lectionary pairs Amos’ vision of a basket of summer fruit (8:1-12, NRSV) with a psalm of equally apocalyptic warning (Psalm 52). Contemporary Americans relegate these sort of warnings to fringe churches, street preachers, and conspiracy theorists at their peril. 

God offered a stark warning of what was to come in Amos, which he had to deliver to Israel. “The songs of the temple shall become wailings,” God warned. “The dead bodies shall be many ,cast out in every place” (8:3). Psalm 52 likewise admonished, “God will break you down forever” (v. 5). But why is God bringing about or at least consenting to these catastrophes? 

Both Amos and the psalmist provide answers. Amos, from Judah, warns the Israelites that they have “trample[d] the needy,” brought “to ruin the poor of the land.” They have committed economic injustices by falsifying balances, tricking buyers, and exploiting the poor and needy (8:5-6). The psalmist decries those who “trust in abundant riches” and seek “refuge in wealth,” becoming evildoers who ignore God (52:7). And God promises, “Surely I will never forget any of their deeds” (Amos 8:7). 

One of the pillars that props up the prison industrial complex is profit. There has been vast amounts of money to be made in the building and maintenance of prisons. GEO Group and Core Civic, leading builders and operators of private prisons in the United States, made a combined total revenue of almost $4,000,000,000 in 2021 (that’s $4 billion, but I believe it’s helpful to write it out). GEO Group and Core Civic aren’t the only companies profiting off private prisons and we can’t limit the financial gains of the prison industrial complex to private prisons. Public prisons and jails enrich vendors and operators, as well. 

I once heard on very good authority of a church that received 40% of its budget from one donor every year. This donor made all his money providing uniforms and other sundries to prisons. Our own Christian institutions are propped up by, in many cases, the same money that God condemns in Amos and the psalms. When we talk about the abolition of prisons, we need to understand that means cleaning up our own houses, too, not just the houses of the wealthy and powerful. 

When confronted with these realities, the far reaching profits of prisons, the temptation is to throw up our hands and despair of ever trying to extricate ourselves from it or abolish the system itself. Amos and the psalmist, however, claimed that we ignore their warnings at our peril. How will God see us if we turn our eyes away from the profit we gain from prisons? How will God judge those benefiting off the oppression of God’s children? God says, “Surely, I will never forget any of their deeds,” so we need to act accordingly.

Wesley Spears-Newsome (he/him/his)is a writer and Baptist pastor in North Carolina. You can find more of his work at wespearsnewsome.com.

Amos 7:1–17

As sometimes happens in the lectionary, we get a snippet of scripture that misses important context. Prior the start of this passage, God has expressed dissatisfaction with the Israelites and threatened a plague of locusts and an all-consuming fire. Both times, Amos pleaded with God and God backs off. Notably, Amos didn’t ask for lenience because the people were good but, instead, because they were “small”, citing human finitude as the reason God should relent. The third exchange begins at vs 7, which we pick up in this lectionary passage. Instead of a tool of destruction like locusts or fire, God is holding a tool for measurement. Like a pendulum, a plumbline is a cord with a lead weight on the end and is meant to assess whether a wall has been built straight and sturdy or if it’s uneven and prone to self-destruction. In these verses, God is measuring according to the expectations of the covenant and finding the people of Israel lacking.

It’s important to know that this isn’t a ritual failing – it’s a moral one. Back in chapter 5, we learn that all the right festivals and songs are happening but that’s only making God angrier. Right ritual isn’t matched with right relationship and the poorest, highest risk, and most marginalized are being abused. God has seriously pissed off mama bear energy even to the point of destroying everything that has been built.

What strikes me is the evasion of accountability that happens in vs 10-13. Instead of recognizing how they are harming people, Amaziah and Jeroboam blame Amos and try to send him away, closing their hearts, minds, and land to protect themselves from hearing Amos’s message. But God’s pronouncement of destruction comes anyway.

As we read in last week’s post, it’s important to hear the hard truths coming from the most marginalized among us, even when it’s hard. In vs 14, we learn that Amos is a shepherd, meaning he’s most likely been on the receiving end of government greed and exploitation.  Amaziah and Jeroboam are getting called on the carpet and, even though they are the antagonists in this story, I sympathize with them. It takes a lot of spiritual fortitude not to double down when you’re being called out and, like Amos notes, sometimes people are small. But if we are going to build the world we dream of where the prison industrial complex is abolished, we need to learn to sit with our discomfort, acknowledge it, and choose to act according to our stated values. Though so much of building an abolitionist world is experimental, an abolitionist ethic provides us a “plumbline” that keeps us building toward this goal in a sustainable, structurally sound way.

A plumbline isn’t a tool of destruction. In fact, its only function is literally to aid in the work of construction, meaning it is only to be feared if our pride is protecting what’s already been built. Possibility lives beneath that fear if we are courageous enough to search for it. Sometimes, we have to deconstruct so we can rebuild. Activist Mariame Kaba writes “Abolitionism is not a politics mediated by emotional responses…abolition is not about your fucking feelings.” She goes on to say “we have to govern the world not based on our personal desires and our personal feelings. We have to have a politic and set of basic values that we as a society are governed by…sometime our feelings aren’t actually aligned with our values.” Abolition is our plumbline, the way we measure the alignment of our actions and our ethics. It’s the true thing we can come back to. May we have enough humility to be accountable when harm is brought to our attention, the strength to resist the urge to reject accountability, and the courage to build something better.

Mallory Everhart is a pastor, poet, and abolitionist spiritual director based in Colorado Springs, CO.