Month: August 2022

Luke 14:25–33

Now large crowds were traveling with Jesus; and he turned and said to them, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it will begin to ridicule him, saying, `This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.’ Or what king, going out to wage war against another king, will not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to oppose the one who comes against him with twenty thousand? If he cannot, then, while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for the terms of peace. So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.” 

As I read through the Luke’s gospel preparing for this lectionary, I was struck by the increasing number of people that flocked to hear and see Jesus. They witnessed his power to heal and willingness to challenge oppressive systems and they wanted in. They heard him preach a gospel that turned the social order upside-down, preaching blessing on those who usually experienced woes and woes for the privileged. When we get to chapter 14, Luke says that many crowds were following Jesus.  

For the abolitionist preacher, Jesus’ response provides insight into how we respond to increased interest in prison and police abolition. Instead of downplaying the social and material costs of pursuing his gospel, even the physical risks, Jesus admonishes them to face the radicalness of his message head on. This reminds me of Mariame Kaba’s response to the increased interest in police abolition after George Floyd’s murder: “Yes, We Really Mean Abolish the Police.” Kaba’s writing on abolition is always nuanced, acknowledging that we are working within a system we seek to abolish, but she is also careful to make sure we hold clearly within our work the need to completely uproot this oppressive system.  

What Jesus and Mariame Kaba remind us, is that we cannot allow ourselves to remain attached to prisons or policing or confuse reform with abolition. This might alienate friends or family. It might not make for the best marketing. It certainly threatens economies that rely on the prison-industrial complex and raises fears (well-founded or not) for many people around their physical safety and their ability to keep their personal property secure. While some of these concerns are addressed within abolitionist organizing (not profiting off of prisoners, but certainly valuing people’s physical well-being), they are addressed within a framework that wholly disavows punitive and violent methods of addressing harm. In the same way, Jesus is clear that we must completely detach from and disavow the oppressive systems of this world in order to be his disciple. We put our faith in the promise of God’s kingdom, even when it seems foolish. We continue to pursue new ways of living in the world, meeting each other’s needs, and dealing with conflict, even when it feels risky. At times it might really be risky and it will demand a lot of our time and resources. If we advocate for transformative justice and are not willing to put in this work, we will certainly fail and look like fools. For this reason, Jesus doesn’t encourage the crowds by minimizing these costs. Instead, he admonishes them to “count the cost” and seeks followers that will whole-heartedly put their faith in the gospel he is preaching. When we share the good news of transformative justice may we do likewise.  

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

Luke 14:1, 7–14

Who should I invite to my birthday party? This is a serious question for most children. Who is in? Who is out? Who do I want to see? Aging changes the focus for people, but the categorization rarely changes. Who is in my in-group? Who is in my out-group?

The words of Jesus cut right across this tendency. In Luke 14, Jesus begins by tearing apart the desire to be in the seat of honor of ‘important people.’ He then inverts this so that no one is off the hook. Instead of just talking about those moments when you are invited to a meal, Jesus speaks to the host of the meal he is attending and then teaches, by saying how when you are in the position of inviting others “_When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind._”

For the churches of North America, the in-groups and out-groups are often as static as for individuals. The words of Jesus cut against those static assumptions and blind acceptance of status quo institutions, like jails and prisons. Jesus pushes for a radical dissolution of the in-group and out-group categories people use, and this push goes all the way to the institutional level. When society declares people ‘good’ or ‘bad’, this is contrary to the Good News of Jesus Christ. When churches acquiesce to such categories, we ignore the Good News of Jesus Christ. We lie to ourselves by seeking “important” places in society, and we lie by not inviting those whom Jesus calls us to invite to the table.

May we receive the words of Jesus with clear eyes. May we see how our institutions keep us from living the life God calls us to live. And may we work towards freeing our neighbors from such institutions and offering a true seat at the table. 

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

Luke 13:10–17

But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, “There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day.”

When it comes to freedom, we have a lot of excuses. Whenever any proposals for life-saving, life-sustaining, or otherwise substantial change arises in our public discourse we find ourselves drowning in excuses. Climate proposals? Think of the lost jobs! Healthcare reform? It’s too expensive! Expansion of the social safety net? We can’t incentivize people not to work! The same is undoubtedly true whenever police and prison abolition is brought up. Look no further than the elite-driven public freakout when activists proposed shifting money from inflated police budgets to social services.  

Likewise, when Jesus presumes to expand the healing reach of God, his contemporaries were full of excuses. The excuse that receives notice in Luke’s Gospel is a protest over timing. It’s the sabbath. No work should be done on the sabbath day. The sabbath is a time set aside from the grinding gears of production, the exchange of goods and services, and the machinations of all the things that make up “the economy.” The sabbath is a liberating social framework designed to help God’s people thrive. But here, it is an excuse. 

Our social frameworks aren’t often meant for our thriving (unlike the sabbath) but they are still used as an excuse for change. If you question one aspect of how we live, other aspects (just or not) are used to get in the way. Abolitionists are often told things like: What would happen to all the people currently in our prisons? Where would they go? How would we reduce crime without police? Wouldn’t we be unsafe? These objections are often masks for unpleasant realities: To drastically reduce our prison population (around 2 million people), we would have to do something about our housing shortage (we are around 3.8 million homes short). To reduce crime, if not through reducing criminalization, we would need to address things like food security (38 million people were food insecure in 2020) and wages (stagnant for decades until very recently). Toppling those dominos seems like an insurmountable challenge, one most people would rather not confront. Freedom, we’re told, just creates more problems. 

This is part of why Mariame Kaba calls abolition not just a “negative project” but a “vision of a restructured society.” Imagining abolition requires imagining “a world where we have everything we need: food, shelter, education, health, art, beauty, clean water, and more.” That’s the mistake of Jesus’ detractors in this story. They miss the point of sabbath, which is itself a vision of a restructured society in which everyone has what they need. The point of sabbath is our thriving, not our suffering. It is a positive, not so much a negative. Our social structures should be geared toward our collective wellbeing, not the prohibition of this or that activity or punishment as the only recourse for wrongdoing. 

Abolition is fundamentally an act of organized imagination of a better world. When considering the Gospel text this week, let it provoke your imagination about what is possible (what Jesus did rarely seemed possible) and communicate a message of possibility to your community. If you only hear excuses in response to the gospel of abolition, take those excuses as an opportunity for imagination. How could everything be different?

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.

Jeremiah 23:23–29

For the past month, I have been reading Jeremiah every morning, one chapter at a time. It largely makes for depressing reading, a lone and lonely radical railing against the leaders of a nation overrun by internal division and external invasion. As the structures of Judah’s civil society collapse, Jeremiah cries out, “How long?” And as the people despair and turn on each other, he seeks out clarity amidst the chaos: “Is not my word like fire, says the LORD, and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces?”

My social media timeline is full of despair. Many of our movements struggle to maintain hope and a plan that can mobilize the people to action. White Christian nationalism solidifies its wins. Jeremiah might have felt very at home here. 

But Jeremiah is not a nihilist, not a cynic who celebrates “being right” as the world burns. Because flickering under the ashes of Jeremiah’s grief is a fierce ember of hope. He still believes that it is worthwhile to speak the truth faithfully, damn the consequences. He still believes in the capacity of the people to do right. Jeremiah’s hope is not just in dreams of a better world, but in the truth of a word like fire, a word that can warm the spirit of the people. 

Faith like this may seem small in the face of all this death and destruction. At the end of the book, Jerusalem is destroyed, the people displaced, and Jeremiah is in exile. What has he accomplished? Jeremiah himself wonders about this, constantly worrying, “Will the hearts of the prophets ever turn back?” And yet his students and his descendants knew there was something here, some mustard seed-size faith that still has the power to break the rocks of oppression into pieces.

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 1:1, 10–20

In my faith context, blood pressures tend to spike when Sodom and Gomorrah are mentioned, since the story of these cities has been misconstrued and used as an excuse to violently oppress queer people. We are given clues throughout the Hebrew Bible as to what the sin of Sodom actually was, namely, “refusing to strengthen the hand of the poor and needy” (Ezekiel 16). One of the prophets’ rhetorical tools is to compare their contemporary situation to a well-known historical archetype so, here in this pericope, the rulers and people of Judah and Jerusalem become the rulers of Sodom and the people of Gomorrah (vs. 10). This comparison is emotionally super-charged and is meant to shock and offend. After all, everyone knows what happened to Sodom and Gomorrah. Isaiah’s direct comparison explodes Judah and Jerusalem’s ability to say “we’re not like those guys over there” and really drives the prophet’s critique home.

What follows this incendiary introduction is a long meditation on what happens when a group of people practices right ritual without right relationship. The way things are going, there is at least a pretext of doing the right things. They’re burning incense, keeping all the festivals, making all the sacrifices. Even though it looks good and technically crosses all the tees, at its core it’s missing the point and, according to Isaiah, God is FED UP. The language used here is pretty evocative – “incense is an abomination to me…your appointed festivals my soul hates; they have become a burden to me” (vs. 13), “even though you pray many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood” (vs. 15).

This text prompts us to pay attention to what doesn’t pass the (incense) sniff test, if you will, or those acts of the state that look good on the surface but break down under scrutiny. Reformist reforms (contrasted with abolitionist reforms) may look great on paper but so often they are a guise to pipe more money into the prison industrial complex. More often than not, the bright, shiny new programs the public was promised never come to fruition and the money gets re-routed to increase the surveillance and oppression of incarcerated people. Abolitionist ideals urge us to follow the money and ask critical questions about whether a reform is moving us closer to or further from liberation.

In its most cynical form, reformist reforms are a pressure release valve which help goodhearted but non-system impacted people feel like they’re doing the right thing. Though they seem like reasonable interventions, at best, reformist reforms are rearranging the deck chairs. At worst, they cause further harm.  Sounds kind of like a solemn assembly with iniquity, doesn’t it? Relationships with people who are incarcerated expose the empty, ritualized promises for what they are – hollow. They don’t get anyone any more free. So, if reformism won’t save us, what will?

After the illusion of reform breaks down, we are left with Isaiah’s ultimatum: “cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed.” I love that we are told to “learn” to do good. It’s hopeful. As in abolition, there is room to try, fail, grow, and change. This work is a great experiment – or a million of them – and we are learning. The important thing is that we invest in trying, using abolitionism as our guide. My prayer for us as a collective is that we have the courage to cease our empty ritualizing and seek true justice which is liberation and flourishing for all. 

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