Month: April 2023

John 10:1-10, Psalm 23, Acts 2:42-47 

What is the Reign (Kingdom) of God like? When Christ comes again in glory, what do we expect that eschatological future to hold? What do we imagine God’s paradise is like, in which Jesus, the Lamb of God, is finally enthroned as eternal Ruler? And, for the purposes of this blog, do we imagine that there are police or prisons in God’s dominion of heaven?

Jesus points us toward the Rule and Reign of God throughout his earthly ministry, preaching about it not only as a future reality, but a present one (e.g., Mark 1:15; Luke 17:21). This Sunday’s scripture passages never use the phrase “kingdom of God” but they each point to that reality in their own way. 

In John 10:10, Jesus says, “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” The second sentence is quite famous, but abundant life is presented as a direct contrast to stealing, killing, and destroying. These are the properties of all the tendrils of the prison-industrial complex. Police and prisons do not fundamentally exist to keep people safe, but to maintain a status quo social order that is unequal in race, socio-economics, gender, sex, and more. The criminal-legal system is designed to steal, kill, and destroy people’s lives toward those ends. Even when the individuals involved wish for better outcomes, the system is rigged. It does not pursue abundant life.

The abundant life that Jesus calls us to is like the world of the early church in Acts 2:42-47. As this community shared in God’s Word and Sacraments, they also shared possessions and goods for the wellbeing of all. They cared for all so that none were in need. Even if Acts’ idyllic depiction was a very short-lived historical reality, the point remains that this is the dream for how Jesus-followers will live. Similarly, Psalm 23 imagines God providing peace and reconciliation with one’s enemies. The godly will share tables and break bread even with those who have trespassed against them. In such a world, there are no prisons because there is no need for prisons.

People may call this an unrealistic dream, but it’s hard to argue that it isn’t God’s dream for the world. And again, it isn’t just God’s dream for a far-off future. The Reign of God is “already, but not yet.” It is both a thing we pray and hope for God to realize when Christ comes to judge the earth and a goal for our human communities, as modeled by the church in Acts 2. If we truly believe that God desires abundant life for creation, we must reject all systems that steal, destroy, and kill, including police and prisons.

The Rev. Guillermo A. Arboleda is the rector of St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church in Savannah, GA, and the Missioner for Racial Justice of the Episcopal Diocese of Georgia.

1 Peter 1:17-23

In Break Every Yoke: Religion, Justice, and the Abolition of Prisons, Joshua Dubler and Vincent Lloyd claim that one of the problems with US American’s conception of justice is that it has become too small. Instead of identifying justice with a divine yet to be fully realized law that we struggle to make real in our world, justice has become equated with the unbiased application of current criminal law. They argue that this is why the eventual obsolescence of prisons went from an almost foregone conclusion (the expected end to the pursuit of justice) in the early 70s, to an almost unthinkable utopic vision. 

The lectionary passage today speaks to the need for Christians to believe in a utopian vision, conforming their minds and their lives in obedience to a law that is beyond the current legal social order. In doing so, they remain sojourners in their land, forced to struggle (and at times suffer) within the tension of a certain, but not yet realized, just and loving community. As they attempt to embody this vision in Christian community, they provide a witness to the world God is working to bring into reality through Christ. 

The abolitionist preacher can highlight the theme of obedience to God as our Father to bring this message out of the text. The preacher can also remind hearers of Jesus’ command “Don’t call anybody on earth your father, because you have one Father, who is heavenly,” (Mt 23:9 CEB). In a legal system that was structured around the power of earthly fathers, the command to give obedience to God as our father undermined their obedience to unjust human fathers and the paterfamilias system. This is why the author of 1 Peter states that they were liberated from the futile ways inherited from their ancestors (1:18). The Greek term, often translated as “ancestors,” is related to the word for father, making the subversion of earthly fathers’ authority clear. Likewise, we are not called to obey and maintain our current justice system, but to seek the fullness of divine justice. This divine justice liberates us from bondage to our current (in)justice system. 

The author of 1 Peter acknowledges that this is difficult. It puts us in tension with a world that seeks power, stability, and safety through a broken, abusive system. We must tolerate the tension, conflict, and at times suffering that living with integrity and pursuing God’s vision for the world can provoke. At the same time, our difference offers a witness to the world. We are called to embrace our otherness, our strangeness and state of exile in this world because our communal witness speaks to the kind of justice that is possible. When we live in obedience to God’s truth and have faith in God’s justice our relations with each other will be “marked by genuine affection and deep and earnest love,” (1:23). Our churches then, should be communities where God’s transformative justice is imagined and worked out. 

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

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” 1 Peter 1:3 (NRSVUE)

Rarely, if ever, do our dreams really come true. In part, yes. Indirectly, yes. But the long history of radical political imagination is one of freedom dreams deferred, or at least truths told slant. The abolitionists of the 19th century dreamed of a new economic system not based on the exploitation of Black bodies; what rose from the ashes of chattel slavery was sharecropping and apartheid (not to mention the continued expansion of the US empire). The movement against the Iraq War in 2003 failed to stop that invasion, but it did make the future invasion of Iran politically impossible.

History teaches us that we see only through a glass darkly. The dialectic never resolves as we expect it to. And yet, we are called to dream. God has given us “a new birth into a living hope,” “an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you.” The flame of faith we are called to tend lights our way forward, though the way twists and turns, though the road may be rough and uncertain. The mystic Thomas Merton once prayed by saying, “My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going…, Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following Your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please You does in fact please You.”

We do not know what world we leave to our children and grandchildren. We can only move forward in faith, trusting that our dreaming and our acting contains a truth “more precious than gold” which will bring all people one step closer to the Kindom of God.

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.

“Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples, ‘He has been raised from the dead, and indeed he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him.’” Matthew 28:5-7, NRSV

The connection between Easter and abolition of state-sponsored violence is quite clear when you take the story at face value, as the angel describes it in Matthew. Jesus was a victim of both brief incarceration and speedy execution at the hands of the state. And yet, God repudiates that violence and overcomes it in the resurrection. God did not defeat death for us to keep doling it out through the prison industrial complex and other state-sponsored violence like police forces and executions. God did not defeat death for us to keep killing people. 

One of my favorite aspects of Matthew’s telling of this event is that Jesus doesn’t wait at the tomb for everyone to catch up with what he’s doing. He has already gone ahead to Galilee. The disciples must play catchup. The movement of the Spirit is often like that, going ahead of where we are. God goes ahead of both our comfort and our comprehension. 

That reality is vital when it comes to the abolitionist imagination. So often the retort to calls to “defund the police” or “abolish prisons” is that it’s not practical or even possible. But that’s not what imagination is for. That’s not where Jesus meets us. Jesus meets us ahead of where we are and beckons us forward. Jesus meets us in the place that we can only barely imagine right now. If we can’t even entertain the idea, we will never arrive. So, Jesus calls us to Galilee where death has been defeated, the state has lost its power, and a new world has begun. 

This Easter, let’s get moving. Let’s go meet Jesus. For God did not defeat death for us to tolerate it further. God defeated death that we all might live.

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