Month: November 2023

This week marks the point where this project began. In 2020, we started on Advent I and now in 2023, we arrive at the same date. I wrote in the first entry for the Abolition Lectionary about Isaiah 64, one of the lections this week. “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down!” Isaiah wrote, begging for God’s involvement in their world. The whole passage, along with the reading from Mark this week, is a fantastical and apocalyptic vision of God’s intervention in the world. We would be so lucky for someone to describe abolition as apocalyptic, for then it would at least hold some legitimacy in communities focused on Christian Scripture. Instead, it is usually regarded as fantastical, and not in the fun Dungeons and Dragons sort of fantasy. 

Some of the words that that first entry still rings true today: Most people think abolition is a fantastical idea—they always have. Abolitionists who wanted to end slavery in the United States heard again and again about how disruptive it would be. Those who sought to abolish Jim Crow, lynching, and discrimination at the ballot box heard again and again about how unsettling it would be. Today, calls for the abolition of police and prisons hear the same thing—it’s too troublesome, unruly, and even destructive! Abolition is an impossible consideration because it would upend everything. 

I recently spent time in Northern Ireland learning about peacemaking with folks who lived through the Troubles there. Many were actively engaged in the peacemaking process that (contrary to popular belief) was always going on, struggling to break through. I was struck by two things relevant to today: (1) peacemaking was a long, often-ignored process that didn’t make the headlines until the end and (2) criminal justice reform was integral to making peace and establishing the power-sharing arrangement that exists to this day in Northern Ireland. 

Both the Isaiah text and the Mark text for this week provoke anxiety in their dramatic language. Our world, too, is full of anxiety about the future and the seemingly ever-deteriorating present. What do we do when we look upon this fragile, messed up world we live in? I think those two northern Irish truths have something to tell us.

Isaiah and Mark both speak to work that requires disruption and endurance. That kind of work typically does not make the headlines. The slow work of abolitionists in establishing non-retributive paths to justice, ministry to those harmed by our criminal justice system, and the push for alternatives to our system of policing don’t make the headlines unless they’re being used to scare people. Abolition only makes the headlines when it’s useful to those in power to stir up fear and get people to circle their wagons around them. 

Nevertheless, this disruptive work is at the core of movement toward a more just, merciful, and peaceful society. We will not change the political temperature and the escalating political violence of the United States in particular unless we disarm the criminal justice system that perpetuates both of these threats. Like in Northern Ireland, changing the way the State treats everyday people is integral to establishing a more peaceful society. How can the individual look at how the State treats people (either through policing, incarceration, or even the death penalty) and believe they shouldn’t behave likewise? 

It’s resistance to the State’s story of redemptive violence and justice through violence that is central to the slow work of abolition. Isaiah and Mark push us in that direction and many of the stories of Jesus are prime examples of how to tell a different story than this one. It’s difficult work, but it’s worth it. Keep at it, or as Mark says, “Keep awake.” 

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

Matthew 25:31-46

Reflecting on Matthew 25 during Reign of Christ Sunday gives us the opportunity to envision the kind of kingdom Jesus proclaims for the future while also seeking to understand his calling for us to live out that kingdom now. And as abolitionists we examine this text through the particular lens of ending imprisonment. Therefore, we get to wrestle with the question: what does it mean that Christ the King declares himself Jesus the prisoner?

This passage opens with the proclamation of Christ’s coming reign and judgment. He will gather all nations – all of creation – as he sits on his throne of glory. Thomas Stegman notes, “Matthew draws on imagery from Daniel 7:13–14—where the Ancient of Days, enthroned in glory, bestows on ‘one like a son of man’ (RSV) dominion and glory—to set forth the full manifestation of God’s reign.”¹ Many of us are uncomfortable with this language of dominion and judgment so the preacher may want to take care here. Perhaps it would be helpful to emphasize that the reign of God means the end of the unjust rule of present, oppressive powers. If Christ is king, then oppressors are not. And if Jesus is judge, then our systems of judgment and punishment will be replaced by something else altogether. This new kingdom will be marked instead by compassion and justice.

Care for the “least of these” (v. 40), the people Howard Thurman described as the disinherited, is central to this passage. Compassion for people who are hungry, poor, sick, and incarcerated is so important to Jesus that he says how people have treated them is how they have treated him. When Christ returns and reigns, the question of compassion will be a (the?) primary concern. Our calling, then, as Jesus’s followers is to serve people in need with works of mercy, here and now, trusting that God’s coming kingdom will bring about complete liberation for the “least of these.”

And so, with compassion and care, we visit the prisoner knowing that we are somehow visiting Jesus. This is what it looks like to live into God’s kingdom now. But I tend to believe that, in addition to compassion, Jesus is also calling us to the work of justice as well, which includes the abolition of prisons. After all, if the Son of Man, Christ the King who will one day come in glory, has chosen to be enfleshed as the prisoner, then shouldn’t we have hope that he will, in time, set the prisoner free and end incarceration itself? And as his followers, as people living into the reign of Christ right now, don’t we have a calling to participate in the building of the prison-less Kingdom? What if we built houses and hospitals and community centers and even churches with the bricks of the prisons we dismantled all because we knew that Jesus was behind those walls?

I think any preacher would do well to highlight themes of compassion in a sermon on Matthew 25; however, I believe there is also a declaration of justice. Jesus is proclaiming the good news of the coming kingdom, and inviting us to participate in its construction through the work of mercy for the oppressed. How might we, as preachers who are abolitionists, inspire wonder and spark imaginations about what it might look like to follow Christ the king who is Jesus the prisoner?

Jed Tate is a United Methodist pastor in North Carolina.

1. Thomas D. Stegman, “Exegetical Perspective on Matthew 25:31–46,” in Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary: Year A, ed. David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, vol. 4 (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 333. ↩︎

Matthew 25:1–13

The parable of the bridesmaids which we read this week always presents a challenge for me. I’m angry at the wise bridesmaids for refusing to share their oil, even at the risk of everyone running out! Wouldn’t it be better to engage in mutual aid and insist that we can only all find safety and salvation together, even if we risk somehow “failing” the expectations of an outside authority figure?

I found help this week in Aaron J. Smith’s reframing of the parable. Smith’s key conclusion is that the point of the parable — Jesus’ admonition at the end — is not about the oil at all, but is to stay awake. “Staying awake would have changed the story,” he writes. It’s because all the bridesmaids fall asleep that the crisis with the oil arises at all. Maybe, then, the point of the parable isn’t about how to hoard our own oil to have “enough” — maybe it’s about how we can stay awake to each other in order to find new ways for all to have enough.

I do think the questions raised by this parable about how to have “enough” to carry on are deeply relevant to our work for abolition. A conversation with a friend and fellow organizer this week got me thinking about how so many movement campaigns and organizations seem to be struggling or slowing right now. It feels like reactionary elements are ascendant against the abolition movement. It feels like many of us are in what Carlos Saavedra calls a “winter” season in movement work: a time to regroup and focus on our own values, and a time to “keep our lamps trimmed and burning.”

The question posed by this parable is how we get through seasons of winter, seasons when the end is not in sight and victories are few and far between. Do we see the answer in the oil, and finding ways to reserve sufficient oil for ourselves by stepping back to refocus on what brings us life? Do we see the answer in doubling down on our values, insisting that what the parable provokes is really the insistence that the bridesmaids should have shared and stayed awake in faith to see what would happen? Do we see the answer, as Smith suggests, in “staying awake,” being present to one another as we make what Andrea Ritchie calls “critical connections” in her new book on abolition and emergent strategy and wait to see where they lead?

What is it, the parable of the bridesmaids asks but (I think) does not answer, that sustains us all as we wait?

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

Micah 3:5–12

The prophet Micah explicitly connects the injustice by which the rich and well-connected receive different justice than the poor as infidelity to God in today’s reading:

“Hear this, you rulers of the house of Jacob and chiefs of the house of Israel, who abhor justice and pervert all equity, who build Zion with blood and Jerusalem with wrong. Its rulers give judgment for a bribe, its priests teach for a price, its prophets give oracles for money; yet they lean upon the LORD and say, “Surely the LORD is with us! No harm shall come upon us.”

Micah promises divine judgment against Israel, its destruction allowed by God, because of this inequity: the giving of judgment for a bribe. (As well, of course, as the restriction of religious knowledge to those who can pay!)

We see this inequity in our modern justice system as well. As attorney and activist Bryan Stevenson has famously said, “We have a justice system that treats you better if you are rich and guilty than if you are poor and innocent.” Examples of the inequality in our justice system abound. Money bail is a particularly heinous example of the economic inequity in our system — poor defendants languishing in prison while rich ones do not — and one that is explicitly addressed elsewhere in scripture as an obligation.

Like the rulers of Israel who heard the words of Micah, we cannot claim not to know the inequity of the system. Abolition calls us to seek the end of systems of prisons and policing for many reasons: because of their racist basis and effects; because of the inherent inhumanity of incarceration and the affront to human dignity of punishment, exclusion, control, and state violence; because they are ineffective responses to harm. But we must always remember that inequity toward the poor is also always at the heart of systems of policing and prisons. “Good news for the poor” may be “bad news” for these systems, just like the harsh news proclaimed by Micah.

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