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.
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.
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.
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.
In this passage from 2 Kings, we see Naaman, an Aramean, come to the prophet Elisha seeking healing for leprosy. When Elisha tells him to wash in the Jordan River and be healed, he is angry, saying: “I thought that for me he would surely come out, and stand and call on the name of the LORD his God, and would wave his hand over the spot, and cure the leprosy!”
How often, I wonder, is our advocacy for abolition in Christian contexts slowed by wanting to see the distinctive work of liberation of God in a way that is comfortable to us, rather than by following the lead of those already doing the work?
One of the key principles of abolitionist advocacy is to engage in solidarity, not allyship, following the lead of most-affected people. Abolitionist work is led by Black people and incarcerated people engaged in the struggle for their own liberation. Churches and faith communities come into the movement most effectively by joining existing coalitions and supporting the demands already being made.
Often, I think, our desire in the mainline church is for something “different” in our advocacy — we admit the problems with police violence but do not want to follow the lead of activists calling to defund the police. We disengage from protestors if we think their tactics are too harsh, yet, as I recently wrote, our response to disruptive protest should be to listen to the prophetic voices.
The “hermeneutical privilege of the oppressed” means that prophetic voices come from those most affected by current systems of oppression, and any analysis of how to act should start by listening to those most affected. What Naaman learns in this text is to listen to the prophetic voices even if they do not say what he wants, expects, or is comfortable with.
Hannah Bowman is the founder and director of Christians for Abolition.
Psalm 77 traces the spiritual journey from grief to praise, through awe at the power of God’s creation. At the beginning, we wail together, we refuse to be comforted. Unconsoled, we turn to prayer. The NRSV tells us “I commune with my heart in the night.” (v. 6) Who has not tossed and turned in the middle of the night, praying (or wrestling, or raging) with just the depths of our own hearts for company? It is often in these dark nights that we kill the God that does not serve us, the God who does not accompany us into freedom.
From this sacred listening, the Psalmist turns us to the long arc of history, tracing God’s faithfulness in accompanying our spiritual ancestors. God’s creation aligns itself with the work of liberation: “The clouds poured out water; the skies thundered… Your way was through the sea, your path, through the mighty waters; yet your footprints were unseen. You led your people like a flock by the hand of Moses and Aaron.” (v. 17-20)
The Psalmist’s journey from personal grief to collective liberation reads like a CliffNotes version of Job. Gustavo Gutierrez describes the Book of Job as a “circling movement into deeper insight” on the presence of God amidst the suffering of the innocent (On Job, 93). He traces Job’s journey from private grief to public proclamation, as Job connects his own suffering and grief to that of others who have experienced immense injustice.
Gutierrez closes his book with this encouragement to other religious leaders: “Only if we know how to be silent and involve ourselves in the suffering of the poor will we be able to speak out of their hope.” (102) This journey is a necessary one even if it is not easy. We would all like to grow in wisdom and in freedom without communing with our grief at night. But the Psalmist encourages us: Through this doorway is suffering, yes, but also great joy and liberation.
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.
For many years I have been disturbed by the story of the Gerasene demoniac. Certainly it’s good that Jesus was able to heal a dangerous man, I thought, but why did he have to send a herd of pigs to destruction? The pigs hadn’t done anything, and besides, didn’t they represent the livelihood of the owner and the swineherds who watched them? Why was there so much collateral damage?
Not uncommon questions, perhaps, but no less disturbing than the story. Why did I think about the man that way? Why was I not concerned that he had been bound with chains, that he was left to wander among the dead, alone and naked? Why was I not equally concerned that the response of all the villagers to seeing him whole again was fear and the request for Jesus to leave?
It is easier to put away people who are disruptive or frightening for any reason, and it is natural, maybe, to bristle at the wiping out of what seems a normal and necessary part of life. But if the story is put in its starkest terms, as my wife phrased it, it is about the Son of God destroying economic utility in favor of the restoration of someone that no one else cared about.
The economic argument, that something shouldn’t be touched because it provides jobs, is a load-bearing one for many businesses that are obviously destructive to human beings: coal mining, industrial animal farming, garment dye and production, sweatshops, and prisons. It is no accident that these operations run in rural areas, both here and in other countries, where there is more need for work and fewer people with enough money or power to complain. Jobs come with the degradation of the environment and the physical and spiritual health of the workers. It is not good to wield power-over and maintain imprisonment for other human beings, even if it’s what gets you a paycheck. And rural prisons keep frightening people far away from population centers—including their families, spouses and parents and siblings and children… that is, anyone who might care about them.
The economic benefit of prisons to rural areas was much-touted; how much they provide in the end is debatable. But Jesus’ healing of the demon-possessed man even at the cost of an entire herd of animals says that it doesn’t matter. The pigs were being raised to make money. Under ordinary circumstances, they would be sold for slaughter, for the gustatory pleasure of people rich enough to buy the meat and the enrichment of the owner of the herd. They were a piece of the economy. The story teaches that this economic activity, the jobs, the passing of money from hand to hand, is absolutely subordinate to the wellness of one human being, even one who had been removed from his community because of his condition, even one the village was not straightforwardly happy to get back. Economic benefit does not outweigh human wellness and restoration. That’s that.
Bailey Pickens is a Presbyterian pastor who lives with her wife and dog in Nashville, TN.
The reading for Trinity Sunday from the Gospel of John offers my favorite description of the Trinity: “All that the Father has is [the Son’s]…[the Spirit] will take what is [the Son’s] and declare it to you.” The fullness of the Father dwells in the Son and also dwells in the Spirit, in the form of revelation or declaration, made visible to us. The Spirit, within the Trinity, shows us God as God is also already present in the Son. The Spirit is the fullness of God the Father, fully present in the Son, made visible (“declared”) to us. This is not to lean on a functionalist modalism where the Spirit is only the “revealing mode” of God — but it is to emphasize that when we look to God, we see God-the-Spirit in the revelation and declaration of that which is the Father’s and fully present in the Son. Theologian Sarah Coakley suggests that our trinitarian theology always arises first from our experience of the Spirit: the Spirit is our entry point into the fullness of the Trinity.
What do these technicalities of the Trinity have to do with abolition? Kathryn Tanner, in her discussion of the sacrament of confirmation, associates “manifestation” with confirmation and the gift of the Spirit. The Holy Spirit manifests to us “all that the Father has [which] is [the Son’s].” The Holy Spirit isn’t identical with this manifestation, but the Spirit’s presence in the Trinity reminds us that the manifestation of God in the world is an essential element of God’s being.
What does the manifestation of God look like? It looks like liberation, reconciliation, and healing: setting the captives free and declaring good news to the poor. Abolition — the work of building healing, loving structures and tearing down powers of death and captivity — is the manifestation of God’s liberating presence. Abolition is a project of the Spirit. John 20:22–23 shows Jesus giving the Spirit to the disciple in order to “forgive and retain” sins: put another way, the Spirit empowers the disciples to engage in the hard work of community accountability. The Spirit “declares” to us all the things that are of God; the Spirit enables us to make the fullness of God’s liberating being present in our material realities. Abolition is the manifestation of God.
But the presence of the Triune God goes deeper. Jesus declares his very presence — the presence of the Son — with those who are hungry, naked, unsheltered, sick, and in prison (Matthew 25:31–45). The Father, fully present in the Son, is fully present in those who are oppressed and incarcerated. The Father and Son, fully present in the Spirit, are fully present to us in the manifestation of liberation that is resistance to that which oppresses.
This reality in the world expresses a perspective on the Trinity rooted in the cross-event. Jürgen Moltmann writes of the Trinity arising from the cross-event, in The Crucified God: “In the cross, Father and Son are most deeply separated in forsakenness and at the same time are most inwardly one in their surrender. What proceeds from this event between Father and Son is the Spirit which justifies the godless, fills the forsaken with love and even brings the dead alive, since even the fact that they are dead cannot exclude them from this event of the cross; the death in God also includes them.” The mystery of the Trinity is this: God the Father is fully present in God the Son, yet God the Son is fully present in those who are forsaken, what Ignacio Ellacuría called “the crucified peoples of the world.” The Spirit arises from the Son’s forsakenness — the Son’s solidarity with those who are oppressed, incarcerated, forsaken by societal structures — making God fully present in the resistance found in places under the power of death. The Triune God is present in all the death-dealing systems of incarceration in a manifestation of resistance to them. Abolition makes manifest the Crucified Son in solidarity with those subjected to death-dealing systems and the Spirit of accountability and reconciliation in the real, material resistance to such systems. All that the Father has is in the Son who is one with those who are incarcerated, and the Spirit declares this liberating, life-giving, death-and-punishment-abolishing fullness of the Father to us.
Hannah Bowman is the founder and director of Christians for Abolition.
When the day of Pentecost had come, the disciples were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.
Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs– in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.”
But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them, “Men of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning. No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel:
`In the last days it will be, God declares,
that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,
and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
and your young men shall see visions,
and your old men shall dream dreams.
Even upon my slaves, both men and women,
in those days I will pour out my Spirit;
and they shall prophesy.
And I will show portents in the heaven above
and signs on the earth below,
blood, and fire, and smoky mist.
The sun shall be turned to darkness
and the moon to blood,
before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day.
Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’ “
Romans 8:14-17
All who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, “Abba! Father!” it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ– if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.
Both Acts 2 and Romans 8 allude to the practice of slavery in the ancient world. A lot of modern translations skirt around this issue by replacing “slaves” with “servants” (see Acts 2:18 NIV, CEB, NABRE, etc.), but that interpretive choice leads readers to miss some of the key biblical and contemporary context. Even though neither text directly calls for the abolition of slavery in the 1st Century, each of them problematize slavery in the Christian’s eyes. Both these passages make clear that the lines between enslaver and enslaved are not drawn by God. They are drawn by people, drawn by our sinful desire to separate, punish, and demonize others. Preachers should consider that incarceration in the USA is little more than a legal form of slavery. The 13th Amendment to the US Constitution makes this explicit by abolishing “slavery [and] involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime.”
With that context in mind, the Apostle Peter and the Prophet Joel remind us that God pours out the Holy Spirit “even upon my slaves, both men and women” (Acts 2:18 NRSV) The status of enslavement does not exclude people from the blessing of God’s presence. It does not erase the Image of God stamped on every human body and soul. If we recognize God’s Image in every human being, enslavement is morally and theologically incoherent (theo-illogical, if you will). There is no basis for one person dominating another if both are made in the Image of God. There is no basis for imprisoning anyone if the Holy Spirit chooses to fall on the imprisoner and the imprisoned alike.
Similarly, the Apostle Paul says that God’s Spirit is opposed to any “spirit of slavery,” which is driven by “fear” (Rom 8:15). Fear is what leads us to enslave and/or imprison people we believe to be dangerous to society. Fear leads us to establish institutions that isolate, torture, and kill people. The American Prison-Industrial Complex is a demented institution; its fruit is the abuse and dehumanization of the individuals in its grasp. It harms the imprisoned, of course, but it also harms the people who work for prisons as guards, wardens, and the like. Incarceration — in all its forms — spreads a spirit of fear and a spirit of slavery.
But God calls people of faith into “a spirit of adoption” (Rom 8:15). Christ has acted triumphantly in the world by rising from the dead and sending the Holy Spirit to people of all ethnicities, nationalities, races, and classes. Through the Holy Spirit, we are adopted as children of God, siblings with one another. The human family is bound together and interdependent, whether or not we acknowledge it or like it. Passages like these should motivate Christians to work for the liberation of enslaved and imprisoned people. God has already made the incarcerated beloved children; God has already declared them free. It’s up to us to make our earthly, human, imperfect societies a bit closer to that heavenly reality.
The Rev. Guillermo A. Arboleda isthe rector of St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church, Savannah, GA, and the Missioner for Racial Justice, Episcopal Diocese of Georgia.
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.
