This Acts story is confusing! Paul gets a vision of a man from Macedonia pleading with him. So he and the rest of his team get on a boat and head right on over to a major city in Macedonia. After a few days there (recovering from the trip? Trying to find the man from the vision?), they leave the city and head to the river, where they meet a group of women. And here they meet Lydia, a wealthy textile merchant and head of her household, who invites them to her house and is baptized.
So, to recap: Paul sees a vision of a man, but he finds women. Then, he and his crew are welcomed in by a woman living in the social role of a man (the pater familias, head of household). And the story seems to take these gender and power reversals without batting an eye. A few verses later (stay tuned for next week’s lectionary!) Paul heals another woman, an enslaved woman, and gets incarcerated for it. Maybe the writer is unconcerned about the man from the initial vision. Maybe Macedonian men are really in need of God’s grace, so bad that they don’t even know it and won’t listen to Paul. Maybe the Holy Spirit is telling us that God’s good news for oppressors (men, people who enslave and oppress others) is rooted first in God’s good news for the oppressed.
As Angela Davis said recently,
“I don’t think we would be where we are today—encouraging ever larger numbers of people to think within an abolitionist frame—had not the trans community taught us that it is possible to effectively challenge that which is considered the very foundation of our sense of normalcy. So if it is possible to challenge the gender binary, then we can certainly, effectively, resist prisons, and jails, and police.” [https://libcom.org/article/dr-angela-davis-role-trans-and-non-binary-communities-fight-feminist-abolition-she]
May our vision of God’s good news lead us to trouble the binaries of power and control. May it lead us to listen to how God is speaking to and through the oppressed. And may we recognize how the good news of liberation is good news for all of us.
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.
There are a thousand permutations of the idea that a society is measured by how it treats its most vulnerable, but the biblical variation of this sentiment is in our Gospel lesson for this week. “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” Although in the middle of John’s Gospel, Jesus was delivering his final teachings to his disciples when he said this, passing along the words necessary for them to continue his work. Jesus sets up the measurement of faithfulness for his followers: love displayed to one another.
Abolitionists in New York have been persistently and consistently pointing out how the state fails this measure, a reality that has been particularly apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic. Prisons by their very nature propagate and spread infectious diseases, exposing everyone within their walls to the danger of infection. On top of that baseline danger, some prisoners in New York prisons have been denied booster shots for months, they have not been provided proper personal protective equipment (PPE), and testing has been dismally unavailable. Addressing these problems doesn’t even begin to touch on the inadequate levels of essential medical care and services in prisons – a problem that existed long before COVID-19.
Such treatment certainly fails Jesus’ ‘new commandment’ in the Gospel lesson. No love has been shared in this catastrophic situation. Beyond it, however, a system of incarceration like the one in the United States is fundamentally incapable of showing love. When the only way to rectify wrongs is through committing more (and often more egregious!) wrongs, love cannot exist. When so many innocents are victims of this system, which does nothing to restore or promote life but only to destroy it, love cannot exist. How else can a Christian look upon such an institution than say, “This must end.”
I’ve seen criticism leveled at both police and prison abolitionists that they are not taking criminal justice issues seriously enough with demands to defund and abolish these institutions of violence and destruction. While solutions are undoubtedly complicated, when I considered our Gospel lesson for this week, I couldn’t help but think those critics are the ones not taking Jesus seriously enough.
Wesley Spears-Newsome (he/him/his) is a writer and Baptist pastor in North Carolina.
When Jesus is confronting crowds, he often has what seems to be a simple, straightforward ask of them: Believe what you see in front of you. Yet this proves to be beyond their ability. They want sometimes words, sometimes miracles on command, but always they want Jesus to be for them what they imagine, respond to them as they expect. They cannot do the most straightforward thing: Look at what is before them and judge accordingly. Their inability or refusal to simply take him at his deed and word, to recognize a truth that doesn’t accord with the world they have grown up in and then continued to build, should be familiar to us. This is a human trait that we, too, display often. We prefer our own ideas about justice and punishment, order and propriety, safety and security, over what is quite evidently true: That prisons do not increase safety or rehabilitate people who have committed crimes, they are not humane “time-outs” until people are ready to reenter society, they do none of the good often assumed about them and much harm. Believing they must be the correct way to respond to harm or disruption, we refuse to see how much is lost and how many hurt—or what else could be, instead of incarceration. Yet Jesus says that no one can snatch his own from his hand. His sheep are his, given to him not by a society that weighs the worth of human beings as it suits the powerful but by Almighty God, the stamp of whose image is on every person, even those who have been banished from public sight. What if we took Jesus at his deed and his word? What if we accepted the truth when it comes before us, even if it disrupts our ideas of how a society must be run? What freedom might await us, with our eyes open to God’s Anointed and the surpassing worth of all of his sheep? What might then be possible?
Bailey Pickens is a Presbyterian pastor who lives with her wife and dog in Nashville, TN
If you know me, you know that the Acts of the Apostles is my favorite book in the Bible. I know it has a complicated history, I know that its stories can trouble and disturb us, but what piece of our Scripture is that not true for? I love Acts precisely because it is the story of people stumbling but continuing to move forward, continuing to grow and change by the power of God’s spirit. And no story better encapsulates how people change than this famous story of Saul’s transformation on the Road to Damascus.
Saul starts this story as a contract bounty hunter, an eager participant in state violence. A few chapters earlier, the story goes out of its way to tell us that he holds the coats for those who lynched Stephen. In the NRSV, Saul is described in this story as “still breathing threats and murder against the disiples of the Lord.”
The writer isn’t interested in Saul’s childhood traumas, how structures of colonialism limit his agency, or anything we might seek out in a story of transformation. He enjoys this work. He volunteers to serve a no-knock warrant in another jurisdiction. Many of us know a cop or a prison CO like this: The one who takes joy in smashing up the encampment, the one quick to write someone up and throw them in the hole. That person who makes us go, “Maybe some people are actually evil?”
But don’t underestimate Jesus. He knocks Paul down and tells him straight: “I’m the one you’re looking for.” And it is in the blinding light of confrontation that Saul begins his transformation.
The struggle for freedom requires conflict (it’s a struggle, after all). I’m a tender-hearted, white middle-class Midwesterner, and I really wish we could all grow and heal without conflict and confrontation. And alas, this story is not the last time Paul will be pushed to grow. The rest of Acts is full of fights, many of them physical. But here, in this dramatic showdown in the street, he begins to change.
The poet Cecilia Llompart writes, “all growth is an argument for more light.” Paul isn’t done growing here, but the fact that he can change is the Spirit’s argument for the disciples of the Lord to not give up on him.
It’s easy to give up on our enemies. But don’t underestimate Jesus. All growth is an argument for more light.
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.
Testimony has a central function within the Christian faith. One of the more curious aspects of Christianization in the Late Ancient period was moving from stories of heroes to stories of martyrs. Instead of tales about Theseus or Achilles, stories of Perpetua & Felicitas and others were shared and spread. A martyr is a witness. Someone who testifies about an event. This legal language of witness and testimony was present in the use of martyr in the ancient world as it is today. The book of acts will show Stephen the Protomartyr and his death in Acts 7, but in Acts 5 we have Peter giving a testimony in front of the Sanhedrin. Peter declares clearly, “We must obey God rather than any human authority.”
There is a tricky balance to be had between obedience to God and human authority. Many claim to speak for God, even if they say opposite things. Just because someone claims to speak for God, doesn’t make what they say true. How we can discern this is found a few verses later in the words of Gamaliel: “Therefore, in the present case I advise you: Leave these men alone! Let them go! For if their purpose or activity is of human origin, it will fail. But if it is from God, you will not be able to stop these men; you will only find yourselves fighting against God.”
Or, in the words of Jesus, a good tree bears good fruit. What is the fruit of the claims people make? We have seen the fruit of the Prison Industrial Complex. We have seen an inability to step down from the carceral state. We have seen families continued to be torn apart and generations ravaged by the ill-effects of this system. Peter stands to speak of Jesus and the power of God. In speaking up, in testifying for prison abolition, we can speak with the full breadth of Scripture as well as the claim of Jesus. A good tree will bear good fruit. Society has let bad trees grow for too long. We need to plant more of the good trees of dignity, reconciliation, and hope.
Rev. Wilson Pruitt is a Methodist pastor and translator in Spicewood, TX.
Much of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians addresses concerns and controversies that were likely brought to Paul in a letter from the Christ-followers in Corinth. Many scholars argue that Paul is addressing ideologically based social hierarchy rooted in Greco-Roman philosophies which divide the Corinthians into “weak” and “strong” classes. Throughout the letter Paul sarcastically admonishes the “strong” and identifies with the “weak,” using and upending the hierarchical logic.[1] The penultimate chapter addresses a concern Paul is bringing to the strong; he has heard that they deny the bodily resurrection of Christ. Here Paul again both appeals to and upends the Greco-Roman philosophies held by the Corinthians in a couple ways that might be interesting to the abolitionist. First, Paul begins this section with language that admonishes the Corinthian “strong” and endears him to the “weak.” In verse 12 he writes, “So if the message that is preached says that Christ has been raised from the dead, then how can some of you say, ‘There’s no resurrection of the dead’?” (CEB). The term “resurrection of the dead” might be better translated as “raising of the corpses.” This phrase would have offended the sensibilities of the well-educated, philosophically nuanced “strong.” It would have been familiar and more easily accepted by the “weak” who may have sincerely relayed stories about risen corpses and had concerns about suffering bodily in this life and the after-life. According to Martin, philosophies acceptable to the strong might have argued that there is no life after death or that the soul was liberated from the body. Populist beliefs on the other hand, “betrayed a fear of death… a belief that death was somehow unnatural and undesirable.”[2] Paul begins by unequivocally affirming the concerns of the weak, using imagery (the raising of corpses) that would offend the strong’s sensibilities. Paul affirms the problem of death, which certainly was a more salient concern for lower-class “weak” Corinthians. The well-educated philosophers would have seen this fear of death as a maladjustment. They believed people should accept death as a natural part of life: leading to a release from worldly concerns and an end to suffering. The people who were looked down on in Greco-Roman hierarchy found the persistent specter of death insufferable and not remedied by its completion. Paul sided with these people. Abolitionists must do the same, unequivocally affirming the concerns and hopes of those suffering under mass incarceration and the specter of death represented by prison and policing. Later in chapter 15 Paul describes the resurrected body in a way that would be intelligible to the strong, but not before admonishing them and clearly aligning himself with the weak. The second thing Paul does is articulate a view of salvation that is cosmic and participatory. Salvation from Paul’s perspective cannot be understood as individual moral or intellectual achievement. Salvation is accomplished by the destruction of powers and principalities that are governed by sin and death. In his letter to the Romans Paul is clear that while law (ethical and social norms that govern relationships) is not bad in itself, it perpetuates sin when it is enforced by the threat of death.[3] Paul hints at this same idea in 15:46, though it is not as well developed and argued in this earlier letter. Those who were less connected to the ongoing threat of death might be able to function in such a system, but they are left “in sin” just as much as the ones who are, as Daniel Oodshorn puts it, “left for dead.”[4] The strong in 1 Corinthians judged the weak’s plight as an individual (or social group based) constitutional, moral or intellectual failure rather than an indictment of the whole social and political system, which is governed by death. Paul insists that the whole system needs to be transformed by Christ’s death and resurrection. This removes the threat of death and power of sin, not by affirming or using death, but by overcoming it. This opens the possibility for people to enter into spaces vulnerable to death without either fearing or affirming the violence death represents. Only in this way can we commune with one another in a life giving way: first by communing with Christ (overcoming fear of death in vulnerable solidarity with those who are “left for dead,” yet live) and then by becoming the “Christic body” that extends this communion to others.[5] It is placing faith in and participating in the life of Christ that the whole world is saved. Likewise, the abolitionist interpreter will note that there is a right and wrong way to talk about overcoming the fear of death. The wrong way, represented by the Corinthian strong, overcomes “fear of death” by some kind of personal intellectual and moral achievement that accepts death (or even lauds it). This can be likened to a particularly insidious form of CBT therapy offered in many prisons and re-entry programs called “Moral Reconation Therapy.” MRT insists that the problems leading to incarceration lie solely within the prisoner. The system does not need to change, just the individual’s beliefs. For example they say, “Suffering and unhappiness are to be expected sometimes right? WRONG. Unhappiness was and is a part of your life because you choose it,” (caps and bold are theirs).[6] The right way, represented by Paul’s cosmic vision, is to see that there is, altogether, a system perpetuating suffering and unhappiness, our embeddedness in that system, and the possibility of putting our faith in another way that is neither governed by the system’s threat of violence nor affirms it. We are liberated from death-dealing systems when we participate in relationships that show us how to communally overcome such systems even while we are still living within them. This is the work of abolition and building new systems of transformative justice. This is also what Jesus’ death and resurrection accomplished from Paul’s perspective. Christ’s resurrection provides the confidence we need to participate in the vulnerable, salvific relationships of the “christic body.” This confidence is not in one’s own personal salvation, but in the transformation of the entire cosmos, where our loving, life-giving God becomes “all in all.”
Sarah Lynne Gershon (she/her) is an MDiv/MTS student, DOC pastor, and lives at the Bloomington Catholic Worker.
[1] See Dale Martin, The Corinthian Body, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).
[3] See Theodore Jennings, Outlaw Justice: The Messianic Politics of Paul, Cultural Memory in the Present, (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2013) for more about how Paul understands Christ’s relationship with the law.
[4] Daniel Oudshoorn, Pauline Eschatology: The Apocalyptic Rupture of Eternal Imperialism, Paul and the Uprising of the Dead, V. 2, (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2020) 134.
[5] See Yung Suk Kim, Christ’s Body in Corinth: The Politics of a Metaphor, Paul in Critical Contexts, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008) for more insight into how I’m using the term “christic body.”
[6] Gregory Little and Kenneth Robinson, How to Escape Your Prison: A Moral Reconation Workbook, Memphis, TN: Eagle Wing Books, 2016), 2.
As we approach Holy Week, I want to share again the Holy Week devotional, Healing Justice and the Paschal Mystery, which combines Holy Week liturgies with ideas from restorative justice practice.
Luke’s Passion narrative presents a number of powerful contrasts: Jesus’s way of self-giving service as opposed to the self-serving actions of those who hold power, Jesus’s way of anti-violence as opposed to the brutality of those who inflict pain, Jesus’s way of forgiveness as opposed to condemnation. Judith Jones explains that, “The whole story emphasizes the dramatic contrast between the kingdom of God and the authorities of this world.” [1] The abolitionist preacher might choose to focus on any one of these themes; however, I think one of the most poignant illustrations of this distinction is depicted in 23:39-43.
Jesus has been condemned by the state to capital punishment, public execution on a cross, and yet even as Jesus suffers the anguish of crucifixion, he offers grace to his neighbor. While leaders and soldiers and even one of the criminals crucified beside Jesus deride and mock him, another criminal proclaims Jesus’s innocence and, seemingly, his lordship. This man confesses and repents, asking Jesus, “remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Jesus responds to the man alongside whom he hangs on a cross, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.” In this singular exchange, Luke describes repentance, forgiveness, and restoration. The state has inflicted its mockery of justice upon the body of Jesus, and yet Jesus embodies the grace-filled justice of God, which redeems and renews. The horrors of incarceration and execution are on display, and yet so too is the grace of Jesus Christ.
One invitation of Passion Sunday, I believe, is to enter into the pain and darkness of Christ crucified while looking for and holding onto the and yet. Powers and principalities imprison, abuse, and execute, and yet Jesus teaches us another way, his way of grace. Our “justice” systems condemn and kill people who are often innocent, and yet Christ offers restoration and renewal to all who repent. This contrast should challenge those of us who participate in unjust systems while offering hope to those of us who suffer because of them.
Dominique DuBois Gilliard writes in Rethinking Incarceration that “Christianity revolves around Jesus, a falsely convicted criminal who was falsely charged, punitively convicted, mercilessly tortured, and unjustly sentenced to death. Given this, I would think the church would understand the necessity of thinking more restoratively about criminal justice.” [2] Additionally, Gilliard says the church is called to “pursue a justice system that builds community, affirms human dignity, and seeks God’s shalom.” [3] What are some examples of ways in which our faith communities are living out this calling? Or, how might we begin to imagine new ways our churches could participate in God’s work of renewal and restoration?
This Sunday, as we look to Christ crucified, how might we be transformed by his grace? We stand in the shadow of the cross, and yet we have hope because the cross is not the end of the story. How might we respond?
Jed Tate is a United Methodist pastor in North Carolina.
Every year, the state and local governments in the United States pour more and more money into a criminal justice system that is fundamentally broken. Despite the fact that police fail to resolve the vast majority of significant crimes and that prisons fail miserably at preventing crime, the bipartisan American political establishment is unwaveringly committed to throwing more and more money at these failed institutions. The budget plan that President Joe Biden released this week goes out of its way to emphasize that it funds the police with “$1.97 billion in discretionary funding to support state and local law enforcement.”
“Budgets are statements of values,” President Biden rightly said and the values his budget espouses represent the American commitment to violence. The American imagination is obsessed with violence as the solution to the economic scarcity induced by capitalism, the criminality created by our legal codes, and the estrangement we feel from one another nurtured by decades of harmful systems and policies. The American consciousness accepts largely without public critique the idea that doing violence to each other will somehow stop violence in our midst, even though this idea has been roundly criticized for millenia.
Isaiah’s imagination is different. In the passage from Isaiah this week, the prophet depicts God as one who “makes a way” (v. 16) in the seemingly insurmountable obstacle of a churning sea. God neutralizes the weapons of war and instruments of violence — “they are extinguished, quenched like a wick” (v. 17). This God declares: “Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert” (vv. 18-19).
Invoking the Exodus, Isaiah provokes us to imagine a new thing, to forget the way we’ve always done things. Yet the American response to its social ills is not to embrace whatever new thing God may want to do among us. The American response is to hold on to the former things and the things of old as if they are the only thing standing between us and death.
The criminal justice system in the United States all too often does not stand between us and death. It is itself an instrument of death. Consider the ludicrous example of Arslan Guney, a 71-year-old man who faces the prospect of a felony for drawing with a sharpie on a gym floor in Colorado. Far from making rivers in the desert, our criminal justice system could send this man to prison creating death where there was life. Consider the role of prisons during the pandemic. Public health experts warned that our prison system would become an “epidemic engine,” destroying the lives of prisoners and people outside their walls. Instead of pursuing decarceration, pandemic relief money often went to funding bloated police departments and investment in even more prisons. American jails hold over 450,000 people not because they have even been convicted by the criminal justice system but because they cannot pay bail or they are being held preventatively without a trial, a system ripe for abuse. Untried incarcerated people experience damage to their families, careers, and communities as the system brings about even more death in our midst.
What does Isaiah propose as the solution, then? Immediately before the lectionary passage, God commits to “break down all the bars” (v 14) in Babylon, a reference to the systems of incarceration and slavery in the ancient empire. It turns out God is quite the abolitionist! God promises to turn the tables on those dedicated to the Jewish people’s imprisonment and bondage. But according to Isaiah, while God promises all of these things, God’s people do not call for God to live up to those promises. In the United States, Christians do the same. We worship a God who in the first sermon of Jesus proclaims (again, in the voice of Isaiah!) a commitment to setting prisoners free, but so many of us do not pray for that God to come. Instead, we fund police and prisons with our prayers and tax dollars, convinced that $1.97 billion dollars in the hands of inherently violent institutions will keep us safe.
Every year, we make the same mistake, but what if we didn’t?
Wesley Spears-Newsome (he/him/his) is a writer and Baptist pastor in North Carolina.
All of the passages for this Sunday speak of how God is made known in and through abundance, in the bounty of God’s creation and the wideness of God’s mercy. So what is this text doing here?
Joshua is a complicated book, with a complicated history. My ancestors, like many other European settlers on Turtle Island, placed themselves in the unfolding of the story of Joshua, as Israelites entering Canaan. This whole book could be considered is a “text of terror” for indigenous peoples around the world.
But the communities who wrote and compiled this book had at best an ambivalent relationship with these stories. Remember, it is only after Constantine that anyone who calls this a sacred text gains actual imperial power. For centuries these stories were passed down by people who knew colonization from the underside. And so, while they may have longed for a God who could act with power, destroying their enemies and giving them total control of the land, they narrated a sacred history that subtly critiqued colonization and imperial power.
Here, at Gilgal, the people of Israel sit down to eat the produce of the land. And at that very moment, God’s abundance leaves them. No longer will they eat manna. No longer will they trust in God to provide for their every need. No doubt, like my ancestors disembarking from the boat to start a new life, they were grateful to be able to provide for themselves. But the writers of Joshua warn us: You can trust in God’s abundance, or you can trust the works of your own hand, but do not confuse the two.
We often talk about abolition as an act of creation. We plant a new world in the shell of the old. But even more fundamentally, abolition requires us to tend to the practices of healing and transformative justice already alive. It begins not from deficit or scarcity, but from a lens of abundance.
My comrades Dawud Lee and Nyako Pippen, who are both currently serving Death By Incarceration sentences in Pennsylvania, write that incarcerated people have always practiced transformative justice. Even in the belly of the beast, where scarcity is not a mindset but a daily reality, “there are some folks inside of these cages that understand the kind of love and patience that is required to help others make the transformation from living a life of perpetual pain and violence to living a life of healing and accountability.”
What could be more abolitionist than practicing love and patience from inside prison walls? What could be more abolitionist than trusting in divine abundance and tending to God’s creation? Let us abolish settler-colonialism and the carceral system, as we grow the transformative justice spirit.
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.
