Author: Hannah

John 2:1-11

In the story of the wedding at Cana, Jesus shows up in power to bring sufficiency — enough wine, enough joy, enough celebration, enough strengthening of community through communal life — to an event strengthening family and community.

What does this have to do with abolition?

As Josie Pickens wrote yesterday on Twitter, about how abolitionists should avoid over-focusing on “alternatives” to policing and prisons: “Often, the question isn’t what the “alternative” should be to an oppressive/harmful system, but rather how people  can have their needs met when these failing  systems cease to exist. And also what individual and community needs look like.… abolition work is about presence— not absence. We should be focusing on the many ways we can imagine and build safe and sustainable communities where folks needs are met.”

Abolition is presence; life-giving sufficient presence in community relationships that already exist, instead of the enforced absence and exclusion provided by police and prisons. What Jesus is offering to the wedding at Cana is the power of presence. We can imagine him there, already bound by relationships of family and community, and able to meet needs as they are pointed out to him by those in those existing relationships (in this passage, memorably, by his mother!). 

And this passage reminds us that the needs of communal life which we invest in by presence, in order to make possible a world without police and prisons, are not only basic, minimal needs for food and shelter, but also the needs for connection, beauty, celebration, joy. Jesus is blessing a wedding, a time of deepening relationship. He provides wine for the sake of the celebration. Sufficient presence is presence that meets every person’s need for beauty. Beauty, joy, and relationship are the opposites of the ugly goals of dehumanization and exclusion that feed the prison-industrial complex.

The question for abolitionists is not only about how to deal with harm — although that is essential — but also about how to make visible the sufficiency of communities that already exist, and how to strengthen communities through existing relationships. The wedding at Cana provides a picture of God’s action, alongside us, in that community work.

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

Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom by Derecka Purnell

Becoming Abolitionists is human rights lawyer, Atlantic staff writer, and community organizer Derecka Purnell’s debut book. An exploration of her journey toward accepting police abolition as an inevitable answer for safe communities, it is part memoir, part history lesson, and part invitation to join a movement. Incredibly convincing in its arguments, there’s an earnest warmth running through it that welcomes questions and celebrates the grassroots efforts of the people working toward change. Becoming Abolitionists is a personal window into the injustice of the police state on the world’s poor and oppressed, and a guide for those who want to understand its history, and work to abolish it. 

Purnell grew up in St. Louis; after her father was killed in a work accident, her mom, siblings, and occasionally grandma shuffled between apartments in the same complex. Aspects of her life, from her father’s death and industrial toxins hanging over her childhood, to post-9/11 security checks and student resource officers in high school, and the murder of young men she knew and loved reflected something that she felt was off. Purnell’s proximity to this world jump started her awareness of state-sanctioned violence on the country’s poorest. When people hear about police abolition and dismiss it as abandoning neighborhoods and people to violence, she says, “…they tend to forget that often we are those victims, those survivors of violence.” 

Purnell does a brilliant job of bringing to light what exactly felt off, and of highlighting the absurdity in the systems that our law is designed and instructed to uphold. From taking children away from parents for poverty-related offenses and then responding by increasing funding for foster parents, to George Zimmerman’s acquittal under a law that makes shooting an unarmed teenager permissible, the book is filled with examples of these inconsistencies. Much of the book is spent in clear, thorough examinations of these anecdotes, which are fleshed out at times to humanize the oppressor as well the oppressed. 

Purnell expounds on policing as a system rooted in oppression all over the world; from Ferguson, to South Africa and the Caribbean. The book is packed with history that traces our young country’s dependence on genocide and slavery to one that’s evolved to be characterized by “militarism, policing and a concentration of wealth for a few.” She builds the reader’s understanding of the many intersections of racial violence through chapters on sexual violence, ableism, and environmental justice. The realization that police reform has only failed, that ending policing outright is the only option feels like a big moment; we’ve tried the body cameras, the decreased funding, the accountability laws. But a system rooted in upholding wealth and power for a few is a system that won’t ever allow itself to make any lasting or real change. 

Within Becoming Abolitionists is an invitation to take a deep breath and meet questions and uncertainty with honesty. What about murderers and rapists? Purnell is comfortable with there being no simple, or single answer. With an astronomical budget to supposedly keep us safe from these things, why isn’t our expectation that societal violences be eradicated? When broken down through a human lens into what she calls “digestible social problems,” what’s stopping us from working together to address these things? Grassroots efforts that respond to specific issues like mental health, lack of access to childcare, etc. are cheaper, build communities, welcome creativity, and are successful at preventing harm. Purnell imagines a holistic future for a society of people that supports one another and their diverse needs. 

Becoming Abolitionists is somehow both a fiery and a welcoming invitation to join a community focused on taking care of one another. It’s a reckoning with the failures of all of the police reforms that have seemed like wins and good ideas. It’s a celebration of the giant web of grassroots efforts that are already ushering in change. Derecka Purnell is convinced that our focus need not be on the utopian ending, but on the process that’s rooted in loving, learning, and leaning on one another. When that happens, we’ll forget there was ever a time that calling the police for help was a thought.

Caitlin Spanjer works learning about history with middle school students in Oregon, and in her spare time turns to fiction and non-fiction to dream up a world of restored relationships and perfect beauty.  

Luke 3:15–22

The Baptism of Jesus is always a curious text. Baptism is something the church does (or at least, should be doing). But when we baptize a person in our churches, it doesn’t look like the baptism in the Jordan. John the Baptist isn’t there with me on Sunday morning. The heavens don’t open.
Baptism has been incredibly divisive in the history of the church because of this disconnect. Schisms took place over believer’s baptism or infant baptism. Schisms took place over baptism in moving water versus still water.

And yet we come back to the river, to the water, to the savior willingly receiving the washing of another. Luke doesn’t spend too much time on the act of baptism itself. Jesus is baptized with the crowd. As Katherine Sonderegger writes,

He stood with all sinners when He awaited John’s baptism, the washing in the Jordan as sign and act of repentance. He did not hold Himself apart and aloof from this evil generation; rather He joined it. Not for his sake. For ours. (Sonderegger, Systematic Theology I, 217)

All of this gets us to abolition because if baptism is true, if Jesus is true, if Jesus stood with sinners, if Jesus stood with us, we must with all. The baptism of Jesus did not take place in the middle of Jerusalem but on a margin, outside the city, at a location that looks a lot like where many of our prisons are located today. Out of sight. The kind of society that hides people, that dehumanizes people, that shuts them up far away, this kind of society does not believe in the power of baptism.

Did the heavens open? Did Christ stand with us? Then let us not rest in the brokenness of society that we ourselves have built. Let us dismantle it to offer new life fully, honestly, transformationally to all. 

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

Abolition Lectionary is taking a holiday break. We will return after Epiphany.

During this time, I’m thinking about how rest and joy are essential to abolition work. How can we cultivate rest, joy, self- and communal-care as central to our praxis in 2022? (With thanks to The Nap Ministry for these insights.)

Isaiah 9:2–7

The words of the prophets are not just words of the past predicting the Messiah, they are words about the present need for a savior. The church has often drifted into this position of not adequately articulating why anyone would need Jesus. A lot of people are fine and dandy now. Maybe we have a supernatural end after we day. Maybe we can think about our loved ones and seeing them again.

The darkness of which the prophet Isaiah spoke was not the darkness of death at the end of a long life but the darkness found in the brokenness of this world. The people who walk in darkness are here and now people who are hurting in this world; people who society marginalizes and dismisses.

Abolition is one response to the claim of Isaiah 9 that God “will establish justice and righteousness from this time onward and forevermore.” The word justice has been entirely appropriated and hollowed out by the criminal justice system, but righteousness has not. In Greek, they are the same word.

If the child is to be born who brings light in the darkness, then we need follow that child in the authority and righteousness even now. Not just with tasks that are easy, but with tasks that are hard.

The yoke of their burden will be broken. May we work to break those yokes this today. May the Incarnation remind us that God’s light is not just for the future, but for now. May we work towards that future of righteousness in all things, especially in ways of justice, now.

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

Luke 1:39–55

The Magnificat is one of the clearest statements of God’s priorities when it comes to power, yet we frequently ignore it. None of the classic Christmas hymns sung in my tradition (and most likely yours too!) utilize the Magnificat as its biblical referent. It’s a regular feature of some liturgies, but it has disappeared from the popular imagination of Christmas in the United States. Mary’s declaration of what the Nativity will mean is very different from what American Christians frequently ascribe to “the reason for the season,” “the meaning of Christmas,” or “the Christmas spirit.” Why? Because the Magnificat is about power. 

The Magnificat outlines God’s agenda for society: scattering the proud, bringing down the powerful, and sending the rich away empty. God wants to lift up the lowly and fill the hungry with good things, because that’s frequently not what is happening in our world. 

The reversals of the Magnificat are inherently uncomfortable for a culture that would be subject to them. The prison industrial complex, of course, would be torn apart under Mary’s divine vision. All the authorities and powers Americans feel they depend on for their safety and security (despite how wrong-headed that notion is) would be unseated according to Mary. The police would lose their gargantuan budgets, the private prisons would lose their profits, and the politicians who support them would lose their seats. 

And, contrary to the ingrained assumptions of many of us, that’s good news! With these dramatic reversals and massive upheavals come liberation, freedom, and the world God wants. Victims of the carceral system would be lifted up, those left without resources and opportunity because of it would be filled. If we listen to Mary’s song, we hear a call to abolition and liberation—one we can’t ignore.

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

Philippians 4:4–7

The reading from Philippians for this Sunday — from which it takes the traditional name “Gaudete Sunday,” from the Latin translation of the text — is all about rejoicing. “Rejoice in the Lord always,” Paul writes. “Again I say, rejoice.”

Joy is all over the letter to the Philippians, which is full of repetitions of Paul’s own “rejoicing” for events in his own life and for the church in Philippi (e.g. 1:18), as well as exhortations to “rejoice.” This is particularly striking given the reality that Paul wrote this letter from his incarceration.

It is important to name that the exhortation to rejoice can be an oppressive one — to demand a sort of performative joy in the Lord from those who suffer is itself an unkindness. But I find the exhortation to rejoice in this letter to be a comfort. Partly, this is because Paul’s exhortation to rejoice comes out of his own confidence and joy — it is less of a demand than an invitation. Another reason, I think, comes from what he identifies in 4:5: “The Lord is near.” Rejoicing derives from the nearness of God; from God who comes down in compassion, sharing in our sufferings so we can share in God’s joy.

And the nearness of God does not only imply God’s self-emptying compassion, but also the promise of deliverance. “The Lord is near,” bringing freedom, liberation, and healing. The very nearness of the Lord implies freedom and liberation, because freedom and liberation are God’s own nature.

This all makes me think of the role of joy in abolition and transformative justice. Sometimes it is easy, in organizing and activism and ministries of presence and solidarity with those who are incarcerated, to see the injustice and suffering of the world so much that we forget how central joy is to the work of abolition. Joy is as essential as struggle.

If abolition is about what we build, not just what must be torn down, then it is enacted in building structures of joy. Solidarity by those of us on the outside with those who are criminalized and incarcerated is based on the joy found in the communities people build within carceral spaces. Restorative justice spaces are spaces of reparation, but they can also be spaces of joy as we deepen connections with one another’s truth. Transformative justice practices build on joy too: in Beyond Survival, Janaé E. Bonsu of BYP100 writes about how “healing-centered organizing requires habitual self-care and collective-care,” naming how organizing spaces draw on “Indigenous and ancestral practices” to build those spaces of care. The work of justice begins with finding joy through practices that have been marginalized by mainstream culture.

“Hope is a discipline,” Mariame Kaba says. And perhaps joy is a discipline too, one that we find as we invest in deep relationships and caring community.

For me, this text is a necessary reminder to search for practices of joy that sustain the work of building a just world.

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

Philippians 1:3–11

It is sometimes easy to forget that Paul wrote while incarcerated. As a citizen, he had access to many privileges and rights that were not on the table for Jesus or John the Baptist, or any of the apostles or most of the people who came to listen to Jesus preach the good news. But even with all his legal privileges, Paul was a prisoner for five or six years. His “sharing in God’s grace” with other Christians was in two senses: That they all “defended and confirmed” the gospel, and that Christians in the cities in which Paul was imprisoned attended to his physical needs.

Imprisonment is, following Orlando Patterson, “social death”: an incarcerated person is cut off from friends and family, from physical or material care from others, and from voluntary meaningful work. Yet during Paul’s imprisonment, this death was absolutely refused. Christians carried and copied his letters, part of his life’s work; they visited him and attended to him; and Paul himself knew himself to still be fundamentally in community and communion with other Christians and their Lord, in a position to encourage, teach, and exhort them. Paul was known to be alive, as we all are alive in Christ; neither his bond of love with those he wrote to, nor his life, nor his faith, nor the worth of his teachings or perspective were in question.

How can we live in this way today? Paul wrote from prison not as a supplicant or one to be pitied but as a teacher and a brother. Yet how easily those of us who are not incarcerated make appeals for incarcerated people based not on siblinghood but on pity. The good news of God’s liberation and the kingdom brought near to us by Christ is not that God has felt sorry for people worse off than us, but rather that death is over and we are all and will all be freed, restored, healed. Prison is become a nothing as sin is become a nothing: this is the foundation upon which Christ works the good work being done in us. We can live this way now.

Bailey Pickens is a Presbyterian pastor who lives with her wife and dog in Nashville, TN.

Jeremiah 33:14–16

In Advent, the church focuses on the eschatological promise of the coming reign of God. The anticipation of Advent reminds us that the incarnation of God on earth is a prolepsis — an experiencing-in-advance — of the true and complete fullness of creation, of the justice God promises.

The promise of coming justice is central to the text from Jeremiah, a promise from God to bring the “righteous Branch” from David, who shall “execute justice and righteousness in the land” — justice so complete that the land shall be renamed: “The LORD is our righteousness.”

The promise made to Israel, which is a promise for the whole creation through Israel, is the promise of justice. And not only of justice as an abstract value, but of just government — in biblical terms, of a just ruler. Or, as we might put it in modern political terms, of just ways of organizing our society. Of just interpersonal relations. Of social relationships structured by justice and righteousness.

The point is that the promise is not separable from the realities of government and societal relationships. The promise to Jeremiah is not an unearthly paradise but a human society structured by God’s justice.

The challenge is to recognize that such justice has not yet fully appeared. Christian theology has tended to separate this promise from its historical context and associate it with a coming future age or the end of history.

Reading this text in Advent can be a reminder to Christians, though, that the promise of God for justice is a promise for the renewal of this world and society. For Christians, the incarnation of God in Jesus is the beginning of the age to come. We live on the edge of apocalypse. In this space, where God has become incarnate within our society but where justice has not yet won, is a profound place for transformation: a creative womb where we can build and experiment and construct new alternative ways to the death-dealing ways of the world and new ways of healing and transforming harm. In this liminal space of tension and creativity, we work alongside God, bringing to birth God’s justice and righteousness from within the societal structures where we find ourselves.

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

John 18:33–37

In the Gospel for Reign of Christ, we find Jesus deep in the carceral system of his day. He has been betrayed by one of his own friends who conspired with the police to arrest him. Most of his community, particularly his disciples, abandon him in the face of his incarceration even before his trial. The trial itself is a sham, something Jesus plainly recognizes. Now, the police have dragged him before the imperial authorities for sentencing. 

At no point is there any logic to Jesus’ incarceration other than imposing the will of the powerful on him. There is no concern for justice (certainly not restorative justice) in this process. There is no concern for what’s best for the community. There isn’t even a significant concern for truth (confoundingly, the lectionary omits Pilate’s famous quotation from v. 38). 

The primary concern in this carceral system appears to be preservation of the powerful hierarchy at work in it. When Jesus testifies for himself earlier in this chapter, the police strike him and demand “Is that how you answer the high priest?” (v.22). The high priest’s power is threatened by Jesus and the police respond with violence. Jesus’ accusers defer to Pilate’s authority when they want to put Jesus to death to preserve their uneasy alliance with the Romans (v. 31). Interrogating Jesus, Pilate famously doesn’t seek truth but the best way to preserve imperial power in the face of one accused of claiming kingship. 

One of the most important things for Christians to recognize about incarceration, policing, and criminal justice in the United States and around the world is what the primary concerns of these systems are. The default assumption is that they exist to keep us safe, but that often doesn’t seem to be the case at all. Private prisons exist to preserve the profits and power of those who own them. Elected law enforcement officials must appear “tough on crime” and follow through with policies to that effect to maintain their power. Whatever the quality of actors within law enforcement and incarceral systems, the priority is preservation of those systems’ status quo. 

Christians, however, are not called to the maintenance of that status quo. Jesus explicitly appeals to a “kingdom … not from this world” (v. 36). This characterization of the Reign of Christ has frequently been spiritualized, but the whole witness of the New Testament doesn’t suggest that. The Reign of Christ has material consequences and should manifest itself in a different order of things, including cared for and freed prisoners (a consistent theme in both Jewish and Christian Scriptures). Particularly on Reign of Christ Sunday, Christians should question the reign of present principalities and powers. Is their status quo godly and holy or is it the same imperial and carceral system that rejected and executed Jesus?

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