Author: Wes Spears-Newsome

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.

The “Greatest Commandment” that Jesus identifies in Matthew 22 and its parallels originates in the Torah (even the precise combination Jesus makes is found in earlier Jewish sources*), and its presence in the reading from Leviticus for this week sits the command to love your neighbor as yourself next to a series of other social-oriented instructions. Here’s a simplified list: 

• Do not base your judicial outcomes on defendant’s income (19:15)
• Do not slander each other (v. 16)
• Do not profit based off other’s pain (v. 16)
• Do not hate each other (v. 17)
• Do not let injustice slide (v. 17)
• Do not center retribution in your relationships with one another (v. 18)

All of these are surmised in vv. 2 and 18 with general commands: “You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy” and “love your neighbor as yourself” (NRSV). I’ve adjusted the wording for the others from direct translation in hopes that we see how obviously our society fails to live up to even the spirit of these commands, particularly in the criminal justice system. 

 Our judicial outcomes are absolutely driven by defendants’ income. Innumerable people take plea deals for crimes they didn’t commit because they can’t afford a lawyer with enough bandwidth to defend them and they don’t want to risk even more punishment and prison time. The public defense system is woefully inadequate (Maine doesn’t even have one, other states are governed by state and county funding, which is far from equitable across geographies) and the plea deal is often the least worst way out. At the same time, the rich have no trouble avoiding lawsuits, punishment, and other consequences for regular wrongdoing. When they fail to avoid it, in fact, it makes news.

The accused and convicted (guilty or not) face immense slander, including barriers to employment, the ballot box, and other critical re-entry needs. The American system very much uses them as scapegoats and heap upon them social ills that many conveniently ignore in light of presumed guilt. 

In 2017, the Prison Policy Initiative estimated that the cost to state and federal governments (and impacted families!) for our incarceration system is upwards of $182 billion. Billions of those dollars go to private prisons, as well. Whatever way you cut it, extraordinary amounts of people are making extraordinary amounts of money off the pain of those who suffer in our prison system (guilty or innocent). This structure certainly falls woefully short of Leviticus 19:16’s injunction against “profit by the blood of your neighbor.” 

The remaining commands are also easily seen as violated. The prison industrial complex only multiplies hate. Our collective (often willful) ignorance of its evil points to our own guilt. The entire system also centers on retribution rather than love for neighbors. Preaching on Leviticus usually isn’t popular, but the Torah is radical in its reproach of our society and preachers should feel empowered to use it as a matrix for judgment. No genuine conscience can look at the prison industrial complex, read these words from Leviticus, and walk away comfortable or at ease. Sometimes, that’s how we need to leave church on Sunday morning—at a fundamental dis-ease with the world around us.   

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

* – See notes on Matthew 22 in The Jewish Annotated New Testament, ed. Levine. 

“Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink.” Exodus 17:6 (NRSV)

I have to admit, I’ve always been rather sympathetic to the Israelites in this story. They’ve endured slavery in Egypt, escaped by the skin of their teeth in an effort that required literal miracles, and now they’re in the middle of the desert — not a place well-known for survivability without an abundance of preparation. Moses can be forgiven for his frustration, too, but it’s hard for me to see his rejoinder seriously: “Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the LORD?” (v. 2) 

Moses doesn’t seem to be taking the Israelites’ trauma and their current situation seriously. Water seems a more than reasonable request on their part. 

The demands for abolition should be as simple and reasonable as asking for water in the desert. When Black Americans are incarcerated at 5 times the rates of White Americans, it’s a reasonable thing to question the legitimacy and existence of the system. When the prison population has increased from 500,000 to 2,200,000 from 1980 to 2015 (far outpacing population growth and crime), it’s reasonable to question the system that’s locking people up. When we’re increasing the spending on prisons and jails at triple the rate as K-12 public education, it’s more than reasonable to object.  

It’s important for pastors to normalize asking these questions of our society and government from the pulpit. Consider this story from the Israelites’ perspective this week. Ask questions that seem provocative but are actually just as reasonable as asking for water in the desert. We’ve become accustomed to the evil all around us, and it sometimes falls to you to ask the questions no one else in your faith community is raising. 

Don’t be afraid to ask for water. 

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

Matthew 14:13-21

When considering Jesus’ feeding miracles, I often think about how his response to people’s poverty was sustenance. When Jesus saw that someone lacked, he provided. This response is the character of God in stories throughout Jewish and Christian Scriptures. To confront lack is to respond with plenty.

So much of what undergirds the prison industrial complex in the United States is a completely different response. The reaction our systems have to poverty is often criminalization.

The connection between incarceration and the housing crisis is one example. You can be arrested essentially for being unhoused. After incarceration, you could find little support and wind up unhoused. You might choose jail to get a roof over your head. In some places, they’ll arrest you for helping unhoused people.

The reaction of our justice system is to perpetuate injustice, to meet lack with more lack. It’s the opposite of what Jesus does in the feeding miracles. How could our world be different if our legal systems acted like Jesus and met people’s lack with plenty? What would your community look like if, instead of passing laws to penalize lack, they passed policies and ordinances that gave people what they need?

Right now, our response not just to crime but to social need is incarceration. Jesus demands something different from us. In Mark and Luke’s versions of this story, when Jesus observes the lack and need of the people around him, Jesus turns to the disciples and simply commands them, “You give them something to eat.” If we stood next to Jesus as he looked on the prison industrial complex today, what would he say to us?

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

Romans 8:26-39

In Romans 8:26-39, Paul continues to encourage his readers to patiently endure the labor pains of liberation that Hannah Bowman reflected on in last week’s Abolition Lectionary post. Here Paul encourages them by emphasizing God’s providence and foreknowledge. In Romans 8:28 he writes, “We know that God works all things together for good for the ones who love God, for those who are called according to his purpose.” Paul states that God “knows them in advance” (NRSVue, this is translated as “predestined” in other translations) and has called them according to God’s purpose. The passage culminates with Paul’s exhortation to trust in God’s love for “nothing can separate us from God’s love in Christ Jesus our Lord: not death or life, not angels or rulers, not present things or future things, not powers or height or depth, or any other thing that is created,” (Romans 8:38-30). 

God’s power and foreknowledge has been appropriated to uphold systems of control when used against the marginalized by the powerful, but the thrust of Paul’s argument in Romans is to criticize systems that rely on rules and punishments as ultimately death-dealing powers opposed to God’s work in Christ. He criticizes gentile Christ-followers who appropriate and misapply Jewish law to malign and marginalize other Christians in their community (see Eisebaum’s Paul was Not a Christian). He exhorts believers to uproot Roman class systems that divide Christian communities into the strong and weak (see Mcknight’s Reading Romans Backwards). Ultimately Paul is proposing a different understanding of justice that stands with the executed and oppressed in pursuit of liberation for all (see Keesmaat and Walsh’s Romans Disarmed as well as Mark Lewis Taylor’s Executed God). Consequently it is a misunderstanding of Paul’s argument to conclude that those God “foreknew” and call are working for anything less than “justification and life for all” (lest we forget Romans 5:18). 

God’s foreknowledge and power can be understood as a kind of control, but it is better understood as the kind of utopic vision that Mariame Kaba writes about when she states that “every vision is a map,” (We Do This ‘Till We Free Us). Likewise, many early Christian theologians interpreted our condition and constructed ethics based on eschatological beliefs about what God is calling us towards. Utopic visions and ethics based on telos become oppressive as control-methods, but they are tools of liberation when they inspire us to question the inevitability of the punitive systems we are embedded in and give us the courage and patience to endure the suffering that comes with demanding change. It is only then that our faith in God’s providence can become the basis of our hope in the abolition of prisons and policing and the triumph of a justice system that separates no person from the love of God or neighbor.

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

Psalm 119:105-112

“Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.”

The effects of the law in this section of Psalm 119 are intriguing (or at least should be!) to a society that claims to be governed by the “rule of law.” The Psalmist holds on to the law as a source of life and sustenance. They bring joy and serve as the inheritance that the Psalmist passes on. The role of Torah is complex in both Jewish and Christian circles, but the picture the Psalmist presents is clear: law should bring life for the psalmist and their community. 

The “rule of law” does not frequently serve this purpose in our system of retributive justice. Following the law does not intrinsically bring you life and quite often it is used to bring about death, both for offenders and for those who exist at its whims. In the United States, from the beginning law was constructed to accrue advantage for some people at the expense of others—most obviously in the enshrinement of slavery. The legacy of such origins endures to this day, bringing life rather than bringing death. 

For some, the first step toward PIC abolition is looking at the effects the law has now. When you live comfortably and, for the most part, don’t interact with the legal system, you don’t see these effects. But once you see them, you can’t unsee them. The laws we have make it expensive to be poor, keep people yolked to their incarceration long after release, and shield law enforcement from the laws they are supposed to enforce. Where Torah is meant to bring life to its followers, our laws so often do the opposite. 

Abolition has an expressive goal that is quite clear and singular in our case, but it is connected to so much else that doesn’t work in our world. When preaching about the life that comes from the imperatives of our Scriptures, pastors should point out the ways in which the laws of the state that we actually follow fall short of God’s will for us. It’s those laws that create the systems we want to abolish and for some, the journey to becoming an abolitionist starts there. 

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

Zechariah 9:9-12

As for you also, because of the blood of my covenant with you, I will set your prisoners free from the waterless pit.

Zechariah 9:11

In the latter portion of Zechariah, most likely a later addition written under the threat or rule of the Greeks, we see a clear portrait of the “demilitarized dominion” of God (David L. Petersen’s words from the New Oxford Annotated Bible). Presented is a common image in prophetic literature of God destroying the weapons of war used to govern the present age and pronounce God’s rule in the age to come. Matthew later connects this specific passage to the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem, linking this newly disarmed world to the purposes of his ministry. 

Zechariah rejects a few critical things in this passage: weapons of war (chariots, war horses, battle bows) and incarceration. The specific form of incarceration referenced here is likely related to military prisoners given the references to war. Freedom for these captives of opposing nations from imperial powers represents liberation for the whole of Zechariah’s people. At the same time, the prisoners could refer to exiles as deportation was a repeated trauma of the Jewish people at the hands of larger Ancient Near Eastern empires. 

For our purposes, we need not see Zechariah’s promise of an end to incarceration so narrowly. The prison industrial complex of the United States specifically is a mechanism of these same dominating powers that plagued Zechariah’s time. Our systems of incarceration wield deportation as a weapon just as ancient empires did. The internal policing of Americans often looks like militarized occupation, especially in times of protest and resistance to police brutality. Prisons are very much the “waterless pit” (v. 11, NRSV) of the country, resulting in intense pain and future marginalization in our social structures. 

God promises freedom from these powers and we ought to declare that freedom from our pulpits. We must declare God’s intentions for these institutions to pass away and be replaced by the kingdom of peace promised in Zechariah. 

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

Genesis 21:8-21

“God was with the boy, and he grew up.” – Genesis 21:20

Abraham and Sarah do not look good in this story. This story (and its “Part 1” back in Genesis 16) lay bare the power that this couple has over the people they enslave. Abraham, the father of nations, is willing to discard Hagar once she is no longer useful (and willing to blame Sarah for it). The patriarch of all Peoples of the Book acts no different from any other slaveholder or lord: Benevolent as long as it serves him, cruel and death-dealing when the situation changes.

Hagar’s story has long been a source for Black feminist and womanist theological criticism of white theologies that would seek redemption in the substitutionary suffering of racialized women, most famously in Dr. Delores Williams’ Sisters in the Wilderness. 

For Williams, there is nothing redemptive about unchosen suffering. Jesus does not die as a surrogate for us. Rather, “The cross is a reminder of how humans have tried throughout history to destroy visions of righting relationships that involve transformation of tradition and transformation of social relations and arrangements sanctioned by the status quo.”

Picking up on these themes, Patrick Reyes writes in his memoir that, “I am not seeking a judge to save us from oppressive rulers. I am not seeking a prophet in the wilderness calling for unflinching faith in the face of adversity. I am not seeking a king to rule a new, more faithful kingdom. I am seeking a Jesus who accompanies me on a journey to survive.”

But this is not, really, a story about Abraham (or Sarah). God is with the boy, Ishmael. God is with Hagar. The God of Hagar and Ishmael accompanies them on a journey to survive. God does not ask them to turn their suffering into a learning opportunity for Abraham and Sarah. “God was with the boy, and he grew up; he lived in the wilderness, and became an expert with the bow.”

Sometimes liberation and reconciliation do not operate on the same timeline. The Black radical tradition in and beyond the United States teaches all of us that self-determination for the oppressed can be found in the wilderness, away from the centers of power. And in these maroon communities (which might dismissively be called “bubbles”), God and God’s people are journeying together towards freedom.

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.

Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person–though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.

Romans 5:1-8 NRSV

     In the Barnard Center’s video The Modern Roots of Transformative Justice, Shira Hassan talks about the realization that they could build a context for accountability through developing relationships with people who harmed others. She says, “building relationships with people was the most TJ thing we could do.”¹ This enabled them to enact strategies, like encouraging drug dealers to distribute narcan, that would reduce harm. She reminds us that, though our impulse is to push people away who are doing things that harm others, finding ways to increase relational and communal connections is ultimately the only way to create a context where people are able to take accountability for, repair, and prevent harm.

The first half of Paul’s letter to the Romans, which culminates in chapter 5, is best understood through that lens. Paul describes the way death and wrath² as a response to sin only increases sin in the world. They will never produce justice. Furthermore, he reminds us that no one is simply an offender or a victim, we are all caught up in a system in which sin increases through retributive logic. The only way out of this system is through faith in a life-giving relationship that offers grace.  Romans 5:1-8 summarizes Paul’s argument in chapters 1-4. He reminds us that this kind of relationship does not offer life without struggle or grace without the building of character. And in chapter 6 he assures us this kind of gracious relation is not an excuse for sin, it is the context for justification. Our suffering can be transformed when it is toward and in commitment to take accountability, repair, and prevent harm. 

Preachers should be careful to note that we “boast” in suffering not to apologize for remain in harmful, abusive contexts. No. We boast in the struggle, in the midst of great adversity, to communally maintain boundaries that protect ourselves without anathematizing or punishing another person. We boast in the suffering and struggle that comes from confronting the systems that harm our community. The work isn’t easy, but when we put our faith in the power of Christ’s TJ, the hard work produces endurance, character, and hope rather than despair. 

On the other hand, we also can boast about the suffering that comes from taking accountability for the harm we have done to others. We can boast in the “clean pain” (to use Resmaa Menakem’s term) that comes from working to repair harm we’ve done and prevent ourselves from harming others again. This is also a painful struggle, but it is work we can be proud of. 

We do this because God demonstrates to us through Christ that this is the path of salvation: of real, transformative healing and justification. God does this with us through Christ, who embodies God’s commitment to remain in loving relationship with God’s people and whose own struggle and suffering resulted from opposing systems of death and wrath.

¹  https://youtu.be/ZqMxNiKQLHc?t=224

²  Though you will read “God’s wrath” or “the wrath of God” in English translations. Paul always just says “wrath” in Romans, excepting Romans 1:18, where NT scholar Douglas Campbell argues that Paul is using speech-in-character. This is a rhetorical technique like satire, and Paul goes on to refute the claims made in that section. I tend to think Paul does not explicitly attribute wrath to God in latter sections because he is criticizing the use of “wrath” as a response to sin.

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

Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26

“Go and learn what it means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’”

This line jumped out from the Gospel text this week as I read and wouldn’t let me go. It’s an arresting statement, an axiom of a different kind of world. We live in a world that requires sacrifice at every level of existence. Capitalism requires the sacrifice of our bodies, our labor, and our relationships with one another to continue to function, for example. The Prison Industrial Complex requires us to sacrifice the highest per capita rate of our neighbors in the world in order for it to function and — allegedly — for us to be safe. 

This sacrifice reminds me of the classic short science fiction story by Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.” In the disturbing bit of speculative fiction, there’s a town called Omelas that is happy by every metric you could imagine and prosperous, too. But Le Guin reveals that the happiness of Omelas is dependent on the suffering of a child, locked away in the basement of one of the town buildings. Everyone in the town knows it, but only some choose to reject the arrangement and leave. Most are happy to live in prosperity thanks to the brutal treatment of others. 

Omelas is based on unjust sacrifice, not mercy. Our society is frequently the same. Popular understandings of safety, security, and even justice depend on the sacrifice of prisoners (guilty or not) and the sacrifice of policed communities (again, guilty or not). Jesus does not condone a world based on such unjust sacrifices and instead, in this passage, prefers the company of those often asked to sacrifice for the greater good. He commends the woman “suffering from hemorrhages” who reaches out to him for healing even though it would have been improper. To keep others ‘safe,’ it would have been better for her to sacrifice community and be isolated. But Jesus desires mercy, not sacrifice. 

What would a justice system in our society based on mercy, not sacrifice, look like? What could our world be like if our economics were based on mercy, not sacrifice? We need to decide, as Christians, if that’s a world worth fighting for or if Omelas is worth living in as it is. N. K. Jemisin, who writes stories that are already or will be considered science fiction classics, wrote a rejoinder to Le Guin’s story about Omelas called “The Ones Who Stay and Fight.” Instead of leaving the Omelas we live in, how can we stay and build a new world based on mercy? How can we be sources of healing, justice, and mercy  in a world that would rather sacrifice untold numbers to the prison industrial complex? 

Abolition is the ultimate answer to these questions, the framework for how we achieve that world. But what steps can you take now to make that world in your midst?

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