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Luke 1:26–38

Mary’s song of justice, commonly referred to as the Magnificat, does not accept the status quo. The powerful are brought down low. The rich are sent away empty. Mary’s words prefigure the parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man later in Luke 16.

The song is powerful and convicting, but the words of Mary hinge on her ‘yes’ to God in our Gospel reading for this week. God is going to shake some things and break some chains. An angel comes to Mary, a messenger of the Lord who probably looked more like a steampunk villain (with wheels and heads and strange words) than a glowing figure with white wings. Mary is scared but she does not run. Mary is confused but she does not doubt. She doubts in herself, not in God. She asks the angel “How can this be?”

And then we have the answer that comforts Mary and should open our eyes to the radical possibility of prison abolition and society being remade. Gabriel starts with giving the deets about the Holy Spirit and Elizabeth and then says, “For nothing is impossible with God.”

This, at its heart, is why abolition is a faith issue. Prisons and jails and the justice system from the top down exist in an immanent continuum where the only justice is ours, where institutions are fixed, and where the imagination is limited by what we have seen before. As a society, we continually find ways of saying ‘no’ to God that only could come down to a lack of faith. We say ‘no’ or ‘not yet’ or ‘let’s be reasonable.’ We say, ‘what about so-and-so,’ describing the horrors that have happened in many people’s lives without questioning the system of justice that perpetuates horrors just as heinous. We perform whataboutism to God, like God is some online poster and we are internet trolls. 

Mary does not. Mary says yes to God. Mary says, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”

May it be so with us all. May we see a world beyond the status quo where we can say yes to God. Where we see the powerful torn down, and the captives go free. 

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

Isaiah 61:1–4, 8–11

Those who have been involved in prison abolition are well aware of one of the first questions asked by those who are unfamiliar: “What will we do with criminals?” Abolitionists are well aware of the need to push back on several assumptions that this question holds. First, that any group of people can be separated as “criminals.” We are all one body, the children of God, and what a legal system labels one cannot impugn that those in prison are still our neighbors. Second, that the community’s role is that of punishing, rather than holding accountable. Still, the question behind the question is what abolitionists must answer: “What will be different from how we do things now?” 

The prophet Isaiah provides a template for how God answers that question. After forcefully declaring that God proclaims release for the imprisoned (a declaration Jesus would later name as the focus of his ministry), Isaiah spells out what God plans for “all who mourn.” 

“They will be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the LORD, to display his glory. They shall build up the ancient ruins, they shall raise up the former devastations; they shall repair the ruined cities, the devastations of many generations.”

God’s vision, for all who mourn, is that they actively pursue the rebuilding and restoring of what’s been ruined. This justice of God is not a retribution, it’s restoration. The vision God has is for people – those who’ve been harmed and those who have harmed others– to rebuild. And God goes further than just seeing restoration for current wrongs, saying that the devastations of many generations will be repaired. 

In light of these prophecies, the church must communicate that abolition is for the good of all the community. When God is involved, God involves all in the work of resurrection, and the restoration goes back generations. For U.S. Christians, this also means supporting financial reparations for harms such as slavery, Jim Crow, and the drug war. Christians must involve themselves in giving land back to Indigenous communities, protecting current lands from unwanted development, and seeking to support expungement of marijuana crimes any time their jurisdiction seeks to legalize marijuana.

Christians follow in Christ’s steps by also embodying this prophetic vision that Isaiah lays claim to, and seeking to rebuild and repair all that has been broken.

Mitchell Atencio (he/him/his) is a discalced writer and photographer based in Arizona.

Isaiah 40:1–11

We sometimes preemptively expect the comfort of God. I often find myself in situations where I almost say, “God, I am here, comfort me! I didn’t do anything; it would be great if I don’t have to and I can get the comfort without the mercy or justice.” Yet throughout the scriptures, the status quo of all societies (from the Egyptians to the Judges to the Kings to the Romans) rests upon injustice. The prophets were the voice of God for the people hurt again and again by those in power.

The comfort here comes in the midst of exile, and yet I want to lift up verse 6: “a voice says, “Cry out!” And I said, “What shall I cry?”” God is calling us this day, telling us to cry out. Do not be satisfied with the way things are. If these things of God are true, the structures and principalities are not eternal. The prison system is not eternal. Abolition is an act of faith in a better world, in a world possible precisely because every valley shall be lifted up. A voice says, “cry out.” Are you crying out? Are you seeing what God sees? Are you lifting up those society tears down? Are you seeking comfort before justice? Offer comfort to those seeking justice. Speak tenderly to those responding to the voice of God.

The Lord is coming, mighty in power. Let us not act is if this were a lie. Taking comfort in the status quo of our judicial system assumes an absent and indifferent God, but our God is on the side of justice. Our God is justice. A voice says, “cry out!” This advent, we have the chance to cry out with God at the injustice around us. We have a chance to speak tenderly to those who have been abused and hurt. We have the chance to welcome a savior who is making all things new. 

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

Isaiah 64:1–9

O that you would tear open the heavens and come down! (Isaiah 64:1)

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.  

Yet, when we come to Isaiah this week the opposite impulse is on full display. The writer invites the tumult!

“Oh, that you would tear open the heavens and come down!”

“The mountains would quake at your presence!”

“The nations might tremble!”

Like much of the prophetic writings, here God is disruptive, unsettling, and troublesome. Instead of shying away from a wild, liberating God, the writer clings to the very things opponents of abolition fear. The writer knows that what some call disruptive and troublesome is actually freedom, justice, and deliverance.

The season of Advent compels us toward this vision of God. Mark’s Gospel this week begs us to keep awake and stay alert for God’s arrival, and Isaiah unflinchingly depicts the advent of God as something that upends the earth.

This upending will not be comfortable, as the writer of Isaiah suggests. God’s arrival unmasks our sins, revealing that “all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth.” Commitment to abolitionism likewise draws us to consider our iniquities. To challenge systems of incarceration and policing demands that we confront the prejudice, malevolence, and evil within ourselves that invented and props up these institutions. To advocate for abolition is to challenge national myths of freedom and greatness, instead pointing to the original sins of this nation.

But the disruption is good news! The writer of Isaiah reminds us that God can make a new thing in us. “We are the clay, and you [God] are the potter; we are the work of your hand.” God can make a new world among us—one that sees as its foundation mutual care, neighborly affection, and shared abundance instead of surveillance, punishment, and violence. If abolition is a fantastical idea, it is no more fantastical than the God we claim to serve.

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.

What is Abolition Lectionary?

Abolition Lectionary is an ongoing blog series for liberation. We will be following the Revised Common Lectionary — the sequence of scriptural readings used by many mainline Protestant and Catholic churches — to provide a devotional meditation or a preaching aid, reading one of the appointed scriptural texts for the Sunday in light of the abolition of policing and prisons.

This is a work of creative exegesis. Our goal is to bring our commitment to abolition to the biblical texts, and then let the biblical texts speak to it. What we will find is support for abolition and the liberation of all marginalized people all across the biblical texts. Structuring our series around a lectionary cycle lets us make abolition a constant devotional practice of study, around the liturgical year.

Posts will be published each Tuesday for the following Sunday, so that preachers looking to draw on these themes in their sermons can use #AbolitionLectionary as a resource. We are beginning next Tuesday, 11/24/20, with the readings for Advent 1, the first Sunday of the “new liturgical year” that begins each Advent.

Our contributors (for now) are: Wesley Spears-Newsome, Wilson Pruitt, Mitchell Atencio, Liam Miller, and me (Hannah Bowman). If you’d like to join us, please reach out!

We’re looking forward to seeing abolition all over the lectionary alongside you!

P.S. You may remember a pilot version of this earlier this year, before the pandemic disrupted it. We’re on a more sustainable footing now!

I wanted to highlight a new resource, an infographic on the interlocking systems of the prison-industrial complex besides simply jails and prisons. This helps express how policing and prison abolition are tied together too:

Most of the information in this infographic comes from Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law’s excellent book, Prison By Any Other Name.

Here’s a text version of the graphic, with some additional sources linked:

• Prisons and Jails
  • Economic interests: Prison Labor, Prison Guards’ Unions, Moving Capital to Rural Areas, Moving “Surplus Labor”
  • Ideological basis: Retribution and Harsh Sentencing, Racial Control and Disenfranchisement
  • Community Confinement and Control
    • Probation and parole
    • Home confinement and electronic monitoring
    • Civil commitment and sex offense registries
    • Economic interests: “saving taxpayer money”
    • Ideological basis: “Law and Order” politics of fear
  • Policing
    • Police Violence
    • Immigration Enforcement
    • Community Surveillance
    • Economic interests: Police unions, gentrification
    • Ideological basis: Anti-Blackness
  • “Treatment Industrial Complex”
    • Forced drug treatment
    • Forced psychiatric treatment
    • Economic interests: lack of accessible healthcare, nonprofit industrial complex
    • Ideological basis: Disregard for Autonomy
  • Criminalization of Survival
    • Survived and Punished
    • Criminalization of Homelessness
    • “Anti-trafficking”/Anti-sex-work
    • Ideological basis: Misogyny/Misogynoir/Transmisogyny
  • Criminalization of Parenting and Childhood
    • Child Welfare System
    • Criminalization of pregnancy loss and drug use in pregnancy
    • School-to-Prison pipeline
    • Ideological basis: Zero Tolerance Policies, Mandatory Reporting

I was honored yesterday to be invited to be part of the Institute for Christian Socialism‘s webinar on abolition, along with some amazing other voices on the relationship of anti-racism and abolition to Christianity. The entire 90-minute webinar was recorded and is available on Facebook Live: full video.

Edited November 2022: a new version of the toolkit is available here. I have also updated the links below to the new version.

What is accountability? How is it different than punishment? How do we practice taking accountability, and how can our spiritual practices support the practice of accountability? What does non-punitive community accountability work look like in cases of serious harm, and how do we prepare for that by practicing the skill of accountability and developing intentional relationships in our communities?

Drawing on the work of restorative and transformative justice practitioners, our new Accountability Toolkit is aimed at offering an introduction to the practices of transformative justice and non-punitive community accountability, specifically for churches and Christian communities. Download it here.

Some sneak peeks:

Download the full toolkit.

I have a new essay up at Anglican magazine The Hour, about the necessity of specificity to expand our moral imagination towards abolition:

The ethical role of the church is to develop moral imagination. The church exists as the first frontier of the kingdom of God, at the boundary between the coming kingdom and the world under the sway of the powers of death. As an outpost of the inbreaking reign of God, the Church’s role is to interpret to the world the new life of grace, the new way of being in freedom, the ultimate liberation of the cosmos. This has aspects beyond the ethical, but on the ethical level, this ultimacy of freedom looses our imagination for new possibilities. To do Christian ethics is precisely to do imaginative ethics, to let the newness and absurdity of the gospel break down the walls in our thinking and nourish new possibilities of love and divine freedom.

Other new resources from this week:

From States of Incarceration, a fascinating essay on Captivity and Spirituality in Medieval Christianity and the Mexican Empire.

From Faith for Justice, a Pledge to End Carceral Christianity.

Foregrounding some resources from Catholic Social Teaching on prison and police abolition today (also available on our Resources page):

Church Life Journal’s series on prison abolition and Catholic ethics:

• Vincent Lloyd, Prisons are a Biblical Abomination
• Katie Walker Grimes, From Slavery to Incarceration
• Kathryn Getek Soltis, Can Justice Demand Prison Abolition?

Michael Jaycox, A Catholic Case for Police Defunding and Abolition

Also check out the Catholic Mobilizing Network and the book they recently published on restorative justice, Redemption and Restoration: A Catholic Perspective on Restorative Justice