Nov 12 | Resistance Lectionary Part 20: Letters from Prison

Today’s Citation: Philippians 1:12-20

I first began to question the carceral system a few years ago reading The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America by Mark Lewis Taylor. In this timely book, Taylor examines the shifting of society into a mass carceral state, and questions the support for capital punishment held by many Fundamentalist and Evangelical Christians.

His was the first piece to introduce me to prison abolition, and at first I was shocked by the idea. Of course I thought prisons were overstuffed, but if there aren’t any prisons at all what kind of a society would that be?

Over time, I learned more about the efficacy of prisons as they currently exist in North America, and my mind has changed.

I won’t get into the politics of abolition here, but one thing that has become clear to me is that prisons are less tools for the safety of the people and more tools for the state to exercise its will.

In April of 1963, the Rev’d Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail”:

“I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. …I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

Over many years the story of Dr. King has been domesticated until it became unclear what he could have said that would ever have spurred someone to murder him. We forget that while he was alive, the white majority was at best deeply ambivalent about his message and methods, and more often than not derided him for being a hostile “agitator.”

No-one gets thrown into prison for saying things little kids are taught in kindergarten (Be nice, share your things, etc.)

In this way, both Dr. King and Paul remind us that while prison is a tool of the oppressor, it can also be a sort of blessing, in that it reminds everyone that the Gospel of God’s radical boundary-breaking love must not be domesticated. Empire will always push back against a God that mocks the rule of violent law, and those who proclaim that God will be punished for not falling in line.

Christians are called to question everything that is a tool of the Empire, for Empire is most concerned about the gathering and maintenance of power, which will always in the end lead to idolatry.

We’ll end today’s reflection with one of the Rev. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s prison poems:

 

Christians and Pagans[1]

People turn to God when they’re in need,
plead for help, contentment, and for bread,
for rescue from their sickness, guilt, and death.
They all do so, both Christian and pagan.

People turn to God in God’s own need,
and find God poor, degraded, without roof or bread,
see God devoured by sin, weakness, and death.
Christians stand with God to share God’s pain.

God turns to all people in their need,
nourishes body and soul with God’s own bread,
takes up the cross for Christians and pagans, both,
and in forgiving both, is slain.

[1] Translated in A Testament to Freedom: The Essential Writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (eds GB Kelly and FB Nelson (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1990), p. 549.

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