Acts 12: 1-19 Rev

“Yes, We Really Do Mean Abolition”: Acts 12: 1-19 Rev. Kaeley McEvoy Westmoreland Congregational UCC Sunday, August 2, 2020 During my last year of seminary, I shared a classroom with 20 incarcerated women at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in Bedford Hills, New York. Bedford Hills is the largest maximum security women’s prison in New York State and houses 900- 1,000 women each year. Once a week a group of 12 students from Union Seminary, and our Professor, Dr. Lisa Thompson, would get in a large van and drive the 45 minutes down the Taconic parkway from upper Manhattan to the prison facility. After moving through three sets of security stations, checking ids, metal detectors, for three hours on Wednesdays, the learning corridor of the prison became a classroom of shared experience. My classmates at Bedford Hills were smart. Like did all of their reading, highlighted the thesis statements, smart. They were also funny. Like abs hurt from laughing funny. And because Bedford Hills has a seeing eye dog training program, some of the women also had dogs beside them in our classroom. Every week, there would be one or two moments, when I would forget that we were in a maximum security prison. A dog would successfully sit for the first time and our class would collectively cheer. Once a dog let out a bark precisely after a student finished a presentation and we all laughed. Each week the dogs would share a slobbery welcome with their tongues and my classmates and I would likewise ask each other how we were doing this particular week. But then every week it would happen: Class would end, a timer would buzz, a guard would knock. We would leave. And our classmates would stay. Every time that I left the women, the smart, funny, dog-training, sermon- speaking, women of Bedford Hills and sat in the back of a van that drove me back to New York City-- I felt deep in my bones and my heart that the world should not be like this. People should not live in cages like this. Each week I was reminded that it is in Jesus’s very first sermon that he declares liberty for those in bondage. And as I traveled freely away from the electrified buzzing barbed wire of Bedford, I knew that we were living in a world very far away from that gospel call. The title for my sermon today is, “Yes, We Really Do Mean Abolition.” And here I want to expand our definition of abolition in the broadest sense possible. Abolition of what Angela Davis calls the Prison Industrial Complex. This means abolition: Of prisons. Of the police. Of systems of justice that only cause more violence. Abolition is a Christian call. And like the call for reparations--it is not a call to be taken lightly. The call to free the prisoners is deeply scriptural and ancient. God freed the people of Israel from captivity in Egypt. In the gospel of Luke, Jesus says that he is on earth first, to proclaim good news to the poor, and second, to proclaim freedom for the prisoners. The call we hear for abolition rising from the street is the very same word Jesus spoke: the Freedom Call has always been a Christian Call. It’s no secret that many leaders of the movement to abolish slavery were inspired by their faith, and enslaved peoples used spirituals and visions like the wheel of Ezekial to create underground railroads and passages to freedom. It is important to remember that the abolition of slavery in America was once a dream. “We are our ancestors' wildest dreams” is a common refrain in communities who have fought their way to liberation. The freedom dream was born in the imagination of Black mothers and fathers who saw a life of flourishing for their children, even though that reality was far from true. “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, proof of things not seen,” says the book of Hebrews. The first step of abolition is imagination. It is seeing a world where I am in a park, with a former classmate from Bedford Hills, and my dog and her dog are sharing a bone, and my child and her child are running in a sprinkler. The practice of imaging a world that should be, from the world that is--is precisely what our Christian faith teaches us to do. As people of faith, the power of religious imagination is one the first tool to cultivate wild dreams for the future. The Books of Acts, which we have been working through as a congregation, is full of narratives of incarceration and authoritative violence. Throughout Acts many early Christians are persecuted and imprisoned including the most well-known apostle Paul who gets arrested in the 21st chapter of Acts, is brought on multiple trials, and writes a handful of his letters to Christian communities from prison. Our scripture today in Acts 12, tells the narrative of a disciple named Peter’s jailing and liberation. Peter is imprisoned by the violent King Herod during the festival of Passover, and though Peter is surrounded by four guards and two heavy chains, an Angel taps on Peter’s shoulder and basically says, “Let’s go, we are out of here.” This scene itself is a miracle. Standing alone Peter’s escape from prison is a strong argument that God is on the side of freedom from jail. However, after the Angel frees Peter from prison, he rushes to Mary’s house and what happens next is what ignited my heart to speak on abolition this morning. Peter knocks fiercely upon a locked door behind which the church community is fervently praying for his release, and a woman named Rhoda answers the door. Rhoda, in Greek means rose, and she is the reason I’m wearing red today and there are roses behind me. Rhoda was a foregin-born domestic servant in the prominent house of Mary, and that she answered Mary’s door at this late hour suggests that she was a laborer who did not enjoy any personal time after hours. At the sound of Peter’s voice, Rhoda is overjoyed and instead of opening the gate for him she frantically runs and tells the community that Peter is outside. However, the community does not believe the news of Peter’s release. Rhoda was perhaps not taken seriously because of her status as both woman and slave. The people of the church, who had been sending Peter “thoughts and prayers” did not believe Rhoda. They laughed at her and said that “it must be an angel or a vision of Peter standing at the door,” it cannot actually be him. The good people of the church tell Rhoda that she is “out of her mind” or that she is a “mad woman.” Does this sound familiar to anyone? Rhoda is far from the first woman to be ignored in scripture. When Mary Magdalene and the other women at the tomb of Jesus saw the empty grave and confirmed that Jesus had risen, the disciples didn’t believe them either. When those women claimed resurrection, they were also considered mad. When Rhoda claimed the miracle of freedom, she was laughed at. But Rhoda insisted it was true. She knew in her heart of hearts that Peter could be, and was, free. Like the freedom fighters through history, like Harriet Tubman, who knew in her bones the way of the North star when Rhoda heard Peter’s voice through the heavy gate, she immediately knew that life had overcome death, and the chains were lifted. Rhoda believed the freedom dream could be a reality. When the people of the church who questioned her finally opened the gate, they were amazed. They stood corrected: Peter was there. Impossibility was now standing in front of them. Overcoming impossibility is what I call a faith in resurrection. It is stepping into the reality which was once a dream. For many, the idea of abolishing prisons may seem impossible. There are too many questions without answers. The call for defunding the police, or abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, may also seem like pipe dreams. There will be good church folk like the church folk at the house of Mary that will laugh at this idea. But learning from the wisdom of Rhoda I want us to consider that abolition is not only a tangible reality, it is uniquely Christian task, it is a resurrection task. It first is a task of imagining, believing, and then it is a task of building. Political geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore redefines abolition by saying abolition is: NOT centered on the removal of the systems that harm us, BUT focuses on the process of imagining into being the soul affirming tools that aught to go in the place of the things that harm us.” From Gilmore’s point of view, “Abolition is figuring how to work with people to MAKE something, rather than figuring out how to erase something.” What are ways that we can MAKE communities safer without police? How can restorative justice practitioners replace police in schools and MAKE relationships with youth? Scholar Darnell Moore says, “ Abolition is politics and a practice of CREATION, not just destruction, it demands that we broaden and diversify our imaginations, to activate and stretch and complicate our “freedom dreams.” As people of faith right now, we must be people of creation, and not destruction. We must be like Rhoda and stretch our view of what is possible.

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