Wanted: modern-day repairers of the breach

APCE worship leader the Rev. Paul Roberts compares our predicament to the exile God’s people faced 2,500 years ago

by Mike Ferguson | Presbyterian News Service

The Rev. Paul Roberts is president of Johnson C. Smith Theological Seminary.

LOUISVILLE ­— With Isaiah 58: 1-12 as his preaching text Friday, the Rev. Paul Roberts wondered out loud what it means today to be repairers of the breach.

“What does it mean to be a restorer of streets when our streets are so mean, so often peppered with bullets?” the president of Johnson C. Smith Theological Seminary told the more than 1,000 people attending worship during the first-ever national online gathering of the Association of Presbyterian Church Educators. “What does it mean to be a repairer of the breach today when our theology is littered with notions of personal property?”

Much like today, the prophet from the 5^th century BCE “was addressing a fractured and fractious community,” Roberts said. “People had witnessed the exploitation and destruction of the Temple, which had been the seat of their religious and cultural life. Defenseless, they were deported, and in some cases separated from more vulnerable family members. They lived as aliens, subject to the laws and morays that may have flown in the face of their own ideals. Imagine 9/11, but exponentially more devastating.”

Isaiah’s aim is to give God’s people “health and hope while reconnecting them to the centrality of worship. No wonder he connects them to images of repair and restoration,” Roberts said. “Petty discord would cease, and God’s people would come home … walled in against the forces that would harm them. Who wouldn’t want that?”

Roberts told the devastating story of Wanda Irving, as reported by NPR in 2017, whose daughter, Shalon, a Black epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, died three weeks after giving birth to her daughter, Soleil, after doctors had dismissed her complaints about how poorly she was feeling. Shalon’s research had centered on how people’s limited health options led to poor health outcomes — including the fact that Black women die at more than triple the rate of their white counterparts giving birth.

On the day of her daughter’s funeral, Wanda wore a black suit and a veiled hat. “Her face showed signs of grief and despair,” Roberts said. “She held her infant granddaughter Soleil, who was preoccupied with her pink blanket.”

“I know this story, not because of the NPR report, but because my daughter was Soleil’s nanny,” Roberts said. “Not a day goes by that grandmother doesn’t long for the restoration of her family, for some sense of normalcy. Not a day goes by that Wanda Irving doesn’t long for the repair of the breach that broke her home, that has broken many homes and will continue to break homes until it is fixed.”

Do Isaiah’s celebrated words “beckon us to the side of the Wanda Irvings of this world?” Roberts asked. While we think of fixing something when we consider the word “repair,” an older definition of “repair” is to go to, to frequent a place, as in “they repaired to the tranquility of their country home, or he repaired to his in-home office for the pending Zoom meeting,” Roberts said. “What is relevant here is the definition is derived from the Latin root, which means ‘repatriate,’ to return to one’s home country, or to restore someone in their home or homeland.”

What would it be like, he asked, if the church conceived its mission as repatriation? “This reformation of our mission, friends, it intrigues me,” Roberts said. “The charitable model to which we currently subscribe — those who have give stuff to those who don’t — doesn’t work. It’s like putting a [bandage] on a broken arm.”

If it did work, he reasoned, there’s no way that 200 million professing Christians in the U.S. couldn’t solve the problem of the 500,000 or so people who are unhoused in this country, or the 35 million who are hungry, or the 2.3 million who are incarcerated — many of them wrongly so, Roberts said.

There’s also no way those 200 million Christians couldn’t solve the crisis of the 545 children still separated from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border, he said.

“And unless you think that 200 million is too large a group to organize, I am willing to make the claim about 1.7 million Presbyterians,” some of the best-off and most educated people in the country, he said.

“And unless you think 1.7 million is too large a group to assemble and organize, I’m willing to make the same claim about 1,000 APCEans,” Roberts said. “Let us be reminded that Jesus had 12

Roberts pointed his hearers to the 2002 film “Antwone Fisher,” in which Denzel Washington made his directorial debut. One of the last scenes has the central figure’s biological mother stretching her arm out to welcome Fisher home, “beckoning him to enter the inner sanctum of the family home, to sit at table, to eat the feast that had been prepared,” Roberts said. “It is sacramental and holy and somehow the viewer just knows that the breach is over and done. It’s done. It’s fixed. It’s healed. It’s repaired.”

“1.7 million Presbyterians can do that! 1,000 APCEans can do that! If we can, we must,” Roberts said.

Worship organizers kept the quality high during Friday’s hour-long service. Conference artist Hannah Garrity, the founding creative partner of A Sanctified Art, worked on a piece around Isaiah 58 during worship. Singers from Westminster Presbyterian Church in Greenville, South Carolina, sang “When All is Ended,” by Brian Wren and William P. Rowan. Concluding the service was a group of young bell-ringers from Second Presbyterian Church in Little Rock, Arkansas, who played an upbeat verse of “Joyful, Joyful We Adore Thee.

The gathering, titled “Anything But Ordinar

y Time,” concludes Saturday with a plenary address by Amy Kim Kyremes-Parks, director of Children’s and Family Ministries at Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church in Asheville, North Carolina. The Rev. Keatan King, associate pastor at St. Philip Presbyterian Church in Houston, will lead closing worship.