May we be repairers of the Breach: a Sermon on Reparations

Photo of the Robert E. Lee statue in Richmond, VA in 2020 before it was taken down by the city. Photo by Lucy Duncan

by Lucy Duncan

Note: This is a sermon offered at First United Methodist Church of Germantown (FUMCOG) on October 19th, 2025. This was one part of a longer sermon offered by both Lucy and Ant. You can see the full service here.

“And they that shall be of thee shall build the old waste places: thou shalt raise up the foundations of many generations; and thou shalt be called, The repairer of the breach, The restorer of paths to dwell in.” Isaiah 58:12

I love this call to become repairers of the breach, restorers of paths to dwell in. 

We are the people called to that work, in this time, as we look upon our treasures to discover the seeds of wars within them (to paraphrase Quaker abolitionist John Woolman), as we turn to face the truth of the past to discover what can bring us into wholeness, as we work to release our ancestors from the harms they caused and that they experienced, from the trauma they enacted and the traumas they lived through. 

Reparation (reparation is a process, reparations is an act) is to me a vehicle for this repair, a way to restore the path to be in right relationship with one another and the earth. 

I want to speak fairly personally, how I came to reparations as a spiritual commitment.

I went to Palestine for the first time with AFSC, for whom I worked for 10 years, in May of 2014. We traveled all around, went to Hebron and stayed with members of the popular resistance committee in Bi’lin. 

Because AFSC has worked in Gaza since 1948, we also were granted permits to visit Gaza. That visit was powerful. Seeing the buildings with no glass because of the bombs, the damaged mosques.  We sat in a circle with the young people with whom AFSC worked at the time and they told us stories. My friend Ayah talked about holding the ears of her brother as the bombs fell with the last bombings, we danced the dabke and laughed. 

We spent three days with these folks, they showed us up and down the Gaza strip, we visited a refugee camp where the matriarch of the family still had the key to the house she had been forcibly removed from, and we met a man who was an organizer with the BDS movement. On the last night we had supper on the beach with these young people. We told stories and sang songs, and it was the closest I’ve ever felt to a sense of communion, of finding kindred spirits on the other side of the world, enclosed by an apartheid state in an open air prison, and feeling this deep connection.

When we left the next day, walking through the walkway enclosed with barbed wire past the separation wall with the remote controlled machine gun which shot anyone who got too close, we wept not knowing when we would see our new friends again. My friend Bilal said he felt like he had been visiting the Jim Crow south.

As Ramadan began, Israel bombed Gaza, for 51 days. It was the first time I knew people who were being bombed and I woke up every day to see whether they were still alive. One young man I had met was killed that summer. Living through this was a somatic experience, living with this grief, the helplessness. I wondered how I could put my body in the way.

In August while that bombardment was still going on, Mike Brown was killed in Ferguson. My friends in Gaza offered solidarity posts on Instagram about how to deal with tear gas. 

Not long after that I became connected with Philly REAL Justice, a police abolition organization that Ant helped to found and they deepened my understanding of the root causes of police killings, of white supremacy.

I looked at Gaza and the colonization there, I looked at Ferguson, the legacy of land theft, colonization, and chattel slavery and I saw them as deeply connected. The thread of genocide at the founding of this country, the horrors of chattel slavery and its afterlives like incarceration being woven into the fabric of this economy and country, that being a model for Nazi germany, then the thread of that trauma being enacted in Palestine. And now it is coming back here, these techniques are broadening their targets, fascism expands, and we are living in the world created by not having the courage to face the past, to repair what has been stolen, to repair the soul breach caused to both victim and perpetrator in this brutal system we find ourselves in.

I had been doing anti-racism work for awhile, but I wanted to figure out what racial justice looked like. To me, it looks like reparations. The multi-dimensions of reparation. The telling of the truth of the past, the whole truth, without flinching, without looking away, the repair of relationships - between white folks and in principled solidarity with Black and Indigenous folks, and in addressing the economic roots of this country, of the racial wealth gap, of stolen labor and stolen land, of going back to untangle the ways racial capitalism distorts our relationships, and embeds systems of oppression in our tissues, our institutions, our landscapes. 

A big step for me (an admittedly unfinished step) was doing some of my own reparative genealogic research. My grandmother, my mother’s mother, was a closed off woman, an alcoholic and was fairly disconnected from my mom and my brothers and me. She lived in a white mansion on Peachtree Blvd in Atlanta, GA and just watched TV and drank beer. I wasn’t entirely surprised to discover that through her lineage my great, great great grandfather Presbyterian minister Rev. Clement Reade had listed among the record of his estate 22 people whom he enslaved, including Ephraim, Lucy, Africa, Juda, Ben, and Sophia. I say their names as a prayer. It is a daunting revelation, and it feels different to suspect I am descended from enslavers rather than knowing it to be so. Holding this reality, the weight of this truth, and yes the shame of it, metabolizing that shame, has changed me. I have more work to do, to connect with the descendants of those my ancestors enslaved, to do direct reparations, but it has led me to devote my life to this transformation, the transformation that reparation (on the levels of Spirit, relationship, and economic justice) promises, and which I have seen in the experiments in the faith community in Philadelphia and beyond. I have a debt to pay, and a role to play in healing. 

I want to end with this: “And the Lord shall guide thee continually, and satisfy thy soul in drought, and make fat thy bones: and thou shalt be like a watered garden, and like a spring of water, whose waters fail not.”

Reparations is a call for justice for Black folks, for indigenous peoples. And it is a way to rebalance the world. I do not want to center we white folks in this project of engaged solidarity. And, yet, it is also healing for us, for white folks. Living from the lineages of perpetrators, in a system that says we are “more than” disconnects us from other people, from ourselves, from our souls. The harms of the perpetrator enact within us what Wendell Berry calls a “hidden wound,”  in white folks that mirrors the hurt enacted. Leaving that wound buried and unconscious renders us white folks delusional and sociopathic: perpetuating harms that threaten life on earth and can result in genocide and, ultimately, suicide. When we lean into facing the truth about our selves, the multiple ways that this legacy of harm has rendered our souls distorted and confined, and commit to the healing the facing of these harms demands, we shift our inward life, our souls do become as watered gardens, we recover our birthright of connection to God and to other human beings. 

My experience has been that since I have been working for reparations in principled solidarity with Black folks that I endeavor to support, I have been as happy as any time in my life, I have felt more free, more connected, more whole. Yes, I also have felt the pain of others, I am more proximate to folks more directly targeted by the system than I, but I have glimpsed a tiny window onto what the world could be if reparations were enacted, a space animated by love and joy, rather than oppression, and scarcity.

My prayer is: Let us become reparationists: repairers of the breach, and make of our souls watered gardens, springs, offering sustenance for ourselves and one another, bringing forth a spring of justice to water our hearts and this land.