Livin’ on the Margins

By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion.

…for there our captors asked us for songs,

our tormentors demanded songs of joy;

they said, "Sing us one of the songs of Zion!"

One of the great challenges God’s people faced in Babylon was that of being displaced from the centre of power and influence. The loss of power is a practical problem, of course, but it’s also a great humiliation. In Zion these Hebrews had been important people; now, they have become just another odd little community, a plaything, quaint and amusing.

This is the fate of displaced peoples everywhere as exemplified by the Ukrainian and Polish jokes of the 1960s? It’s also been the fate of the Chinese, East Indians, and, most recently, Muslims from the Middle East. But the supreme North American example remains the Africans who were transported from their homelands to serve white masters on this continent. Eventually they formed indigenous American communities on the margins of the dominant culture, but, being visible and marginal, they suffered innumerable indignities, not the least of which was the humiliation of having their language, culture and appearance serve as entertainment for those who ruled over them. When I was a child the caricature of the shuffling black servant was still popular in cinema. And my father could remember watching “minstrel shows” where white singers and comedians performed in black-face. They thought nothing of singing stylized “Negro” numbers they called “mammy songs”. And, ironically, the greatest performer of them all was Al Jolson, a Lithuanian Jew who grew up in his own marginal community in New York.

The margins of society are a hard place to be. Few choose to go there, and fewer sill to live there. But when you do settle down there you discover more than a hard life, for it’s from the margins of society that cultural change is driven. The centre is invested in the status quo. It’s those on the margins who, having little to lose, create the new material that changes society. Consider music, for example: jazz, gospel, rock ‘n’ roll, folk, rap. All these forms arose in marginal communities. And the Gandhis, Mother Teresas, and Martin Luther Kings of any society, seldom arise from the centre of power. And it’s not just because these people have little to lose. They also have a perspective on society denied to those in the centre. They experience the injustice, poverty and discrimination that’s invisible to those in power.

And this is the plan and purpose of God; to continually take those who are sensitive to him and move them to the margins. Abraham was called to leave his home and family. Moses was taken out of the Pharaoh’s house in Egypt to live as a shepherd in the desert. Jesus was born to a peasant family in Galilee, on the margins, no, on the margin of the margins of the Roman Empire. And he told his followers to work on the margins; to be the salt in the food and the light in the darkness. (Matthew 5:13-14)