Crying Out from the Margins

Rev. Leroy Barber paced the stage at the Calvin College Covenant Fine Arts Center, gesturing and preaching about Jesus reaching out to people living on the margins of society.

To illustrate his point, Barber, college pastor at Kilns College in Bend, Ore., told the story contained in Matthew 15:21-28 of the woman from Canaan who called out to Jesus to heal her daughter who was demon-filled and suffering greatly.

“Canaan was this despised place, a coastal city, a Gentile place, an accursed place where the descendants of Ham, the black people, lived,” said Barber at the January Series 2016 on Monday, the day that celebrated the life and legacy of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

When Christ arrived, this woman from Canaan, this outsider, yelled out, asking Jesus to rid her daughter of the demons. Even though the disciples wanted to send her on her way, this woman was persistent. Christ responded and healed her daughter, said Barber, a Baptist minister.

“We realize that these voices from the margins aren’t always neat voices. They don’t always come with the right protocol,” said Barber.

During his talk, Barber made a connection between the Canaanite woman and her call for healing and the trip King made in April 1968 to Memphis, Tenn. to show support for striking sanitation workers.

On the night before King was killed as he stood on a motel balcony in Memphis, the civil rights leader preached at a church.

“People (the sanitation workers and their families) came to that service to be healed,” to hear King talk to them of justice and to show them he understood their challenges, said Barber.

Throughout his ministry, said Barber, “King was a man who talked to the beaten-down ones about being healed. King talked to them about Jesus, the one who would suffer with them and who understood their suffering.”

Barber is the co-founder of the Voices Project, an effort, among other things, to support leaders of color who are working alone amid people from the majority culture.

He is also an author whose third book, Red, Brown, Yellow, Black and White:Who’s More Precious in God’s Sight?, was released last year. It is a call for diversity in Christian missions and ministry.

In his presentation at Calvin, he talked about the need to rethink the popular theology of today, promoted by and for people in power. He said Christians should follow Jesus and King in adopting a more grassroots theology that arises from the margins, from the outside places where people who are not part of the majority culture live.

Barber also made another connection. He said members of the current Black Lives Matter movement, who face rubber bullets, beatings and water hoses to protest police brutality, are beaten-down ones who are coming from the margins and displaying hope for a more just society.

“The theology of Ferguson, Mo. (where a young black man was killed by a white police officer and the  Black Lives Matter movement gained strength) is speaking to us today,” he said. “Are you listening? Folks are speaking from the margins.”

Similarly, the Canaanite woman who cried out, calling for Jesus to help, did so from outside the lines of the mainstream culture of the time. As part of an ignored and rejected group of people, she called attention to the need for healing.

“The woman in Canaan knew Jesus was the Messiah. She knew he was God and that the healer was here,” said Barber. “Jesus took this woman from the outside and brought her into the middle.”