Sabbath Devotional :: God Help the Outcasts

“*God Help the Outcasts*” from the Hunchback of Notre Dame at the 5th Avenue Theater

This weekend I had the opportunity to see “The Hunchback of Notre Dame“. As it often does, the song “God Help the Outcasts” resonated deeply with me.

For those less familiar with the musical, Esméralda (a French Roma girl) sings this song in the Notre Dame cathedral. As a French Roma girl, she has suffered much persecution, poverty, and misfortune. She finds herself there because she came to check on Quasimodo, who has been ill-treated.

While there, she sings this song as a sort of prayer. She begins by saying she doesn’t know if he is listening or even there, but “Still I see your face and wonder, Were you once an outcast too?” She asks for him to help her people who have been “hungry since birth.”

This is juxtaposed against the so-called faithful who ask for wealth, fame, and blessings for themselves. Esméralda, who objectively is impoverished and not well off, sings:

I ask for nothing, I can get by

But I know so many less lucky that I

Please help my people

The poor and down trod

I thought we all were the children of God

God help the outcasts

Children of God.

Last year as I studied the Hebrew Bible, this idea that God is the God of people at the margins and of the outcasts really hit home for me. We see God personally appearing to Hagar, an Ethiopian enslaved women who was cast out and forgotten, and we see God step in for her more than once.

We see God show up for the Widow of Zarephath (who was by all accounts unimportant and not a believer) in order to save her and her son from death by famine.

This isn’t a pattern we see only in the Hebrew Bible. We see Christ working in the lives of the woman from Samaria at the well in the New Testament and many more.

President Spencer W. Kimball said, “The Lord answers our prayers, but it is usually through another person that he meets our needs.”

There are many people like Esméralda today, who, for one reason or another, the world has decided to push to the margins or made an outcast of too. Like Esméralda, I also believe God is the God of the outcasts and pays particular attention to those at the margins. I believe that’s his charge for us too.