The Lies That Dehumanize
- Pastor Serena Rice
- 18 minutes ago
- 6 min read
A sermon on Luke 16:19-31
[for an audio recording of this sermon, click here. Photo by Kelli McClintock on Unsplash.]
I have a rhetorical question for you (you don’t have to answer out loud, I just want you to think about it): When is the last time that you felt truly seen and acknowledged?
I hope you all know what I mean by that, because I hope you have had that experienced in one context if not many… the experience of just going through your day, not expecting anything special from the moment, and then suddenly being aware that the person in front of you is noticing your individual presence… as someone worth paying attention to… as someone whose particular way of being alive really matters.
It’s a noticing that can be expressed in a variety of different ways, but it’s something that Jesus seems to like to do by calling people by their name.
It happened with Zaccheus, when Jesus noticed him in the tree and called him down to host Jesus and his friends for dinner that night.
It happened with Mary in front of the empty tomb when he called her name and, suddenly, she recognized him.
And, in a way, it happens in today’s parable… because, unlike any other character in the dozens of different parables that Jesus told throughout his ministry, Jesus calls Lazarus by name.
He tells a story in which the character whom society sees and values is identified only by his wealth, but the man whose very humanity is brought into question by longing to eat scraps from the ground and being licked by the dogs is the one who is given a name.
Lazarus is seen as worthy of notice. Worthy of individual identity.
And I think that this seeing and acknowledgment is really important for us to notice. Specifically, now!
In a historical moment when it seems so hard for us to see other people outside our immediate circles as whole, complicated, valuable human beings…
When lives made in God’s image so frequently get reduced to memes, or dismissed as “diversity hires,” or flattened into foils for whatever political point we want to score…
Or when they just become invisible to us entirely, either because our lives don’t meaningfully intersect, or even because it’s too exhausting to stay up on what new group is suffering and needs our advocacy.
Obviously, Jesus did not craft his story solely in order to speak to our particular time in history, but I still think that it has wisdom to offer us.
Specifically, I think the story he tells – about a man whom Jesus names, but whom the other person in the story sees only as someone to either ignore or to use – has key insights for us about three lies that can blind us to others’ humanity.
The first lie is that some people are just irrelevant to our lives.
The rich man seems to feel this way about Lazarus in the first part of the parable.
He would have inevitably seen the ill and starving beggar whenever he went in and out of his gate. This is doubtless why Lazarus positioned himself there, hoping for some compassion. But the rich man did not apparently see any value in compassion, so he ignored his literal neighbor.
It's a familiar scene actually. Our movies and TV shows are peopled with plenty of rich snob characters who treat the less fortunate as disposable, and whom we in the audience enjoy seeing get what’s coming to them when they get called out on their heartlessness.
I think this familiarity is unfortunate, though, because the lie at the bottom of this behavior is not exclusively believed by snobs, because it’s not really about class distinctions.
It’s a lie that is more fundamentally about a “transactional” view of social interaction… a default tendency to reduce people down to the function they play for us: the service they are providing, or the role they take in our lives.
We see this adorably with little kids when they think that their teacher lives at the school and get confused to see them at the grocery store.
It’s less adorable when we adults make a snap assessment that we don’t need anything from another person and therefore class them as irrelevant to us.
It’s pervasive, and instinctive, and I know I do it every day: because we live in a complex world and are navigating it with very finite energy, and I don’t have time and mental space to contemplate the personhood of every parent and student in front of me in the drop-off line at school.
But I also believe that this easy habit of “not seeing” people has a deadening effect on our ability to love our neighbor… and the idea that anyone made in the image of God is actually irrelevant is just a lie.
The flip side of the “irrelevance” lie is the lie that people’s value derives from their usefulness to us.
We see this lie expressed in the second part of the parable, when the rich man finally does acknowledge Lazarus, but only as a tool to fulfill his own needs or those of his living siblings.
Of course, this treatment is almost a foregone conclusion if the man’s initial decision to ignore Lazarus reflected his assumption that Lazarus had no transactional value to him.
Once a transactional function emerges, ignoring morphs into using, but it does not make Lazarus any more of a person to him.
Sure, the rich man now sees him as having a value, but it is purely conditional, based on what the man can get from him: a drop of water to cool his tongue, or a compelling messenger to convince his living family members that they needed to change their ways.
Honestly, this might be a down-grade from being ignored.
I imagine most women who have been cat-called by strangers on the street would far rather be ignored…
As would every trans person whose need to use the bathroom has become a useful political talking point…
And every soldier whose PTSD gets cited in an argument that has no bearing on whether or not they will actually get access to effective mental health care.
It can be painful to be ignored, but it’s dehumanizing to be used for someone else’s gratification or agenda.
It’s a direct assault on one’s sense of inherent worth.
The final lie that this parable exposes is more subtle, found indirectly through the third character in the drama: Father Abraham.
We could see his part as just a flair of picturesque storytelling, or maybe a way to separate the God of Heaven from this weird cross-chasm conversation with the morally reprobate villain of the story.
But the Father-Child language used between Abraham and the rich man calls back to an earlier interaction in Luke’s gospel.
As the SALT Commentary argues this week, “The rich man may well be a ‘child of Abraham,’ but that alone won’t do. At the end of the day, it’s action – doing justice, loving kindness, walking humbly with God – that matters most, not membership in any supposedly entitled club (for example, the Christian church!) It’s an idea reminiscent of John the Baptizer’s admonition to ‘bear fruits worthy of repentance:’ ‘Do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor,’ for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham…’”[1]
The lie exposed by this call-back is the lie that any group identity other than our shared identity, other than the identity that we hold in common with every other human being made in the image of God, has any power to define our own value.
You see, if we locate our value in our tribal identities – whether that be about our politics, or our race, or our sexuality, or our education, or even our religion… that gives us an excuse to devalue anyone outside our group.
The way we see ourselves has ripple effects on the way we see other people… but identity and value are not pie. It doesn’t have to be “more for me, means less for you.”
Instead, it can be “my humanity is bound up in your humanity.” It can be “I know my life matters because I know your life matters, and vice versa.”
There are powerful lies – and powerful forces peddling those lies – that are trying to convince us otherwise, but value, worth, humanity… are not up for debate.
They are not conditioned on relevance, or on usefulness.
And they are certainly not defined by in-groups and out-groups. (Not even the ones that feel super-moral to be part of).
Every person we ignore. Every person we are tempted to use. Every person whose group puts them in conflict with us has a name. And I bet Jesus calls them by that name.
Just as he calls each of us by our names too.
Thanks be to God.
