Lausanne World Pulse – Themed Articles – Reducing Poverty, Not the Poor: Reclaiming Community with the Victims of Oppression

By Christopher L. Heuertz
September 2007 The power of naming is also a tool used in society to control the victims of poverty. We use terms to label the victims of poverty that only contribute to their powerlessness. Even by labeling victims of poverty as “the poor,” we have done our friends (and ourselves) a terrible disservice. We have built social walls that divided “us” from “them”; we have ascribed labels that disconnect us from any responsibility we may have in perpetuating situations of poverty, and we have ascribed derogatory terms that describe a situation, not the person. Terms and names such as beggars, street kids, squatters, bums, rag-pickers and hookers have become tools that further the dehumanizing process of marginalization. These terms focus on the environment of a person over his or her identity and the social standing of a person over his or her dignity.

Scripture has much to say about the power of naming.

• In the Psalms, we discover a theology of significance in a passage in which God reveals that he knew us before we were born (Psalm 139:13-16).
• In Genesis, a theology of dignity is detailed through the creation of humanity in God’s image (Genesis 1:26-27).
• In Isaiah, we read that the theology of dignity is based in grace when we learn that God has inscribed us on the palms of his hands (Isaiah 49:16).
• These theological inferences to dignity are all precursors to the ultimate theology of God’s redemption. In Matthew, Jesus renames Simon, illustrating his theology of redemption. Simon becoming Peter was more than a mere renaming of a man; it was the reclaiming of his humanity so that God could be glorified in it.

Today, however, humanity (along with significance, identity, dignity and grace) is stolen in the grip of poverty and is renamed.

When we allow scripture and Christ’s example to penetrate our hearts and minds, we can do no less than commit to relationships. Photo credit: Daphne Eck

It is not coincidental that the only character named in any of Christ’s parables was Lazarus, the man found begging and sleeping on the street in front of a rich man’s home (Luke 16:19-31). In the world’s telling of that story, the rich man would have been named and the one begging would have remained part of the backdrop of the narrative. But God’s kingdom reverses contemporary social norms in such a way that the reversal is a renewal that sets things right. By naming only Lazarus in all of his parables, Christ challenges and reclaims the world’s power of naming, a naming that has been used to defame. His disregard for our labels and his renaming of the victims of poverty redeem the poor whom he has chosen to inherit his kingdom (James 2:5-6). How easy it is to exploit the nameless.

How easy it is to justify our unresponsiveness to those we see only as statistics. Our perceptions of reality have been insulated and isolated by the way we read reality. As long as society and the Church continue to steal significance, identity, dignity, grace and the potential of redemption from the oppressed, then God’s image and character will continue to be under assault.

The community I am a part of has taken this on as a challenge: to rename those the world (and even the Church) has forgotten. The name of poverty is oppression; the name of the poor is chosen.

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