Our Dignity
BMCC Sunday Sermon · 27 Sep 2026 · Speaker: Frankie So
When was the last time someone genuinely recognised you as a full person?
Frankie So came to Sunday worship with Deuteronomy 24:14–15 and Matthew 7:12, opening a searching reflection on what it truly means to be respected — and what we lose when we are not. He started with two simple questions: “When was the last time you disrespected someone? When was the last time someone disrespected you?” The room went quiet. Everyone could feel the weight of those questions. We have all known moments of being made invisible — dismissed, overlooked, or rendered nameless in someone else’s world.
On this Sunday following the Mid-Autumn Festival, Frankie guided the congregation through a careful reading of two passages separated by centuries of history.
The Book of Deuteronomy, he explained, is largely concerned with worship — King Josiah’s determined centralisation of Israel’s liturgical life in Jerusalem. But later chapters, from 15 through 24, shift to the grain of ordinary life: how to treat those who owe you money, how to protect the workers who depend on you. Sunday’s scripture came from this very section: “You shall not withhold the wages of poor and needy labourers, whether other Israelites or aliens who reside in your land in one of your towns. You shall pay them their wages daily before sunset, because they are poor and their livelihood depends on them; otherwise they might cry to the Lord against you, and you would incur guilt” (Deuteronomy 24:14–15, NRSV). This is not simply a legal rule — it is a declaration that each person’s need is real, that each person’s contribution must be seen.
Frankie chose this passage from a place of personal experience. In the period leading up to Sunday’s service, he had been in the middle of a long and difficult job search. Most painful of all was a job that lasted three days: three days during which no contract was signed, his name was never asked, no identification was requested, and by the third day his manager had simply vanished. “I went in every day and I didn’t know if I was even an employee,” he said. “I didn’t know who I was in that place.” The erasure of his name — the most basic acknowledgement of a person’s existence — sent him into weeks of identity disorientation. The Frankie known to friends, the Frankie who belonged to BMCC, and the invisible Frankie at that office: were they really the same person? Being unseen drove his sense of worth to zero. He found himself asking Jesus: “What do you want from me?” — and wondering, in that moment, whether his faith was part of the problem.
What followed was not just a personal crisis but a theological investigation. What actually constitutes respect? Frankie traced the question through three angles. Is respect in behaviour alone? A shop assistant following customer service protocols looks respectful on the outside — but does following a script mean respecting a person? Is respect in intention? If I genuinely respect you but withhold information you need, is that enough? He offered a concrete example: a friend dealing with an unexpected claim received a follow-up call from a responsible staff member who spoke warmly and offered reassurance — but said nothing about which documents needed to be kept, what practical steps the friend should take, or what would happen next with the matter. The “feeling of respect” was present; the substance was not. And is respect simply a feeling in the person who receives it? Frankie’s conclusion cut through all three angles: genuine respect requires intention, action, legible signals, and the other person’s capacity to receive and understand those signals. Remove any one of these, and respect is incomplete.
This was not an exercise in philosophy for its own sake. It was hard-won insight pressed from pain. Philosophers distinguish between two forms of respect: evaluative respect — earned through roles and achievements, the deference extended to a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer; and recognitive respect — inherent to every human being simply because they exist, requiring no further credential. It was recognitive respect that Jesus was speaking into with Matthew 7:12: “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets.” In a world stratified by social rank, where the dignity of the poor and the labourer was conditional and easily withheld, Jesus’s teaching was profoundly countercultural. Frankie offered a gentle image: it was as though someone two thousand years ago had set about vigorously promoting clean, sustainable energy — you would have thought them absurd. They would simply have been ahead of their time. Jesus was calling people to see a dignity in every person that the social order around them could not accommodate.
In the midst of his own low season, Frankie admitted he did not turn to God right away. “I was like the psalms of lament,” he said — full of complaints, sitting with grief before finding any path forward. He tried first to reason through respect, to map where his sense of dignity had been lost. But looking back across that season, he could see that God had not, in fact, been absent. God had entered through small openings: a hymn lyric that surfaced from memory at an unexpected moment; a WhatsApp message from a fellow church member asking about his job situation; the quiet accumulation of prayers from people who held him in mind; and the steady, accumulated foundation of belonging to BMCC over years — a foundation that held him up when nothing else was keeping him afloat. “God’s presence is not always the kind you can photograph and post,” he said. “But in every moment, there is somewhere for God to enter.”
He also had words for those who still cannot feel God at work. “It is okay. I will not tell you to be at peace. I will not say on God’s behalf that there must be a purpose. Your life does not need to perform. You are allowed to come to God at the bottom, with nothing to offer but your complaints. I believe the God I follow can absolutely hold your honesty.”
Frankie closed with a small, practical invitation: from today, could each of us make one small adjustment — to proactively inform someone of something that affects them, to take one step beyond courtesy toward genuine acknowledgement? Not based on someone’s role or status, but based on the fact that they are a person created by God, carrying real weight, deserving to be seen. That, he suggested, is what it looks like when faith comes to life in the everyday.
Blessed Ministry Community Church (BMCC) is a home that welcomes everyone. Whether or not you can sense God’s presence right now, whether you are caught in a difficult job search, struggling with questions of identity, or carrying years of feeling overlooked — you are welcome here. Every Sunday morning, we gather online to worship together and to explore what faith has to say to the real weight of our lives, including the moments when it feels like we have no weight at all. Come. We are here.
