Sermon for Sunday, September 21, 2025 || Proper 20C || Luke 16:1-13

The parable Deacon Chuck just read is, admittedly, very confusing. But one thing the dishonest manager says leapt out to me this week, and that’s what we’re going to focus on today. After his boss is getting ready to fire him, the manager says, “What will I do, now that my master is taking the position away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg.”

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The words that struck me this week were these last ones: I am ashamed to beg. And these are the words we are going to dwell on for the rest of this sermon. I am ashamed to beg. I looked up multiple translations of this verse. Some translate this as the manager being “too proud” to beg, but most say he would feel “ashamed” to beg. The Greek word translated as “ashamed” appears only five other times in the New Testament, and in each case the word is used in a phrase like, “will not be put to shame.”

You might think, “It’s only natural to be ashamed to beg.” This is the assumption that brought me up short as I read Jesus’ parable this week. I asked myself, “Why should someone be ashamed to beg?” And the only answer I could come up with is that we have been socialized to think of begging as a shameful practice.

But words are funny things. Words and the thoughts they spawn curate our realities. So I wonder, what is the difference between ‘begging’ and ‘asking?’ If a person holding a cardboard sign at the intersection near Wal-Mart begs for help, begs for a few bucks to get some food for the day, how is that different from a friend who asks you to spot them a few bucks to pay for a coffee? Again, the only answer I can come up with is that the difference between begging and asking is the severity of need. The person at the intersection needs those few dollars way more than the friend at Starbucks. We associate begging with shame, but not asking.

So if severity of need is the separator between begging and asking, we are forced to admit that what we truly find shameful is poverty. And this is where we have to take a deep breath and confront head on the stigmas our society teaches us. We are taught not only that begging is a shameful practice, but that the poverty that underlies begging is the root of the shame. Poverty is the shameful thing. Somehow, our culture (and not just ours, but cultures as far back as Jesus’ time) has defined poverty as a character flaw, as a personal moral failing.

But is that truly the case? In some cases, yes, poverty can be a result of personal failing if poverty happened due to the squandering of resources on useless or destructive things. Yet, this is surely a tiny minority of cases of poverty. The main culprit of poverty is not the personal shame of moral failure, but a societal dereliction of duty when it comes to taking care of one another. This is where the shame truly lies, in a conscious cultural shifting of blame for poverty from the structures of society to the individual.

And I guarantee you’ve felt this tacit cultural shame. Ask yourself how you behave when you drive by the person with the cardboard sign near Wal-Mart. Do you see them there and count the cars ahead of you hoping that you don’t come to stop right by them? Do you switch lanes so they can’t approach your car? Do you resist making eye contact with the person until the light turns green? I’m positive I have done every one of these in the last month. I tell myself it’s because I don’t carry cash, but that’s a load of bull. The real answer is shame. Not the shame of begging. The shame of my participation in the structures of society that make begging a necessity.

I am ashamed to beg. When I reflect on these words, I confront that stigma and realize the truth is I am ashamed that begging is shameful. In the vast majority of cases, poverty exists not because of any personal moral failing but because of a lack of financial resources. It’s really that simple. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. This wage has not risen since 2009, the longest stretch without a raise since the minimum wage was started in the 1930s. Meanwhile, the purchasing power of the dollar is 70% what it was in 2009. So not only has the minimum wage not gone up, it has, in effect, fallen 30%. A person working for the federal minimum wage – full-time without any vacation or sick days – makes $15,000 a year. So there’s a good chance that person is working two or three jobs to make ends meet. And yet our shameful society has the gall to characterize those who are poor as lazy.

Let’s bring the examples a little closer to home. According to MIT’s Living Wage Calculator, a single adult with two children needs to earn $59 an hour to make a living wage in New London County, Connecticut. Right here, in our county. $59 an hour. And the minimum wage in Connecticut is currently $16.35. So someone making minimum wage in Groton or Ledyard or Waterford or New London would need to work nearly four jobs to fully provide for their family. With two working adults, that number drops to $32 an hour, still twice the minimum wage.

So it’s no wonder that so many people, even right here in our own county, have no savings, have no down payment to purchase a home, have to worry about a sudden medical bill or a flat tire which could send them into a downward spiral towards poverty.

Okay, let’s turn the corner here and spend the rest of our time talking about  what we can do as faithful followers of Jesus, as those who pray for God’s reign to come closer to earth. God calls us to confront poverty in two ways, through both charity and justice. Our charity helps provide immediate resources for those in need: food, clothes, rental assistance, fuel assistance. If we stopped there, we would continue to treat the symptoms of poverty without ever confronting poverty’s root causes.

And this is where the work of justice comes in. Justice work reshapes society to remove the shame associated with poverty and to change economic systems so people do not become mired in poverty in the first place. We can work towards this economic justice by speaking out against policies that cut SNAP benefits, that make homelessness a crime, that make social security harder to access, that curtail Medicare and Medicaid, that remove funding from rural hospitals. And we can promote policies that turn the minimum wage into a living wage, that provide a basic social safety net to keep people from spiraling, that spur development of housing accessible to all income levels.

I pray today that, with God’s help, we each will have the courage to confront the shame our culture has associated with poverty. I pray today that, with God’s help, we will continue our work of charity and redouble our efforts in the work of justice. I pray today that, with God’s help, we strive to reshape the world into a place where no one ever needs to beg.