We have many different images of God.    Many times the culture or even the time influences our view of God.   I would say today our image of God is a bit too grandfatherly or permissive.    Other times God was viewed as very strict & unyielding.   Today, it seems that we imagine God to be like a very lonely person who waits by the phone for anyone to call.    God is so lonely that he might even enjoy speaking to a salesperson with a pitch on the telephone.   He is just happy when anyone pays him any attention.   People can go about their lives with little consideration for God, but then during difficult times or at the end of life, the expectation is that God will forgive everything & accept whoever into the kingdom regardless of the person’s life simply because God is a pushover.   

 

Today’s parable teaches us otherwise. God is not a pushover.   He demands an accounting from us. God is a loving father, but we must be loving children in return.      There are three people in the story. The one who has the most talents, the one who has less, & the one who has the least.     Talents are measures in weight, so most likely it is the weight of some valuable metal such as gold or silver. The two who have more seem to do fine. The one who has the least does the worst. He sits on his hands & does nothing. He takes no risks. He is apathetic & lazy.  

 

I found this curious. We may wonder about this unfortunate fellow. Is it a coincidence that the one who has least does nothing or is this precisely the point Jesus is making? Why is he so frightened to take a chance?   Does he compare himself with the others? Is that what makes him so depressed? He might think that these other two are so far better off than I am, so I need not try.   They have everything & I have nothing. The one thing that destroys our relationships with others & destroys our relationship with God is to compare ourselves with others.   If someone is better off than us, we may feel that we have been cheated by life or by God. Those who walk look to those who ride a bike. Those who ride a bike look to those who take the bus or the train. Those who take the bus look to those who have a car. Those who have a car look to those who have a SUV. Those who have a SUV look to those who have an airplane. Those who have an airplane look to those who have a jet. Those who have a jet, think gee I would like to take a walk.     In regard to our relationship with God, we lose our faith & trust in him when we compare ourselves with others.   We discount the gifts that God gives us & we envy the gifts of others.   We focus our attention on our own woeful life & turn to whatever might take away the pain.   Drugs, alcohol, sex, food or some other destructive behavior may be our way of easing our self contempt & anger toward those who have more than we do.

 

Mother Theresa commented that the poverty that she found in the US was the most brutal form of poverty she had found in her life.    This could be because we have such a disparity of wealth in the US.   Those who have little are so angry with those who have everything that they feel they have nothing to offer or that they are worthless to God & to others. I saw this clearly when I was in Park City. At St. Mary’s church, we had a large immigrant population. These immigrants had children.   There children knew little about their parent’s former condition in life when they lived in Mexico or some other latin America country, they only knew Park City or Heber.   They harboured a great resentment against the other children from affluent families who they knew from church & from school. Many times they refused to participate in the religious education classes. To show their contempt for those who had much, they tried to sabotage the class through their bad behavior.   

 

 I wondered who is at fault in this situation.   We could easily say these children are at fault, but that is not true.   It is the great disparity of wealth that causes the evil.   The disparity of goods & wealth influences greatly how these children are able to develop their gifts & to see themselves as loved by God.    

 

 

It is tragic to see addiction & despair run in families.   One of the highest rates of addiction per capita in the country is in the area around Taos, New Mexico. Taos is a beautiful area. Why do people feel they need meth & pot to get through the day?   The New York Times did a feature on the area asking why this is happening.   When I was in Midvale, it had the highest rate of teen pregnancy.   Those who have little, lose what little they have.  

 

Poverty brings with it a lack of vision and a lack of hope.   Most people in the US have enough. We just need to take a trip to another country to realize poor people here live better than most middle class people in the rest of the world. What is frightening is that those who have little, lose or never find hope, those who have little, lose their self respect & succumb to despair, those who have little, lose their desire to learn & to educate their children.  

 

If we are to work against this trend, we must voluntarily live more simply. We must choose to educate ourselves & our children not so that we can make ungodly amounts of money, but so that we can serve others. The American dream is the devil’s dream.    We must choose to live in smaller houses & drive smaller cars that are more energy efficient so that our consumption does not destroy the ecosystems of the planet.   We choose to go to school for that higher degrees to help those who have not been able to help themselves for whatever reason. The desire to work hard to be able to afford the finer things in life & live lives removed from the rest of the human race is fundamently selfish & evil.   It destroys our society & it destroys our humanity. There are far too many men & women who care more for their dog than for a child that goes to one of the schools in these neighborhoods.   Until those who live on the East bench or Park City care about those who live on the west side, we will continue to see the despair & the addiction grow. 

 

Many times when I think of the man who had nothing to offer God, it was not the poor man, but it was the rich one, who squandered his talents on himself.