If I were to choose a song that went with the Gospel reading today, I’d choose the song written and performed by the Bare Naked Ladies, “If I had a million dollars.”

The rich master may have entrusted the third slave with just one talent, but according to today’s currency, that one talent is equivalent to a million dollars. A talent is a measure of currency equivalent to about 6000 denarius and one denarius is equivalent to a day’s wage. One talent is therefore about a million dollars in today’s currency. Just as the Bare Naked Ladies said, “If I had a million dollars, I’d be rich.”

When we open the Bible from its opening book, Genesis, we read about the abundance of God, until chapter 47 where we meet Pharaoh who dreams that there will be famine in the land. And Pharaoh, with all his wealth, and all his power, was afraid.  He was afraid that there wouldn’t be enough food to go around so he set up the first ever Food Security Policy and hired Joseph to hoard and bury all that food in storage.

When the crops failed and the peasants ran out of food, they came to Joseph who on behalf of Pharaoh asked, “What’s your collateral?” They gave up their cattle for food, their means of production and within the next two years, having already lost the tools of their trade and they still were out of food, they gave up their land, so Pharaoh accumulated all these lands, and they had no collateral but themselves and that was how the children of Israel traded themselves for food and became slaves, through an economic transaction.

Abundance is what God gave us in Creation. Through an economic transaction, we get scarcity and slavery.

Toronto marks this day with the annual Santa Claus Parade at the same time that  “The Hidden Epidemic, A Report on child and Family poverty in Toronto” is released.

“Of Toronto’s 507,810 children age 0–17, 145,890, or 29%, live in poverty – a far higher proportion than in the rest of the province or country. In some Toronto neighbourhoods, the majority of children are living in poverty. Indeed, despite being home to 5 of the 10 richest neighbourhoods in Canada, Toronto has the shameful record of leading all major cities in Canada when it comes to child poverty.”

Meanwhile in the Church Calendar two weeks before Advent our readings are about the end of days, or Apocryphal readings, the time when we must give account.

We must confess that the central problem of our lives is that we are torn apart by the conflict between our attraction to the good news of God’s abundance and the power of our belief in scarcity — a belief that makes us greedy, mean and unneighborly, storing and hoarding and burying treasures in the ground. We spend our lives trying to sort out that ambiguity.

In Zephaniah, there are the people with knowledge, who regard God as no real agent in the life of the world, is irrelevant, though they remained religious, keeping religious talk and cultic practice.  In a world of Enlightenment rationality where human knowledge is transposed into ultimate control, God is surely an irrelevance. The passage in Zephaniah speaks about the great day of the LORD that is near, near and hastening fast, where our tools for control, our ways of dealing with troubles such as these, are futile. Those who are rich will find no help from money – neither silver nor gold. Those who are powerful will find no help from military might – the warrior cries aloud. In settling accounts, God will have a time of intrusive self-assertion.

We often evade this dark side of God. We say that that darkness only comes to those who are not ourselves, which is our chief attempt at evasion: “God is always there for me.”

The dark side of God is not summoning us to repentance. It is, as the prophets say, the end. We take the name of the LORD our God in vain when we continue to reduce God to a useful notion, or a dispenser of enhancements to our lives.

And we hear the psalmist say that our innermost secrets are revealed.

That recent report, “The Hidden Epidemic, A Report on child and Family poverty in Toronto” only serves to underline how areas such as where we work are regarded as problems. They are noted for their deficiencies and needs.

Deficiency-oriented policies and programs in human service systems translate the programs into local activities that teach people the nature of their problems, and the value of services as the answer to their problems.

As a result, many low-income urban neighborhoods are now environments of service where behaviors are affected because residents come to believe that their well-being depends upon being a client.

They see themselves as people with special needs to be met by outsiders.

I hear people laugh when they hear the word firkin.  It sounds like the word we forbid our children to speak. A firkin is a unit of measure equivalent to nine gallons.

In the first nine months of 1847, 56,557 firkins of butter were exported from Ireland to Bristol, and 34,852 firkins of butter were shipped to Liverpool. That works out to be 822,681 gallons of butter exported to England from Ireland during nine months of the worst year of “famine”, when people starved.

While there was plenty of wheat, meat and dairy produce the Irish peasants had no money with which to buy the food. This was a food policy of an economic transaction. They starved in the midst of plenty. Wheat, oats, barley, butter, eggs, beef and pork were exported from Ireland in large quantities during the Famine. In fact, eight ships left Ireland daily carrying all kinds of food.

And we don’t have to look far to see such luxurious, epicurean delights in our own city today, when children go to bed hungry. The reason people go hungry in this city comes down to dollars and cents. The average monthly income is $693, and after rent is paid people are left with $5.83 per person per day. Close to one quarter of people accessing food banks have someone in their household working. Paid employment is not always a ticket out of hunger and poverty.

The story of scarcity is a tale of death. And the people of God counter this tale by witnessing to the abundance of God’s gifts, of food that is given freely, without any need for money.

Davenport Perth Community Ministry (DPCM) holds a Whiz Kids program in a Toronto Community Housing building at Pelham Park Gardens. Whiz Kids is in the last year of its three-year funding from736 Outreach Corporation, a fund created from selling the church at 736 Bathurst, which now helps Toronto communities make a difference.  About 25 to 30 children sign up for the programs. We’ve had a summer camp of games and outings, including a Rookie League baseball day camp that is open to children aged 6 to13. Last summer, our Pelham youth joined more than 1,400 youth from 60 Toronto Community Housing neighbourhoods to develop their baseball skills through weekly drills, games, and tournaments that ended with a championship game and awards presentation at the home of the Toronto Blue Jays, the Rogers Centre.

Last October 16, Whiz Kids held the “Green Screen” workshop with people from the Toronto International Film Festival. We have now posted the final video on our FaceBook page, “Pelham Community Hub.” A child is posed in front of a green screen, while pretending to be somewhere else. The green screen “disappears” on film and a variety of images can be superimposed where it was. In the final film, a performer – or child – can be seen climbing a mountain, sitting on a rock, or flying in the sky. In that moment, the child is magically transported to another place, exploring various possibilities.

If I had a million dollars, I’d be rich.

When Jesus held out his hand to heal those who were blind, who were lame or filled with a variety of other infirmities, the people who were upset were not those who were healed.

The creation is infused with the Creator’s generosity, and we can find practices, procedures and institutions that allow that generosity to work. And like the boy who gave five loaves and two fish, they do multiply, because in God, abundance is the key.

Tina Conlon

Reflections on Lectionary readings from 16 November 2014

Zephaniah 1:7, 12-18, Psalm 90, 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11, Matthew 25: 14-30