Rewards points gone wild

There must have been three or four of us waiting in the checkout line at Walgreen's this afternoon, waiting for one of two cashiers to open up. One man at the first cashier had questions about a sale price on some cigarettes. A woman with the second cashier had many questions about the reward card points Walgreen's offers. She had accumulated something like 14,000 points and seemed to think the points would double or possibly even triple at some point. Perhaps she thought she would be earning air miles but she wasn't very clear. After a time, however, it became clear that she assumed the reward points automatically increased.

I suppose this expectation follows from all the gimmicks retailers and others offer to gain customers but it seems to be working against them. If children are paid to study, or for taking an exam, when will they begin to demand payment for going to school rather than paying tuition to be schooled. The American psyche seems to expect rewards for doing nothing.

An advertisement for Dish TV features a woman proclaiming that with Dish you get more of everything including more channels. Car commercials have long touted the incredible number of cars available on dealer lots and tried to convince us we should buy from them and not the dealer across the street who has fewer cars. We are used to having just about every kind of food available in grocery stores much to the amazement of foreigners who can be overwhelmed by the variety of food available.  i recall many years ago hearing an Irish woman flummoxed when trying to buy some milk only to discover she had to make sense of the differences between whole milk, 2%, 1%, skim, buttermilk, and perhaps other variations.

The disciples plead with Jesus to increase their faith in Luke's Gospel for the 27th Sunday. We want more, they seem to say, while Jesus reminds them how much they could do with only a mustard seed size faith. For an American Christian, that goes against everything we learn as loyal citizens. If faith is any good, it must be splattered all over our Sunday morning worship like a movie with a cast of thousands and a pea brain intelligence. Let us have a faith that does miracles and we will all become believers.

The point of the unprofitable servant is that he expects to be rewarded for what he is expected and obliged to do. How much we seem to marvel when someone does a good turn and asks nothing in return. How is it possible that such human beings exist? The missing virtue is, of course, humility and it is consistently denigrated by the icons of our pop culture as well as the captains of modern industry. The meek don't inherit the earth, they proclaim, they inherit the dirt.

Pope Francis this week said, "Without the Cross, without Jesus and without stripping ourselves of worldliness, we become pastry shop Christians… like nice sweet things but not real Christians.” The Christian cannot enter into the spirit of the world, which leads to vanity, arrogance and pride, he continued. And these lead to idolatry, which is the gravest sin. “Our Lord told us: We cannot serve two masters: either we serve money or we serve God.…We can’t cancel with one hand what we write with another,” he remarked. “The Gospel is the Gospel.”

Our worldliness and demands for rewards are infecting and destroying us.