Joel D. Kline
July 27, 2003
Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren
The Seventh Sunday after
Pentecost
In the early 1900s thousands of Norwegian families immigrated to the United States in search of employment opportunities and a new life. One young family, the Johnsons, had long dreamed of starting over in America, but they were too poor to afford the journey. Some caring neighbors, aware of the Johnsons’ long-held dream, banded together, purchased steerage tickets for the family’s voyage, and, on the day of their departure, gave the Johnsons enough bread and cheese for the lengthy journey.
Coming from a small, rural village, the Johnson family had never seen anything so wondrous as the ship on which they would make their journey to America. Overwhelmed, they immediately made their way to the ship’s steerage section, claiming a little corner as their own, where they could stay until the ship reached port. The Johnsons were grateful for what they had and hopeful for their future.
But about six days into their voyage, Ole, their son, had had enough, and he lamented to his father, “I cannot look at one more cheese sandwich. I need something else to eat.” Though their funds were extremely limited, the father took pity on his son and sent him to the ship’s store with just enough money to buy an apple or other piece of fruit. Two hours passed by, and still Ole did not return. Becoming more and more anxious, Mr. Johnson finally set out to find his wayward son. Up flights of stairs he went, with the surroundings becoming more and more luxurious at each ascending level. Finally, Mr. Johnson reached a grand dining room, and to his amazement, there sat Ole, surrounded by a banquet table of food: fish, chicken, ham, potatoes, vegetables, and dessert.
“Son, what have you done?” cried Mr. Johnson. “I can’t possibly pay for all this food. They will put me in the brig.”
“It’s OK, Dad,” responded Ole. “The meal didn’t cost me anything. It’s included in the cost of our tickets. We could have been eating like this the whole time!”
Lutheran pastor Thomas Williamsen shares this story as he introduces his book entitled Attending Parishoners’ Spiritual Growth. Writes Williamsen,
Many people recognize their own spiritual poverty and embark on a journey they hope will lead to a deeper faith. Friends, family, and church members support and encourage them as best they can. The supporters offer provisions for the trek. Often the spiritual nourishment sustains a shallow spiritual existence, but it does not satisfy travelers’ deepest longings. It does not allow them to feast at the banquet table of our Lord. It is a cheese-sandwich spirituality.
How do we move to a deeper level in our spiritual journeys? How do we get beyond a cheese-sandwich spirituality to a spiritual journey in which we find ourselves feasting at the Lord’s banquet table? Our Scripture lesson from the letter to the Ephesians offers a prayer for the first-century church—a prayer that those early Christians might experience a power and a presence that far exceeds a cheese-sandwich spirituality. Writes the apostle,
I pray that, according to the riches of God’s glory, God may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through God’s Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God (3:16-19).
Two Sunday mornings ago I was sitting on a balcony outside of the room in the lodge in which we were staying, on the edge of Montana’s Glacier National Park. It was a crisp morning, and the balcony provided a breath-taking view of nearby snow-capped mountains. With coffee mug in hand, I found myself basking in the glory and wonder of God’s creation, the psalmist’s cry ringing in my heart:
I lift up my eyes to the hills—
from where will my help come?
My help comes from the Lord,
who made heaven and earth (Psalm 121:1-2).
It’s rather easy to sense the breadth and length and height and depth of God’s love and God’s creative power, when surrounded by magnificent vistas and when in “vacation mode,” relatively free from daily stress. But can we experience a similar sense of connectedness with God when back in the “valleys” of day-to-day frustrations and challenges? Can we explore the depths of relationship with God while enmeshed in a world where suffering, injustice, and oppression remain all too common, a world where our lives may well be interrupted by unanticipated illness, pain and grief? Can we move beyond cheese-sandwich spirituality in a world where stock markets rise on the news of the death of two of Saddam Hussein’s sons, a world where uncertainty, fear and violence too often rule?
Beacon Heights, the congregation I formerly served, has a partner relationship with a congregation in Managua, Nicaragua—the Second Congregation of Mision Cristiana. Mision Cristiana is a small Pentecostal denomination in Nicaragua that intentionally plants its congregations among the poorest of neighborhoods. Some ten years ago, during Holy Week of 1993, Janice and I, along with four others from Beacon Heights, spent a week living and worshiping with Second Congregation. One of my most powerful memories from that trip is of the church participating in a day of fasting and prayer for another partner church, this one in Cuba, where a hurricane had wrought havoc. From a North American perspective, where concern for security frequently dominates, it made little sense for people of poverty to be fasting and taking a collection for others in distress. Yet there was among those Nicaraguan Christians a spirit of enthusiastic and contagious joy that reminded me that we need not wait until moments of smooth sailing in life—moments of comfort and ease—before we acknowledge the gifts of God’s gracious love and peace. Indeed, it is often in our most troublesome moments that the reality of God’s grace may well break through.
Could it be all of our “stuff,” all of our concern for material comfort and security, all of our thirst for the bigger and the better—could it be that all this gets in the way of our moving beyond a cheese-sandwich spirituality? Episcopal priest James Fenhagen in his book Ministry and Solitude asserts that “it is greed, more than anything else in today’s world, that denies and hinders our interdependence and prevents us from understanding ourselves as a global community.” In like manner, our greed may well erect a barrier that separates us from God, for greed keeps us from seeing beyond ourselves. Greed denies that it is God who is the Source of every good gift.
The Asian thinker Kosuki Koyama labels greed “the unclean spirit number one.” In our day, so many Christians are tempted to point the finger at whole other groups, defining them as “unclean.” Yet these words of Koyama encourage us to examine our own hearts, questioning what it is that keeps you and me from experiencing “the fullness of God” (Ephesians 3:19).
Nearly a century and a half ago, Mark Twain cynically described the powerful grip greed can have on our souls. Revising the Westminster Catechism, which asserts that the chief purpose of human life is to glorify God, Twain counters,
What is the chief end of humankind? To get rich.
In what way? Dishonestly if we can; honestly if we must.
Who is God, the one and only true God?
Money is God, Gold and Greenbacks and Stock—father, son, and ghosts of same, three persons in one:
These are the true and only God, mighty and supreme.
The apostle’s prayer in Ephesians 3 ends with words of doxology. “Now to God who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask for or imagine, to God be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus for all generations, forever and ever.” In our culture of materialism and greed, some would read that promise of abundance merely as a promise for yet more possessions. But this letter to the Ephesians is written in a time of turmoil and even persecution to a people who are concerned about the very survival of the church.
The last thing on their minds is material prosperity. They are looking for something much deeper, for reassurance that God will remain faithful in the midst of trying times. They are yearning for a sense of hope. And the writer of Ephesians provides that hope, reminding them that they are living in the very midst of God’s unfolding kingdom. They are part of something radically new. The old world of divisions—between Jew and Gentile, rich and poor, male and female, slave and free—this old world is being dismantled in Christ. They are part of a new world in which the ways of violence and injustice and brokenness are being replaced by Christ’s way of compassion, reconciliation, and peace. All appearances to the contrary, affirms the writer of Ephesians, life is being transformed. And it is God who stands at the heart of that transformation.
Carl Jung once wisely observed that “if we continue to feel poor when we have enough of the world’s goods, it is because we have not given sufficient attention to the inner person.” Surely the writer of Ephesians offers a similar message, reminding us that at the heart of the life of faith stands the assurance that God loves us with a love that will not let us go. Allow the love of Christ to reside at the very center of your being, affirms the apostle, and you will discover the secret of moving beyond a cheese-sandwich spirituality. You will find yourselves instead seated at the very banquet table of our God; you will find yourselves strengthened in your inner beings with power through the Spirit of God; you will find yourselves rooted and grounded in the love of Christ.
Richard Halverson once suggested that when the Greeks got hold of the gospel, they turned it into a philosophy. When the Romans got it, they turned it into a government. When the Europeans got it, they turned it into a culture. And when the Americans got it, they turned it into a business! But the gospel of Jesus is far more than a business, and Christian discipleship involves far more than taking care of business, unless we understand that business to be a matter of drawing deeply from the streams of faith. To experience a life of the Spirit that far exceeds cheese-sandwich spirituality, we must be about the business of living lives rooted and grounded in love. Like Ole Johnson who discovered that an abundant table on the ship was his for the taking, so we who place our faith in Jesus discover what has always been ours—the banquet table of God’s grace and God’s goodness. It is a table to which we are invited, not just in times of ease, but in all the changing experiences of life. No longer dare we be satisfied with superficial living, with business as usual. For we encounter the One who “by the power at work within us is able to accomplish far more than all we can ask or imagine.” Thanks be to God! Amen.