You may not know it, but we may be in the vicinity of a piece of history. We may be in the neighborhood that gave rise to a revolution in the restaurant business. I cannot really document this, but at least in my limited observation, it was right here in this neighborhood that one enterprising restaurant invented something that has by now become an institution. And the reason that this particular gourmet practice has become an institution forms the jumping off spot for this morning’s message.
As far as I know or experienced, it was in what used to be known as Emerson’s restaurant, just a few blocks away at Eastern and Georgia Avenues, that the salad bar was invented. Now it may have been done elsewhere, but so far as the Washington area is concerned and far as my limited dabbling in haute cuisine is concerned, Emerson’s was the first.
When we moved to this area in 1971 and began to venture out to eat occasionally, we discovered this wonderful idea: that you could go back to the salad bar as often as you liked and could stock up on lettuce and celery and this and that. You could pile it high and you could even drape the whole sorry mess in blue cheese dressing, all for one price. That appealed to me. I think what appealed as much as anything was getting blue cheese dressing without paying extra. Remember when the waiter always said we have French or thousand island or blue cheese, the blue cheese is 25¢ extra? My dad would never let me get the blue cheese. But now here comes this wonderful idea of all the salad you can eat, blue cheese too, and you can keep on going back, plate after plate.
Well, as they say, the rest is history. And now you can go almost anywhere, from fast food to the finest hotel cabaret, and find a salad bar. It appeals to something inside of us ... and I am going to confess right out front that I have this something ... it appeals to our desire to get something for nothing or nearly nothing. It appeals to our need to feel as though we are really making a killing in the marketplace.
Never mind that it has now been revealed that the original purpose of the salad bar was to keep customers busy while the chefs finished their poker game in the kitchen before putting your steak on to grill; never mind that all that lettuce and other rabbit food is so cheap, relatively speaking, that you will fill up on that and never notice how small the meat portion is; never mind that it saves labor costs and thus helps the restaurant owner more than it helps you; the salad bar has become standard operating procedure because we like to think we are getting to belly up for all we want at little or no cost. Frankly, I consider it a moral obligation to go back for a second plate of salad. Even if the main course has arrived, even if it looks as though I could not possibly consume all that is set before me, I sit there thinking I’ve cheated myself if I do not go back for more cheese, more watermelon, more olives, more something.
My family still laughs about the lady of already generous proportions who preceded us at a salad bar over in Ocean City several years ago. She piled her plate high with every conceivable item, she laced it all with scoop after scoop of salad dressing, and when it was all about eight inches high, she plopped another plate on top, squeezed down the whole stash, and plunged it into a carryout bag. Whether it was edible is quite open to question, but she left happy, because she believed she was getting something more than she had paid for. She believed that she was beating the system at the bountiful buffet.
I suspect it is something like that which infects us as we find ourselves presented with God’s bountiful buffet. This world is so full of goodies, so rich in wonders, so tantalizing in its wealth, that we just decide to take, take, take, and we do not stop to think what the taking means or whether we need it or really want it. We are dazzled by all there is to have, and we throw discretion to the winds and take.
This world, according to the book of Deuteronomy, is in fact God’s bountiful buffet. The land of promise toward which He was leading His people was described as a land filled with every good thing they could possibly want. “For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and springs, flowing forth in valleys and hills, a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey, a land in which you will eat bread without scarcity, in which you will lack nothing.1I
Now remember that these words are spoken to a people who have spent an entire generation wandering in the desert. Remember that this promise is presented to a people whose backs were up against it many times and who did not have much to eat. Oh, there was the mysterious substance called manna that floated out of the skies, but however much it may have been God-given and miraculous, I expect that it got boring eating manna morning noon and night. And so the promise of a bountiful and varied buffet must have struck them as truly wonderful.
But remember: the problem with the buffet is that you think you are getting much for little cost. The problem with the bountiful buffet is always that our greed takes over and all we think about is taking; eating, consuming, and it is an illusion that it costs us nothing.
There are two principles in this passage that are worth noticing, and I am going to have to ask you to listen very closely, because these two principles are very similar. If you don’t listen closely you will miss the distinction.
Two principles about our presence at God’s bountiful buffet:
First: when you don’t have enough, materially, then it’s fairly easy to remember that we are physical creatures; it is therefore time to rediscover how spiritual we are, and to respond to God with gratitude.
And second: when you do have enough, materially, then it’s fairly easy to remember that we are spiritual creatures; and then it is time to rediscover how physical and material we are, and to respond to God with responsibility.
I know that all sounds complex; let me restate it and then move on to fill out each of these principles.
The first is that when you and I do not have enough materially, when we know that we are poor, it’s not hard to remember that we are physical beings. The growling tummy tells us that. The drafty house tells us that. The tattered clothing tells us that. When you do not have enough it is easy to remember that we are physical. The problem is that we forget that we are spiritual. And our relationship to God, however deprived we are, needs to be one of thanksgiving.
And the second principle, the second idea, sounds a whole lot like the first one, but it is really the reverse, it’s the mirror image of the first one. The mirror image truth is this: that when we do have enough materially, when we do arrive at the pl ace where we have enough, then it’ s easy to fall into the trap of a superficial spirituality. It’s too easy to remember that we are spiritual and hard to remember that we are physical. And God calls us at that time to respond to Him with responsibility.
All right, first, then: when you are poor, there is no problem with knowing that you are physical. Your tummy tells you that. The drafty house and the tattered clothing tell you that. But it is hard to be spiritually minded, because all your energies are focused on staying alive. Let’s not get romantic about poverty; some folks seem to feel that it is somehow more spiritual to be poor. But if you’ve been there at all, and a good many of us have been, you know there is nothing spiritual at all about starvation. There is nothing that turns you to the Lord, necessarily, when you cannot provide for your children. And the Bible does not want us to romanticize poverty.
In fact, one commentator says that Deuteronomy is the book of holy materialism – holy materialism – for the writer of Deuteronomy tells God’s people that if they wandered in the wilderness, if they wondered where the next meal was coming from, and if they faced difficult days, it was designed as a humbling time to get them to be spiritual. It was God’s in tent that they should be forced to depend on Him. Not grateful that they were poor, but grateful that God has led them and kept them alive. Listen:
“You shall remember all the way which the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments or not. And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna … that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but that man lives by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord."
When we are poor, we can think only of our physical and material needs, but God gives us the gift of life and says, “Now remember that you are spiritual too, and be grateful.” Be grateful for what you do have.
Be grateful for your loving Father. Be thankful that all of life is a gift. Be thankful that you do not live by bread alone.
I suspect that very few of us particularly need this part of
Deuteronomy’s message. We seem to be incurably middle-class. Most of us appear to be doing all right. We may need to be more thankful than we are, but we are, most of us, reasonably well past the stage in which poverty means that we can only think about our physical needs and we forget our spiritual sides.
But I tell you we do need the other side of this message and we need it badly. Like the fulsome lady piling up her platter in Ocean City, most of us have waltzed up to God’s bountiful buffet and have considered it a matter of right to take and take and keep on taking. And the curious thing about this is that we have therefore become exceedingly spiritual and not materialistic enough!
Yes, you are hearing me right. That’s what I said. The problem with prosperous Christians is that spirituality comes too easy and materialism -- holy materialism – is forgotten.
Spirituality comes too easy. When you have plenty it is easy to get high on things religious. It is easy to pray when the stomach is not growling. It is easy to attend worship when you are comfortable and when your new car is running and when the air conditioning works. And, in deed, it is far too easy to be overly pious and to declare that if poor people just trusted the Lord as we have they would have no problems. It is too easy to be overly spiritual and to wave off the real , crunching, death-dealing blows that others have to face.
Are you hearing me? Am I coming through? Those of us who have arrived at God’s bountiful buffet, like me at the salad bar, just feel somehow we have a moral obligation to get and keep on getting for ourselves, and we will happily pray for the rest and indulge ourselves in esthetically pleasing worship in a lovely setting, all of it very fine, but our crime is that we have forgotten that there really are physical needs. We have forgotten that there are.poor folks who really do need help. We have omitted any thought of lands and peoples far off who need the work of missionaries. We have fallen prey to the illusion that we can just keep on receiving and taking without paying much of a price, and so we try to nickel and dime our way through at God’s bountiful buffet. We have forgotten. We have taken our fill and have forgotten.
But listen again to Deuteronomy:
“The Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey, a land in which you will eat bread without scarcity, in which you will lack nothing ... you shall eat and be full ... but beware lest you say in your heart, ’My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth.’ ... You shall remember the Lord your God, for it is He who gives you power to get wealth"
You shall remember that it is He who gives us power to get wealth, and therefore we must be responsible with it. We must use it for His purposes and for His kingdom.
In the 18th Century old John Wesley used to preach a simple outline along this line: Earn all you can, save all you can and give all you can. Today our creed is: Earn what the traffic will bear, borrow what the credit line will stand, and give to nobody ... they ought to be achievers too. But we have forgotten that as we stand at God’s bountiful buffet, there is the price of responsible giving that needs to be paid.
I will tell you exactly what I am thinking this morning. All the evidence I know about points to us as a people who are enjoying the bounty of God’s gifts. There are a few of us who are still in the wilderness of unemployment or hunger or just plain inadequate income.
But most of us have taken one look at God’s gifts of prosperity and have decided that it can all be mine, all of it, and that all I owe the Lord God is a wink, a smile, and a little loose change. Many of us have not gotten serious about holy materialism. Many of us have not decided to be responsible with our stewardship. Many of us have not yet climbed on board what the Kingdom of God is going to be in this church. As you know I do not know anything about what any individual gives. I never see those records; I am not permitted to see them and I do not want to see them. But as I see what we are doing financially overall and as I see what some other churches are doing, it does not take a genius to figure out that some of us have just not come away from the buffet and realized that, yes, there is a bill to pay. Yes, there is a need to be responsible to our God and His bountiful buffet.
Several years ago my family and I drove from here to New Mexico to attend home missions week at Glorieta conference center. Believe me I will never drive all across the country with one wife and two kids again. But there was at least one high point in the wilderness wandering; when we drove through Amarillo we spotted a sign that said, Buffet dinner, children only 10¢ per year of age. Since ours were seven and five at the time, we fed them all they wanted to consume for only $l.20. You know, we got so excited about that we forgot even to ask what the adult prices were. And after we got all warmed up to that bountiful buffet, I got the sad news: I think it was $11.95 for adults, which, believe me, was real money in 1971. We felt taken, we felt used ... that is, until we worked it out and realized that our high prices had subsidized the low prices for the children, and that overall it was not a bad deal . Overall, we were able to invest and glad to invest responsibly for those who needed it.
So eat all you want at God’s bountiful buffet, but don’t indulge in the illusion that there is no price that needs to be paid.
