Bringing in the Cheese

TOMMY, my six-year-old grandson, preached one of the summer's best sermons, or so it seemed to me. It happened the other day when I took him on a "man trip" to Jenks Lake not far from our mountain home. It was Sabbath, so I put an appropriate cartridge in the tape deck recently given me by my son, Tom. It was the Mormon Tabernacle choir singing the great Christian hymns.

Tommy and I listened to such favorites as "God of Our Fathers," "I Need Thee Every Hour," and "Ten Thousand Times Ten Thousand." He sat enraptured as the hi-fi system filled the car with incomparable sound. And then, slipped as though by accident between "Holy, Holy, Holy" and "Now the Day Is Over" came "Bringing in the Sheaves," performed almost boisterously to martial music. Tommy clapped his hands, rejoicing in the music, jumping for joy.

After a walk around the lake we started the drive home. He asked me to play the tape again. "Bringing in the Sheaves," the selection I liked least, again induced the ecstatic clapping. The tape was finished and we crossed the bridge near our home.

"Grandpa," he said, "do you know something?"

"No," I said, "what should I know?"

"Do you know the song I like best?" I suspected it was the "sheaves" song, but wasn't sure.

"No," I replied. "Which do you like best?"

"Bringing in the Cheese," he chirped. "That one's best of all!"

Fortunately, I was parking the car, so there was no accident. I laughed until my sides ached. He laughed too, but just to keep me company.

"Why did you laugh?" he asked when I had gotten control of myself. I explained what "sheaves" were (how many 6-year-olds know about sheaves?) and we both laughed again.

It was then that the sermon began to sink in. Tommy ran into the house and asked his grandmother to make him a cheese sandwich. I fell into my recliner. The last thing I wanted was a cheese sandwich.

"Is that what I'm doing?" I asked my self. "Am I content to earn a living when I should be working to save souls?" I looked around the room, taking in the beauty and comfort. "Are these things more important than they should be? Am I preoccupied with 'cheese' when I should be concerned with 'sheaves?' "

I then reflected on the materialism that seems to penetrate every aspect of this crazy age even the church and its institutions. "Is ours a 'cheese'- oriented culture?" I asked. "To what extent have we sold out to Mammon? What about the pioneers? What would they think of us and our interminable hassle over wage scales, earnings, and grants?" A wave of nausea hit me and I got up for a drink of water.

Jesus talked about it--the grip that materialism gets on people and He prescribed drastic medicine. "Sell what you have, give it to the poor, and follow Me." Was He thinking of the likes of me when He told of the rich man with the inadequate barns? What did He really mean by His talk about the rich getting into heaven? Was He joking about the camel going through the eye of a needle? These are among His less popular stories

And what about the founders of our own university? Every time we look with pride on our beautiful campus, we should think of how they sacrificed. None were well-to-do, let alone affluent or rich. There certainly were no millionaires!

And then there was Ellen White. I had just read a compilation of her statements, most of them about Loma Linda. I wondered why she kept talking about self-denial. There is, for instance, an entire section on remuneration! Believe me, it's tough reading! And then, to make matters worse, she links principles of self-denial to institutional prosperity and then declares that the conditions of prosperity are unchanged.

The nagging question was, "Is this self-denial business valid today?" And then I thought of something I had read, boning up to teach a class in human communication. According to the text, most communication is nonverbal. All six of its authors agree that seemingly irrelevant things can increase or decrease credibility. Among the things that destroy effective communication, for instance, are selfishness, greed, lust for power, et cetera. If we perceive these things in a man or woman, our confidence in what he or she says or claims plummets to the vanishing point. I thought of poor Richard Nixon and the way his popularity eroded when his tax-evasion problems were discovered.

In contrast, I thought of Jesus, who was born in a barn and later, as a prophet, had no place to lay His head. What effect has His self-denial had? And how about Albert Schweitzer, and the powerful mystique that surrounded him as he labored in his primitive African hospital, and, in the evening, played Bach on his squeaky pump organ by lantern light? Is it possible that affluence and materialism are robbing our philosophy and Christian hope of their credibility? Are we rejoicing about "cheese" when we should be "bringing in the sheaves"?