January 20, 2008
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
San Francisco is the home of GAP. I shop at GAP for blue jeans because they have the right length for my short legs. Sometimes Marilyn Poon Melvin gives me those “family and friends shopping” certificates to get extra discounts. But GAP knows that one store can’t serve all possible shoppers. While the GAP is a general enough of a store for people like me, there’s Banana Republic for those who want to dress up a bit or there’s Old Navy that sells reasonable-priced clothes for everyday wear. And of course there’s Gap Kids and Baby Gap for dressing up all the little ones in our church nursery.
The GAP Company wants to personalize their merchandise to different segments of the buying public. It wants to be the local retail store that has just what you are looking for.
When I was in college, one of the writers that I read was the great American philosopher William James who wrote The Varieties of Religious Experience. Some of you might have read this too. James contrasts a God who does “wholesale business” and a God who does “retail business.” Marcus Borg who is the Professor of Religion at Oregon State University has taken this idea from William James and spoke about the difference between a wholesale God and a retail God.
The wholesale God is God abstracted from the language of any particular religious tradition. This is the God of philosophy and I daresay, the God of lots of popular American Christianity. This is the God that Paul Tillich told us not to call God Father but to call God, the “Ultimate Reality.” William James, who was reluctant to speak directly of God on any terms, once referred to God as, “The More.”
The wholesale God is what we talk about when we talk about what the word, “God” means. The wholesale God is God emptied of much specificity, God as a large abstract idea, a rather vague concept. It’s more like the general GAP store that sells basic clothes for basic people like me.
Some people today prefer to speak about God not as a person but rather talk about God as “energy” or “force.” “The force be with you” is from Hollywood and not from the Bible.
But another way of understanding God is seeing God as the “retail God.” This God of the church is like the retail store in a community. The retail God is personified. The retail God has personal characteristics—a proper name, a face, a God who speaks, acts and has distinctive qualities, just like a person. The “retail God” is the way that most traditional religions talk about God. Continuing with our GAP analogies, the “retail God” is more like the Banana Republic and the Baby Gap stores and not just the GAP.
In this season of Epiphany when we see the revelation of Christ in the world, our God has a face, a name, and a specific way of being in the world. Our God is no detached, indistinct concept or idea. Our God is an active, personal being who appears, from the testimony of scripture, who wants to love us and to own us, to enlist us to work with him through Jesus Christ in the world.
Jesus’ Baptism
In our lesson from John’s gospel for today, we see that John the Baptist saw Jesus coming and declares that Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. At first John did not know Jesus but after he baptized Jesus, it was John who witnessed the Holy Spirit like a dove descending from heaven and resting on Jesus. John the Baptist has a personal encounter with Jesus. This was no abstract wholesale God but a retail God who became personified in Jesus in the Jordan River. John goes on to say that he himself has seen and can testify that Jesus is the Son of God.
Most people today and may I dare to say that maybe some of us here today want only to hear about the wholesale God. The more vague, indistinct, mushy, and impersonal we can make God, the better for us! Then we can make God just about anything we want. We can render God into a projection of our sweet sentimentality and will never have to grow, change, or be born again.
It’s like how we tend to practice and celebrate Christmas. We pull out the same old Christmas tree, sing the same Christmas songs, decorate our homes with the same lights; then we undecorated everything until next year. We stay forever stuck in celebrating Christmas the same way year after year. We keep Jesus as a little baby in the manger and he never grows up to meet us as our Lord and Savior. It’s a wholesale God that is bland, general and nothing personal or distinct.
Have you noticed that over the past few years, how many Christians seem to talk little about Jesus and talk a great deal about God? We go around saying that we may have our differences but we all believe in God. In order to get unity, we sacrifice God as a distinct, a particular personal being who lived on this earth. God becomes simply a nice idea!
When we only think about God as this vague wholesale God who runs some vast, vague distribution center somewhere, it leaves out about 90% of everything said about God in scripture. God is not the vague wholesale God but the God John the Baptist met or the disciples met or Paul met or we meet is the local, “retail God.” This “retail God” is like the kindly shopkeeper at the corner store who knows your name, always notices you when you come in, who knows what kind of milk you buy and talks to you about the sports scores and whether the Patriots will win the Super Bowl.
John the Baptist looks at Jesus and sees in him as the very presence of God in the flesh, the personification of God among us. John sees God in Jesus who speaks, acts, moves, and intrudes. The “retail God” would tell you that you picked up the wrong kind of milk when you were rushing with your errands.
What Are You Looking For?
The next day after Jesus’ baptism, John the Baptist standing with two of his disciples noticed Jesus was walking by and pointed to his disciples that here is the Lamb of God. And when the two disciples heard this, they decided to follow Jesus. When Jesus turned around and noticed that they were following him, he said to them, “What are you looking for?” They asked Jesus, “Where are you staying?” They were not necessarily asking Jesus for his address. They were asking Jesus, “What are we supposed to make of you?” or “Where do you belong?” They wanted to know how to place Jesus in their relationship with God.
Answering their question, “Where are you staying?” Jesus said, “Come and see.”
The “retail God” in Jesus Christ meets the two curious disciples where they are. He doesn’t push or manipulate or control or judge or punish them. Instead, he engages them, asking a question that gets to the heart of our human experience: “What are you looking for?” Encouraged by his personable-ness, by his humanness, by his openness, Andrew and his friend decide to follow Jesus a little bit farther.
They end up staying with Jesus all day—the beginning of a staying with Jesus for the rest of their lives. You can’t do this with a “wholesale God” but you can only to this with a “retail God” personified in Jesus Christ.
Jesus is the only Word that becomes flesh and we get to get personal with him.
Let me ask you, “What are you looking for?” We come to church perhaps out of habit—it’s just what we do on Sunday mornings. We come to church to see our friends and to go out to lunch. We come to church because afterward we’ll be going to a red egg and ginger party. We come to church to sing in the choir or attend a meeting. What are you looking for?
I know why I come to church. And it’s not because I have to. I come to church because after living six days of my week hearing about this generic, abstract, indistinct “wholesale God” that most candidates running for president mentions to win votes to be able to once again hear about the “retail God” in Jesus Christ who wants to get downright personal with us!
Come and See
Knowing Jesus is not about intellectual certainty or about ethical perfection. We’re not trying to have a philosophical theological debate about an abstract “wholesale God” that everyone here and everybody in the world can agree.
To truly know Jesus is to say, “Yes” to Jesus’ invitation to “Come and see.” We embark in a personal journey with Jesus to ask ourselves the question, “What are you looking for?” To know Jesus is to come and see, to remain with him, stay with him, to simply hang out with Jesus for a while, and see what happens. That’s the reason why you are at church.
We come to church to hang out with him in worship, to hang out with him in Bible study, to hang out with him in fellowship groups, to hang out with him when we go to St. Anthony’s dining room, to hang out with him when we are in a church meeting, to hang out with him in the ups and downs of this faithful congregation—to simply hang out with Jesus and see what happens.
Notice that Jesus didn’t answer the question, “Where are you staying?” He only invites the disciples to come and see. In other words, he meets them where they are—and encourages them to go further. Come and see what you are looking for.
Think of Sunday as our attempt to get personal with God, to give that word “God,” which can be terribly abstract and general, some specificity and concreteness. Sunday is when we tell God who we are and, more importantly, when we find out who God is.
We never know. Perhaps one day you will meet Jesus again—really meet him, as if for the very first time. And you may find an answer to Jesus’ question to you, “What are you looking for?” No “wholesale God” can do that for you—only the “retail God” in Jesus Christ who knows you by your name and you know God by his personal name, Jesus Christ, can answer your question.
Christianity is not an idea. It is God incarnate in Jesus Christ and we are invited to come and see for ourselves what it’s like to have a personal relationship with Christ himself. This relationship is a lifelong journey within a community of disciples like this church. Jesus invites us to our commitment to abide, to stay, to hang out with him for a while. And God will do the rest.
When I walk into a GAP store, the sales clerk would ask me, “What are you looking for that I can be of help?” Jesus is personally asking us this same question, “What are you looking for?” God is not some idea but a person, a person walking among us, revealing the true, inner life of God with us in the name of our Lord and personal Savior, Jesus Christ.
Now, let us get very personal with God.
Let us pray.
Dear God, we thank you for becoming personal with us by giving us the gift of your Son and our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Show us how to follow your lead and to come and see what the meaning of faithful discipleship is all about. Enable us to hang out with Jesus Christ for truly you have made yourself known to us and to the whole world by your dearly life. We pray in Christ’s name to whom we give glory and praise and that we can speak one to one with. Amen.