I have certainly evolved in my eating habits as a human over the last year, and as you know I now try to follow a healthy diet most days.  I always had been a meat, bread and potato guy, shunning most vegetables and I was not big on fruit.  I did chocolate like a crack addict, and pie was in my food pyramid.  People would ask me if I like this kind of pie or that kind of pie and my answer was always “that is my favorite!”  The truth is I had my favorite narrowed down to Coconut, lemon ice box, chocolate, pecan, pumpkin and sweet potato.  It was one of those.  So it seems strange these days to say that broccoli, asparagus and spinach are my favorite vegetables and I am absolutely sugar free, 99.9% of the time.  The funny thing is now when I eat any of those old favorites they don’t taste as good to me, or at least they don’t taste worth it – as in worth it to my blood chemistry and my long term health outlook.

Perhaps the biggest challenge in eating has to do with our lifestyles.  When one is on such a diet it is not easy to eat out.  And Dianna and I eat out constantly. When she asks me what we should make for dinner I say “reservations.”   I have discovered that it is easy to eat healthily at home if you cook, and tough to eat healthily if you eat out most places.  You really have to study your choices.  For example at P.F. Chang’s (according to their published nutrition information), if you want the Lo Mein Pork, you consume 1400 calories in that one dish.  1400. But hey, we always like the Crab Won Tons, sometimes called Crab Raccoons, uh Ragoons, so throw in 440 more calories.  And if that Great Wall of Chocolate Cake is a special once-in-a-while treat, add (are you ready for this I am not kidding) 2,237 calories, for a total of 4,077 calories in one meal, albeit a big meal.  That is two days worth of calories for the one on a 2,000 calorie a day diet.  So all you have to do is simply just skip your next 6 meals to stay on target.  However, if you choose wisely, you can get the Cantonese Shrimp for only 330 calories, or the Buddha’s Feast steamed at a paltry 137 calories, and both are pretty good.  And shoot, throw in some lettuce wraps at 377 calories and it is a pretty good healthy lunch. Except for the sodium content, of course.

So eating out is a challenge and you certainly have to be prepared.  Or be willing to splurge as we did Friday night, when Eric got home and we went to Igibon, a wonderful place for Sushi.  Dianna and I shared a plate that featured three kinds of rolls, and Eric got a big plate with all kinds of unidentified food on it.  We ate well; but the problem for me is that I consumed a lot of rice, which for me is a no-no.  But it was a treat, and I skipped the green tea ice cream. 

But there is another challenge in eating out that I encountered Friday night. There were three men at the next table, which was very close, and the men were very loud.  I hate going into a restaurant that is empty and them putting you at a table right on top of someone else.  It is an invasion of my personal space.  Not as bad though as the time I was riding a crowded elevator at Baptist and a lady stepped the on elevator while talking on the cell phone.  It wasn’t bad enough that we had to listen to her loud cell phone voice, but it only took her a second to stop long enough for her to ask the rest of the pack-in crowd to please be quiet, as she was trying to talk on the phone.  It was then I understood the cliché that her elevator didn’t go all the way to the top.  I also thought she might not make it all the way to the top as there were some angry faces in the crowd. I thought there was going to be a riot. We would have liked her better if she had just lit up a cigarette in those close quarters.

Well, back to my story, Igibon was in fact crowded, so very crowded so that particular table was OK, and we were glad to not have to wait.  But those men at the next table were loud, and they were talking about Religion.  Why is it that people in religious discussions are always louder than everyone else?  Have you noticed that?  I could hear their even louder theology very well, and I was tempted to do an intervention, but instead focused on my California Rolls. And I focused on something else and thus this sermon was born.

            So what did they say?  My ears perked up when one of them said this: “God is good because God is Sovereign. And as Sovereign, God has to be good by definition. God is the creator, and as such he defines what is good and what is evil. Something is good because he says it is good and that makes it good. So as sovereign creator, God defines himself as good, even if we don’t think so.”  Holy cow, I am no philosopher, but there is something wrong with that kind of logic.  It is circular or nonsensical or something.

            So I thought about that for a moment and was concerned with the belief that something we think is evil is good because God says that it is, or at least we believe God has said that it is, and that can be a difficult pill to swallow.  And lest we be too hard on this brother, we often act as though this faith assertion is true in our own lives and faith practices. 

And the question is a good one, who defines what is good? Society?  Culture?  The government?  Surely not.  How about a great big God who sits back light years away and monkeys with his creation? Maybe not as well.  One of my chaplains shared the story this week of a visit that he had with a man whose fairly young wife was dying terribly, and the husband’s corresponding struggle with that reality.  The husband was having a hard time with the concept that God would let his wife die.  He said that she had been real religious, just like his mother and father, but even so, that was not his belief.  He thought the traditional Christian view of eternal life was crap.  When you die, that is it, period.  End of story.  His mother and father had died within two weeks of each other of unrelated illnesses, and that their belief didn’t make any difference, just as it had not in the life of his wife.  And as my chaplain struggled to respond to his honest doubts, he also added, “Did I mention that I was 11 years old when my parents died?  And that my wife is the same age as they were when they died?  What kind of God takes both parents away from an 11 year old?  We have a 14 year old.  What am I going to tell her about her mother dying?”  Why didn’t her God that she so trusted in do something?  How is that kind of God good and loving?  A sovereign God indeed, who defines both good and evil, and thereby is exempted from such himself.  No wonder this man has a hard time with this kind of faith. This God seemed so far away from his reality, and so unconcerned with his plight.  I wonder what kind of comfort he could have possibly received from those of us who are people of faith.

            This brings me to our lectionary text today.  Today’s passage is about the Ascension, one of God’s “power” passages.  It is one of those supernatural, unexplainable texts; one that portrays Jesus as wholly other and not one of us.  He is not the simple carpenter form Galilee in this text. This is a text where Jesus’ future is somewhere else out there and maybe so is ours.  It is a text that one commentator I read this week described as the true sovereign nature of Christ.  It is the account of the Ascension, and it is as true of other worldly experience as there is in the gospels.  Christ exits planet earth in dramatic fashion, and his followers are simply described as silly happy about the whole ordeal.  They can’t get enough “church” after this event.  Jesus blesses them, and flies away.  What a scene, it could have been scripted by Hollywood.  And furthermore, the followers present  are to get about the business of the kingdom as soon as Jesus sends the power down to help them do what they otherwise could not– and perhaps most certainly would not do.

            The Ascension.  It is an event that seems out of place in the life of the Jesus we all know in the gospels. What is it all about? I found it interesting some years ago at the Great Passion Play to see how they portrayed the Ascension, as I knew that their telling of the story ended with this event in the life of Christ.  They pulled it off by discreetly slipping a rear projection screen unobtrusively over the Upper Room set and showed a film of Jesus blasting off into the clouds, just like a rocket.   Can it be that this is what happened?  Jesus flew away like I saw that superhero Iron Man do in a movie yesterday?

            You see, whatever the Ascension is all about one thing is true.  We as Christians sometimes are stuck in a three-story universe, where heaven is up and hell is down, and our theology is often just as simplistic.  John A.T. Robinson, once Anglican Bishop of Woolrich south of London wrote a classic treatise entitled “Honest to God,” published in 1963.  What I remembered about this work was Robinson challenging the assumption that Heaven was really upstairs somewhere, somewhere above the sky and that hell was under ground, right beneath our very feet.  Our view of the cosmos was literally three stories, with an attic and a basement, if you will.  And as ridiculous as that sounds, there have been many who have believed that if you fly far enough into space you will find heaven.  Robinson was obviously controversial.  His point was more than that and a good one though, namely that God is not “up there” or “out there,” we need to look somewhere else.  That being the secular people that we are requires a secular theology that God’s presence and revelation in the world cannot be contained by the walls of the church, but is brought to us in culture at large.     

            One blogger expounding on Robinson says this:

What I think is striking is the continuing inability of the Church’s power-structures to adjust to what is becoming plainer by the day – that only when Christians are honest before God will they be taken seriously by the world at large. The current climate of internal squabbling over the non-issue of homosexuality is a good example. And the Church’s belated and half-hearted response to environmental challenges provokes a weary exasperation in those who have been struggling for decades against establishment opposition.  And behind all that lies a stubborn, irrational and Spirit-denying refusal to consider that Christian teachings need radical reworking. This challenge is not recent. It arises from a series of paradigm changes which began three centuries or more ago. Refusal to change has caused a substantial exodus of good Christian people from the Holy Land of traditional Christianity into the secular wilderness – a sort of exile in reverse. (Radical Faith at homepages.which.net~radical.faith)

            Fiends, I do believe that there is an exile in reverse going on and we had better wake up to it.  People are looking for alternatives left and right.  They no longer default to the traditional places for answers to their unanswerable questions.  They no longer find any practical value in supernatural and unexplainable answers to their predicaments.  They seem so fatalistic and so irrelevant.  And if we wonder why, just think about the man I mention earlier with the dying wife. Here is a man in deep hurt, hopelessly caught in the drama of the human predicament and we have offered him nothing to make any difference in his life except a three storied universe where everyone this man loves is stolen by a God who flies away, taking his loves upstairs while the hurting man is destined for more hurt in the basement.  Some have no doubt told him that he will need to repent if he is to ever see his wife again, and that is there religious answer to his plight.  And while I do not know if he needs to repent or not, what I do know is we should be telling him that God is not up there, that God is not out there, but God is right here. We need to find a theology that keeps God on this planet, or many more will follow in this secular exodus.

            You see if Jesus is doing nothing but flying away from here to get heaven ready for all of us, where does that leave those of us who are left behind?  What does it say about our present?  Have the last 2,000 years been a waste, an idle waiting for God to do his thing all the while the world seems to be going to hell?  And his people on earth fade into insignificance as we pass the responsibility buck to a God who will come back and fix what he could not in his first coming?  How does this kind of Jesus impact we who need God’s presence in the here and now and not just someday after we die? 

It seems to me that a Jesus who flies away is a Jesus who leaves us on our own.  He becomes the man upstairs, who intervenes supernaturally from the heavens with a waving of his magic wand, and capriciously decides who to help and who to not help in some balance of good and evil that is indiscernible to us.  And when we need someone to walk with us, he is a very long ways off, he is unavailable for the aforementioned grieving man and maybe also for us.  And if you don’t see what the big deal is with that view, ask the man losing his wife.  Or ask the man I was called in to minister two the other night whose 36 year old wife went out to smoke and didn’t ever come back in.  Or ask any of the families of eight people who died Friday in what has been violent spring weather wise.  Or ask the minister friend who may be losing his second wife to cancer in just a few years.  I know he needs a God who is present here, not just somewhere else.

            But our question this morning is even bigger than that.  How do we tell the world that God cares for them from afar if they are one of two billion people on the planet living on less than $2 a day?  Or the fact that there are truly hungry people in the shadows of our mighty churches?  That just a fraction of the cost of our edifices in this city could feed all the hungry and put the poor to work and help solve the crime problem in our city?  How do we live with the fact that we are in a city that is in the top five per capita for violent crimes and at the same time we have nine pages not counting advertising of churches in the yellow pages (that’s about 150 churches a page, so you do the math)? Or if they are one of the survivors of a war torn world where Christians are duking it out with Muslims or even other Christians, and that we could solve the healthcare crisis and feed everyone on the planet for what the war in Iraq has cost so far?  Honest to God, the church has made little impact on our biggest problems.  We can seek God’s will for the right mate, for a good job, for our health, for the upcoming test we have in school, but what have we done to tackle the world’s great problems?  We pray to a man upstairs who has blessed us with material wealth and has added more money and people to our church (OK, unfortunately not ours), but all of our prayers have not stopped hunger, they have not stopped poverty, they have not stopped war or anything else that we should be impacting. These are persistent problems that have persisted for the 2,000 years since Christ’s Ascension.  We believe that God gives us that parking space we pray for close to the door in the rain, but what do we believe about the big things that never change?

Jesus said in our text that the disciples would be clothed in power when he left, the power to change.  The truth is, as Church we have been endued with marvelous amounts of money, lots and lots of money, we have been endued with people with over one billion of us calling ourselves by the name Christian.  But that is not all, we have been endued with fantastic facilities, we have been endued with a prodigious amount of potent programs, but have we been endued with power?  We live in a world where Christianity is often relegated to the innocuous, the insignificant, and the trivial.  Christians and the church is often seen as ineffectual in impacting the world’s great problems, in fact in many cases it is a contributor to those problems.  And instead of being part of the solution,we major on pettiness, on selfishness, on the egocentric utilization of our resources.   While we focus on Sunday School attendance or making budget or on building a striking new structure, real problems are going unaddressed.  For all that is the church, for all of our great assets, we have not made a difference in proportion to our resources. And I believe in part because we trust in a God who is somewhere else, while we are sitting back and waiting on him to fix things from afar, to intervene supernaturally.

We don’t own our own building at Providence, and I do wish we did as we are dependent upon the good graces of the Sisters, but if we did I would hope that for every dollar we spent on ourselves we would spend on ministry.  For every program for our own benefit we would have one for those we seek to serve.  You see, what we need to do to fix this world is to bring Jesus back.  He is not just out there or up there, he has to be right here, right now.  It has to be more that about heaven someday, it has to be about defeating the forces of hell right now. And we have to be about the business that he left us to do, we have to be about impacting our world in a significant way. We need to bring Jesus back to earth because that is where our work is. 

Our faith is not just about someday somewhere else; it is about the here and now. Because if an ascended Jesus is somewhere else, so is our faith.  And this form of religious escapism and denial is literally allowing the world to implode on itself, and as a result it is sliding into the basement of our three storied house.

            So what then are we to think of this passage today? Is there Good News here? The ascension is not about Jesus leaving, he has not gone anywhere. The Ascension marks the transition from Jesus’ time to our time.  The Ascension says loudly that our time is now. The ascension says that Jesus has kicked the ball into our court; we are to be the difference the world needs. That we are to be Christ presence on earth, to take up the mantle and change the world and to not wait for Jesus to come back and apocalyptically have his way with all the things that we have failed at, or even things he could not accomplish through the very things he said that the Kingdom of God was really all about.  The Ascension says that we are left here to focus on this world and intervene on behalf of God. And God has given us everything we need to do the job, not from afar, but from right here in this room. God has not given us buildings, or people or assets or money.  He has given us something else, he has given us himself, and he has given us power.  The power to succeed. The power to change.  The power to transform the kingdoms of this world into the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ.

            My brothers and sisters, the message today is that Jesus is not just upstairs somewhere, he is right outside that door.  He is here, right here on 32nd street, but we have to make his presence known.  And when and only when the early disciples did just that, they were embolden with power.  And his early followers did something that one person could not have done.  They changed the world.  And we must do likewise, or there is not much hope for any of us.  The fate of our street, the fate of our city, the fate of our world has been left in our hands, like it or not.  It will not be fixed by a God out there or up there, but by one right here.  It is not someone else’s time, it is our time.  Jesus has left us in charge of redeeming creation and all that it means.  And he promises to be with us every step of the way, clothing us with power. Honest to God, that is the truth.  And it is also something else when you catch its meaning — it is the Good News of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.