Acts 1: 6-14 Psalm 68: 1-10, 32-35
1 Peter 4:12-14; 5: 6-11 John 17: 1-11
Grace and peace to you from God our Creator and from our risen and ascended Savior, Jesus the Christ. Amen.
His name is Robert Timothy Clark. He’s been gone for just over two years…serving in the United States Army. His mother keeps his room ready for his return. In fact, she keeps their home ready for his return. His clothes are all clean and put away. His car has a full tank of gas and every few days Margaret drives her son’s Ford Focus around the block to keep it in good running condition. Some days she’ll even drive it down to the high school…slowing down as she remembers how she used to drop him off there before he got his driver’s license…calling out after him to have a good day and “Love you Robby!” She’d remember how red his cheeks would turn, but how he’d never forget to turn back and wave to her as she drove away. The cookie jar on the kitchen counter is filled with his favorite cookies….chocolate chip. And there’s always plenty of cold milk in the refrigerator.
Margaret misses her son in a way that is so profound that some nights she could swear she hears the floorboards in his room creak under the weight of his size twelve sneakers. She knows it’s silly to think he’s still there, especially since it’s been so long since that proud day he went off to basic training. But some days she sneaks into his room, just to catch a whiff of what her only child smells like, because somehow that scent brings her beloved son closer to home.
Have you ever missed someone? Maybe you miss an old friend and the good times you used to have together. Maybe you miss a loved one who has died. Maybe you miss an old love. The missing of that person can be painful. It can feel like a real and true physical pain in your stomach.
On the day before he died I was talking to Henry Gibbs about his beloved wife, Gladys, who had died a couple of years before. I asked Henry how long they had been married and he replied “sixty three years.” “That’s a long time” I responded. And Henry looked me in the eye and said “not long enough.”
When we miss another person, we miss their presence in our lives. After all, their absence is felt so acutely because their presence was so important to us. If it had not been so, the pain of the absence would not be so profound. What makes absence ache so is the memory of what used to be. “Absence is the arm flung across the bed in the middle of the night, the empty space where a beloved sleeper once lay. Absence is the child’s room now empty and hung with silence and dust. Absence is the over-grown lot where the old house once stood, the house in which people laughed and thought their happiness would last forever.” [1] Absence is what Margaret felt each morning when she tried to imagine what her son was doing at that exact time, half a world away.
When we gather to worship, we gather as followers of Jesus Christ, who is, in the flesh at least, not present with us. The early church was convinced that Jesus’ return was imminent. After all, when he ascended into heaven, as we read in the book of Acts today, he gave no indication that he was going to be gone for so long. The early church was so convinced that he was going to return and return quickly that they lived each day as though it were that last. That was why Paul told them not to get married, if they could help it anyway. Why marry when Jesus was going to return so soon? What would be the point?
Now some two thousand plus years later we are still waiting on Jesus to return and to some, that can look a little bit ridiculous. It can seem as though we were somehow led to believe something that was not true.
This is why people like Harold Camping and countless others have tried to predict and determine when exactly it is that Jesus will come again. When exactly it is that the world as we know it will end. Camping and others, like the authors of the “Left Behind” series of books and movies suggest that being left behind is a bad thing, a thing that happens to those who don’t believe in Jesus. But if we read today’s texts, todays readings about the Ascension of Christ, we know that this is precisely what happened. Jesus’ followers and his mother and his brothers and the other women who were critical to that early church were left behind when he ascended to heaven. Those who witnessed Jesus ascending into heaven could do nothing more than stand and watch him ascend into the clouds.
I wonder if, when they gathered together there in that Upper Room, they talked about the many ways they missed Jesus? Did they speak about him in great fondness and tell stories about when he was with them?
Remember the time we were in the boat in the middle of that storm and he slept through it?
Remember how mad he was at the money changers in the temple? I didn’t know he was strong enough to throw those tables around like that?
Or maybe Mary said “I’ll never forget when Joseph and I thought we’d lost him on the way to the temple.”
You can’t miss what you’ve never had. Absence is only possible where there was once presence.
And so I would suggest to you that our very act of gathering for worship is an act of searching for God’s presence with us again. God, who chose to be present with us in the flesh. God who chose to come to earth as one of us, as Jesus, the Son of God. We search for him and we come here for worship to seek him out, returning again and again. We come here and we hear and we tell the stories again and again. We tell them to our children so they will live on. We tell them because they come from and live in the deepest places in our very souls. We search for God in tangible ways…in bread and wine…in water and word. We pray for his coming again.
The two beings in white robes who suddenly appeared to the disciples when Jesus ascended asked them why they were standing there looking upward. What was the point? They were just eleven abandoned disciples with nothing to show for their beliefs. No Jesus. No risen Savior. No Messiah with wounded hands and side. But then a remarkable thing happened. Something that was prefaced with constant prayer in an upper room and the receiving of the power of the Holy Spirit. Those early followers became leaders. Those who had heard the proclamation of Jesus became the ones who proclaimed the word of Jesus. Those who had been healed became the healers. And the church grew and a movement…a Jesus movement…the Way….grew. And we are still here.
Oh, to be sure, that we are still here is a great frustration to some. We’ve been waiting for a long time for Jesus to return. There are those who call us foolish for coming to church week after week worshipping a God who hasn’t returned the flesh for thousands of years. But we come here as people who long for that day when Jesus will return. We long for his presence and we feel deeply his absence because somewhere within each of us lies a memory. A memory of a very real, a very flesh and bones Jesus. Jesus who was born, just like us, and who lived and laughed and cried and loved…just like us.
To see Jesus, my friends, we don’t have to stand and look up. We don’t even have to search our memories. To see Jesus we only have to look around us. Look in the eyes of our fellow believer. There….there’s Jesus. Look in the eyes of the children in our lives…there…there’s Jesus. This is where we are most likely to find Jesus, not the way he was known to those eleven disciples who watched him ascend into heaven, but in a new way…a risen and ascended way. This is how we will know the LORD, who was no longer anywhere on earth so that he can be everwhere instead. We know him in our prayers. We know him in the breaking of the bread.
Men of Galilee, people of this place…why do you stand looking up toward heaven? Just look around….just look around….
Thanks be to God. Amen.
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