Acts 1:1-11

In the first book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus did and taught from the beginning until the day when he was taken up to heaven, after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen. After his suffering he presented himself alive to them by many convincing proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God. While staying with them, he ordered them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait there for the promise of the Father. “This,” he said, “is what you have heard from me; for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.”

So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” He replied, “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority.But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. While he was going and they were gazing up toward heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them. They said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”

On Sunday mornings around Australia, a great division takes place among our communities, as some go to church, and some either stay home or do other things. Those in the latter group are not taking a week off; church is just not part of their lives. As far as they are concerned, churches are little more than pretty antiques, fussed over by wishful thinkers who don’t know when to admit they are wrong and join their group. It is one of the most peculiar things modern-day human beings can do, to come together week after week, with no intention of being useful or productive, but only to face a decorated wall to declare things they cannot prove about a God they cannot see.

The word we use for this is worship, and it is increasingly difficult to justify it in this day and age, but those of us who do it over and over again begin to count on it. Sunday mornings is how we learn where we fit. This is how we locate ourselves in the world. This is how we learn who we are and what we are meant to be doing – by coming together with our friends to sing and pray and be silent and be still and listen and eat and go. We may baffle our local community, but it cannot be helped. Half the time, we baffle ourselves – think about it: we proclaim Good News when the rest of the news is just so bad; we trust in the Light of the World when the sky seems so dark; we continue to believe that Christ is among us, when all evidence suggests he packed up and left a long time ago.

To be more theologically correct, we have been waiting ever since that first Ascension Day, when Jesus led his disciples up Mount Olivet, spoke to them for the last time, and disappeared inside a cloud for good. One moment he was there with his disciples, and the next he was gone, his hand raised in blessing, his face bright and indistinct, his shape vanishing into the fog like a beautiful dream – slipping out of their reach until he was absent, no longer present tense but past tense, a memory that would haunt them forever.

According to tradition, where he went was to heaven, and what he went there to do was to finish what he had begun with us. It began at Christmas, when God became human form in the world. Now, like a great circle of life, he now gifts his bodily form back to God. By presenting his own, still scarred body to be seated at the right hand of God, Jesus brings flesh and blood to heaven for the first time. By ascending bodily into heaven, Jesus showed us that flesh and blood are not bad but good, good enough for heaven, good enough for God.

This was my evangelism message in the very first sermon I ever preached at Burwood Evening, some seven years ago. Isn’t that incredible, I said. Doesn’t that make the ascension come alive for you? After the service, a congregant replied, “sure, it’s interesting, but it’s not compelling.”

What he meant, I think, was that it is still an abstract concept, an explanation that has very little to do with our everyday experience. Just about everything else that happened to Jesus makes sense in terms of human life. He was born to a human mother; so were we. He ate and drank and slept at night; so do we. He loved people and got angry with people and forgave people; so have we. He wept; we do too. He died; so will we. He rose from the dead; we have all and will all have resurrection moments in our lives – joy in sorrow, life in death.

But disappearing in the sky to be seated at the right hand of God? Yeah, that’s where we part company, Jesus and I. I have zero experience of anything like this.

Luke ends his gospel by telling us that the disciples returned to Jerusalem with great joy, which I’m sure was true. But I imagine that it had just happened for them, they had just experienced it, and their memory was still fresh. They were running on adrenaline; and you see it in all the pictures. Most old churches have an ascension window somewhere. In it, Christ hovers in the air, his hands raised in blessing, while the disciples look up at him with awe and delight. But Jesus is still in the picture – so if they went away joyfully, then perhaps they thought that he would be back in a day or two, a week at most.

Two thousand years later, we see the whole thing a little differently. Perhaps we need a new stained glass window, one with just us in it – no angels, no Jesus, no heavenly light – just us, still waiting, watching the sky. But he is not present anymore, not in the way he used to be. Today, Ascension Day, is the day the present Lord Jesus became absent – which is why it is one of the most forgotten feast days of the church year. Who would want to mark the day that Jesus left the world, never to be seen again? Hungry as we all are for the real presence of God, the one thing we really don’t need is a day to remind us that God isn’t here.

OR… is that really the one reason, beyond all reasons that we are here? Because we have all sensed God’s absence in our hollow nights, our pounding hearts, our unanswered prayers – and because those things have not discouraged us from coming here, but perhaps have brought us here, to seek that presence we so long for?

You know, sometimes I think absence is not underrated. Absence is not the same as nothing. When someone I love is absent from me, I become clearer than ever about what that person means to me. Details that got lost in our togetherness are recalled in our apartness. I see the virtues I have overlooked, the opportunities I have missed. Those oddities and quirks that drove me crazy at close range now become endearing at a distance. I can see the things that make that person a someone, not just anyone.

There is something else that happens during an absence. If the relationship is strong, then the absent one has a way of becoming present anyway – if not in body, then in mind and spirit.

My dad is quite the photography buff, so much so that he takes his camera almost everywhere he goes. When I was a child and we went on long distance car trips, inevitably Dad would spot a rainbow or a tree or a cow or something that he wanted to photograph, and the heartrates of everyone else in the car would skyrocket as he would crane over the steering wheel to see, sometimes weaving down the road as he did so. “Keep your eyes on the road!” Mum would yell at him. “Who cares about a cow? I’ll buy you a book of cow photos; I’ll buy you a cow; just watch where you are going!”

In 2006 when I moved from home in Canberra to Sydney, I would visit Canberra about once a month. Every time I drove down and back, I began to see rainbows and trees and cows everywhere. Seeing them, really seeing them for the first time in my life, I began to realize that I was not seeing these things with my own eyes, but with my father’s. He was not there with me, so I was seeing them for him. He was absent – or was he? No, he was present, in me.

“Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?” Luke calls them men in white robes, which presumably means they were angels, sent to remind those below that if they wanted to see Jesus again, it was no use looking up. Better they should look around instead, at each other, at the world, at the ordinary people in their ordinary lives, because that is where they were most likely to find him – not in his own body, but in their bodies, no longer anywhere on earth, but everywhere instead.

No one watching this event could have guessed the astounding thing that happened when the disciples stopped looking into the sky and looked at each other instead. At that time, it wasn’t very exciting – eleven abandoned disciples with nothing to show for their three years of following. But as that moment became history, it would become very apparent what happened to them. See, those eleven consented to become to Church, and nothing was ever the same again, beginning with them. The followers became leaders. The listeners became preachers. The healed became healers. The disciples became apostles, witnesses of the risen Lord Jesus, and nothing was ever the same again.

And once they consented to become the Church, surprising things began to happen. They began to say things that sounded like him, and do things they had never seen anyone but him do before. They became brave and capable and wise. Whenever two or three got together, it was always as if there was someone else in the room with them, someone they could not see – the abiding presence of the absent one, as available to them as wine and bread, as familiar to them as each other’s faces. It was like Jesus had not ascended, but exploded, so that all the holiness that was once concentrated in one man flew everywhere, far and wide, so that the seeds of heaven were sown into all the fields of the earth.

Friends, we come to Church to worship, to acknowledge the Lord’s absence, to seek the Lord’s presence, to sing and to pray, to be silent and to be stilled, to be filled with bread and wine, until He comes again. Do you miss him sometimes? Do you long for an assurance that you have not been left behind, all alone? Then why do you stand looking up towards heaven? Look around, and see Christ in your fellow disciples around you. Amen.