Sermon for Ascension Sunday, 5/13/18: Where's Jesus?

Text—Acts 1: 1-11                                                                                                      Where's Jesus?

    Where did he go? Did you see?! Up there—the sun is so bright! Look…a cloud’s moving over him! I can see his feet…now there, no, there, no…he’s gone. [I caught you looking up!]
    Can you hear their voices getting more frantic? Can you feel the sting of their tears as his feet disappear?

    Biblical scholars tell us they should have gotten the point of this scene. In the ancient scriptures, a cloud always signaled God’s presence. God came to Moses in a cloud. As the Israelites wandered in the desert, God’s presence went before them, leading them. A pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night. And at Jesus’ transfiguration God spoke from a cloud: “This is my son, the beloved. Listen to him.” A cloud is on the scene—check—God is there.
    A cloud carrying Jesus away meant a homecoming for him, a happy reunion with God! But not for those on the ground—they didn’t want to let him go.
 
    It’s a scene you can easily visualize, and many artists have tried to capture it. Maybe you’ve seen a painting of the Ascension. In some the disciples are looking straight up—heads thrown back, necks craned. In some you see what they saw as Jesus went up, just his feet. And the disciples are reaching to hold him, keep him.
    I’d be reaching, too. Wouldn’t you? We put a lot of stock in Jesus’ bodily presence! Our two biggest celebrations in the church bank on it. On Christmas Eve, the manger scene is stage central. In worship here the children carry the baby Jesus up to the manger and put him in.
    At Easter the risen Christ, flesh and blood, is everything. If his followers had not seen him and touched his body, alive again, how would they have believed? He invited them: “Look at my hands and my feet. See that it is I myself. Touch me and see. For a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.”
    But when Jesus ascends to heaven, his body is gone. There’s no flesh and blood person left—no baby whimpering in the stable when the cows bellow, no risen Jesus taking grilled fish from a disciples’ hand. Once Jesus is gone, he’s gone.

    If he wasn’t going to stay with them, if he was going to live with them and for them and then disappear in a cloud, leaving them craning their necks toward heaven, why did God come to earth in bodily form in the first place? I don’t think it was so that we would spend our time trying to figure out how to get where he is or when he’s coming back here. 
    God came to earth as Jesus so we could learn from his life where to look for him now. When he lived among us, he touched people’s wounds; so when we do that now we find him. Then he ate with people who were down and out; so when we sit with someone who might not get a meal without us, we sit with him. He listened to others; so when we listen deeply to someone’s story, we find him.  
    And we can be sure to find him here, in each other. We are ‘little Christs,’ Luther declared, Christ to one another.
    Kelley Cooper gave a children’s message not so long ago about this very thing, a message I described in a meditation for this quarter’s Christ in Our Home. She told the kids that we can always count on meeting Jesus in church. Then she walked around the front here, knocking on the wall, the pulpit, the baptismal font, the altar. “Jesus, are you there?” Finally she asked the children in frustration, “Where is Jesus?” One of them offered hesitantly, ‘In me?’ Amen! Preach it, sister!

    But the more I thought about that, the more I wondered….If Jesus is in you and me, and I do believe that…why aren’t we more like those first disciples? He told them, you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. And they were! The book of Acts is full of their brave witness to the faith and details mass conversions and fiery preaching.
    Fiery preaching? Mass conversions? Right here? Well, maybe. But in the meantime, we CAN change the world, one person at a time.
    These are unusual times. To be as wired and connected, as well-read and hip as this generation appears to be, sociologists tell us we are the loneliest, most disconnected generation ever. And many are longing to catch a glimpse of Jesus, the real, authentic Jesus. They aren’t trying to hold onto his feet. They’re watching OUR feet. They’re listening to OUR words, hoping for some good news about God that rings true, hoping to see God’s love in this world—lived out in generosity, self-sacrifice, kindness.

    It’s a big job description for us. As you’re driving to work on a busy Monday morning (with your C&C logo in the back window), as you’re pumping gas or ordering dinner in your favorite restaurant or dropping off the dry cleaning or giving a child a bath, you are Christ’s hands, feet, mouth. A little scary, maybe?
    So next Sunday we’re going to remember that he didn’t leave us alone to get this job done. He promised a helper, an equipper, a comforter—and he sent one in flame and wind on the day of Pentecost, 50 days after the resurrection.
    Because of that, you’ve GOT the Spirit, folks, the power to BE Christ for others.

    But how does that work, exactly? Some of those depictions of the Ascension give us a clue. Thanks to Pastor Barbara Lundblad for pointing out an unusual feature in one. It’s a wood cut from the 16th Century, and when I found it and followed the trail, I discovered several others.
    In them, as in all the others, Jesus is rising and the disciples’ heads are turned upward, their necks craning back. But the feature added to these ‘special renderings’ is footprints on the ground below, clearly meant to be Jesus’. The disciples don’t see them because they are looking up. But we do. Cue the two men in white robes to say to those awestruck disciples, “Don’t look up. Look down at these footprints. They are his. Walk in them!”

    If we carry Christ within us, those footprints are our roadmap. All of us here are equipped every Sunday to follow that roadmap, having received the bread and wine that are Christ himself. Because of that and the work of the Spirit in us, we can go to the places he went:

• to the wrong side of the road touching the people most people won’t;
• to the places where trash piles up, on the roadsides and in people’s lives; 
• to places of vulnerability where only trust in God can create enough bread and fish, money and resources to care for the hungry. 

This is where he walked, when he walked among us. It is where we are to walk, too.
    Ascension day is not a day to look up at the clouds and wonder where he is. It’s a day to look down and around us, to see him in each other and find strength there. So that maybe tomorrow someone you meet who is longing to find real faith, authentic caring, and a reason to trust will look for Jesus not up there, but find him right here on the ground, in you.
    Thanks be to God. Amen.