Creekside Church Sermon of May 27, 2001 "Transformed" Acts 1:6-11	Rev. David Bibbee
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One of the lessons I have learned is this: whenever people look up at something, you should drop whatever you are doing and look up with them. You never know what you might see. Scan the skies on a clear night away from the light pollution of the city and perhaps you'll see a shooting star, or if you're lucky, the northern lights. When heads tilt back and fingers point up you should look up, too. It could be a skywriter, a blimp, or a formation of skydivers. Last Monday afternoon while fishing in a downpour on Heaton Lake, my fishing partner cried, "Look up! Is that what I think it is?" Soaring over the treetops near the Indiana toll road was a juvenile bald eagle!

There is no telling what you might miss if you look at life at eye level only. I belong to the generation that grew up watching a television program that began, "Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! No, it's Superman!" We have been looking up ever since… into the sky, into space… to the moon and Mars and beyond. With the incredible eye of the Hubble Telescope we see cosmic events which happened billions of years ago which might provide answers to questions about the origins and directions of life.

Today is "Look Up Sunday" in the church, better known as Ascension Sunday. It recalls an event forty days after Jesus' resurrection when he blessed his disciples, bid them goodbye, and was transported via a cumulus cloud upward and out of sight. Heaven was his destination-the realm from which he had come. The Word we could not comprehend wrapped itself in flesh and lived us in a way we could see, touch, and understand. He brought something of heaven to us. The day came when the body which experienced the same things we experience headed home.

It's significant that Jesus returned to heaven with a body and not as an amorphous, unrecognizable, spiritual mist. He entered the world in a body and he was leaving in one. Apparently it was good enough to keep… appropriate attire for heaven, which suggests there will be something distinct and recognizable about us which we shall take with us to God. But the ascension was for Jesus alone. He was taken up and away and gone. And the disciples were left with their heads cranked backwards, eyes squinted, mouths gapped open.

One moment Jesus was present. The next he was absent. Luke ends his gospel with the ascension story. As soon as Jesus disappeared into the stratosphere, Luke says the disciples returned to Jerusalem with "great joy." Beholding such a sight as this, so would we, but what about later? They did not know how long Jesus would be gone. Evidence from the early church suggests they thought he would return sooner rather than later. A year. Maybe two. Five at the most. They could cope with Jesus' absence at least that long.

But what if someone told them they would have to wait at least 2,000 years? The disciples would have grabbed him out of the air, tied a rope around his ankles and tethered him to a tree, leaving him float there like a helium balloon. That way they could keep Jesus close. They could go to him whenever they needed him and find him right where they left him. It would have been easier for everyone. But this is not what happened.

It is hard for the church to make a big deal of Ascension Day. Celebrate the day our Savior disappeared? Observe the anniversary of the day your Lord left you behind? How do you commend people to a God who vanishes when you need him most? It's tough to testify to someone last seen by eleven men 2,000 years ago. An absentee Lord.

Why bother remembering such a story about Jesus who is "up there" or "out there" in a heaven that not even the Hubble Telescope has been able to locate, while we are confined to spend the foreseeable future in a world that grows more difficult by the day? Jesus is in heaven and we are here. How strange we must seem to the world, coming together Sunday after Sunday as someone said, "To declare things we cannot prove about a God we cannot see." Quaker churches come as close as any to depicting our experience of an absent Lord. Bare walls. No pictures. No crosses. No symbols. No likenesses. Lots of silence.

Some of you might be thinking, "We know enough already about God's absence, David. We pay you to point us to His presence. But what if I told you this is how it is supposed to be, at least for the time being? What if I said Jesus' absence serves an important purpose?

On numerous occasions I have asked you, "What are you doing here? Why do you go to the bother of coming to church for an activity that doesn't accomplish or produce anything?" Suppose we decide to make a regular appointment and I don't show up. Let's say I wrote the wrong day for the first meeting. It happens. But I don't show up the second week, either. Scheduling conflict. I don't come the third or the fourth week. How long before you quit coming? Not long, I assure you. Yet we have been coming to worship every Sunday for two millennia now, long after Jesus has been carried away on the clouds, absent from us, far, far away. Why?

Can you give me the definition of nothing? Nothing is something that doesn't exist. People outside the faith listen to what we take for granted as real and say it doesn't exist. If it can't be seen, if it can't be replicated in a laboratory, it isn't real. But absence isn't the same thing as non-existence.

Recall the verse, "Absence the heart grow fonder." You can't miss what you have never known. Your child is away at school. Her bedroom is empty and there is no vibration of the stereo turned full blast. That's absence. Or, something comes to mind and you want to share it with your spouse. You instinctively blurt out a few words when reality snaps you back. There has been a funeral. You're in the house alone, now. That's absence. But it isn't only absence. Though the loved one isn't there, in another sense he is.

We would not hunger for God if we had not already known him or had some experience of him, no matter how fleeting or how long ago. You wouldn't keep coming here; you wouldn't cast your lot with the people who make up this church, and you wouldn't endure the absence if you did not have some past sense of his presence, or faith that where Jesus is, we will be also.

My grandmother was a great cook. Nothing fancy. She cooked substantial, stick-to-your-ribs country food. There was always a pie and pickled eggs in the refrigerator. Grandma died in 1978, but she is still cooking. I have her recipes, and when I find myself being nostalgic and missing her, I cook. The result isn't just good food. It is communion with Grandma Bibbee. I know she's not there, but sometimes I wonder. I can almost hear her say, "Ready for a third helping, David?" I can't help but think that some day, in some way we will meet at a kitchen table.

Though it often feels that God is more distant than near, we cannot shake the hope that someday, in some way, the distance will be closed for good, and we will leave where we are for where he is. In the meantime we are here. Each Sunday we come with our memories of God and our longings for God. We share our stories of when and how we encountered him last. We encourage each other to be on the lookout, just in case.

We have seen footage of family members, neighbors, concerned citizens and police banding together to search for a missing child. Standing near one another, they form a long line and walk abreast, carefully combing the field for any evidence they can find that might lead them to the child. It's not unlike what we do together. We are looking for Someone. We walk together, sharing our stories and our hopes as we go, looking, waiting for someone to shout, "Over here! I think I've found something!"

I began by saying that when people look up, you should look up with them. But there is a precaution. A pastor wrote about driving on the Chicago Loop. The drive that day was more horrendous than usual. Cars were braking for no apparent reason. There were several near collisions. Past the Loop, traffic was okay. It wasn't until she listened to the news later that day that she realized what had happened. A daredevil had been arrested for climbing the outside of the Sears Tower. The drivers on Interstate 94 were trying to watch the climber and the road at the same time… a dangerous activity.

If you spend a lot of time looking up, you will likely run into something. While the disciples stared slack-jawed into the sky, two angels dressed incognito came out of nowhere, stood beside them and asked, "Men of Galilee, why do you stand here staring at heaven? He's been taken from you. He will come back as you saw him go." It's reminiscent of Luke's Easter story. Two men in dazzling clothes said to the women at the tomb, "Why do you seek the living among the dead? You won't find him here."

The last look the disciples got of Jesus, was the bottoms of his feet…the feet which took him among the people. Jesus' feet would not touch the earth again. But theirs did. It wasn't much of an insight, but it was enough. With no Jesus to look at, they were left looking at each other. They looked at all of the ordinary people who had looked at him.

Strange, wonderful things happened. They looked into each other's eyes and saw his eyes. These men with thick tongues and lockjaw became eloquent preachers and teachers. They spoke the words he spoke. Like Jesus, they touched people and they were healed. What Jesus said came true. "Not only will you do the works I do; you will do greater works than these." None of this would have happened had Jesus not left them. "It is to your benefit that I leave you," Jesus said. They had to discover what they in his name could do. They learned that hard as his absence was to endure, they could find within it his presence.

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