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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?”
I think I know why.
When my father died late last November, and in the early-December aftermath, for a while there, it felt like old times. All the adult children of our family patriarch came together, with all our old shoes. By “all our old shoes,” I mean all our old ways of relating, ways of being, ways of being together. I know how to talk to my brother John, for instance, the way I know how it feels to wear an old shoe. I’ve known John from the beginning of my life. If he walks into a room, I’ll say, “Hey,” and we will need no more of an elaborate greeting than that.
And so it went, last November, and into December, as we said farewell to our dad and laid him to rest alongside our mother. We remembered immediately who we were, who we had always been.
But our family wasn’t entirely like we were before. Things felt different. These days, all of my siblings have children of their own, and in two cases, grandchildren. And in our various lived experiences as adults, we’ve all changed. We’ve evolved.
And what’s more, my father married again after my mother’s death, so of course his wife was there at the gatherings that marked his death, along with her two sons, and a daughter-in-law. And then, at my father’s funeral reception, we were joined by a couple hundred more people: people from my father’s workplaces and from our own workplaces, old friends of the family, people from all over, many people my father knew and loved but I have never met. Even my first boyfriend was there, surprising me with his thoughtful presence and kind condolences.
And finally, my father of course was not there. And yet, yes he was. He was painfully absent yet powerfully present: hundreds of photographs, annals of stories, his physical bodily presence until November 30 (the day he died), and then that strange, otherworldly, terrible mahogany box of ashes surrounded by pungent lilies. He was out of reach and out of sight, yet resting heavily on my heart. I could see his features whenever I glanced at a mirror. Everything was abundantly familiar, yet strange. We were a community with a clear history, but a muddled present, and an unknown future.
And that’s the thing. That’s the puzzle, the confusion, the wondrous but also exasperating thing about the Ascension of Jesus: you’re tempted to stare up to the skies, where you last saw what — or who — was familiar, someone who was with you back there, back then, but now is gone. Or if he’s not entirely gone, he’s sure a whole lot different.
The Ascension focuses and condenses — in one mountaintop experience — the mystical, odd, deeply unsettling (yet wondrous) experiences that astonished the bewildered first members of the Jesus Movement in the days and weeks after his death. The resurrection, even more than the death, upended everything they thought they knew, including — and especially — their friendships with Jesus himself.
The risen Jesus wondrously moves through locked doors, but he also eats a bit of cooked fish. He’s an unfamiliar, unrecognizable garden worker, but then, in a flash, he knows Mary Magdalene’s name and is immediately recognizable as her greatest friend. (But then, confusingly, she’s not allowed to embrace him!) He has left the tomb and is appearing before them, which is startling and deeply unnerving, but he’s also not reliably by their side as the friend they used to know, and that’s unnerving, too. He sometimes seems to be the one they knew and loved, serving breakfast by the sea and calling them “little children,” but then he’s the scary stranger who knows what they did — what they did wrong. Friend and stranger; comforting yet harrowing; still here but also, oddly and awfully, not here. Old shoes, new shoes. The Ascension brings the upsetting season of Easter to a climactic moment. Little wonder, then, that they gaze up at the skies.
We gaze up at the skies, too. Week by week, we say and do things that bind us to those first followers and friends, the ones who visited an empty tomb; the ones who tried in vain to keep safe behind locked doors; the ones who see a stranger on the beach, and row ashore when they hear him say, “Come and have breakfast.” Week by week, we feel, say, and do things that bind us to those who stood on the mountaintop, in wonder but also in confusion, trying to work out where Jesus was, where Jesus is, and how they can know and trust him in this vexing and often vicious world. We share their confusion. We share their fears.
We search the skies, just as they did, until we remember, again and again, just as they remembered, that Jesus is still here. And so we enter through these front doors, while others of us join the livestream: in this gathering of our family, Jesus is here. Then we pour water into a basin and sprinkle water over ourselves: in this washing, Jesus is here. Then we lift a splendid book aloft, and carry it to the middle of the room: in this book, and in our proclamation of it, Jesus is here. Then we bake bread and uncork a wine bottle, we hold these gifts aloft, we break the bread, and we take care that everyone is fed: in this feast, Jesus is here.
But this is a hard teaching. It carries a bracing and sobering sting of sadness. Jesus is here in our gathering, in our washing, in our proclamation, in our feasting. Yes. But Jesus is never only here. Jesus is not only our greatest friend, exclusively available to us, contained forever in the close confines of church as we see it, community as we expect and embody it. Jesus is also, always, beyond us. Jesus appears to people we’ve never met, and people we (if we’re honest) don’t want to meet. Jesus appears — Jesus has ascended into — all times and places, and we are mere mortals, bound fast by time and space, so we will directly witness only the tiniest fraction of the life and love of Jesus, who is present to all people everywhere, living and dead, long gone and not yet here.
Jesus never belongs to us.
And finally, we find Jesus, we embrace Jesus, we work alongside Jesus, in one more way. After finding Jesus in our gathering, washing, proclamation, and feasting, we go from here into this neighborhood, this city, this watershed, this world. And in the vocations of our lives, Jesus is here. “Stay here in the city,” the risen Jesus tells his friends, “until you have been clothed with power from on high.” “Stay here in the city,” Jesus tells us. Stay in your vocation. Stay in the arena of action and contemplation. Stay in relationship with your neighbor. Stay in the fray as an advocate for justice. Stay in the place where — as Frederick Buechner says so well — “your deep gladness meets the world’s deep hunger.” Stay here in the city.
Stay here.
Stay.
Jesus is not only here, but Jesus is here. Jesus is not only yours, but Jesus is yours. Jesus is not only who you think he is, but yes, Jesus is the one you’ve always expected, the one you’ve always known.
Here and not here, both. Ours and not ours, both. Closer to you than your own heartbeat, yet ever elusive, eternally beyond.
Jesus is here, but always, always, Jesus leads us into the everywhere.
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Preached on the Day of Ascension, May 9, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.
Acts 1:1-11
Psalm 47
Ephesians 1:15-23
Luke 24:44-53