Monday morning a few weeks ago.

It is, I suppose, a Monday morning just most other Monday mornings. It is raining outside, and I am tired from a busy week. The rain falls down drearily, like a gray blanket spread across the horizon. I leave my house on some errands and weave my car among other cars probably running errands like myself. I go to the gas station to fill up my car, I wait in line at the bank to make a deposit, I go to the grocery store to buy food for the rest of the week.

As I push my shopping cart through the aisles of Kroger, I survey the faces of the people around me. The faces look remarkably similar – they all bear a rather stoic expression. Perhaps they are understandably focused on what they need to buy. Looking at the people, I feel as though the color has drained out of their faces -- if this were a movie, maybe this scene should be filmed in black and white (to accentuate the ordinariness of the moment). Are they awake, or are they merely hiding their thoughts and feelings behind their

As I pick up my milk and orange juice, I wonder about the direction that their thoughts take. Perhaps they are thinking about what they will have to do at work this week. Perhaps they are remembering a word spoken to them as

I am sure you have had a similar experience. Shopping someplace, or waiting in line, or stuck on I-35 in a traffic jam. Stuck together with all these different people, yet not really with them at all. What fascinates me is how it often seems that the more the people pack together,the more they turn inward. I am reminded of riding the subways in big cities. It is almost as though for those moments in the subway, the minds of the passengers have checked out of their bodies. That is sort of the paradox – in the midst of having their bodies pushed this way and that, as if they were clothes being stuffed into a suitcase, they are sort of having an out-of-body experience, and I cannot help but suspect that something spiritual is going on there, on the subway, or in those moments waiting in line, with our thoughts and minds often disconnected from our immediate surroundings.

It was in the midst of one of those moments in which I recently pondered an email that I had received from one of my best friends. My thoughts drifted to that friend, several thousand miles away in Japan. The image of his face came into my mind, with all of the associated emotions of remembering a good friend, and I thought about the struggles he was going through. I suppose that in some way the remembering of him was a form of prayer. As I thought about and prayed for him, I noticed the person standing behind me in the grocery store line. And I realized that this person who was sitting only a few feet away from me was somehow less real to me than my friend who was on the other side of this planet. Sure, the person next to me was close enough to reach out and touch physically, but my relationship with my friend on the other side of the world touched me much more deeply, more profoundly. He was not on the in the grocery line, he was absent, but in almost all the ways that really matter, he was more present to me than everyone in the store.

This is what I call “present absence.” It is when you have been touched so deeply by a relationship, that you profoundly feel the absence of the other – their absence is present with you. I suspect you have all experienced this at some time or another.

A classic example is when you go to a loud celebration or party, and you spend hours having fun, and connecting with other people. And almost suddenly, as quickly as the party began, it is over. The people go home, and the room becomes quiet. But if you pause for a moment, and shut your eyes, and listen, it is almost as though their ghosts are present, as though you can still see their faces and hear the echoes of their laughter.

Undoubtedly, one of the most common profound experiences of present absence is the experience of the death of a loved one. I think it is fair to say that probably all of us will experience this at least one point in our lives. I think for example of the death of my grandfather several years ago. We got the call that you don’t want to get, the call that wakes you up in the middle of the night to tell you that a loved one has died. A few days later my family was on a plane to Ohio. We knocked at my grandmother’s door, and when she answered it, looking like the bereaved widow that she had so recently become, I was struck less by her presence than by my grandfather’s absence. They had been married more than 60 years, their home was the only permanent home I had ever known, it wasn’t right that he wasn’t here, it couldn’t be true that he wasn’t here, I was in shock. It was almost as though I were living an inverted version of the doubting Thomas story, as though I had to reach out and touch his absence to really believe that he wasn’t there. From time to time, even and including in the

writing of this sermon, my spirit feels his absence afresh, it is present with me.

These experiences of present absence are not peripheral to who we are, rather they shape us and affect who we become. We are shaped as much by absence as we are by presence. Indeed, it is through the absence of those that are close to us that we experience some of the most profound depths of intimacy.

That has certainly been the case in my life. One of the most powerful spiritual experience of my entire life, even more powerful than my experience in Israel/Palestine, was the experience of separation from a woman I loved. Her name was Holly and we were students together. I loved her passion and compassion, I loved her insight and creativity, when she laughed my spirit floated upward like a balloon, and when she cried, my heart broke. We were in many classes together, we spent lots of time together, but all of that time seemed to go by in the blink of an eye, and suddenly, before I knew it, the time together was gone, she got on a plane and went to do an internship a long way away. It was months before I could go visit, and although we corresponded, I still felt like I had had the wind knocked out of me, I couldn’t breathe, her absence was a weight upon my chest. I have never known an absence that was as present with me as that one. I learned what it was like to have thirsty eyes, eyes that longed to see her. I thought about her everyday for months, even longer, I could not stop thinking about her, praying for her, missing her. I went for a walk every single day, a walk with her absence, I wrote in my journal like I have never written before or since.

Years after that experience, looking back on it, I once wrote the following:

“Presence . . . is when your eyes see the light of her smile, your ears hear the dance of her laugh, her hair’s fragrance intoxicates you, her touch redeems you, you FEEL her, her presence infuses yours, it is a part of you.

Absent presence . . . is when she has just left, when her laugh still echoes through the hollow air. You turn around, half expecting to see her. You see someone wearing a red coat like the one she wears, and there is a moment of anticipation, an intake of breath, before your intellect begins to work, before it reminds you, No, it cannot be her, she isn’t here. She isn’t here. Like the refrain of a song being endlessly repeated on a broken record, the reality of her absence echoes through your hollow spirit, but it doesn’t catch, the sense of her absence is too raw, your shock is too great.

Present absence . . .is when you know she has gone, her absence gnaws at your insides, you no longer subconsciously expect her. The edge of the missing, of the longing, has been blunted. Only the ache remains, the ache that lacks a language of expression, and you know in a full-being, more-than-intellectual way, that there is a depth of reality in that ache that cannot be known in any other way.

Absence . . . is when thoughts of her no longer fill your silences, when they no longer arise from within. You hear a special song that you first heard together, you stumble across an old, wrinkled photo, and only then do you think of her. With the fading of her presence, you no longer miss her. If anything, you miss missing her, you miss the ache and the sense of being painfully alive that came with it.”

I know now that something happened to me in the midst of those months, that I was transformed. You see, I learned something from that experience, something that cannot be taught but can only be experienced. I learned something about the nature of presence and absence, I learned that

they are not so easily defined, that there is no clear dividing line separating one from the other. I learned that presence and absence are bound together in a mystery, and at the heart of that mystery, at the heart of any experience of present absence, is the present absence of God.

We experience the present absence of God to varying degrees all of our lives. I am willing to wager that none of us have physically touched God incarnate, in that sense God is absent, but we would not be here as a church community if we did not nevertheless believe that God is indeed present. If you are like me, your spiritual life is characterized by fluctuations of God’s presence and absence in your life. One moment God seems right around the corner, in a kind word a friend says, in the extraordinary sense of wonder you experience when watching a beautiful sunset, or in the feeling you have inside of you when talking to someone you love. In those moments, God’s footsteps still feel warm, you hear God’s echoes, you can almost reach out and touch God. In other moments, God seems nowhere to be found, or maybe you aren’t looking, you feel next to nothing, you go through the motions, numb, hoping that if you can’t feel God’s presence, you can at least feel God’s absence.

Similar issues of God’s presence and absence are at work in the Biblical text for today. I think it is fair to assume that the recent events of Christ’s crucifixion, death, and resurrection had shattered the world-view of the disciples. Suddenly, much of what they had believed about God, Christ, themselves, and the world was shown to be no longer true. Boundaries that may have existed in their minds between life and death, the possible and the impossible, and presence and absence had all been crossed. No wonder they were confused. They were in shock. They were dealing not with the shock of absence, but the shock of presence, the shock of a Christ that had returned from the absence of death to be present once again. To draw from one of my earlier examples, it was not so much that they were hearing echoes and seeing ghosts from a party that was over, rather they couldn’t fully believe that this party had truly begun, the party to end all parties, the party of the resurrection of our Lord. We get a hint of this in verse 17, where it says, “they worshipped him; but some doubted.” In other words, even while they were worshipping him, even while the physical resurrected Christ was present among them, some of them still couldn’t believe it, it was too good to be true. The text does not make any other comment on the fact that they doubted, it does not condemn their doubt, rather it is it as though their doubt is understandable.

I feel for the disciples, for hardly had they begun to wrap their minds around the reality of Christ’s presence with them, when Christ prepares to leave them again. Presence to absence to presence and now back again as Christ ascends to heaven. But before Christ’s ascension, he leaves them with these parting words, known as the Great Commission: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”

This is where we get the Trinitarian formula that we use in every baptism. But the key to this passage, the climax, is not in the going, or the making disciples, or the baptizing, or the teaching. In the Greek language in which this passage was written, none of these verbs are in the imperative tense, none of them are commands, rather they are participles and would be perhaps better translated as Going and making and baptizing and teaching. I don’t want to diminish their importance, but in the Greek there is only one verb in the imperative, there is only one command, and it comes at the end, at the climax. Remember! I am with you always. Even to the end of the age! These are the words that are left ringing in the disciples’ ears as Christ ascends to heaven, these are the words that should still be ringing in our ears today, affirming God’s present absence.

A closer examination of the Greek strengthens the power of this passage. Greek is like Spanish in that you don’t have to say the subject of the sentence – it is understood. In Spanish I can say, “estoy cansado,” literally “am hot” without saying "I" and it is understood by means of the conjugation that I am speaking about myself. So if I choose to say “yo estoy cansado,“ it is like saying “I am hot,” really emphasizing the "I". It is the same in the Greek, so when Christ says “Ego eimi” he is saying “I AM” as though those letters are written in capitals and are jumping off the page, he is pouring his very identity into the statement.

He goes on to say, “with you,” in the Greek the “you” is plural here, so it does not mean with you individually, with you and you and you, rather translating it into a southern Texan dialect, it would be “with y’all”, with you as a collective being, the emphasis is on the community, there is something about the community that is special and holy. Furthermore, in the Greek the order of the words is “I . . . with y’all . . . AM”, the “with y’all” splits the “I AM,” it rests at the very center of the identity of God. In other words, being with us is not just a bonus, something that God casually chooses, rather it is an essential part of what makes God God.

Jesus does not end there, he goes on to say, “I AM with you always”, always, it doesn’t say “I am with you when you believe” or “I am with you when you don’t sin” or “I am with you when you pray”, there are no conditions here, God’s being with us is not dependent on us, there is nothing that can prevent God from being with us. “Even to the end of the age”, which is another way of saying, “even when the going gets rough,” because above all, that is when you need the knowledge that God is with you, that is when you need to remember God’s presence.

This is the gospel, this is the good news, it is so simple and yet so powerful, this witnesses to the reality of present absence, how by the power of the Holy Spirit God can be present and absent at the same time. By the power of the Holy Spirit that unites us to Christ, Christ is with us even when he isn’t here. If you don’t fully understand that, if you don’t understand the concept of present absence completely, that’s okay, neither do I, but it’s true. My experience of thinking about my friend in the Kroger grocery line, my experience of my grandfather’s death, my experience of separation from Holly – every experience of present absence I have ever known points to this truth. It lies at the very heart of reality, at the very heart of who God is. God is on the subway, at our parties, and in our silences. God is here even now. “Remember!” says Christ. “I am with you always, even to the age.”