Why do you stand looking up? - 21 May 2023
Acts 1.6-14
1 Peter 4.12-14; 5.6-11
John 17.1-11
If, like me, you’re 5’3”, there is usually a sensible answer to this question: in order to look anyone in the eye when you’re having a conversation, the only way is up.
For Jesus’s friends, staring heavenwards after he had just been taken from their sight, it was more complicated. You can just imagine them, gaping at this extraordinary thing they have witnessed – their companion, already risen from the dead, ascending before their bewildered eyes.
Of course, the two men in white robes who ask them why they’re looking up, know the answer already. This isn’t a fact-finding question – it’s more along the lines of, ‘What d’you want to do that for? You’re missing the point!’ Their question drives the apostles back to Jerusalem, back to their community, back to the world. They’ve looked up to heaven; now, in the light of what they’ve seen, they need to get back down to their lives.
There’s another reason I sometimes stand looking up, and it’s happened particularly since I’ve lived here by the sea. It’s to turn my face to the light. Coming from South London, I have never before experienced on a regular basis the vivid yellow sunrises, blood-orange sunsets, and silvery moons that I have known here. A little while ago, for several nights as we left the Cathedral at the end of the day, we saw over the sea a crescent moon with a star inside it – a shimmering, real-life version of the City’s Coat of Arms.
Heaven’s Light Our Guide.
Celestial navigation – using the sun, moon and stars to plot a ship’s course – has been around for about 4000 years, and I suspect there are quite a few people here this morning who are well-versed in the use of a sextant. To those of you who are here from Britannia Royal Naval College, it might be your sixtieth anniversary, but this is by no means an ageist comment – as a current Navigating Officer says, this form of navigation ‘is something that no-one has yet worked out how to corrupt’ – and it’s still essential that we know how to use it, given that electronic methods are so much more vulnerable. For those in smaller vessels, it’s still used routinely whenever they lose sight of the shore.
For that incorruptible heavenly light to guide you, you need to look up, but it’s no use keeping your eyes fixed there: you need to get down to the nitty gritty of working out where you are, charting your course, and moving forward.
Heaven’s Light Our Guide. For the ships which bore this motto across the world from Portsmouth Harbour, it carried a double meaning. And celestial navigation with Christ as our guide works on the same principle as it does with the sun, moon and stars.
But what does that light really mean for us?
In our Gospel reading, we rewind from the risen and ascended Jesus, and here, not long before he suffers and dies, we find him looking up, too. No-one needs to ask him why. He is looking up to his Father – a look which demonstrates the bond of love between them. And as he looks, he talks to his Father about that bond. But this isn’t just between the two of them: he immediately draws in ‘all people’ to his prayer, and then he prays for his disciples, in the knowledge that he will be physically leaving them. He leaves them at his death. He leaves them again at his ascension. And so he asks the Father to protect them. But he doesn’t just ask for beams of heavenly light to rest on them: ‘Holy Father,’ he says, ‘protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one’.
This is not just a nice pious sentiment. Jesus knows that, as he dies, they will experience fear, disorientation, hopelessness, doubt. They are about to feel crushed, and as a result, they will have those very human emotions of grief and anger and bewilderment. And so he asks for his Father’s protection to keep them together, in bonds of love.
Jesus’s disciples are a motley band of ordinary people, who miss the point, who say the wrong things to the wrong people at the wrong time, who regularly seem to hinder rather than help his ministry, and some of whom make truly terrible mistakes. They are a great encouragement to all of us. But here, he shows that it is this bunch of people who will be taking his place, as his body, when he no longer occupies a place on earth: ‘And now I am no longer in the world,’ he says, ‘but they are in the world’. Yes, they get things wrong. But they love him, and he loves them – just as he loves the Father, and the Father loves him. And because of this love – the love that comes first from the Father - they can hold together. So it is that after that strange experience that leaves them staring up to heaven, they go back to Jerusalem to be together, to pray together, to start to make sense of it together.
This is what it means for heaven’s light to be our guide. We need first to look up and recognise the love and power and direction which lies beyond us. Only then can we spot the fact that we are called to hold together, to chart our course together, to journey together.
This togetherness is not sameness. Just as Jesus’s disciples were all different from each other, with different views and emotions and preoccupations, so, of course, are we. Next week, when we celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, we will hear of the apostles’ suddenly being filled with the power to speak in a multitude of different languages – as we are invited to do when we pray the Lord’s Prayer this morning - so that they could be understood by the people ‘from every nation under heaven’ who were living in Jerusalem. The call to be guided by the Light is not a call to a homogenous way of being: unity is not the same as unanimity. Instead, in the same way as Jesus draws all humanity to himself in his life and death, his resurrection and ascension, he recognises here that it is the loving unity of his followers which will draw more to their number.
And the greater the diversity, the more power that unity has to be a witness to the Light which guides it. There is limited potential to see love in an echo-chamber. Instead, it is when we are faced with the debating chamber – whether literally, or just by being out in the world - when we wrestle with difference and are challenged by otherness and go through the pain of disagreement - that we need to call on the outside help which shines beyond us. And as we call on it, so, bathed in its reflection, we shine, too.
We might not notice that we are shining, so intent are we on looking up, charting a course, being guided. But it is the act of turning away from ourselves, recognising what is beyond us, and putting in the hard yards of living and journeying well with one another, which mirrors the light and draws people to the love.
Since its incorporation into the Coat of Arms in 1929, Heaven’s Light Our Guide has been a motto which links Church and State, City and Diocese. It is a motto which recognises both our common humanity and our shared need for the celestial navigation which no-one can corrupt. Whatever our height, we are all in it together. Amen.