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My mother tells me that when I was not much more than 1 year old, she took me to the window of their flat and told me to look up. There I was to see the moon – on which Neil Armstrong was walking on that very day in July 1969. The first British astronaut who may similarly land on the moon is Rosemary Coogan, who, it was reported last week, has spent the last 6 months training at the Johnson Space Centre in Houston.

Today in churches and cathedrals, the question will be asked from Scripture – why are you looking up? On Ascension Day, today, the stories are told of Jesus withdrawing from the world after all the heat and dust of crucifixion, and those heady resurrection appearances on beaches, in gardens, behind locked doors. Today, the friends who’d been with him all that time are left – looking up into the sky - into heaven as the story goes.

Medieval Christianity imagined God up there – we could look up – and although we couldn’t physically see – we could imagine a large throne, with millions of angels and gold leaf, with crowns and chariots, and in the incomporable imagery of the Book of Revelation, all accompanied by the sound of rushing waters and the glassy sea.

Just 8 years before that moon landing, human beings had gone into space for the first time and found, if we ever needed to know for sure, that this sort of heaven wasn’t there.
But what was there – what is there now – is atmosphere that the World Meteorological Organisation reported yesterday, contains so much carbon that the world will now heat close to 2 degrees, heat that is already bringing such destruction and suffering on the earth.
Why are you looking up? is the Biblical question asked of Christians on Ascension Day.

And now, as then, the searching of the skies is a search for meaning, for truth. But now as then, this searching is not isolated from the earth, but intimately connected to human wellbeing, the hope and suffering of creation.

The disciples of Christ, left gazing into the sky, were compelled to turn back to earthly life, plunging themselves into the daily negotiations of politics, sickness and health, the economics of society and a radical re-think of spiritual life: the forming of new communities rooted in love.
And so today the same question might be asked of us: why do you search the skies for meaning? And the answer might come back: Look up, or don’t look up: …………but Ascension tells us - don’t look away.

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