It has been quite a week, hasn’t it? It’s one of those weeks when I could not bear to turn on the TV news and could only glance at the headlines.
Today’s scripture readings could certainly be applied to our current state. From Jeremiah we have the prophet’s warning of the consequences of the shepherd who divides and scatters the flock with his evil ways.
Then we hear Jesus looking at the crowds who have followed them with compassion because they were like sheep without a shepherd.
Really a sermon on either of these two passages would almost write itself — on the evil of modern day shepherds who seek to divide rather than unite; or on the lack of compassion from so many in our public domain.
Either of those sermons might be easy to write, but I have longed to hear astory of hope, and maybe you have, too. Then I realized that this weekend is the anniversary of an important event in our nation’s history.
It happened 55 years ago, and if you were alive then you probably remember it well.
My family was on vacation at the beach. The house we were renting did not have a television, and I think I realized how important what was about to occur truly was when my father went out and rented one.
We gathered around that small black-and-white TV on July 20, 1969, 55 years ago yesterday, and watched as men landed on the moon for the very first time.
In my memory, it was very late at night. In fact, the Eagle touched down on the moon’s surface at 4:17 p.m. It was at 10:56 p.m. that astronaut Neil Armstrong climbed down the Eagle’s ladder and first set foot on land that was not of the Earth.
Everyone knows Armstrong’s words as his feet touched the moon’s surface: “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
What you may not know is what he did before fellow astronaut Buzz Aldrin joined him.
Armstrong was an elder in his Presbyterian church in Texas. He asked his pastor to consecrate a communion wafer and wine for him to take on his journey. When he stood on the moon’s surface he made this statement, “I’d like to take this opportunity to ask every person listening in, whoever and wherever they may be, to pause for a moment and contemplate the events of the past few hours and to give thanks in his or her own way.”
Armstrong then turned off his radio. Then, he said in a later interview, “I opened the little plastic packages which contained the bread and the wine. I poured the wine into the chalice our church had given me.
“In the one-sixth gravity of the moon, the wine slowly curled and gracefully came up the side of the cup.
“Then I read the scripture from the Gospel of John, ‘I am the vine, you are the branches. Whosoever abides in me will bring forth much fruit. Apart from me you can do nothing.’
“I ate the tiny Host and swallowed the wine. I gave thanks for the intelligence and spirit that had brought two young pilots to the Sea of Tranquility on the moon. It was interesting for me to think: the very first liquid ever poured on the moon, and the very first food eaten there, were the communion elements.”
For the next two hours and 21 minutes Armstrong and Aldrin explored the moon’s surface.
And I am sure that we were not the only ones during those hours who went outside and looked up at the moon, marveling that the mythic man there had visitors that night from planet Earth.
Most of the moments in my life that I can remember as times when the world came together or stopped, transfixed by events of history, are difficult times. The assassination of a president, the death of a political leader or cultural icon, the bombing of cities, terrorist attacks, mass shootings, or natural disasters.
But this was different. This was a time of rejoicing, a time of awe and wonder at something good.
Astronaut Michael Collins, who orbited the moon while his colleagues made history below, recalls traveling around the world after their return to Earth.
“People we met everywhere felt they had participated in the landing, too,” he said. “Instead of saying, ‘You Americans did it,’ everywhere people said, ‘We did it! We, humankind; we, the human race; we, people, did it!
“The inclusiveness of the experience was remarkable, especially given the space race’s origins in an atmosphere of fear and belligerence.”
The moon landing was, of course, a triumph of human intelligence and technology. It was a time, as the apostle Paul says, when we “prayed with the spirit, but with the mind, also.” When we “sang praise with the spirit, but with the mind, also.”
That moment of scientific and technological triumph was, indeed, for many people a very spiritual moment.
That’s what it was for an Episcopalian named Howard Galley, who marveled at the moon landing while he washed his clothes in a laundromat in Brooklyn. As his laundry spun through the washer and dryer, Galley picked up a pen and began to write.
I think you’ll recognize his words.
“God of all power, Ruler of the Universe, you are worthy of glory and praise. At your command all things came to be: the vast expanse of interstellar space, galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses, and this fragile earth, our island home.”
Yes, one of the by-products of the Apollo space program is Eucharistic Prayer C, which I think is the most beautiful of all our Eucharistic prayers.
The Apollo program, which culminated in landing and walking on the moon, was just as much about this fragile Earth as it was about far flung corners of the universe.
John Noble Wilford, who covered NASA and the moon landing for The New York Times, wrote in a retrospective piece that “we went to the moon, but we ended up discovering Earth.”
That is the reason some historians believe that the most important of the Apollo missions was not Apollo 11, the first to land humans on the moon, but Apollo 8, the mission that seven months earlier first left Earth’s orbit and orbited the moon, 60 miles above its surface.
On their fourth lunar orbit, Commander Frank Borman looked over his shoulder and saw something that made him gasp in awe.
“Oh, my God!” he exclaimed, and his words were a prayer. “Look at that over there! Here’s the earth coming up. Wow, that is pretty!”
The astronauts gasped at the sight of Earth, a blue and white orb sparkling in the blackness of space, rising above the surface of the moon.
The picture they took, Earthrise, was printed in black and white in newspapers around the world. But even in black and white, its impact was tremendous.
This was our first glimpse of our planet from beyond itself. We were all made tremendously aware that our Earth is indeed fragile, an island home in that vast expanse of interstellar space.
The photograph moved poet Archibald MacLeish to write in The New York Times, “To see the Earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the Earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold – brothers who now know they are truly brothers.”
In his book Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth, writer Robert Poole contends that this picture was the spiritual beginning of the environmental movement.
“It is possible to see that Earthrise marked the tipping point, the moment when the sense of the space age flipped from what its means for space to what it means for Earth,” he says.
Late on Christmas Eve in 1968, a year of turmoil which had seen the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, riots in the streets of Chicago during the Democratic convention, and numerous protests against an unpopular war, the astronauts of Apollo 8 had a Christmas gift for the world.
On one of its final orbits around the moon, Borman announced to millions gathered around their TV sets, “The crew of Apollo 8 have a message that we would like to send you.”
While a camera focused on the Moon outside the spacecraft window, astronaut William Anders read the opening words of the creation story from the Book of Genesis.
“In the beginning, God created the heaven and earth,” he began. “And the Earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.”
Then astronaut James Lovell took over. “And God called the light day and the darkness he called night.”
Borman closed the reading. “And God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering together of the waters he called Seas, and God saw that it was good.”
A hushed audience throughout the lands of Earth heard Borman sign off from the Moon: “And from the crew of Apollo 8 we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you – all of you on the Good Earth.”
Wilford writes that “This message, truly from on high, was like a gift of hope: There is still beauty to behold, still an aspiration to goodness and greatness.
“Those who believe in other gods, or no god at all, shared in the spirit of the moment, its solemnity and its evocation of wonder.
“And believers, if only in hope, experienced emotions of relief and an upwelling of optimism, where there had been despair.”
More than a half century later that message, and the feelings it evoked, are worth remembering – a reminder that the hands that created this vast expanse of interstellar space are divine, and that we, as God’s co-creators, have an obligation to this fragile earth, our island home, and to our brothers and sisters with whom we share the ride.
Amen.