Sermon 2019.07.21
Divine Perspective
(Psalm 8; 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 landing)

1. 50 years.  As we’ve heard, yesterday marked the 50th anniversary of the moon landing by Apollo 11. As the world watched in blurry, grainy black and white, Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon’s surface and proclaimed, “That’s one small step for man, and one giant leap for mankind.”

Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin spent less than a day on the surface of the moon, and about two-and-a-half hours walking on the moon. Yet that moment changed the perspective of the human race about what was possible. 

Sadly, I missed it by eleven days. I was born July 31, 1969. I’ve been a little miffed about it ever since.

2. Aiming high.  The Apollo program was a hurry-up job. At the beginning of the 1960s, America was behind in the space race. The Soviet Union had been the first to launch a satellite; in April 1961 they were the first to put a man in orbit. 

At the time, the Apollo program was a nebulous NASA project to develop some kind of space craft, maybe to ferry astronauts to a space station, maybe to orbit the moon, maybe one day to transport people to the moon. President Kennedy wanted to focus the mission on something achievable. After consultation with his science advisors, they selected a moon mission. 

The audacity was astounding. On May, 1961 NASA managed to pop Alan Shepard into a suborbital flight, the first American in space. Just twenty days later, Kennedy announced to Congress: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.”

In a speech the following year, Kennedy said, “But why… the Moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? ... We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills; because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win.”

3. Going to the Moon. From a suborbital hop to landing on the moon in nine years. Indeed, we did choose to do the hard thing. But the focus given to America’s space program was laser sharp.

Vast resources were required to move forward – Apollo cost about $25 billion dollars (or $153 billion dollars in today’s money). Whole new areas of science and technology had to be developed – at one point Apollo was using 60% of all the integrated circuits (computer chips) made. At its peak, 400,000 men and women were employed by the Apollo program. Some, like the three astronauts killed in the Apollo 1 test, gave their all.

Apollo gave us many gifts of technology, some that changed the world like microcomputers, and others that didn’t… like Tang. It pioneered key space technologies like launch and recovery, docking systems, and space stations. Apollo led to a thaw in the space race and the first cooperative international space missions with the Americans and the Soviets.

4. Divine perspective.  But most of all, Apollo gave humanity perspective. The Apollo 8 mission sent back the first television images of the earth and moon from space. On Christmas Eve 1968, while orbiting the moon, the Apollo 8 crew read from the creation story in Genesis. It is estimated that one quarter of the world’s population saw this broadcast.

With Apollo 11, we saw humanity first set food on the surface of another world. By Apollo 15 we were driving cars on the surface of the moon. Apollo 13 rallied the world as we prayed for the safe return of the astronauts following an explosion. Apollo 17 gave us this photo, the so-called “Big Blue Marble” image of Earth.

Apollo took us outside the small horizons of our world, the artificial boundaries of national politics. For the first time, people saw the world as God sees it – a divine perspective that brought together all humanity, all the environment, all plants and animals, into one fragile blue sphere spinning through space.

5. What is humanity?  Hear again the words of Psalm 8:3-6…

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars that you have established;
what are human beings that you are mindful of them,
mortals that you care for them?
Yet you have made them a little lower than God,
and crowned them with glory and honor.
You have given them dominion over the works of your hands;
you have put all things under their feet…

The Apollo missions reminded us that we are indeed near to God in the divine order. The universe that God created – sun and stars and moon – is awesome and beautiful… but not beyond our reach. 

God has blessed women and men with the creativity and the power to shape creation, to dream and to build, and the responsibility to care for each other and for the worlds we touch.

When we focus our efforts to love God and love one another, when we remember our place as caretakers of creation and not polluters and exploiters, when we reach for the stars… we are reaching for God.  	- Amen.