Reaching for the Moon 1 Stephen Mitchell preached this sermon at St Peter’s Church Moulton on Sunday 19th July 2009, the Sixth Sunday after Trinity Tomorrow – July 20th – is for most of us here a remarkable anniversary. Today – forty years ago – we were glued to our television sets eagerly awaiting news of the little spacecraft winging its way to the moon. Tomorrow it will be forty years since Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the moon.
Like most kids at that time, I was fascinated by the whole enterprise. There were a further five moon landings. Twelve men in all set foot on the moon.
The next proposed landing on the moon is around 2025 by the Russians, who plan to have a permanently manned moon station. Who knows, the Chinese might be there next. But there is something about it that I find rather disturbing. It’s partly the fact that it may be 60 or more years since the first moon landing before people again set foot on the moon. It’s the same sort of feeling you get when you see a house restoration which someone started years ago and then abandoned. And the house still has its knocked-down walls and half-stripped-off wallpaper.
Or perhaps it’s like discovering a temple, which centuries ago fell into disuse and now it’s overgrown and falling down. And we wonder what happened.
Why did someone abandon the restoration? Why did the temple fall into disuse? What happened to that civilisation? What happened to the moon quest? What happened to the 60s?
There are people who say it was all a hoax: the biggest cover-up the world has ever known. No one ever went to the moon. And all the film footage is faked. Look at the flag, they say, it’s blowing in the wind - and there’s no wind on the moon. Actually look more carefully and it isn’t blowing: it’s swinging on a bar and the folds remain the same. There are people who say it was done purely for political reasons. But the cold war is over now. The Russians are no longer our enemy. There is no need for the space race. There are people who say it was a waste of money. No one can afford that sort of money these days. The next moon landing will have to be privately financed and in these recessionary times no private entrepreneur can afford it. And – and this is probably the main reason – people say there is too much to do here on Earth. There’s the hungry to feed, wars to end and – most of all – climate change and global warming to conquer. But it still seems to me disturbing.
I suppose what is disturbing besides the sense of a lost age and a great achievement long ago, is the thought that human beings are in every sense earthbound. Of course we always were earthbound.
But in those heady 60s, I suppose there was a feeling that human beings could do anything and go anywhere and one day – just as the Pilgrim Fathers had crossed oceans to discover the New World, so future generations would cross deep space to discover new planets and establish new worlds out in space. But now that iconic image of the Earth seen from the moon makes the Earth seem even smaller, even more fragile, even more vulnerable. And here we are. Compared to the hostility of the moon’s waterless and airless climate, Earth may seem in every sense a luxurious home. But Earth – as the trips to the moon have emphasised – is a tiny speck in the vastness of the universe. And life on Earth is sustained by the merest tissue of an atmosphere that is already punctured and in danger of becoming even thinner. Life on Earth, and even more so after our trips the moon, seems to hang by a very, very, very thin thread and seems so utterly insignificant. There is nothing new about this rather disturbing thought.
The psalmist over three thousand years ago looked up into space and wrote:
When I consider thy heavens, even the works of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast ordained, what is man, that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that thou visitest him?
But our trips into space, our landings on the moon – now over forty years old – and our awareness of the complex balance of the world’s eco-system bring an added bleakness to our situation. There is the feeling that, just as the footprints on the moon’s surface and 17 sofia 93 September 2009 the abandoned moon rovers are the only surviving relics of our trips to the moon, so we wonder if one day there will be as little evidence here on Earth that, once, human beings lived and flourished on this planet. Again, this is only the human condition writ large and finely observed by the psalmist:
Like as a father pitieth his own children even so is the Lord merciful to them that fear him.
For he knoweth whereof we are made he remembereth that we are but dust.
The days are of man are but as grass for he flourisheth as a flower of the field.
For as soon as the wind goeth over it, it is gone and the place thereof shall know it no more.
Such realism seems to be the starting place for the spiritual life and there have been a number of ways of meeting this truth about human life. One is to rubbish life on Earth. Compared with future glories, this life is a sham. It’s of no value and we should escape from it as far as possible, shut ourselves away and wait for the next life. Here we are strangers in a foreign land and we should wait and prepare ourselves for our true home in heaven.
However, this is not quite the Christian approach. It does rather belittle life on Earth and it doesn’t exactly encourage us to get involved and make the most of life here and now. There are probably two better things for us to work on. One is to celebrate human achievement. The days of man may be as grass but human beings do flourish as the flower of the field. Like Solomon in all his glory, adorned as the lilies of the field, human beings achieve remarkable and great things. And landing one of their kind on the moon is one such considerable achievement. Even if it was part of a political game, it was still a remarkable triumph of human ingenuity, technology, and teamwork. Whatever your thing is – whether golf or cricket or promenade concerts; whether farming or pharmaceuticals; or just the everyday business of shopping, feeding and clothing ourselves – marvel at the things human beings achieve. We are extraordinary creatures. Of course we are, we’re made in the image of God and to contemplate human achievement is to contemplate the things of God.
The second thing to work on is the old spiritual advice: live in the present. We have this happy coincidence in English that the present is a present, a gift. Of course the past has important lessons to teach us and the future has to be planned for, but it’s in the present that we can give our attention, respond to need and demonstrate our love. It’s simply no good wishing back the 60s with their political idealism, groundbreaking pop music and technological growth.
Today is the day – as the gospel is always reminding us – to bring in the kingdom of God and it’s in the present moment that we can lose ourselves in the infinity of heaven.
Stephen Mitchell is the Vicar of Gazeley and four other parishes and Rural Dean of Mildenhall, Suffolk. He is a former Chair of SOF trustees.