Messages from Space
the World Overlooked

By Neil Earle

Borman, Lovell and Anders. The Crew of famous Apollo 8 – our first trip to the moon.

Though not a lot of people noticed, the Christmas season just past was the 40th anniversary of one of the extraordinary moments in the history of television.

Do you remember?

It was December 24, 1968. Three Apollo 8 astronauts had been sent on a “hurry up” mission to orbit the moon on December 21, 1968. There were rumors that the Russians were about to try another “space stunt” that would leave NASA and the American people behind yet again in the high-stakes race to the moon.

The propaganda stakes in the icy cold Cold War were high. A lot was riding on whether the United States could fulfill President John F. Kennedy’s pledge to “put a man on the moon before this decade is out and returning him safely back to earth.”

“Shooting the Moon”

The story needs retelling. A hurried-up mission expanded from just another earth orbit to a manned probe out to deep space – beyond the moon, actually orbiting the dark side, boldly going where no humans had gone before and ten times around the silvery sphere. The Saturn rocket had never been tested and the 34 story beast gobbled up 20 tons of fuel per second going 25,000 mph – gulping in one second ten times what Lindberg expended in his 1927 crossing of the Atlantic.

The mission dates of December 21-27 meant the crew would be away from earth over Christmas. NASA told them to do “something special” for a worldwide broadcast on Christmas Eve. Borman’s wife, Susan, had had morbid fears that her husband would not come back, had begun thinking of a quiet funeral with an empty casket. Like the true military wife, she kept these fears to herself. Borman related these secrets on the excellent documentary Moon Shot.

In awe at the waste and desolation below them on the pock-marked surface of the earth’s true satellite, the three men were in for the thrill of a lifetime. They witnessed the first human-observed earthrise – the spectre of the lovely dark blue orb of the Third Planet seemingly bobbing up on top of the wasted lunar surface. The picture became a classic and a sure-fire postage stamp the next year.

The pictures coming back from Apollo 8 were making the whole world stop and stare. For Americans – reeling from the traumas of 1968, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy’s deaths, the spectacle in Chicago at the Democratic Convention, the Russian move into Czechoslovakia – Christmas couldn’t come too soon.

“In the Beginning”

Borman seemed to be a closet Christian. As mission commander, there was no doubt what his “something special” would be. His voice beamed in to the still out-of-sight-earth, crackling with the static of authenticity across 240,000 miles of frigid vacuum. He sprung his surprise to the approximately 1 billion TV watchers below. He began reading from the first words of…the Bible: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…and God said, Let there be light, and it was so.” Borman said later: “It seemed so appropriate. Here was a description of the only planet that had achieved life in contrast to one that hadn’t” – the cratered wreck he saw below.

Lovell and Anders joined in with their own share of the reading. Borman signed off the special Christmas broadcast with a heavenly benediction: “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.”

Wow! What a coup! A far-out member of the Religious Right couldn’t have been more radical. But Borman wasn’t finished yet. The next day, December 25, he penned this prayer: “Give us, O God, the vision which can see thy love in the world in spite of human failure. Give us the faith to trust the goodness in spite of our ignorance and weakness. Give us the knowledge that we may continue to pray with understanding hearts, and show us what each one of us can do to set forth the coming day of peace.”

That’s pretty good theology. Borman knew that the knowledge of Christ’s Kingdom to arrive in full splendor at the end of human history lays an obligation on those who understand this to work for Kingdom Values in the here and now. Christians do good works in the name of the One who is coming, who has come already and who is coming every instant into those who have yielded their lives as a fit habitation of the Holy Spirit.

Seven months after Apollo 8 it was Buzz Aldrin’s turn – Aldrin, second man on the moon behind Neil Armstrong was a loyal Episcopalian. Not only had Aldrin performed a very quiet Communion service with specially preserved bread and wine on the lunar surface – consecrating this supreme moment to the glory of God – but he openly cited Psalm 8 on the return voyage. Stupefied by his ringside view of his home planet set against the inky blackness of deep space he recited: “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained ; what is man, that thou art mindful of him…” (Psalms 8:3-4).

Incredible, isn’t it?

Faced with their breath-taking view from space some of the star performers brought God into the picture! Apparently, the story goes, this earned them stiff reprimands from their superiors back on earth. Even if only for a few moments, humanity’s most superb technological feat took us back to God. Back to the Creator.

The Divine Purpose

Actually, we are all space travelers. Spaceship Earth logs 2.5 million kilometers a day. Question: What is the mission for our planet?

That Great God the astronauts spoke about has purpose for his creation (Isaiah 45:18). It is summarized in a nutshell in Hebrews 2:10. Something along the lines of “bringing many sons to glory.” God is not mad at us. Far from it. He is in the business of expanding his Family through adoption. He wants to adopt us sinning, fallible human beings into his family. Almost the very last words of the Bible say this: “He who overcomes will inherit all this, and I will be his God, and he will be my son” (Revelation 21:7).

This is the purpose that has mystified the seers and scholars for millennia. You can read about the process in Saint Paul’s heavyweight Letter to the Roman Church, or, as we call it today, Romans, Chapters 5, 6, 7, 8. Romans 8:24 says “in this hope we were saved.” That is the hope that Borman and Aldrin caught a glimpse of from the cramped quarters of the Apollo spacecraft. For a fleeting few moments, Apollo astronauts asked earth’s inhabitants to consider that there is indeed Intelligent Life beyond – far, far beyond – Planet Earth. This is the message the world soon overlooked. But as many as received it, to those who began to contemplate God anew and study the Book beamed back that dramatic Christmas Eve, “to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God” (John 1:12).

Mission accomplished! Mission possible!