Sermon Audio
April 3, 2016 First Sunday After Easter
A Cautionary Tale
Deuteronomy 11:1-15, Psalm 66, 1 St. John 5:4-12, St. John 20:19-23
Buzz Aldrin did a lovely thing. In 1969, as he prepared for the first lunar landing in history, Aldrin served as an elder in his Presbyterian church in Houston.
He was about to do a monumental thing, an act that would change the way humans relate to the cosmos around us. He wanted to find a gesture equal to the moment by which to commemorate it. He sought help from his minister.
The minister consecrated a communion wafer and a small vial of wine. They went with Aldrin as he soared into space and landed on the moon. Just a few minutes after Aldrin and Neil Armstrong set the lunar module down on the moon’s surface, Aldrin told the world:
"This is the LM pilot. 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."
He then ended radio communication, and there, on the silent surface of the moon, 250,000 miles from home, he read a verse from the Gospel of John and he took communion.
A few months later, he gave an account in Guideposts magazine:
"In the radio blackout, 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: “'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 had intended to read my communion passage back to Earth, but at the last minute (NASA officials) had requested that I not do this. NASA was already embroiled in a legal battle with Madelyn Murray O'Hare, the celebrated opponent of religion, over the Apollo 8 crew's reading from Genesis while orbiting the moon at Christmas. I agreed reluctantly."
"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. It was interesting for me to think that the very first liquid ever poured on the moon and the very first food eaten there were the communion elements.
"And, of course, it's interesting to think that some of the first words spoken on the moon were the words of Jesus Christ, who made the Earth and the moon -- and who, in the immortal words of Dante, is Himself the ‘Love that moves the Sun and other stars.’"
Aldrin imparted what we might call a high cosmology, a view of the universe that puts the Creator of all things above all things, where He belongs. He also gave us a sacramental understanding of the world, all of it representing the God who made it.
What could be more fitting, what could serve as a bolder testimony, than to take Christ into himself on the moon, proclaiming Christ’s lordship over the things above the earth?
His story reveals something else we should not miss as well. He throttled back his message, reading from Scripture and receiving the elements only after he had cut off radio contact, because his bosses at NASA were running scared after a prominent atheist’s legal assault on the agency.
A high cosmology and a sacramental understanding of the world just weren’t in fashion in the land of the free and the home of the brave in the enlightened 20th century. Aldrin might observe his religious ritual on the moon . . . but he had better keep it out of the world that sent him into space.
This tale presents itself as we consider our epistle lesson for today, from the fifth chapter of St. John’s first letter. The letter serves as a commentary on the Gospel of John, from which Aldrin read on the moon: “I am the vine, you are the branches . . .”
The apostle has a special interest in blunting the gnosticism that is seeping into the early church. His gospel is a happy hunting ground for the heretics who are pushing a philosophy of dualism: Spirit is good, matter is evil.
All of creation is corrupted and only god is pure. God exists outside the creation and cannot be present within it, for god, as matter, would then be infected. For man, the way to god is to escape from the body and the world and to exist as pure spirit.
Those who gain the gnosis, or special knowledge, can make good their escape. All others, the vast majority who have no access to it, are doomed.
Gnostics found John’s gospel so agreeable because of the contrasts he sets up: light vs. darkness, life vs. death, spiritual vs. natural, and so on. These contrasts proved useful in their dualistic scheme: Either one lived in the light or he dwelt in darkness; there was no middle ground.
And in the end, Jesus of Nazareth could not be the God/man whom John and the other evangelists portrayed Him to be. Flesh, which is matter, is necessarily evil and cannot be conjoined with spirit, which is good.
God could not take on flesh. Jesus either only appeared to be a man and could not have died on a cross or He was not God. John saw the words of his gospel twisted to support the gnostic cause and took up his pen to refute it in this letter.
Its theme is this: the one who believes Jesus is the Son of God conquers the world. That one enters into Jesus’ victory over sin and death and receives His Spirit. We read in our gospel lesson from John 20 of the resurrected Lord’s meeting with His apostles:
“Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.’ And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit’” (vv. 21-22).
Jesus is God and He did come in the flesh and He did impart His pure and holy Spirit to men. At Pentecost the Spirit descended on thousands more and ever since He has come to indwell all who place their trust in Christ.
God is not a remote and mysterious force out there who remains aloof from his creatures, revealing himself only to the few who come into possession of a special gnosis.
No, God communicates with His creatures. Another way of saying that is He enters into communion with us. God’s Spirit, who is Truth, bears witness in heaven with the Father and the Word – the Living Word who is Christ. And this Spirit bears witness on earth with the water and the blood.
This is a sacramental understanding, for it was water in which Jesus was baptized and the blood that flowed from His side on the cross that baptizes those who believe in Him. It is His blood that we take into ourselves that sustains His life in us – whether in a Presbyterian church in Houston or on the surface of the moon or in an Anglican church in Durango.
He is Lord of all, and nothing He has made is evil – neither flesh nor blood, neither bread nor wine nor water.
God communicates with us by His written word and His Living Word and His sacraments. He comes to us in the bread and the wine. I cannot think of sacramental theology without going back to the soaring words of Alexander Schmemann in his classic work, “For the Life of the World”:
“When we see the world as an end in itself, everything becomes a value and therefore loses all value, because only in God is found the meaning (value) in everything, and the world is meaningful only when it is the ‘sacrament’ of God’s presence . . .
“God blesses everything He creates, and, in biblical language, this means, that He makes all creation the sign and means of His presence and wisdom, love and revelation: ‘O taste and see that the Lord is good . . .’
“. . . (man) transforms his life, the one he receives from the world, into life in God, into communion with Him.”
Beloved, our eternal life is in the Son of God, in His flesh and blood and in the bread and wine that become His flesh and blood in us. Any who deny this deny the truth and they make God out a liar. Believing this truth, we overcome the world . . . but the world is for now under the sway of our enemy, the great deceiver.
He used the doubts and falsehoods and fears the gnostics generated in John’s day and he uses them in ours, for we have gnostics among us today. They are an especially pernicious lot because they do not take on the name of a sect like “Christian Scientists” or “Seventh-Day Adventists” and publish doctrine we can refute.
In John’s day and in ours, they operate both outside the church and within it. They are chameleons, blending in seamlessly wherever they infiltrate. They’re a pair of khaki pants; you can top them with a Christian shirt of a Buddhist shirt or a generic New Agey shirt and they’ll appear to go together just fine.
They will take a figure of speech such as light vs. darkness and twist it into something its author never intended. In the end, they will arrive at one of two conclusions: Either Jesus of Nazareth was merely a great prophet but not God or He is one of many ways to God, one god among many.
Our postmodern age adores relativism: There is no objective reality but only a myriad of interpretations of reality, each equally valid. Our culture loves “spirituality.” Turn on the television and you’ll find a celebrity with millions of worshipful followers preaching “spirituality.”
Peer into the crystals and be transported to a state in which you can contend with the “realities” of life.
Ours is a time that worships choices. Venture into the religions section of your local bookstore and confront an array of options on living out your “spirituality.” Even Christ might be among them. He is, after all, one of the choices.
No, says the apostle, the gnostics are out to deceive you. The Spirit is the truth. Truth is not a matter of invention or speculation or imagination or negotiation; it is the gift of God. God is love . . . and the God who is love is also truth.
Reality lives not in a “spirituality” that will guide you through the “realities” of life but in the incarnation and the sacraments and the church and the Spirit who is the truth. Our hope is in them, not in psychic exercises.
Gnostic “spirituality” will lead you only deeper and deeper into yourself. Christ is the Word of community with your brothers and sisters, of loving God and loving one another.
Jesus is not a choice but eternal life itself. All false teaching of another way to God can lead only to death. You can indeed locate truth within you – provided Christ is within you. If not, you are empty. Nothing could be more relevant for our time.
Imagine for a moment that God had not communicated with His creatures through the written word and the Living Word and the sacraments. Imagine He had made the world and released it to float detached from Him and on its own to make sense of itself.
Would we not have the situation in which so many wander about today, conjuring philosophies out of the ether to impose order on a world their finite minds cannot organize, drifting from one explanation to the next to the next and finally putting their faith in some amorphous “spirituality” or throwing up their hands in despair?
But God did not leave us without understanding: “Who is he who overcomes the world, but he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?”
I want to return now to Buzz Aldrin, because in his story lies a cautionary tale for us. Our courageous astronaut, seeking a means of commemorating a world-shaking event, went to his minister. Together, they settled on a sacramental act that glorified God as King of creation.
We would rejoice . . . if the story ended there. It does not. He gave his account of taking communion on the moon not just in the “Guideposts” article but elsewhere, including a book he published in 1973, four years after the moon landing, “Return to Earth.”
In 2009 he published another book, “Magnificent Desolation,” in which he describes it again, but adds:
“Perhaps, if I had it to do over again, I would not choose to celebrate communion. Although it was a deeply meaningful experience for me, it was a Christian sacrament, and we had come to the moon in the name of all mankind – be they Christians, Jews, Muslims, animists, agnostics, or atheists.
“But at the time I could think of no better way to acknowledge the enormity of the Apollo 11 experience than by giving thanks to God.
“It was my hope that people would keep the whole event in their minds and see, beyond minor details and technical achievements, a deeper meaning – a challenge, and the human need to explore whatever is above us, below us, or out there.”
In recanting his lunar communion service, church elder Buzz Aldrin capitulated to the spirit of our multi-culti age, making Jesus Christ one god among many. Unwittingly, to be sure, he was doing the work of Madelyn Murray O’Hair and all the others who would relativize and trivialize the Christian faith until it is empty of meaning.
Those who worship the god of Jews, Muslims, animists, agnostics or atheists believe the testimony of men, not God. They make God a liar and, ensnared in their falsehood, they have not life.
Aldrin may have flown to the moon “in the name of all mankind” but he traveled through a universe and landed on a celestial body under the sovereignty of the one true God who created them.
Jesus Christ cannot be one god among many because only Jesus Christ absorbed in His flesh all of the sin and hatred and evil that separates us from God. Only He carried it to the cross that it might be crucified, vanquished and buried.
Only in our baptism into His death, burial and resurrection, only in His body and blood that we take into ourselves when we gather for worship, do we have life. This, beloved, is the truth we must hold fast no matter what deceit the world shouts against us, no matter how many forsake it.
For without this truth we will not overcome the world, and we must. Amen.
A Cautionary Tale
Deuteronomy 11:1-15, Psalm 66, 1 St. John 5:4-12, St. John 20:19-23
Buzz Aldrin did a lovely thing. In 1969, as he prepared for the first lunar landing in history, Aldrin served as an elder in his Presbyterian church in Houston.
He was about to do a monumental thing, an act that would change the way humans relate to the cosmos around us. He wanted to find a gesture equal to the moment by which to commemorate it. He sought help from his minister.
The minister consecrated a communion wafer and a small vial of wine. They went with Aldrin as he soared into space and landed on the moon. Just a few minutes after Aldrin and Neil Armstrong set the lunar module down on the moon’s surface, Aldrin told the world:
"This is the LM pilot. 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."
He then ended radio communication, and there, on the silent surface of the moon, 250,000 miles from home, he read a verse from the Gospel of John and he took communion.
A few months later, he gave an account in Guideposts magazine:
"In the radio blackout, 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: “'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 had intended to read my communion passage back to Earth, but at the last minute (NASA officials) had requested that I not do this. NASA was already embroiled in a legal battle with Madelyn Murray O'Hare, the celebrated opponent of religion, over the Apollo 8 crew's reading from Genesis while orbiting the moon at Christmas. I agreed reluctantly."
"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. It was interesting for me to think that the very first liquid ever poured on the moon and the very first food eaten there were the communion elements.
"And, of course, it's interesting to think that some of the first words spoken on the moon were the words of Jesus Christ, who made the Earth and the moon -- and who, in the immortal words of Dante, is Himself the ‘Love that moves the Sun and other stars.’"
Aldrin imparted what we might call a high cosmology, a view of the universe that puts the Creator of all things above all things, where He belongs. He also gave us a sacramental understanding of the world, all of it representing the God who made it.
What could be more fitting, what could serve as a bolder testimony, than to take Christ into himself on the moon, proclaiming Christ’s lordship over the things above the earth?
His story reveals something else we should not miss as well. He throttled back his message, reading from Scripture and receiving the elements only after he had cut off radio contact, because his bosses at NASA were running scared after a prominent atheist’s legal assault on the agency.
A high cosmology and a sacramental understanding of the world just weren’t in fashion in the land of the free and the home of the brave in the enlightened 20th century. Aldrin might observe his religious ritual on the moon . . . but he had better keep it out of the world that sent him into space.
This tale presents itself as we consider our epistle lesson for today, from the fifth chapter of St. John’s first letter. The letter serves as a commentary on the Gospel of John, from which Aldrin read on the moon: “I am the vine, you are the branches . . .”
The apostle has a special interest in blunting the gnosticism that is seeping into the early church. His gospel is a happy hunting ground for the heretics who are pushing a philosophy of dualism: Spirit is good, matter is evil.
All of creation is corrupted and only god is pure. God exists outside the creation and cannot be present within it, for god, as matter, would then be infected. For man, the way to god is to escape from the body and the world and to exist as pure spirit.
Those who gain the gnosis, or special knowledge, can make good their escape. All others, the vast majority who have no access to it, are doomed.
Gnostics found John’s gospel so agreeable because of the contrasts he sets up: light vs. darkness, life vs. death, spiritual vs. natural, and so on. These contrasts proved useful in their dualistic scheme: Either one lived in the light or he dwelt in darkness; there was no middle ground.
And in the end, Jesus of Nazareth could not be the God/man whom John and the other evangelists portrayed Him to be. Flesh, which is matter, is necessarily evil and cannot be conjoined with spirit, which is good.
God could not take on flesh. Jesus either only appeared to be a man and could not have died on a cross or He was not God. John saw the words of his gospel twisted to support the gnostic cause and took up his pen to refute it in this letter.
Its theme is this: the one who believes Jesus is the Son of God conquers the world. That one enters into Jesus’ victory over sin and death and receives His Spirit. We read in our gospel lesson from John 20 of the resurrected Lord’s meeting with His apostles:
“Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.’ And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit’” (vv. 21-22).
Jesus is God and He did come in the flesh and He did impart His pure and holy Spirit to men. At Pentecost the Spirit descended on thousands more and ever since He has come to indwell all who place their trust in Christ.
God is not a remote and mysterious force out there who remains aloof from his creatures, revealing himself only to the few who come into possession of a special gnosis.
No, God communicates with His creatures. Another way of saying that is He enters into communion with us. God’s Spirit, who is Truth, bears witness in heaven with the Father and the Word – the Living Word who is Christ. And this Spirit bears witness on earth with the water and the blood.
This is a sacramental understanding, for it was water in which Jesus was baptized and the blood that flowed from His side on the cross that baptizes those who believe in Him. It is His blood that we take into ourselves that sustains His life in us – whether in a Presbyterian church in Houston or on the surface of the moon or in an Anglican church in Durango.
He is Lord of all, and nothing He has made is evil – neither flesh nor blood, neither bread nor wine nor water.
God communicates with us by His written word and His Living Word and His sacraments. He comes to us in the bread and the wine. I cannot think of sacramental theology without going back to the soaring words of Alexander Schmemann in his classic work, “For the Life of the World”:
“When we see the world as an end in itself, everything becomes a value and therefore loses all value, because only in God is found the meaning (value) in everything, and the world is meaningful only when it is the ‘sacrament’ of God’s presence . . .
“God blesses everything He creates, and, in biblical language, this means, that He makes all creation the sign and means of His presence and wisdom, love and revelation: ‘O taste and see that the Lord is good . . .’
“. . . (man) transforms his life, the one he receives from the world, into life in God, into communion with Him.”
Beloved, our eternal life is in the Son of God, in His flesh and blood and in the bread and wine that become His flesh and blood in us. Any who deny this deny the truth and they make God out a liar. Believing this truth, we overcome the world . . . but the world is for now under the sway of our enemy, the great deceiver.
He used the doubts and falsehoods and fears the gnostics generated in John’s day and he uses them in ours, for we have gnostics among us today. They are an especially pernicious lot because they do not take on the name of a sect like “Christian Scientists” or “Seventh-Day Adventists” and publish doctrine we can refute.
In John’s day and in ours, they operate both outside the church and within it. They are chameleons, blending in seamlessly wherever they infiltrate. They’re a pair of khaki pants; you can top them with a Christian shirt of a Buddhist shirt or a generic New Agey shirt and they’ll appear to go together just fine.
They will take a figure of speech such as light vs. darkness and twist it into something its author never intended. In the end, they will arrive at one of two conclusions: Either Jesus of Nazareth was merely a great prophet but not God or He is one of many ways to God, one god among many.
Our postmodern age adores relativism: There is no objective reality but only a myriad of interpretations of reality, each equally valid. Our culture loves “spirituality.” Turn on the television and you’ll find a celebrity with millions of worshipful followers preaching “spirituality.”
Peer into the crystals and be transported to a state in which you can contend with the “realities” of life.
Ours is a time that worships choices. Venture into the religions section of your local bookstore and confront an array of options on living out your “spirituality.” Even Christ might be among them. He is, after all, one of the choices.
No, says the apostle, the gnostics are out to deceive you. The Spirit is the truth. Truth is not a matter of invention or speculation or imagination or negotiation; it is the gift of God. God is love . . . and the God who is love is also truth.
Reality lives not in a “spirituality” that will guide you through the “realities” of life but in the incarnation and the sacraments and the church and the Spirit who is the truth. Our hope is in them, not in psychic exercises.
Gnostic “spirituality” will lead you only deeper and deeper into yourself. Christ is the Word of community with your brothers and sisters, of loving God and loving one another.
Jesus is not a choice but eternal life itself. All false teaching of another way to God can lead only to death. You can indeed locate truth within you – provided Christ is within you. If not, you are empty. Nothing could be more relevant for our time.
Imagine for a moment that God had not communicated with His creatures through the written word and the Living Word and the sacraments. Imagine He had made the world and released it to float detached from Him and on its own to make sense of itself.
Would we not have the situation in which so many wander about today, conjuring philosophies out of the ether to impose order on a world their finite minds cannot organize, drifting from one explanation to the next to the next and finally putting their faith in some amorphous “spirituality” or throwing up their hands in despair?
But God did not leave us without understanding: “Who is he who overcomes the world, but he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?”
I want to return now to Buzz Aldrin, because in his story lies a cautionary tale for us. Our courageous astronaut, seeking a means of commemorating a world-shaking event, went to his minister. Together, they settled on a sacramental act that glorified God as King of creation.
We would rejoice . . . if the story ended there. It does not. He gave his account of taking communion on the moon not just in the “Guideposts” article but elsewhere, including a book he published in 1973, four years after the moon landing, “Return to Earth.”
In 2009 he published another book, “Magnificent Desolation,” in which he describes it again, but adds:
“Perhaps, if I had it to do over again, I would not choose to celebrate communion. Although it was a deeply meaningful experience for me, it was a Christian sacrament, and we had come to the moon in the name of all mankind – be they Christians, Jews, Muslims, animists, agnostics, or atheists.
“But at the time I could think of no better way to acknowledge the enormity of the Apollo 11 experience than by giving thanks to God.
“It was my hope that people would keep the whole event in their minds and see, beyond minor details and technical achievements, a deeper meaning – a challenge, and the human need to explore whatever is above us, below us, or out there.”
In recanting his lunar communion service, church elder Buzz Aldrin capitulated to the spirit of our multi-culti age, making Jesus Christ one god among many. Unwittingly, to be sure, he was doing the work of Madelyn Murray O’Hair and all the others who would relativize and trivialize the Christian faith until it is empty of meaning.
Those who worship the god of Jews, Muslims, animists, agnostics or atheists believe the testimony of men, not God. They make God a liar and, ensnared in their falsehood, they have not life.
Aldrin may have flown to the moon “in the name of all mankind” but he traveled through a universe and landed on a celestial body under the sovereignty of the one true God who created them.
Jesus Christ cannot be one god among many because only Jesus Christ absorbed in His flesh all of the sin and hatred and evil that separates us from God. Only He carried it to the cross that it might be crucified, vanquished and buried.
Only in our baptism into His death, burial and resurrection, only in His body and blood that we take into ourselves when we gather for worship, do we have life. This, beloved, is the truth we must hold fast no matter what deceit the world shouts against us, no matter how many forsake it.
For without this truth we will not overcome the world, and we must. Amen.