No. 980



In view of the fact that today there are people in America who would like to remove all references to public religious or spiritual matters from our society, I am proud to say they have an uphill, and really impossible, battle. I say this because religious freedom is one of the main reasons our country was founded.
With these thoughts in mind, I want to tell you about “Communion on the Moon” and I checked it out with Snopes and they say it’s true. I might add there is a good chance you may not know what I am going to share. I know I did not until a friend sent the following article to me. It begins: “An incident took place over 43 years ago when two human beings changed history by walking on the surface of the moon.
“But what happened before Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong exited the Lunar Module is perhaps even more amazing, if only because so few people know about it. This is the fact that Buzz Aldrin took communion on the surface of the moon. Several months after his return, he wrote about it in Guideposts magazine. Buzz was an elder in his Presbyterian Church in Texas during this period in his life and, knowing that he would be doing something unprecedented in human history, he felt he should mark the occasion somehow. He asked his minister to help him. And so the minister consecrated a communion wafer and a small vial of communion wine
“Buzz Aldrin took these elements with him out of the Earth’s orbit and on to the surface of the moon. He and Armstrong had only been on the lunar surface for a few minutes when Aldrin made the following public statement: ‘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.
“Here is his own account of what happened; ‘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, whoever abides in Me will bring forth much fruit … Apart from me you can do nothing’. He had intended to read the communion passage back to earth, but for fear of controversy, at the last minute NASA requested that he not do this.
“He reluctantly agreed but continued there in the Lunar Module, ‘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 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 the other stars’.”
As I said earlier, one of the hallmarks of our nation’s history is religious freedom. I respect the rights of every individual to believe or not to believe as they choose. However, I don’t believe that Christians should sit back and not say anything when our airwaves are filled with trash and filth that does nothing to lift the human spirit.