COMMUNION ON THE MOON

The date, July 20, 1969, will forever be known as the day the USA put the first man on the moon. What most people do not know is the date also marks when Edwin Buzz Aldrin celebrated the first & only Lord’s Supper on the moon, a fact the U.S. government refused to make public at the time.

Inside the lunar module, just hours before stepping onto the moon for the first time, Aldrin radioed Houston Space Center Mission Control. He asked for a few moments of silence “to invite each person listening in, wherever & whomever they may be, to pause for a moment & contemplate the events of the past few hours, & to GIVE THANKS in his or her own way.”

(At that point, NASA had decided to blackout the broadcast of the communion service.)

In that moment of silence that followed, Aldrin silently read a passage from the book of John (15:5 RSV) that he had written out on a 3×5 card: “I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me, & I in him, will bear much fruit; for you can do nothing without me.”

Then he took out the miniature chalice & bread & wine from his personal allowance pouch. “I poured the wine into the chalice our church had given me,” he told Guideposts magazine in 1970.

“In the one-sixth gravity of the moon the wine curled slowly & gracefully up the side of the cup. It was interesting to think that the very first liquid ever poured on the moon, & the first food eaten there, were communion elements.”

Neil Armstrong, the other astronaut onboard, did not participate.

(Elizabeth Dias, writer-reporter in TIME's Washington bureau - time.com)

Don’t forget to THANK GOD even if you are over the moon!