Dear Members and Friends,
For as long as I can remember, the space program has ignited deep feelings of excitement and fascination in my soul. I can recall the tension and thrill, sitting transfixed in front of an RCA black and white TV, following John Glenn’s three orbit mission. By the time of Apollo 11 we had moved up to a color television, but the anxiety and the exhilaration were much the same.
Just a few days ago, another American made rover bounced upon the Martian surface, beaming auburn digital delights back to our blue and green planet. We search diligently and hopefully for signs of primordial water, perchance to discover an essential component of life. Yet this extraterrestrial nomad, the product of incredible vision and reason, was designed and assembled in a place at war with itself – where people fashion crude devices to indiscriminately eliminate life and destroy dreams of peace and freedom.
How is it we can cover millions of miles in a noble quest for knowledge, but we cannot get along with our next door neighbor? Indeed, we send our most sophisticated equipment and intelligent human beings hundreds of miles aloft in orbit, yet we cannot scale the walls of animosity and mistrust in our very midst.
The current stellar voyage is not the first, nor will it be the last. In the continuing quest for living things in space, we have thus far been left with the indisputable fact of how unique and fragile we are here on Earth. Unfolding with the intimate involvement of God, as the celestial dust coalesced and galaxies were born, the seeds for our own bodies were planted while the planets formed and suns ignited.
Hearkening to astronomical truth in the universe, not the astrological signs in the papers, there is indeed a message in the firmament. It begins with the eminent declaration that God is great. For surely as we consider the vast distance our spacecraft have traveled from Earth to the Heavens, it calls to mind the even greater journey Our Lord made from the Heavens to the Earth – not seeking new life, but granting it in Jesus Christ.
Reaching up in fascination with the stars, may we also be found reaching out in friendship for our sisters and brothers – each one stardust with a soul, cosmic essence with emotion and intellect. Thus may it be proven, as we uncover the mysteries of Mars, that faith and love are alive and well on planet Earth.
From Reverend William J. Keane,
Senior Minister of First Baptist Church of Branford
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