John 10:1-10
Very truly, I tell you, anyone who does not enter the sheepfold by the gate but climbs in by another way is a thief and a bandit. The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice. They will not follow a stranger, but they will run from him because they do not know the voice of strangers.”
Jesus used this figure of speech with them, but they did not understand what he was saying to them.
So again Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. All who came before me are thieves and bandits; but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”
I am a little late to the party, but this past week, I have been intrigued by the Artemis 2 space mission that launched at the beginning of the month. Because the trip coincided with Holy Week, I didn’t have much time to take it in as it was happening. Now with Jesus thoroughly out of the grave, I have been mesmerized by the mission and the moments captured by the crew aboard Integrity, their aptly named spacecraft, which carried some of the kindest, well qualified, yet humble overachievers we could find.
Of the many remarkable moments, a few struck me most.
The first was just the tightness of the crew, in more ways than one. In all of the photos and videos the crew seems to genuinely care not only about the mission they are on, but for each other too.
When asked what it means to be a crew back on earth Christina Koch, one of the mission specialists said, a crew is “a group that is in it all the time, no matter what. That sacrifices silently for each other, gives grace, has the same cares and the same needs, and is inescapably, beautifully, dutifully linked. Planet Earth: You are a crew,”
What a hopeful, aspirational description for a place that acts the opposite most of the time.
But it’s a good thing the crew on Integrity got along so well, because look at how tight those quarters are! For nearly two weeks, those four grown adults were in 316 cubic feet of shared space,
which is like being confined to the interior of two mini vans.
I mean look at the size of the bathroom!
Speaking of the bathroom…there was a small problem with the toilet, which is really no small problem at all. As I understand it, which isn’t well, the vent that pushes all their fluid out into space had frozen. That meant they’d have to use bags for all their toileting needs, which sounds difficult in space. So to fix this they rotated their craft so that the vents faced toward instead of away from the sun. And it worked!
What a wonderfully human problem and need to see people work together and overcome.
These kind of moments led to the contagious moonjoy many talked about, this awe at the moon and those who approached it.
The second is this photo. It’s a picture of earth setting behind the moon’s crated filled surface.
This was the first public photo of Artemis II crew’s trip to the dark side of the moon. We’ve seen sunsets, sunrises, and in 1968 we saw earthrise for the first time with pictures from Apollo 8. But never before had we seen all the earth setting, as if we, the whole world, were off to bed at the end of a collective day.
Describing that moment the best he could, Reid Weisman said:
“No matter how long we look at this, our brains are not processing this image in front of us. It is absolutely spectacular, surreal. I know there’s no adjectives. I’m going to need to invent some new ones to describe what we are looking at out this window.”
And finally, minutes later from that photo, the crew lost all signal with earth for forty minutes, becoming the first crew to ever travel that far around the moon and that far away from the earth. Once they came back in contact, Christina Koch had this to say to all of us: Click here to watch.
We will always choose earth. We will always choose each other. What a beautiful, much needed message to everyone.
Such a statement might be the result of the overview effect. It’s the profound mental shift that many astronauts report having experienced after seeing Earth from a distance. It is an awe experienced from space.
Awe is that moment when something is so vast, so beautiful, so beyond you, that it rearranges how you see everything else. And whether in space or on earth, all experiences of awe encourage attitudes of compassion, generosity, and selflessness. That’s according to leading researcher Dacher Keltner, whose book we’ve read here. Those four astronauts had an overwhelming experience of awe and it shows in statements like: “We will all always choose each other.”
It was awe that led the early church to live the way described in our story from Acts. After the resurrection, they experienced awe from the signs and wonders being done by the apostles who were filled with the Holy Spirit. They heard the good news proclaimed by Peter about Jesus who was crucified and killed, but whom God raised up, freeing him from death, and giving everyone forgiveness of sins in his name.
All of this drove them toward not just an attitude of generosity, compassion, and selflessness, but action that encompassed all of that. As Luke tells it, these early disciples lived together and shared all they had. If anyone was in need, they would sell what they had to meet that need. They were committed to doing life together: learning, eating, praying, and playing together. In the words of Christina Koch, they were a crew, “a group that was in it all the time, that gave grace, and had the same cares and the same needs, which was the people beside them.
They were inescapably, beautifully, dutifully linked, choosing each other, in the most Christ- like way.
Now it would be easy to say that this is the goal of the church and of this church, to live like the picture given to us of the first disciples. But if that’s the goal, we’ve already missed it. If all I did this morning was tell all of us to live together, eat all our meals together, come to church everyday, sell our possessions: One, no one would do it. And two, it would just set us up for failure.
All of our striving would only show how short we fall, and become a form of works righteousness,
believing that what we do will make Jesus love us more or bring about our own forgiveness and salvation.
Instead, the exhortation or hope is that you experience awe – not only from artemis 2 and all the moonjoy they brought, but awe at our God who became human, lived, walked, and suffered among us. Awe at a savior who as Peter says in his letter, bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that, free from sins, we are free to live the right way.
When we are in awe of our savior, something shifts. We start to see each other differently. We start to live differently.
My prayer for us as individuals and as a church, is that we do not seek to live as the early disciples.
If that’s our aim, we will only disappoint ourselves and each other. Instead, I hope, I pray you experience awe. And if you are wondering how or where to experience that: Go to a concert, take a walk with a three year old (I’ll loan you mine), visit with a centenarian, stare at a rainbow, listen to mozart, look at great art, read the words of Tolstoy or Toni Morrison. Watch the light cascade over a lake at sunset, feel the warmth of the sun at its rising.
Be in awe at a crew of four humans who traveled the furthest distance of any human ever before, only to reemerge and say we must choose each other.
Most of all be in awe of a savior who chose to go to a cross and rise out of a tomb for you
and still chooses each and every day to forgive your sins and give you grace.
When we are in awe of that, we too will be more generous, more compassionate, more selfless to our neighbors.
We too will choose each other.
Amen.
