Literally the most unearthly Bible reading ever was given today in 1968. Circling the Moon, the three American astronauts of the spacecraft Apollo 8, Frank Borman, James Lovell and William Anders, the first people ever to travel to the Moon, read out on live TV the opening verses of the Genesis creation story from the King James Bible. In the broadcast, which was seen by an estimated 1 billion people, the voices of the astronauts were heard as the cratered surface of the Moon passed by the spacecraft window. Borman, Lovell and Anders were also the first humans to see the Earth rising above the Moon’s horizon (above).
Today is Christmas Day in most churches around the world. Back in the 4th century, the early Church picked 25th December as the date to celebrate Jesus’ birth, because that date was already in the Roman calendar as the winter solstice. It made theological and poetic sense that Jesus came as a light in the darkness, as the year was reborn and the days grew longer. The first recorded celebration of natus Christus (‘the birth of Christ’) took place in the year 336, according to an ancient Roman calendar known as the Chronograph of 354.
The Church of England clergyman, Francis Kilvert, who wrote a lyrical diary of his life as a curate in the villages of Radnorshire in Victorian times, had a cold start to Christmas morning in 1870:
‘As I lay awake praying in the early morning I thought I heard a sound of distant bells. It was an intense frost. I lay down in my bath upon a sheet of thick ice which broke in the middle into large pieces whilst sharp points and jagged edges stuck all round the sides of the tub like chevaux de frise, not particularly comforting to the naked thighs and loins, for the keen ice cut like broken glass… The morning was most brilliant. Walked to the Sunday School with Gibbins and the road sparkled with millions of rainbows, the seven colours gleaming in every glittering point of hoar frost.’ Francis Kilvert, Christmas Day 1870
On Christmas Day of 1622, Bishop Lancelot Andrewes preached in Whitehall before King James I of England on the coming of the magi to the birth of Christ. In 1927, the poet TS Eliot adapted the closing section of Andrewes’s sermon for the opening lines of his poem, ‘Journey of the Magi’. And thus King James I heard part of a TS Eliot poem 300 years before it was written.
‘Last we consider the time of their coming, the season of the year. It was no summer progress. A cold coming they had of it at this time of the year, just the worst time of the year to take a journey, and specially a long journey in. The ways deep, the weather sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off, in solstitio brumali, “the very dead of winter”… And these difficulties they overcame, of a wearisome, irksome, troublesome, dangerous, unseasonable journey; and for all this they came.’ Lancelot Andrewes, sermon on Christmas Day 1622
Christmas Day is a good day for kings. In the year 800, Charlemagne was crowned the first Holy Roman Emperor by a grateful Pope Leo III, who had almost been torn to bits by a Roman mob until he was rescued by Charlemagne’s envoys. The Danish invader Sweyn Forkbeard was proclaimed King of England on Christmas Day 1013, and in 1066, another conqueror, William I, was crowned at Christmas in Westminster Abbey. And on Christmas Day 1100, Baldwin I was crowned King of Jerusalem in Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity.
Happy Christmas.
Image: NASA