Spaceship Church

If you haven't heard by now, let me enlighten you. Back in 1978, NASA launched the ISEE-3 Spacecraft, which was successfully sent on several missions before finally being given a shutdown signal in 1997. To the amazement of many, 17 years later in the present, engineers have discovered that the spacecraft never actually shutdown.

The spacecraft still has plenty of fuel to be sent on another mission. All onboard systems seem to be working fine and its orbit around the Sun has brought it within range to potentially orbit Earth, be sent on another mission, or even be captured and brought back home. -- On the other hand, this also means that scientists are not sure yet that ISEE-3 won't also crash into the Moon. --

However, the equipment used to communicate with the spacecraft is obsolete. NASA doesn't have that 80's technology anymore and they don't feel its worth the investment to piece it together again. It follows that the commands and protocols used by the spacecraft is knowledge that has also been lost to time.

With NASA unwilling to continue the project with this currently viable spacecraft, a team of scientists and engineers have spent the past two month assembling the technology to communicate with and take command of ISEE-3. 

This news and its progression has filled me for the past month with excitement that borders on euphoric. (If you too want to follow their progress, bookmark this. I'll confess I check it far too frequently to be healthy). It's really hard for me to not dance across the room everytime contact is made with this beautiful old machine, flying through space towards home. Something in me deeply resonates and celebrates with this machine, despite it being retired before I was out of diapers.

Through this whole thing I've sensed something familiar about this situation. As if it bears resemblance to another body I love dearly and dance when it also successfully engages with the world. I think today I finally figured it out. The church is no different from this forgotten spacecraft.

The church is also long lost in the mind of society. Our changing culture and society's regard towards church should have been our shutdown signal all those years ago. Maybe it would have been best to shutdown and let the church die as it fell away from popular favor. Maybe not. Either way, the church did not shut down. And as we hurtle through a formless void, unable to see ahead and unsure of where we are headed, there's no little anxiety in the midst of that. This anxiety permeates into every church meeting I've ever been to, without exception: a deep concern that we might not be here in 5 years.

Our liturgy and tradition is a language all to itself. A language that the world forgot long ago, much like the commands needed to control the ISEE-3. The church was a more integral piece of society back when ISEE-3 was launched, and our shutdown signals both came several years ago. We've both been flying blind, but surviving, since.

I do find hope in the ISEE-3 Reboot Team, as they have been called, that even an old and obsolete spacecraft can still find relevance to people in the modern day. There's nothing wrong with the spacecraft, and I don't think that there is much wrong with the church. Our common problem is that nobody knows how to engage with us. It doesn't matter whose fault this is, only that we work to fix it now. Before we too crash into a celestial object. We must seek to translate our life and vitality in a way that makes sense to the rest of the world.

I want to close with a passage of a sermon spoken recently by my Interim Priest, Rev. Joseph Hickey-Tiernan:

"With any tradition, the most important generation is always the present one. If the present generation merely mouths the words of the past and goes through the motions of the past, the tradition dies with them.

If they bring it into their life, as their life is in the present: new challenges, new engagements, new people, and they are able to translate it in a way that makes sense for that generation, they are worthy of handing it on to the next generation."

Robert