A Foolish Proposition - Audio
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OK, if you look at the front of your bulletins, we're going to be in 1 Corinthians 1825 today. So if you could please open there and then stand up. That's page 1152. We had a little bit of a mix up there. When the ushers pass out the notes sheets, you'll see the places that will be in Scripture today. So February 2002, I was at school at Davidson College. I had a car that year. My dad's in 1992, a drop top Mustang. I drove it across the country and I had a car in North Carolina. So I took advantage of that. Whenever I had an opportunity, I would try and visit other friends who were up and down the Eastern Seaboard. And in February of 2002, what is it, President's Day weekend? Is that in February? For President's Day, I went up to Maryland to visit my friend Dan, who many of you may remember, he was our guitarist for a long time, here. Dan was at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, and we were hanging out for the weekend. We decided to see a movie. Yourselves may have seen this movie, "Black Hawk Down," have you seen this film? It's a pretty intense movie. Well it was 2002. You remember, that was just a few months, really, after September 11th. It was a strange time. It was a very strange time for a country. It was a strange time for me, especially, because my generation, for those of you who know, we have a really hard time being serious, right? We have a very hard time being, what, genuine, sincere. Our generation is just dipped, soaked in irony, and in cynicism. And as you've sort of put up with me as I've been growing up in this church, you've known how cutting, how edgy I can be, right, where I just -- oh, I'll just laugh at anything. It doesn't matter what it's like, I can just shrug it off and ha ha ha, and that's silly, and I'm cooler than that, right? This September 11th was a big shock for my generation, because it was the kind of thing that nobody could laugh at. It was the kind of thing that was so intense, so serious, that it generated within a lot of the people in my generation, something we weren't familiar with. It was a kind of sincerity, a kind of genuineness, a kind of well of, what, of just real sympathy empathy, feeling for our country. Well, that February we saw Black Hawk Down. If you don't know the movie, it takes place, it's based on the book Black Hawk Down, which was written following Mogadishu in Somalia in the early '90s, '93, I think, when the United States sent soldiers into Mogadishu to try and prevent -- or try to help keep the peace and feed the people in the midst of a civil war. And for one day, really, a mission goes badly, and a small squad of soldiers is caught in the middle of the city, surrounded by gangsters and thugs, under fire, and they're wounded, they're injured, and because it's nighttime, they're left behind and they can't get out. They're running low on ammunition, some of their men are injured, and at one point one of the men who's injured believes that he dies while they're hunkered down, waiting for rescue.
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Pastor Tom reflects on the incomprehensible wisdom of God with respect to Christ's atoning death on the cross. Or to quote Pastor Tom: "When you think you have God figured out, He'll come up with a crazy way to blow your mind."