The Shanksville Redemption

The more I thought about it, the more chilling the drama takes in yesterday's sermon were. They started with a "stewardess" doing the usual welcome aboard and we hope you enjoy your flight, etc. The next scene was the stewardess sweetly announcing breakfast would be served shortly as soon as cruising altitude was reached. Next was the stewardess fearfully confronting misbehaving passengers who needed to return to their seats and then, in words that made my blood run cold, calling out "Stewardess needs assistance." Next was Todd Beamer talking to a police operator on his cell phone describing the hijacking and the thugs committing it. Next was Todd Beamer reciting the Lord's Prayer with the operator and completing the scene with "Let's Roll!" Christians are warriors when confronted by evil. Ask Lisa Beamer if she thinks Todd was a warrior. Call or write a serviceman or servicewoman you know, or better yet - don't know, and read them Psalm 144 or Psalm 68. Or "Patton's Prayer" - Psalm 63. These are words for warriors.

As promised, here's the Flight 93 memoriam that made rounds on the internet not long after 9/11. It's shameless plagiarism of the Gettysburg Address made not far from Shanksville and 137 years earlier, but the words are quite relevant to Flight 93. Perhaps it's time it made another round:

Eleven score and six years ago our forefathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal under God.
Now we are engaged in a great moral war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met here on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of it as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But in a larger sense we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow this ground. The brave men and women, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they have, thus far, so nobly carried on. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom; and that this government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.