Most people my age remember the late 1960s T.V. series The Wild Wild West, starring Robert Conrad and Ross Martin. In the mid-1970s, Conrad did another series, loosely based on a WWII fighter pilot ace by the name of Gregory (“Pappy”) Boyington (1912-1988).
Boyington was one of the finest Marine Corp fighter pilots of his day. His initial exploits were with the infamous Flying Tigers. He later commanded the USMC Squadron 214 — “The Black Sheep Squadron.”
As a fighter ace, “Pappy” Boyington (given that nickname because at 31, he was ten years senior to most of his men) claimed six “victories” with the Tigers and 22 with the USMC, surpassing Eddie Rickenbacker’s record of 26. Boyington was also shot down and survived twenty months as a Japanese POW. For his heroism, he was awarded the Navy Cross and Congressional Medal of Honor.
The T.V. series was very loosely based on Boyington’s memoir of the Black Sheep Squadron. Fact is, many of the guys from Squadron 214 hated the show, claiming it was mostly fiction — and that it overly-glamorized Boyington.
Be that as it may, the T.V. series depicts Boyington taking a group of young misfit pilots, some of whom had no experience, training them into one of the most deadly and feared fighter squadrons in the South Pacific: Squadron 214 — The Black Sheep. That they were deadly and feared is a known fact!
Typical of Boyington and the Black Sheep Squadron, was a daring raid (cited by FDR in Boyington’s Medal of Honor Citation) on October 17, 1943 in which “Pappy” led his 24 fighters in an attack on Kahili, in the Solomon Islands. They circled the field where 60 hostile aircraft were based, taunting the enemy into sending these planes up! In the fierce aerial combat that followed, 20 enemy aircraft were shot down — the Black Sheep returned to their base without a loss!
There is a valid parallel between Col. Boyington and Jesus Christ (maybe only one!) in that Jesus took 12 men, misfits in their own right, and trained them for spiritual combat. We’re here today because they were lethal instruments in the hands of their “CO”, Jesus Christ.
Like “Pappy” Boyington, Jesus had His work cut out for Him! The men He chose were not super-saints! They were common people with common problems. In fact, humanly speaking, they were a defective bunch:
- slow and thick-headed when it came to understanding Jesus’ teaching
- lacking in humility, faith, commitment, and power
In his classic book The Master Plan of Evangelism, Robert Coleman makes this observation: “What is more revealing about these men is that at first they don’t impress us as being key men. None of them occupied prominent places in the Synagogue, nor did any of them belong to the Levitical priesthood. For the most part, they were common laboring men, probably having no professional training beyond the rudiments of knowledge necessary for their vocation. Perhaps a few of them came from families of some considerable means, such as the sons of Zebedee, but none of them could have been considered wealthy. They had no academic degrees in the arts and philosophies of their day.
“Like their Master, their formal education likely consisted of the Synagogue schools. Most of them were raised in the poor section of the country around Galilee. Apparently, the only one of the twelve who came from the more refined region of Judea was Judas Iscariot. By any standard of sophisticated culture then and now they would surely be considered as a rather ragged aggregation of souls. One might wonder how Jesus could ever use them. They were impulsive, temperamental, easily offended, and had all the prejudices of their environment. In short, these men selected by the Lord to be His assistants represented an average cross-section of a lot of society in their day. Not the kind of group one would expect to win the world for Christ.”
Be encouraged — this means there is hope for us!