Prepare the Way

It's the Monday after Thanksgiving and I am exhausted.  I am exhausted by all the festivities of the weekend.  In order to give thanks for life's blessings, I have engaged in the sin of gluttony on a rather epic scale.  Because I'm so grateful for family, we had a houseful of them for several days, which was a happy thing, but draining nonetheless.  By the time church was done yesterday afternoon, all I could do was passively absorb several football games and drag myself (and my family) out for Mexican food.  But by somewhat cruel happenstance, Advent is upon me, which means, in the life of an introverted pastor, more dinners and parties and "extra" church stuff.
Quite frankly, I'm rather wishing it was Lent instead (yeah, I really just said that, that proves how tired I am).
Thankfully, when I opened up my Bible this morning to read the lectionary passages for this week, I found John the Baptist.  I love me some JBap.  Truth be told, he's the guy I want to be when the Presbyterian side of me wears a little thin.  I want to be the wild man in the wilderness, making a ruckus that brings folks from far and wide.  It's John the Baptist, harbinger of doom, crazy guy in the wildlands, who really sparks my imagination of what I would like to be as a preacher.  But I know that he wasn't the main attraction, and I know that there's not much of a future in that sort of adventure.
But for a minute he's the thing.  He challenges the hypocrites, he baptizes people and he is a beautiful messenger of God, a prophet, the last of his kind.  I think it would have been really easy for him to get a little to full of himself.  When you look around the world of the church you see the danger inherent in preaching a powerful message, you become a brand, not Jesus, you.  The scripture mentions those who came to consider themselves John's disciples and it doesn't take too much imagination to guess that maybe there were moments when the Jesus camp and the John camp butted heads, because their methods were rather different.  John emphasized the "Repent" part of the phrase.  Jesus emphasized "the kingdom of God is at hand."  But it the message was remarkably consistent for two distant cousins who only seem to meet once.
What I think I really need to identify with in John is the fact that he knows his place in the whole story.  Despite the success and the crowds, he understands that he's not the one, his wildness is something that simultaneously attracts attention and keeps people at arm's length.  He understands that he can be what he is called to be because another is coming.  He can emphasize one half of the equation because another is coming to solve it.  He can build a highway of diamonds, clear and shining and straight, because another is going to walk down it towards the cross.
I think I really love John, because he gives the preacher in me a kick in my circumspection.  He challenges the balanced, think everything through four times, Presbyterian in me a vision of holy wildness.  He speaks to the part of me that wants to leave my comfortable suburban home and walk the Appalachian trail and the Camino de Santiago.  He cries in the wilderness and points out all the excesses and the sins, which are after all, painfully obvious.  But he's not the destination, he's not even the road, he's a signpost, and he points clearly, powerfully and certainly to the one who is coming.
No wonder I love him, he's what I want to be, he's what I should be.  I want and I need to remember that I'm not Jesus, but I'm pointing to him, I'm proclaiming him, I'm preparing the way.
And now I don't feel so tired anymore.