The other day I received a very flattering and enticing letter, offering me what was called a “highly valued” membership in a very select group. Let me share with you a part of that letter.

Dear Dr. Dunnam:

I believe you’ve earned this privilege. You’ve worked hard and have been recognized for your efforts. Now it’s time for you to carry the card that symbolizes your achievements - the Gold Card.

Only a select group of people will ever carry the Gold Card. So it instantly identifies you as someone special - one who expects an added measure of courtesy and personal attention.

The letter went on for three pages, and then it closed with this paragraph:

“The Gold Card says more about you than anything you can buy with it. It says you’re an achiever. I think it’s time you join the select group that carries it.”

The letter was addressed to me personally. It was right there in the greeting: “Dear Dr. Dunnam.” I also know, though I didn’t want to think about it, that American Express by the computer sent that personal letter to a few others, maybe a million others. But it was personal - it had my name on it.

And what an appeal - the Gold Card would instantly identify me as someone special. I was living with the Gospel of Mark when this letter came - in fact had been trying to listen to John the Baptist. I could see him in his camel’s hair clothes, about to eat his daily ration of locusts and wild honey, and I could hear him laugh at me - one of those mocking laughs that make you a little angry, but causes you to check the signals you’re receiving and the response you are making.

I’ll bet American Express would be surprised if they knew that they were robbed of $65 and another member to carry their Gold Card by that wild prophet, the forerunner of Jesus, John the Baptist. But they were.

This morning, let’s look at this wild man. That’s what some would have called him, and we would probably have seen him that way. Certainly if he appeared today, we would think of him as wild.

Let’s look at this wild man who has so much wisdom.

I want us to look at him first as a parable - a parable for our lives; then I want to look at him as a prophet.

I.

First, as a parable, because I believe that in his very person, John the Baptist is a parable, a story incarnated to teach us. Listen to him in verse 7 of our text: “After me comes one who is mightier than I, the thongs of whose sandals I am not worthy to slow down and listen.”

That’s the reason that I began with the letter from American Express. The Parable of John the Baptist addresses the problem of position and status with which we are always struggling, the whole matter of success, and what success means. How we keep our ambitions in perspective.

Most of us find it difficult to identify with this ancient figure. He cuts directly across the grain of self-interest and the glamour of being Number One that continues to plague us. Think of it. If you were asked to choose the dominant symbol for our generation, what would it be? A flag, a cross, a missile, a television antenna, a dollar sign, a test tube, an oil barrel, a bloated belly, a hand gun, an automobile, a peace symbol? I join David McKenna in suggesting that the dominant symbol of our generation is a forefinger pointed into the air and accompanied by the chant, “We’re Number One.” The symbol, of course, comes from the world of sports, where winning has come dangerously close to being everything.

I’ve told some of you my story about the football game between Alabama and Notre Dame a couple of weeks ago.

“We’re number one.” – That’s the signal.

The lifted finger is seen in the stadium, but if we look we see it clearly. We lift that finger in the cars we drive, the clothes we wear, the zip code of our residential address, and by thousand other subtle and glaring signals we send to the world telling them who we are.

Many of you know the name Michael Korda. He’s a very popular writer of books on how to be a success.

People are so desperate to succeed, or at least to find an easy way to success, that they buy his books by the thousands. And in his books, they find advice like this: “Appearances are everything.” So he advises you about what clothes to wear. He recommends using your glasses for rhetorical flourish. If you don’t wear glasses, buy some clear lens ones, he counsels, in order that you can use them. Pay attention to telephones - that’s important too; the right kind, the right color, but the most important part of the telephone is the “hold” button. The more people you can keep on hold, the more successful you will appear. He even has a diagram in one of his books on where to sit at an office staff meeting. If the meeting is held in the boss’s office with chairs arranged around the desk, you can assume that the boss is going to sit at his own desk. So get there early to secure a straight chair, and put it next to the desk. That’s the position of power. And if you’re sitting there, you will have the appearance of having power. Make sure though, it’s a straight chair. Never sit in a soft chair or on a sofa. That’s makes you lower than other people. Always pick a straight chair, and remember what mother told you “Sit up straight.”

Now that advice about where to sit is very interesting. Get there early, pick the seat of prominence, and sit up straight in order to be recognized. That’s precisely contradictor to what Jesus advised us. You remember his word about how to act when you are invited by someone to a marriage feast, or to a staff meeting? Don’t clamor to find the place of honor. Rather, take a back seat, set in the lowest place. Then if you’re invited to sit some place else, it will be an honor received, not a position you’ve hogged for yourself.

John the Baptist challenged Korda.

Get the perspective. So great was John the Baptist, so powerful in his preaching and teaching, people began to think of him as the Messiah? What a parable for us! John’s head was not turned an inch, even for an instant. No temptation to cash in on his popularity. He knew who he was in relation to Jesus. Mark that down. He knew who he was in relation to Jesus.

I want to draw out one big practical truth that has to do with success.

Success is not a dirty word. I want you to hear that clearly. Success is not a dirty word. But, also, hear this clearly: Success, fueled by blind ambition, ruins as many lives as any thing else I know.

John the Baptist teaches us about taking our rightful place in relation to Jesus, and Jesus teaches us that there are some things that must not be sacrificed to success.

“Contrary to some preaching you hear nowadays, Jesus did not come to show us how to be successful, being a Christian does not guarantee that you’re going to be a success in this life. Jesus said there are times in this life when you may have to choose between being a Christian and being successful…

And maybe that’s the word many of us need to hear. We know how to be successful – but what about those occasions that may come when we have to choose between being a Christian and being successful?

Some years ago, Jim Murray wrote an article about the Special Olympics. He wrote, “You learn very quickly what is special about the Special Olympics. Nobody was trying to win. He wrote. “Every athlete performed as if he alone were on the track. They ran with a kind of beatific joy. And there were no tears from losers because there were no losers.”

Then Murray told some beautiful stories of individual efforts - children, for instance, who lost a 300-yard race by 200 yards, but who were cheered all the way along by their friends standing alongside the track. And when they got to the end of the race, they collapsed into the arms of their competitors who congratulated them, cheered for them. And there was the story of the time that a winning runner knew that a companion had fallen and so he turned around and picked him up, and they ran the rest of the race together, “You see that?” Murray wrote. “And your mind flashes back to an auto race where a driver sped past a burning car that had his brother in it, and you ask yourself, “Who is retarded?” And he told of a boy who ran on crutches and a girl who long-jumped on an artificial leg, and a blind boy who followed the voice of his coach around the track, and a basketball game in which there was not one intentional foul.

He closed the article with these words. “Matched on that yardstick, the athletes in the real Olympics will be an inferior lot. It is no trick to win the long jump when you’ve got two legs and neither one is metal. It’s no achievement to win a mile when you can see which way to go. It is no honor to win the 440 when a fellow athlete stumbles and falls and you don’t stop to pick him up.”

Listen friends, there is nothing wrong with ambition, but if it blinds you to someone who has fallen, or to one who is on the road who is suffering, then there is something wrong with it.

John the Baptist is a parable for us – He teaches us about success and ambition because he shows us our clear place in relation to Jesus: “One is coming after me those sandals thongs. I’m not worthy to until.”

Remember this – If we are clear about our place in relation to Jesus, the chances are we will stay clear about our place in relation to others.

II.

That’s John the Baptist as a parable. Let’s look at him now as a prophet. Look at verses 2 and 3:

As it is written in Isaiah the prophet, Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, who shall prepare thy way; the voice of one crying in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, “make his paths straight.”

Mark is telling us that John the Baptist is this prophet about whom Isaiah wrote, the “one who prepares the way of the Lord.

So, John is a prophet. Don’t forget that. Somewhere we got the idea that prophets are concerned only with the future. We use the word that way in English. We think a prophet is somebody who predicts what is going to happen in the future, and that’s partly right. But that’s the part of the prophet that we think is O.K. We don’t mind that. What is hard to take about prophets is what they say about the present (Mark Trotter “Directions to Bethlehem”)

John reveals in his Gospel that when Jesus came to be baptized, John the Baptist looked at him and said “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” And when you see him, there’s only one thing to do – repent.

We resist repentance because we think a call to repentance is bad news. But the gospel is not about bad news - it’s about good news. It’s not about slavery; it’s about freedom. It’s not about doors closing for you in this life - it’s about doors opening for you in this life. It’s not about some destiny that has you in its grip - it’s about the possibilities that are always there - that is, always there if we will behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world and repent.

Let me illustrate, Ruth Gordon had a tough time getting started as an actress. Her parents were a liability to her, and she was something less than glamorous, which is considered a liability in the theater. Her early training was a discouragement. She was told at the end of her junior year at the School of Dramatic Arts that she shouldn’t continue because she had no acting talent. She ignored all that. She ignored all that had gone on in the past, and went on to become one of this century’s great actresses. In her autobiography she gives this advice to other people: “Never face the facts unless you’re prepared to forget them.” (Mark Trotter, “No more Sour Grapes”)

I like that. I like that because I think that’s what John the Baptist is saying to us: Face the facts, but be prepared to forget them, because here comes the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.

Prophets are always reminding us to practice what we preach - they remind us of what we know but don’t want to be reminded of. They never seem to say the right thing, because it presses in upon us, and calls us to decision, to commitment, even to judgment, and the prophets always pay the consequences for their preaching. John the Baptist was no exception. He paid with his head on a platter to a seductive woman.

You know what happened when Jesus heard about John? You know what he said? “There’s no man born of woman greater than John.”

Later, Jesus makes room for those who are with him to follow John’s example, and become second to the person of power of Jesus Christ: “But he who is least in the Kingdom of God is greater than he.” (Luke 7: 28)

So that brings us back where we began. John said, “After he comes me who is mightier than I, the thongs of whose sandals I’m not worthy to stoop down and untie. I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”

So that’s John the Baptist

As parable – showing us our proper place in relation to Jesus, so that we may show our place in relation to others.

As prophet – calling us to repentance became here come Jesus…the Lamb of God who takes away the since of the world.