In the movie Conan the Barbarian, there is a scene, one of my favorites, where Conan and his cohorts are captured by the royal guard and dragged before the king. They’ve been caught. They had just robbed the evil temple of Set and they’ve been caught. The king looks at the three thieves and rails, “How dare you! What insolence this is. What daring!” And then he stands up, tips his head, and says “I salute you. Only you have stood up to them. And what are you? Thieves!” Nothing more than thieves. And it is from there that Conan goes on to become more than a mere thief, but becomes a hero.

Popular fiction is replete with stories like this. Stories that remind us that many of the great heroes whose stories excite and entertain us begin with the hero anything but heroic. They often begin as something very mundane, or even something a bit sinister. Conan is a thief. Luke Skywalker was a farm boy. Harry Potter was an abused and neglected orphan. And these stories are not limited to fiction alone. They are commonplace throughout history also. Martin Luther was a monk scared of his own shadow half the time. Thomas Jefferson was a slave-owner. Even the Bible is full of such characters. David, the shepherd who became king. Peter, the fisherman who became the foremost of the early Christians. Moses, the stuttering murderer who leads his people to freedom.

Heroes are not born. They are made. That is the lesson of all these stories.

But part and parcel of that lesson is the simple fact that heroes are more than they appear. And too often we remember the great tales of their deeds, and forget their humble and/or less-than-noble origins. We assume there is something about them that puts such people on a higher level than most of us, and never remember that they began as people just like us.

The hero of today’s story, that is to say the hero of our Gospel lesson, has not lost sight of who he truly is and where he began. John the Baptist is a nobody and he knows it. But he is a nobody who has been given a specific task by God and he’s not going to let being a nobody stop him from doing it. Still the people he encounters are clearly convinced that he must be something special because of what he’s doing.

“Are you the Messiah?” They keep asking him. A weaker man might have given into the temptation to say yes, but again John never loses sight of who he truly is. “No, not me. He’s coming, but it’s not me.”

When they press him, he responds with that now-famous saying, “I am not even worthy enough to untie the thong of his sandals. That’s how much greater than I is the Messiah.”

“I am not worthy.” It seems such a strange thing for one of the great heroes of the Bible to say such a thing about themselves. “I am not worthy.” We may be tempted to say to John that he doesn’t give himself enough credit. He is, after all, the voice of one crying out in the wilderness. He is the one who made the world ready for the coming of Jesus. He is the one who baptized Jesus in the River Jordan. He is the one who stood up to the depravities of King Herod and as a result got his head chopped off and put on a platter for all to see.

These don’t sound like the qualities of an ordinary man. But that is exactly what John is. He is an ordinary man and he never loses sight of that. He knows who he is.

Ah, but Pastor, aren’t you forgetting the story of his birth? His parents are aged, unable to have children, and yet they were blessed with a miracle. Yes, that is true. But is not the birth of every child a miracle in a way? And this is some twenty five to thirty years later. A lot can happen in that time. Somehow I doubt that John thinks much about the circumstances that surround his amazing birth. He thinks more about how he grew up, the people he knew, the places he hung out, the schools he attended. I suspect strongly that if he compared those things to other men and women his age, he found very little different. He is an ordinary man and his extraordinary birth is largely irrelevant.

I am not worthy, and yet there he is, proclaiming the coming of the Messiah, baptizing people into repentance for their sins and faults. Doing amazing things, and yet he is just like us. Ordinary.

The reverse however is also true. Not only is he us. But we are him.

John is ordinary, but that does not stop him from answering God’s call to be that voice in the wilderness. That is what makes him remarkable. He knows who he is, but he also knows that God has called him to be that voice. Why? I’m sure John wrestled with that question from time to time, but his questioning never silences his voice. Prepare the way of the Lord.

We too are called by God to the task of proclaiming his coming, of proclaiming his peace, of proclaiming his mercy, of proclaiming his salvation. We’re ordinary. We’ve all got some skeletons in our closet that we don’t want anyone to know about. But guess what? God is still calling us. God is calling us to be his heroes in this day and time, to be more than we appear.

Heroes are not born. They are made. God wishes to make of us new heroes, heroes who will proclaim his salvation in word and deed to this world in this time. We have no more than John did to do this task, and yet look at him. Look at what he accomplished, ordinary as he was. When God calls, he makes the ordinary extraordinary. And he makes heroes of the mundane and the scandalous. Let him transform you. Prepare the way of the Lord. Amen.