Advent 2 - Isaiah 11:1-10 Well, look who’s crashing the Christmas pageant again! Just as our 4th and 5th graders here at St. Paul’s are getting ready for next week’s Christmas pageant -- with rosy-cheeked Mary and fresh-faced shepherds and gently baa-ing lambs and feathered angels, we get grumpy John the Baptist sporting camel fur and eating locusts. You can almost smell the fumes coming from this man who has been living in the wilderness too long. There’s no escaping John the Baptist in the season of Advent, and every year it feels funny to me that he’s the one helping us get ready for Christmas. He was born only a handful of months before Jesus. This part of the story, with him screeching out “You brood of vipers!” won’t come for another 30 years after the nativity story. Couldn’t we stretch out the lovely stories of the angel coming to Mary and Joseph’s dream that told them of the impending birth instead of this grumpy prophet? Or maybe we c...