To my teenage eyes, the history professor was a short, fat, unkempt man with an oily combover and a stained tie who smoked filthy cigarettes during class. (These were the days when teachers were not allowed to smoke in class because janitors didn't like the cleanup, rather than out of any particular health concern.) Dr. B’s personal lack-of-style, along with his harsh grading, made him unpopular among the mostly female students scrambling for social status among their peers. His course was required, and I couldn’t afford to be snobby.
Dr. B was a loner, or appeared to be. I once saw him talking to another teacher, I think, but it might have been someone else. Some lost townie trying to make his way home, maybe.
By the end of that first semester I was hooked. He was always prepared, clearly knew his stuff, and could tie history to literature to art to movies to language, as well as redeem any convoluted and naive observation I babbled aloud.
I took three courses from him though the first was enough for graduation.
The last course I took from him probably saved my life.
At the end of my junior year I had decided to drop out of college. For months I had been repeatedly and publicly abused by a powerful faculty member who was jockeying for control of my major department. I was exhausted and broken and deeply ashamed, and couldn’t imagine surviving another round. Showing up at Dr. B’s office on the first day of what would have been my senior year, I begged him to sign the paper that would set me free from my obligations if not my demons.
I don’t remember what he said. But he saw me, and listened, and got me to believe that giving up would simply prove “them” right. I enrolled in everything I had to take to finish, plus one more from him. He turned me around, literally and academically, acting as light until I could see it by myself.
Looking back, I realize God had called him to his work, and had guided me to his care.
I can't read the beginning of Luke 3 without thinking of that teacher. Luke lists powerful and oh-so-appropriate rulers—tetrarchs and governors and high priests—and then Luke has this guy named John wander out of the desert into the very same verse as this ruler and that one. Turns out John is the son of a priest of some stature, but a wild man. Other writers describe him as wearing camel’s hair, which was as weird then as it sounds now, and munching on locusts and honey, so that’s how I see him when he shows up within syllables of the Roman powerhouse Pontius Pilate.
John's been told by God to call people to “repentance,” a fancy way of saying “to turn back toward God.” So John stumbles into town out of the wilderness and does what he's been called by God to do. While we don’t know how many people John taught and saved through baptism, we do know of at least one, Jesus, and that one is enough.
The way he writes it, Luke makes clear that John could have stayed within the priestly class, doing what his father did, with status and nice long robes. Instead, John has gone into the desert to fast and pray and learn, tilling the soil of his soul and listening for God’s whisper. When he hears God’s word, he’s prepared to do what God tells him, and does it.
Not every weird-looking guy is John the Baptizer, and not every unkempt professor is Dr. B. To be the men they were, they had to prepare, to practice, to not only know their stuff but to pay attention when God guided them toward people who needed what they had to give. Doing that takes discipline of mind, body, and spirit, along with the ability to ignore the name-calling and pointing that comes when you aren’t what others expect.
I don’t know whether Dr. B ever got the respect he deserved, or how many people he rescued. But I know of at least one, and that one is enough for me.