Francis Xavier, an Extraordinary Missionary and Saint

The Feast of St. Francis Xavier will be celebrated in Goa, India, this Saturday. That special yearly observance commemorates and honors Xavier and his remarkable Christian missionary activity (see this link). He died 470 years ago, on December 3, 1552.

I have mentioned Xavier several times in my blog posts through the years, the first being on Aug. 15, 2009, my twelfth post on this blog started the previous month. 

Francis Xavier was born in 1506 in what is now northern Spain. When he was 19, he enrolled in Paris University, the world’s premier university at the time.

While a student in Paris, Xavier became friends with Ignatius of Loyola, and he became one of the seven original members of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) started by Ignatius on August 15, 1534.*

Xavier became one of the most famous Jesuits of all time in spite of his early death only eighteen years and a few months after the formation of that new Roman Catholic order. Further, he became one of the most effective Catholic missionaries of all time, even though he served only 10½ years.

Xavier’s missionary work began on May 6, 1542, when after a treacherous sea voyage of several months he disembarked in Goa, the center of Portuguese activity in the East. He worked there with considerable success for about three years.

For the next three years, Xavier engaged in missionary work in what now is the country of Malaysia. It was there that he met Anjirō, a Japanese fugitive, who accompanied him when he returned to Goa.

Xavier was the first Christian missionary to reach Japan. With Anjirō as his interpreter and guide, Xavier left Goa in April 1549, and exactly four months later, on August 15, set foot in Kagoshima at the southernmost part of the Japanese island of Kyushu.

For a little over two years, Xavier engaged in energetic missionary work—and struggled with the Japanese language, which he reportedly called the “Devil’s language,” designed to keep the Gospel out of Japan.

His contact with the Japanese Emperor in Kyoto proved disappointing, but he then had considerable success in what is now Yamaguchi Prefecture at the southern tip of the major island of Honshu. He also enjoyed a measure of success in what are now Nagasaki and Oita Prefectures on Kyushu.

Surprisingly, Xavier didn’t think he was particularly successful in Japan, but he established the work for other Jesuit missionaries there and scholars have estimated that more than 300,000 people in Japan converted to Christianity over the next fifty years.

Xavier is widely known and respected in Japan to this day. I have been to the St. Francis Xavier Memorial Church in Yamaguchi (see here for a picture) and have seen the statue of Xavier in downtown Oita City (pictured below). 

Xavier’s impressive legacy is well worth noting. While still in Japan, Xavier longed to go to mainland China and to evangelize there.

After a short visit back in Goa, in April 1552 Xavier set off for China. In late August, he arrived at Shangchuan Island, less than nine miles from the mainland, but he was not allowed to enter the country that was closed to foreigners. As he waited and waited, he grew ill and then died on Dec. 3.

His remains were taken back to Goa where they are preserved in a silver casket within Bom Jesus Basilica there.

Xavier’s dream of entering China and meeting the Emperor was fulfilled by the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci, who was born less than two months before Xavier died.**

Xavier was canonized 400 years ago, in March 1622, and in 1927 he was named the Roman Catholic patron saint of all missions.

He is justly credited for his idea that missionaries must adapt to the customs and language of the people they evangelize, and for his advocation of an educated native clergy.

Partly because of Xavier’s emphasis on education, the Jesuits founded many universities around the world.

In the U.S., currently there are 29 Jesuit universities, including Xavier University in Cincinnati and Rockhurst University here in Kansas City, where I had the distinct privilege of teaching for 17 semesters from 2006 to 2014.

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* See my Oct. 25, 2013, blog post titled “In Appreciation of Ignatius and the Jesuits.”

** See my blog article about Ricci posted last month on Oct. 10.

Note: While teaching at Rockhurst U., I sometimes showed my classes part of a DVD titled “Xavier: Missionary & Saint.” That 2006 PBS documentary is now available for viewing (here) on YouTube. 

In Praise of Koinonia Farm

On the day after his 100^th birthday anniversary, on 7/30/12 I posted a blog article titled "In Praise of Clarence Jordan.” This article is about Jordan’s Koinonia Farm which is celebrating its 80^th anniversary tomorrow (on 11/26), and I am posting it in deep appreciation for their decades of faithful work. 

Clarence Jordan was a farmer with a Ph.D. in theology. Born in 1912 in the small town of Talbotton, Georgia, about 90 miles south of Atlanta, Jordan graduated with a degree in agriculture at the University of Georgia in 1933. The following year, he was ordained as a Southern Baptist minister.

Then, in 1938 Jordan earned a Ph.D. in Greek New Testament from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kentucky, and four years later he started Koinonia Farm near Americus, Georgia, about 65 miles south of where he was born.

Clarence Jordan sought to be a “demonstration plot” farmer. An article in the December Sojourners magazine is titled “The Radical Southern Farmer White Christians Should Know About.” In that piece, Jordan is cited as saying,

While I love books and have a passion for knowledge, I have thought the real laboratory for learning was not the classroom but in the fields, by farming, and in interaction with human need.

So, the 440-acre Koinonia Farm, named after the Greek word for fellowship and joint participation, was designed to be a “demonstration plot” of the Kingdom of God in the here and now of southern Georgia.

According to the Sojourners article, Jordan conceived of the farm as being

cooperative and communal ... interracial, controlled by investment of time (life), rather than capital; based on the principle of distribution according to need; [and] motivated by Christian love as the most powerful instrument known to [people] for solving [their] problems.

Clarence Jordan has recently been hailed as the preacher of “the inconvenient Gospel.” Just last month a book containing some of Jordan’s writings and sermons was published under the title The Inconvenient Gospel: A Southern Prophet Tackles War, Wealth, Race, and Religion. 

Issued by Plough Publishing House on October 25, I bought a Kindle copy that day and read it before attending (on Zoom) the book launch event sponsored by Plough on Oct. 28.

One of the three panelists on that webinar was Starlette Thomas, a young Black pastor and journalist. Her opening remarks were largely the same as the Introduction that she authored for the book. Starlette’s explanation and praise of Koinonia is also printed in the Autumn 2022 issue of Plough.**

Koinonia Farm has had influence far beyond southern Georgia. In the 1970s not long after Jordan’s death in 1969, Koinonia Farm began to market some of his sermons on long-play vinyl records—and I listened to some of those, with considerable delight, in Japan.

I had heard of Jordan and Koinonia Farm while a seminary student (at Jordan’s alma mater) in the 1960s, but it was after hearing his sermons preached with a captivating southern drawl, that I became a big admirer of Jordan and what he had done in Georgia.

The influence of Jordan and Koinonia Farm expanded beyond Georgia in other, more important ways. Millard Fuller (1935~2009) was a self-made millionaire by age 29, but he gave up his wealth and moved to Koinonia Farm in 1968, where he and his family lived for five years.

Under the name Koinonia Partners, Fuller started Habitat for Humanity in 1976, and in 1984 he enlisted Jimmy Carter as a hands-on supporter—and Jimmy and Rosalynn continued to do volunteer work with Habitat into their 90s. (The Carter home in Plains was about ten miles from Koinonia Farm.)

The number of people currently living at Koinonia Farm (see their website here) is small, but they are valiantly working to keep alive Clarence Jordan’s vision of maintaining a demonstration plot for the Kingdom of God. For that, I remain deeply grateful.

And in reflecting upon Koinonia Farm’s existence for 80 years now, I am challenged to think about how June and I, and our church, can be more intentionally a part of a demonstration plot for God’s Kin-dom.

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** Starlette’s article is titled “The Raceless Gospel,” a concept she constantly emphasizes. She is director of The Raceless Gospel Initiative at Good Faith Ministries and host of the Raceless Gospel podcasts.

Note: In addition to the new book about Jordan issued last month, I highly recommend Dallas M. Lee’s excellent book, The Cotton Patch Evidence: The Story of Clarence Jordan and the Koinonia Farm Experiment (1942–1970), first published in 1971 (3^rd ed., 2011).

The Relevance of Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation

The circumstances of the United States (such as it was) in 1863 and now in 2022 are greatly different, but there is much to learn from President Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation issued then. Consider the relevance of Lincoln’s lasting words written in that momentous year. 

Here in the U.S., this Thursday (Nov. 24) is Thanksgiving Day, and across the country people will be scrambling to be with loved ones for that traditional time for families to be together—and sometimes finding traveling difficult as depicted in the 1987 comedy film Planes, Trains and Automobiles.

The USAmerican Thanksgiving Day “myth” is traced back to 1621, and for decades from the early days of the USA in 1789 on, national thanksgiving days were observed only intermittently.

But on October 3, 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, Pres. Lincoln issued a Thanksgiving Proclamation, calling for November 26 of that year to be a national day of "Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens."

This year, then, marks the 160th year that Thanksgiving Day has been observed annually, and for the last 80 years the official national holiday has been on the fourth Thursday of November.

In recent decades, Thanksgiving Day has become less and less a time for giving thanks to “our beneficent Father” and more and more a time of feasting, arguing with relatives around the dinner table, watching football games, and even shopping for Christmas presents.

Perhaps the time has come to go back to Lincoln’s proclamation and to recover his original intention. The fall of 1863 was certainly not the “best of times” to have a national day of thanksgiving. But in spite of the difficulties the President was looking back with thanksgiving and looking forward in hope.

In January 1863, Lincoln issued the Proclamation Emancipation, changing the legal status of more than 3.5 million enslaved African Americans in the secessionist Confederate states from enslaved to free.

Then, exactly three months before that 1863 Thanksgiving Proclamation, the victorious battle at Gettysburg on July 3 marked the turning point in the Civil War. Thus, in that call to national thanksgiving, the President noted the coming likelihood of a “large increase in freedom.”*

Lincoln’s call for thanksgiving also included an appeal for citizens “to fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and Union.”

In his second inaugural address, delivered seventeen months later on March 4, 1865, Lincoln reiterated his call for thanksgiving with an appeal for magnanimity. That magnificent speech/sermon ended with these words:

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.**

In this month of the U.S. midterm elections, which were held following a long period of militant mud-slinging and rancorous political campaigning, let’s join in the spirit of Lincoln to give thanks that democracy and the common good were largely victorious.

Further, as we celebrate Thanksgiving Day this year, let’s ask our family and friends to join us in going forward “with malice toward none and justice for all,” seeking to do all we can to create a nation, and our own neighborhood, with peace and justice for all. 

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* Lincoln’s outstanding Gettysburg address was delivered on November 19 of that year. I recommend reading Heather Cox Richardson’s last Saturday’s informative “letter” regarding that address (see here).

** On Feb. 28, 2015, I made a blog post titled “Lincoln’s Greatest Speech/Sermon,” which was how I referred to his second inaugural address.

In Grateful Memory of a Theologian Named Rosemary

Not many Christian theologians have been named Rosemary. In fact, not many Christian theologians before this century were women. But Rosemary Radford Ruether was a noted theologian and a leader of feminist liberation theology. She was born on November 2, 1936, and died in May of this year. 

Claremont School of Theology photo

Rosemary Radford was born in Minnesota, the daughter of an Episcopalian father and a Roman Catholic mother. When she was 12, her father died and she moved with her mother to California where she attended Catholic schools.

Rosemary graduated from prestigious Scripps College, a private women’s school in southern California, and then earned M.A. and Ph.D. degrees at Claremont School of Theology, a United Methodist institution.

While still a student at Scripps, she married Herman Ruether in 1957, and eight years later they had three children—and she had her Ph.D. and was authoring a book. During her lifetime, she wrote 36 books and more than 600 scholarly articles and also gave a formidable number of public lectures.

Ruether’s teaching career was spent entirely in Protestant schools: Howard University, Pacific School of Religion, and Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary where she taught the longest. But she was a self-identified Catholic for her whole life.

Rosemary Radford Ruether is best known as a pioneer feminist theologian and an advocate of ecofeminist theology. Her major books are Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology (1983) and Gaia and God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing (1992).

The subtitle of the second chapter of Ruether’s 1983 book is “Male and Female Images of the Divine,” and she concludes with a subsection titled “Toward a Feminist Understanding of God/ess.”

There is strong opposition to any reference to a Goddess in Christianity, since that term is always feminine, but little opposition to the use of Christianity’s use of God, which has overwhelmingly been seen as male, at least until recently. Ruether’s term helped correct that theological error.*

To overcome the powerful and long tradition of envisioning God as male, Ruether uses the Goddess image to emphasize that God is equally female, which is the same as saying that God transcends gender bifurcation.

With regard to her ecofeminism, Ruether was the first to connect publicly the domination of the earth with the oppression of women. In her 1992 book, she sought to “demonstrate the interconnectedness of domination and deceit, the social systems of power over women . . .” (p. 8).

Ruether is also known as a critic of such traditional Roman Catholic stances as birth control, the ordination of women, papal infallibility, and the rejection of liberation theology. In 2008 she published a slim book under the title Catholic Does Not Equal the Vatican: A Vision for Progressive Catholicism.

In that book’s Introduction, she calls for a church that is multicultural, that acknowledges its fallibility, lives by grace, is liberated from sexism, is democratic, and is committed to the poor and the oppressed (see pp. 4~11).

Rosemary Ruether was a liberation theologian and modern prophet. In my university lecture on liberation theology (both in Japan and at Rockhurst U. here in Kansas City), I introduced Gustavo Gutiérrez, James Cone, and Ruether.

Just as Gutiérrez wrote about liberating the poor in South America from economic exploitation and Cone wrote about liberating African Americans from racism, Ruether wrote about liberating women from male domination. All three advocated that liberation on the basis of their Christian faith.

In Four Modern Prophets (1986), author William Ramsay summarizes the work of four modern theologians who epitomized the struggle for freedom and justice. Those four are Walter Rauschenbusch, Martin Luther King, Jr, Gustavo Gutiérrez, and Ruether.**

Ramsay contends that much of Ruether’s theology was an effort to apply the teaching of Jesus “to contemporary concerns, not only sexism but also racism and economic oppression” (p. 87).

When I heard of Ruether’s death back in May, I was saddened that the voice of this prodigious theologian and prophet had been silenced, but I am grateful that she continues to speak through her numerous books and articles.

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* In February 2015, I made a blog post titled “Using Gender-Neutral Language for God.” (Inexplicably, there have been over 3,000 pageviews of that post.)

** I have previously posted blog articles about the first three of these (see especially here, here, and here). I am happy now to be making this post about Ruether.

Election Reflections (Nov. 2022)

The results of Tuesday’s midterm elections in the U.S. are mostly, but not completely, known at this point. I thought about waiting until my Nov. 15 blog post to share my election reflections, but I decided to go ahead and write this on the day after those important November 8 elections. 

Although most of you Thinking Friends and other of my blog readers know which political party I identify with, please know that I write what I do here primarily from the viewpoint of a progressive Christian believer, not as the member of any political party.   

THE MOST ENCOURAGING RESULTS:

** Democracy is surviving. In spite of challenges, it seems that democracy is alive and well in the U.S. Historian Mark K. Updegrove tweeted that Tuesday’s “big winners” include, “Democracy, with huge voter turnout and many high-profile election deniers losing big.”

On Nov. 2, President Biden gave an important speech urging the citizenry to protect democracy. Yesterday, one week later, he gave another speech in which he said that Tuesday had been “a good day for democracy.”

** The Democrats will probably retain control of the Senate. Although we will not know until after the runoff election on Dec. 6 in Georgia, it seems likely that control will remain with the Democrats. This is of great importance for the President, especially for the appointment of judges.

** Two noteworthy results in Pennsylvania. Not only was the election of John Fetterman crucial for the Democrats retaining control of the Senate, the defeat of Doug Mastriano’s bid for the governorship was also a victory for religious freedom and maintaining the separation of church and state.

** Two noteworthy results (maybe) in Arizona. The likely re-election of Sen. Mark Kelly was also crucial for the Democrats, and the probable defeat of Kari Lake for the governorship was also significant as she is one of the most outspoken MAGA Republicans and “darling” of right-wing extremists.

THE MOST DISAPPOINTING RESULTS:

** The Republicans have gained control of the House. Although it may be several days before the final numbers are known, the Republicans now have a small majority in the House.

Why is this disappointing? Among other things, the January 6 Committee will likely be disbanded before completion of its work, legislation to fight global warming will probably lessen greatly, and perhaps there will be impeachment charges against Pres. Biden and Attorney General Garland.

However, the size of the GOP majority is far less than most political pundits expected.

Here are the opposition Party’s House gains in three recent midterm elections: the Dems. gained 31 seats in 2006, the Reps. gained 63 seats in 2010, and the Dems gained 41 seats in 2018. This year the expected “red wave” was more like what one of my friends called a “pink puddle.”

** The defeat of good candidates by questionable opponents. There are many names that might be noted here, but two of those are Mandela Barnes, who lost his bid for the Wisconsin Senate seat, and J.D. Vance, who won the Senate seat in Ohio.

Barnes (b. 1986) narrowly lost to incumbent Ron Johnson, a staunch ally of Donald Trump. Barnes was vying to become the first Black Senator from Wisconsin, but lost by just 1%, perhaps mainly because of the racist attack ads against him (see here).

I was impressed by Vance in the movie Hillbilly Elegy, based on his 2016 memoir. But even though he was originally a critic of Trump, in Oct. 2021 he expressed agreement with Trump’s claim that he lost the 2020 election because of voter fraud. Subsequently, Trump endorsed Vance.

I was also sad that Stacey Abrams lost (for the second time) her bid to become the governor of Georgia. But I am hopeful that she will be instrumental in the re-election of Sen. Warnock in the Dec. runoff as she was in 2020.

Well, there is so much more that could (and maybe should) be said about this week’s midterm elections, but this, in part, is the view from this Seat/seat at this point. How do things look from where you are sitting?

What is and Where is Sacred Space?

Ever since my pastor preached a few weeks ago about sacred space, I have been thinking, off and on, about that topic. Are there certain places that are sacred? Can we come into contact with God (by whatever name God is called) in some places more than others? 

Sacred places/spaces are commonly thought to be religious structures (church buildings, temples, shrines, etc.). Christians are often told that the church building is the “house of God.”

In the Old Testament, Bethel means “house of God.” Jacob dreamed of a ladder leading to heaven, and he named that out-in-the-open space Bethel. It was a sacred space, for he experienced God’s presence there. (See Genesis 28:10~19).

Centuries later under King Solomon, the Temple was built in Jerusalem, and it was deemed the dwelling place of God on earth. Thus, it was considered to be a space more sacred than anywhere else.

In spite of the fact that the first Christians had no church buildings at all, over the past 18 centuries Christians have built increasingly elaborate structures and many, including many church leaders, consider the sanctuary (=sacred space) in those buildings to be where God is met.

When I was a boy, at the beginning of the Sunday morning worship services, the church choir often sang the words of Habakkuk 2:20: “The Lord is in his holy temple . . . let all the earth keep silent before Him.”

Looking back, though, the most sacred spaces/places for me were not in a church building. Sacred spaces for me and many others, such as Jacob, were out in the open not inside a religious structure. For Moses, it was by a burning bush. Indeed, as Elizabeth Barrett Browning sensed,

“Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God.

That seems to be the way it was for Shug in The Color Purple (which I wrote about recently). She asked Celie if she had ever found God in church. “I never did,” Shug said. “Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me. And I think all the other folks did too. They come to church to share God, not find God” (Kindle, p. 192).

The sacred spaces where I have sensed God “speaking” most clearly were where I was by myself, mowing hay on the farm where I grew up, driving alone across Missouri or Kentucky, walking down a street in Japan, etc.

That doesn’t mean that attending worship services in church buildings was valueless. Far from it. Still, my most important experiences of God have not been in some sort of “sacred” building or while engaged in some “sacred” activity with other people.

Those most important experiences have been times of prayer and have been when alone with God. For that reason, I believe that any and every place has the potential of being a sacred space. Thus, as I wrote while listening to my pastor’s sermon,

Where there’s prayer, God is there;
The prayer place is sacred space.

Sacred space is abundant when we practice the presence of God. I certainly can’t claim to have achieved what the 17th-century French monk known as Brother Lawrence called “the practice of the presence of God.” (His brief book by that name was published in 1692, a year after his death.)

Brother Lawrence spent much of his life as a lowly monastic kitchen aide. But he “resolved to make the love of God the end of all his actions.” Such was possible by practicing the presence of God in whatever he was doing.

Wherever we sense the presence of God, as Brother Lawrence did in the kitchen, as Shug did in the fields of purple flowers, as I have done in various places, all are sacred spaces.

Meeting God in any sacred space, though, is never just for the purpose of receiving a blessing from God. After Jacob met God at Bethel, God said to him, “Every family of earth will be blessed because of you . . . .”

God blesses us in sacred spaces so we can become a blessing to others, sharing God’s love.