Greetings from Seinan Gakuin

It is a beautiful May morning as I start this blog article, and I am writing this in Fukuoka, the city in southwest Japan where June and I lived for 36 years. So I send you warm greetings from Japan and from the campus of Seinan Gakuin University.

Having lived here for so long, it really seemed like I was coming home when I arrived back here on May 14. I had warm and nostalgic feelings much like I used to have years ago upon going back to where I grew up in north Missouri after having been in Japan for several years.

June and I last visited back in Fukuoka in 2010, and I am sorry she decided not to come with me this time—especially since we can’t celebrate our 56^th wedding anniversary together tomorrow.

One of the first things that stuck me upon being back in Fukuoka was how little things have changed in the past three years. There used to be so much new construction taking place across the city all the time, but there seemingly has not been much since I was here last and there is not a lot that is visible now. That is, no doubt, largely due to the sluggish economy over the last many years.

On May 15, I attended the Founders Day ceremonies at the school system known as Seinan Gakuin (SG), which started as a small school for junior high school for boys in 1916. Now there are well over 10,000 students from the nursery school through the university that includes a law school.

And there has been, and is, new construction on campus. There is a beautiful new four-story Language Education Center at SGU, and a new administration building is currently being built.

Around 80% of the students at Seinan Gakuin are in the university, and that is where I taught for the 36 years we lived in Fukuoka. But this academic year, which began the first of April, marks the completion of the Seinan Gakuin Elementary School (SGES), which opened with grades one through three in 2010.

From 1996 to 2004 I had the privilege (and the heavy responsibility) of serving as the chancellor of Seinan Gakuin. In that capacity I was the one who proposed and then worked toward the founding of the SGES. It was a thrill to visit it the month after it opened in 2010, and it was a thrill for me again to attend the SGES chapel service this month with more than 400 students, from the first through the sixth grades, present.

I wish you could have heard the grade school students recite the Lord’s Prayer together. I venture to say you have never heard that prayer said as loudly or as clearly as I heard it in that chapel service. And the pupils were so quiet and well-behaved through the remainder of the service that I was much impressed.

Of all I tried to do in Japan through the years, I can’t help but think that perhaps my most significant accomplishment was laying the groundwork for the founding of Seinan Gakuin Elementary School.

Seinan Gakuin Elementary School (on left)

I thank God for the privilege of being able to serve as an educational missionary at Seinan Gakuin from 1968 to 2004 and for the blessing of being here again now and until the end of this merry month of May.

Who Speaks for God?

Yesterday, May 19, was a day of celebration for Protestant and Roman Catholic Christians. It was Pentecost Sunday, a day commemorating the Holy Spirit coming upon the followers of Jesus on the traditional Jewish festival day known as Pentecost.

The events on Pentecost roughly 50 days after the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ brought about what is sometimes called the birthday of the Christian Church. Yesterday I had the privilege of preaching in a local church, talking some about its birth.

The Hirao Baptist Church was started by missionaries Bob and Kay Culpepper in the 1950s. The church’s first meeting place was in the upstairs of the missionary residence where June and I, and our two older children, moved in 1968 after the Culpeppers had moved to another part of the city.

Then in its own building, Hirao became our church home from 1968 until 1980, when we helped start the Fukuoka International Church under the sponsorship of Hirao Church. It was a real joy to have the privilege of preaching there again yesterday—in the fine new facilities built several years ago at the same location as their first building.

Hirao Baptist Church, Fukuoka City, Japan

My text was 1 Corinthians 14:1-5a and my emphasis was upon “prophesying.” 1 Cor. 14:1 says, “Pursue love and strive for the spiritual gifts, and especially that you may prophesy” (NRSV). In Eugene Peterson’s delightful Bible paraphrase known as “The Message,” this verse reads, “Go after a life of love as if your life depended on it—because it does. Give yourselves to the gifts God gives you. Most of all, try to proclaim [God’s] truth.”

One of the main points of my message was that the thrust of that first Christian Pentecost was not the speaking in “tongues.” Rather, it was speaking/proclaiming God’s message. That is what needs to be emphasized now. And speaking/proclaiming God’s message is something that can and should be done by all Christian believers, not just by those who are pastors or missionaries.

Moreover, proclaiming God’s message is something that needs to be done by deeds as well as by words. Of course, for some groups, such as the Quakers and maybe many Mennonites, perhaps the emphasis needs to be on proclaiming God’s message by words as well as by deeds. (Long ago I heard of someone who said to a Quaker, “Why don’t you preach what you practice!”)

But who speaks for God? There are so many different voices all claiming to be speaking for God, how can we tell true “prophets” from false ones? This is no new problem. But it is still a problem, and it is a big problem.

The words of 1 Corinthians 14:3 are helpful here: “. . . the one who proclaims God’s message speaks to people and gives them help, encouragement, and comfort” (TEV). This is not the only guideline for discerning who speaks for God, but it is an important one.

Those who truly speak for God, proclaiming God’s truth, are those who speak words and do deeds that help, encourage, and comfort others—especially those who are hurting: the physically and spiritually needy, the exploited and discriminated against, and (among others) the victims of violence and the ravages of warfare.

Next month I will have the opportunity to speak at the dedication service of a new church building in Cambodia. Please pray that I may truly speak for God to people of that troubled country who have been hurting for such a long time and desperately need God’s word of help, encouragement, and comfort.

“On the Fifteenth of May, in the Jungle of Nool”

Perhaps Dr. Seuss’s most noteworthy book is “Horton Hears a Who!” (1954). It begins,

On the fifteenth of May, in the jungle of Nool,   
In the heat of the day, in the cool of the pool,
He was splashing…enjoying the jungle’s great joys…
When Horton the elephant heard a small noise.

Many of you have read this book to your children or grandchildren, and perhaps some of you have watched the delightful 2008 movie version with them. But do you know that this and other Dr. Seuss books are the subject of theological and philosophical considerations?

In 2004, James W. Kemp, a retired Methodist pastor, published a book titled “The Gospel According to Dr. Seuss.” And Jacob M. Held, a philosophy professor at the University of Central Arkansas, is the editor of “Dr. Seuss and Philosophy,” a 260-page book published in 2011.

Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel, 1904-91) published 46 children’s books, and children across the country, as well as their parents and grandparents, have very much enjoyed the rhyming, rhythm, and rhetoric of those books as well as the illustrations, drawn by the author. And even though subtle, there is an important moral teaching in most of his books.

Sometimes the moral is misunderstood. The line "A person’s a person, no matter how small!!" from “Horton Hears a Who!” has been used as a slogan by the anti-abortion movement in the U.S.

While Geisel preferred to let his work speak for itself, he did occasionally speak out to protect his characters from exploitation. In 1986 when that line from “Horton” was first used by the pro-life movement, he demanded a retraction and received one.

Actually, “Horton Hears a Who!” is said to be an allegory for the Hiroshima bombing and the American post-war occupation of Japan, and it was dedicated to a Japanese friend.

Seuss wrote “Horton” after visiting Japan in 1953 and admitted that Who-ville was partially modeled on the country, which had just emerged from U.S. occupation at the time. The book’s dedication, “For My Great Friend, Mitsugi Nakamura,” refers to a professor he met on that trip.

One of the philosophy professors, though, suggests a different underlying message in “Horton.” He says that “we must remember that Dr. Seuss published this story in 1954, in the midst of the civil rights movement.” That was when many Americans “remained ‘blind’ to the plight of African Americans” (“Dr. Seuss and Philosophy,” p. 130).

And some of the authors of the same book use “Horton” to explain the moral ideas of Immanuel Kant, one of the most difficult-to-understand German philosophers.

For example, the co-authors of the ninth chapter write, “Horton is promoting the view that all people matter. All people possess an inherent, inviolable value beyond any price or measure; all people possess dignity. Kant couldn’t have said it better” (p. 107).

“Horton Hears a Who!” is the seventh chapter in Kemp’s delightful book. He relates the theme of that Seuss story, “a person is a person, no matter how small,” to Psalm 24:1-2. Kemp contends that

we must, like Horton, hear the cries of other people, no matter how small or insignificant they may be in the world’s eyes. If anything, Scripture instructs us to take special care of those people—especially widows, orphans, and prisoners—who are downtrodden and have been marginalized from the spheres of influence in our society (p. 49).

And that is something worth considering on this fifteenth of May, even if you are not in the Jungle of Nool!

Brown v. Board of Education

Last month June and I had Japanese house guests, and as they had visited us before (three years ago), we wanted to find some different places to take them. So we made a day trip to Topeka.

One main reason for going to Topeka was to see the tulips. That city is well known for its “Tulip Time” every year in April. Because of the cool spring, many of the tulips were not in full bloom, but we still enjoyed the beauty of those that were blooming, as well as the daffodils, at the 2.5-acre Botanical Garden in Old Prairie Town at the Ward-Meade Historic Site.

Then we visited the state Capitol building, which is so impressive that June and I wondered why we had not gone there before since it is so close to Kansas City. We enjoyed the old-fashioned (employee-operated) “cage elevator,” and when we stepped off on the second floor we were face to face with the huge John S. Curry mural depicting the wild-eyed abolitionist John Brown.

Later, although we did not have time to go through it, we drove by the Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site, which is in the old Monroe School, where Linda Brown and other African-American children had to attend because they could not go to white schools. That segregation was challenged by Oliver Brown, Linda’s father, and 12 other plaintiffs.

I did go inside briefly, and picked up a leaflet titled “From Brown to Brown: Topeka’s Civil Rights Story.”

In 1856, John Brown (1800-59) commanded forces in battles at Black Jack and at Osawatomie against the Border Ruffians, the pro-slavery activists from Missouri who crossed the state border into Kansas Territory to force the acceptance of slavery there. The leaflet explains that “Brown’s involvement in Bleeding Kansas set the spark that ignited the Civil War that freed millions of enslaved human beings.”

Then on May 17, 1954, in ruling on the case known as “Brown v. Board of Education” the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously declared that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” As a result, racial segregation in public schools was ruled a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Even though that historic Supreme Court decision was made the month I finished my junior year in high school, I don’t have any memories of it from that time. Separate but equal schools was not an issue where I grew up in north Missouri, for there were no African-American school-age children in the county.

But it made quite a difference in Liberty, where June and I were students at William Jewell College from 1957 to 1959. June was an elementary education major, and she did her practice teaching in the recently-integrated Garrison School, which was founded as a school for African-Americans in 1877.

Garrison School, however, had only provided education for its students through the 10th grade, and the “separate but equal” laws barred them from attending Liberty’s white high school. During the 1953-54 school year, Garrison students rode buses into Kansas City to attend the all-black Lincoln High School. Then, as a result of the Supreme Court decision in May 1954, that fall the Liberty School District began to integrate its African American students.

Islamophobia

Islamophobia is defined as “prejudice against, hatred towards, or irrational fear of Muslims.” Especially since 9/11/01 there has been a sizeable percentage of U.S. citizens who have displayed varying levels of such fear. And the tragic bombings in Boston last month intensified Islamophobia in some people and perhaps provoked it in others.

Just three days after the Boston bombings, I heard a discussion between Michael Savage and his guest Walid Shoebat. Savage (b. 1942) has been the conservative talk radio host for “The Savage Nation” since 1999. He has also authored a number of books, including “Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder” (2005).

Savage has been charged with being an Islamophobe for years, and since 2009 he has been barred from entering the United Kingdom for allegedly “seeking to provoke others to serious criminal acts and fostering hatred.” So it was not surprising he would have such a cordial interview with Shoebat.

Walid Shoebat (b. 1960) is a Palestinian American Christian who converted from Islam. He lectures on the dangers of Islamic radicalism and strongly supports the state of Israel. His new book is titled “The Case FOR Islamophobia: Jihad by the Word; America’s Final Warning” (2013). But he is just one of many vocal Islamophobes widely heard on the public media.

Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) is a progressive media criticism organization founded in 1986 and based in New York City. Back in 2008 they published "Smearcasting: How Islamophobes Spread Bigotry, Fear and Misinformation." Part of that paper included a listing of “the dirty dozen,” America’s leading Islamophobes. Savage is on that list, of course, as are fellow talk radio hosts Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly, as well as Pat Robertson.

And then there is Brigitte Gabriel. I mention her because of recently receiving a YouTube video of her lecturing, sent to me by a boyhood friend (not that he particularly agreed with the video). Gabriel (b. 1964) is a Lebanese-American journalist, author, and activist who founded the American Congress For Truth—and a very persuasive speaker.

Back in 1997 the Runnymede Commission in Great Britain produced a consultation paper entitled “Islamophobia: Its Features and Dangers.” One main purpose of the publication of that report was to counter Islamophobic assumptions that Islam is a single monolithic system. That is the main problem with Islamophobia: it sees all Muslims as being the same, mainly as terrorists bent upon destroying the U.S.

We who know well the great diversity within Christianity should be able to understand there is the same sort of diversity among people who are Muslims or who have a Muslim background. Would all of us Christians want to be judged by the likes of Timothy McViegh, the Oklahoma bomber who was a confirmed Catholic Christian and who was deeply influenced by the Christian Identity movement? Or would we want to be identified with Rev. Fred Phelps and his hateful activities done as a “Christian” (Baptist) pastor?

Terrorism and hatred must be strongly opposed and denounced regardless of the religion or the ideology of those who perpetrate them. So groups of people, made up mostly of peaceful, law-abiding citizens should not be condemned because of the evil acts and attitudes of some within those larger groups.

Islamophobia should be opposed by all people of good will, for it fosters discrimination, exclusion, prejudice and violence toward many decent people. Rather than harboring fear and hatred toward a group of people, let’s embrace a worldview based on love, one that fosters understanding and acceptance of people with different religious and/or cultural viewpoints and one that engenders acts of kindness.