Open: Won’t you be my neighbour (sing)
Welcome, friend, to the neighbourhood of God.
Wait a minute, I heard somebody ask, wasn’t the question about the Kingdom of God? And how to get in?
Yes, that was the question. But the answer was about neighbouring.
And when I think about neighbouring, I think about Mr. Rogers.
Does anybody here not know who Mr. Rogers was? He was the creator of Mr. Roger’s Neighbourhood, which ran for 5 years on the CBC, then 33 years on American Public TV, and lives on today on Youtube and in its recent spin-off, “Daniel Tiger’s Neighbourhood.” If you’ve never seen the original, or have forgotten it, go home and watch it. It’s as unlike anything else in children’s programming as the parables of Jesus are unlike life in the Roman Empire.
Mr. Rogers isn’t manic, or flashy or funny. He has no superpowers beyond those of the usual, mortal body, with which to vanquish enemies. He doesn’t even have enemies—the moral tension in the show comes not from good guys fighting bad guys but from people simply struggling, and learning, to do what is right. Mr. Rogers talks and moves slowly. He looks through the camara and says things directly to the child watching, like, “I’m so glad you came,” and “there’s no one just like you.” Through “picture picture,” he shows videos about how things in a child’s world work, like going to the dentist or making a skyscraper or getting a letter from one place to another. Sometimes he goes to places, like a hospital, and asks questions like, “when you use that x-ray machine to look inside my body, you can’t see what my thoughts are, can you? Because nobody can see another person’s thoughts.” But he really shines in showing how things in a child’s inner world work, and for that he travels to The Land of Make Believe.
When we say, “Mr. Rogers loved children,” we might be thinking that we can just tell by the way he acted that he felt a warm, affectionate feeling for every child he ever met. But you know what? We don’t know that. Nobody can see another person’s thoughts, or feelings, after all—not even with an x-ray machine.
But Mr. Rogers did love children—he loved them the way that Jesus teaches us to love our neighbour in the story. Love in this story is not a noun, not a feeling—it’s a verb. It means taking action to care.
And Mr. Rogers took care of the children who watched his show.
He changed the lyrics of his parting song, “Tomorrow”, because where his show didn’t air on Saturday, he didn’t want to confuse or disappoint children who heard him sing it on Fridays. He made a beautiful segment where he acknowledged and talked about when pets die, but edited out the phrase “put to sleep” because he didn’t want children to be afraid to sleep. He spoke of “the people who take care of you,” because he knew that some children do not live with their parents, and that even though they might be used to translating the word “parent” into the grandparent or foster parent or aunt that they lived with, it would be a relief to them not to have to.
Mr. Rogers was so good at anticipating how children might hear and understand, or misunderstand words, that two his writers, Arthur Greenwald and Barry Head, wrote a tongue-in-cheek pamphlet on how to speak the dialect they called “Freddish”.
Per the pamphlet, there were nine steps for translating into Freddish, beginning with “State the idea you wish to express in terms that preschoolers can understand.” Example: It is dangerous to play in the street.” From there, the speaker was to rephrase the statement in a positive manner, “It is good to play where it is safe.” Then add an advisor, because preschoolers are not old enough to make decisions about something as nuanced and important as “where it is safe.” Eliminate the directive element, “ask,” and the instructive element of “good.” Leave out any element that suggests certainty, such as the word “will” in “your parents will tell you where it is safe,’ since they may not, and that would make the statement untrue to the child. Eliminate language that does not apply to every child. “Your parents” becomes “your favorite grownups.” Finally, add some encouragement about the present moment, and about the child’s development, in words that they can understand.
At the end of the exercise, “It is dangerous to play in the street” has become, “Your favorite grown-ups can tell you where it is safe to play. It is important to try to listen to them, and listening is an important part of growing.
I admit that when I found online the instructions for speaking Freddish, I didn’t exactly take it as parody. I studied it, because, even if it sounds silly to adults it IS the way to reach out to children. Freddish was no accident or natural quirk of Fred Rogers: it was deliberately and patiently cultivated by him as part of a life-long commitment to children.
Freddish has many roots—Fred Rogers started out as a shy little boy with kind, outgoing parents who believed in giving back in service to a world that treated them well. He was teased as a child for his weight, and spent many hours playing make believe games with his stuffies. In high school he was befriended by a popular boy, and came into some social confidence as a member of the student council. He was rejected for the military draft, and obtained an excellent education in Music, Child Psychology, and finally Theological Seminary. By the time he was ordained in 1963 as a minister in the United Presbyterian Church, he had over 10 years of experience in chidren’s television—a field he entered because he hated seeing such a powerful technology for gaining children’s attention wasted on shows that did nothing except entertain. He saw that television could do more—it could help children to grow, to heal in places that were broken, to thrive in becoming their own diverse selves.
But is Mr. Rogers really like the neighbour in the story—the Good Samaritan who, unlike the priest and the Levite, gave so much to help a beaten-up stranger? How did I get from the good Samaritan, a character we thought we knew as the unlikely and brave hero in the emergency situation, to Mr. Rogers?
Let’s go back to the Bible story.
Maybe we’re stuck on the title, The Good Samaritan. I find these titles often get us focused on just one story character, and one simple lesson, when there is more going on. It’s also a story about The Wounded Traveller who lay in the road. Most of us would stop and call 911 if we came upon a stranger in the road who was beaten and left for dead. It’s a rare occurance these days; maybe it was more common in ancient times. We have things like street lights, and local police, and ambulances, and paramedics to handle that sort of thing. For all of these reasons, I’m pretty confident that not one of us here would walk by the scene of such a crime or accident.
These days, the wounds that we carry are mostly on the inside. It’s harder to see when our neighbour is beaten up and left for dead emotionally. Such wounds disguise themselves as mental illness, poverty, rude behaviour, addiction. Ah, now we see—it is easy to walk by all of that, and it’s risky in so many ways to stop, to make eye contact, to help.
And yet, we are commanded to love—not as a feeling, but as action. Kind action. We are not to ignore the wounded traveller—we are to recognize our neighbour. And when it is we who are the wounded traveller, the story also tells us how to recognize a neighbour—not necessarily the one who is of our tribe, but the one who is kind.
Mr. Rogers could, and did, reach out to the wounded stranger in every child. By all accounts, this did not stop on the TV set—it was said that a parent’s appeal about a child in distress was catnip to Fred Rogers. He brought children into his studio and talked with them after taping. He visited them in their homes and in hospitals, always bringing along the violin case that held the puppets—Daniel Tiger, Lady Elaine Fairchild, Donkey Hodie, Henrietta Pussycat, King Friday, Queen Saturday and the rest.
It was the children who let him know what needed to be said on TV, what needed not to be said, and what needed to be seen. And so Mr. Rogers took his viewers to the hospital, to the dentist and doctor.
When Officer Clemens, the neighbourhood police officer who happened to be African American, dropped by one hot afternoon in an episode where Mr. Rogers was cooling his feet in a wading pool, Mr. Rogers simply invited him to put his feet in, too. There was no need to speak about it, to instruct upon racial integration. He just did what a neighbour does—share a cool and comforting experience. Somewhere, I am sure, a child nearly choked on their fig newton. Somewhere a child wondered that such a thing was possible. But in the neigbourhood of Mr. Rogers, it was no big deal.
This story could also be called the Story of the Callous Priest and the Pre-occupied Levite. Jesus, being well schooled in Jewish law, would know that the duty to care is not just individual, it is also collective. That’s why he was so hard on the priest and the Levite who walked by—they were the representatives of a Jewish society that was supposed to build and maintain a safety net. Taking care of the wounded and needy was their job, just as it was their job to teach the prayers and rituals that held their society together spiritually.
When you watch Mr. Rogers, listen carefully to how he speaks about “the people who take care of you,” and “the people who are helping.” The police officer is his friend—he wanted children to watch and see that a police officer could help. It was the same when he talked to or about doctors, nurses, dentists and teachers—all figures of authority and power in a child’s universe. He demonstrated a trust and openness with these figures of authority, and, in turn, they answered with care to dispel the very real fears that children might have—fear of getting a shot, or having someone look inside of their mouth or ear, fear of pain, fear of not already knowing the answer to the teacher’s questions. In Mr. Roger’s neighbourhood, people who are supposed to help us do help, and they look after the institutions—the places where care happens—for children. Neighbours drop by on one another to say hello, and to check in on one another.
The store could also be called “Jesus answers the law expert’s question about entering the Kingdom of God.”
Notice that Jesus never really comes out and answers these questions as though they were only about an afterlife. There is always the distinct possibility that one is already able to live in God’s neighbourhood, by living the life of a Godly neighbour.
And what is the neighbourhood of God like?
Well, it’s not an exclusive club for the true believers. The Christian writer Barbara Brown Taylor puts it this way, “When my religion tries to come between me and my neighbour, I will chose my neigbour. Jesus never commanded me to love my religion.” The neighbourhood of God is welcoming, and diverse, and runs upon the principles of mercy, not power.
Probably my favorite thing about Mr. Rogers and “Freddish” is the way he avoided language that might isolate a child who already felt different from others. When I was little, I remember listening for my name when the Romper Room Lady looked through her magic looking glass and said, “I see you. I see Susan, and Linda, and Bill, and John, and Karen…” If you watched often enough, she probably called out every one of the top 100 baby names of the United States, but she never saw me. She also never saw a Juan, or Minnie May, or Shakir, or Michiel—she saw the children with mainstream, white American names.
Mr. Rogers never made that mistake. He didn’t say “your house,” or “your back yard,” because he knew that not all children have these things. He didn’t say, “come walk with me” because he knew that some children watched from a wheelchair or a hospital bed, and couldn’t dance or run with him. He never said, “wish your mother a Happy Mother’s Day,” or “watch your father as he shaves.” He talked about “the people who take care of you,” and he said it with such love and respect that it helped any child to have a little bit more trust in those people, whether they were parents or not. The children who loved and needed Mr. Rogers the most were children who were used to not being included in generic speech to generic children—those whose families, or living situations, or bodies were not “standard” according to 1970’s television. He wanted them to know that they mattered. Pretending was for pretend, but no child had to pretend away the life that they had in order to matter in Mr. Roger’s neighbourhood. And so when he said, “it’s you I like, every part of you,” it meant something.
In Mr. Roger’s neighbourhood, nothing is ever solved by a contest of strength. Everyone is worthy of consideration, and of mercy. Mistakes are made, and then we learn something and try again. Feelings are hurt and mended. Things that get broken are repaired. Even when things die, and they sometimes do, there is time for honoring them and doing the right, next thing.
I don’t know for certain what the legal expert meant when he referred to entering the Kingdom of Heaven—he might have been talking about an afterlife of Heaven, or a post-apocalyptic world of resurrected bodies as foretold in the Book of Daniel, or something else. But we’ve good reason to suspect that Jesus was answering the question not as “what do I have to do to inherit Heaven when I die?” but rather “what do I have to do in order to participate in God’s neighbourhood as I live?”
Because Jesus did this—he showed the outline of God’s world within this one. He urged us, in this world of commerce and power hierarchies and social divisions, to participate in another world every day—a world of love without boundaries, of grace without limits. In that world—the neighbourhood of God right now—there are robbers on the road, and war, and famine, and illness, and division. But they do not get the last word.
In the neighbourhood of God, the things that are hard and terrible in life can also be places where we meet active, courageous love. If we are kind in the face of the world’s need, this is how God’s grace enters that world. It is through the broken places, after all, that the light gets in.
In the neighbourhood of God, there are things that we cannot fix, and things that we can. We can’t banish poverty, but we can change greed. We can’t banish sickness, but we can take care of one another. We can’t make everyone lucky in life and in love, but we can embrace our neighbour with acceptance and welcome, whatever burdens and griefs that they carry. We can meet one another’s eyes and smile to say, “I’m happy to see you.” We can support our institutions of care and protection, hold them to high standards and expectations, and encourage the helpers within them to have heart and resist despair. We can resist the cynicism that says “expect nothing, and avoid being disappointed,” and instead courageously take up hope, roll up our sleeves and get to work. We can let our own needs show, too, so that others can share in the experience of not only receiving but also passing along the gifts of grace through helping.
It is a beautiful day in this neighbourhood—the neighbourhood of God—and we are all welcome.