Easter People: Mr. Rogers

John 21: 1-19

Third Sunday of Easter:  April 14, 2013

Imagine a teacher – say a second grade teacher.  He hands out a math test with a bunch of addition problems on it.  One student turns in the test, and she gets many of the answers wrong.  If the problem is 2 + 1, she writes 4.  If the problem is 5 + 0, she answers 3.  The teacher is a bit grieved, because he knows this student tries hard, but just doesn’t quite get it yet.  So, before handing the paper back to the student, he changes all the problems to match the answers given.  He changes 2 + 1 to 2 + 2.  5 + 0 becomes 3 + 0, and so on.  Questionable teaching method.  But it seems he must have done his student teaching with Jesus.

We all know the story:  Jesus asks Peter three times if he loves him.  And each time Peter answers yes.  And then Jesus follows Peter’s declaration of love with an instruction…three, actually:  Feed my lambs; tend my sheep; feed my sheep.  But we know the story in English, and we have only one word for love:  this passage uses two.  The first two times Jesus asks Peter if he loves him, Jesus uses the word “agape” for love.  When Peter says he loves Jesus he uses the word phileo. 

Agape, many argue, is a pure, divine kind of love.  It is the love God has for us.  Full, complete, transcendent.  Phileo is more of a family love – kinship or love between close friends.  It is powerful, but when compared with agape, it falls short of reflecting the love of God.  So this conversation is really something like Jesus saying, “Do you love me?” and Peter answering, “Yes, I’m incredibly fond of you.”  Point being, the first two times Peter and Jesus are using different words for love.

And so the story kind of sets up the anticipation that Jesus is going to keep asking him until he gets the answer right.  Do you love me, Jesus asks using agape.  We think, the third time, Peter must have finally said “yes..agape…I love you.”  No:  The third time he still says phileo.  But here’s the thing:  So does Jesus.  Peter never gets it right – he misses the boat from beginning to end, so in the end, Jesus changes the question to match the answer.  I love that. 

We often, and rightly so, focus on Peter and what we are supposed to learn about the relationship between loving Jesus – loving God – and feeding and tending to the people in this world.  But I love stopping for just a moment and looking at what Jesus did – how Jesus loved Peter so much he met him right where he was – he changed the question to match the answer.

Meeting people where they are with an almost incomprehensible love.  For 30 years, Mr. Rogers did this for thousands, then millions of kids 5 days a week. 

Now let me say three things here:  First, I love Mr. Rogers – I loved him as a child, and I have loved reconnecting with him as Lydia meets him for the first time.  I have dozens of pages of things I wanted to include in this sermon.  I didn’t, but I wanted to.   Second, mostly because of that, I can’t call him Fred Rogers.  I can’t call him Fred and I can’t refer to him as Rogers.  He is to me, and will be in this sermon, Mr. Rogers. 

Third, I always want to avoid the danger of over-romanticizing people who history proves have done great things.  Everyone is human.  Everyone has their foibles and flaws.  If you ignore this, people are unreal – no one can relate to them.  So I always think it’s important to see the human, flawed side to folks.  I’m sure Mr. Rogers had foibles.  I’m sure he was human.  But I’m in a bind because I just couldn’t find the flaws. 

You see, no matter what I read about him from people who knew him, interviewed him, or worked with him, I could only find statements like this one:  “It’s entirely possible that Fred Rogers is not a saint, but I have found little evidence to suggest otherwise.”  Or this one, written by a reporter-turned-friend of Mr. Rogers:  “I felt like I was testing him, searching for a foible, for something I could say or do that would finally render him incapable of unconditional regard…He responded with what can only be described as supernatural love, wholly without judgment, and with perfect clarity, wisdom, and compassion.”  One person called him a “human embodiment of heaven.”

I could go on and on – each person saying it in a different way.  What’s so incredible is that everyone I read felt they needed to comment on this- that they went in with the assumption that he is flawed, but only found him more incredible than they anticipated.  So, the best I can do is just call him a saint and move on with what I think he teaches us.

From early on, Mr. Rogers had a love-hate relationship with TV.  He knew it was a powerful medium.  He knew it reached into the lives of children and adults alike.  And he hated the shows that were on TV – especially children’s shows.  But he also figured, since TV was here to stay, and if it was going to reach people, it could, in fact, be used for good.  And use it for good he did.

He began with a couple of early children’s shows, produced both in Pittsburg and Canada.  But he came back to Pittsburg, close to his childhood home, and there he stayed until he died, producing and hosting Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood for 30 years.

Mr. Rogers was a pastor.  Early on in his TV career, he went to seminary to deepen his theology and faith knowing this would enrich what he was doing in his show.  He was ordained by the Presbyterian denomination.  But in an unusual move, he was ordained to do exactly what he did:  produce children’s television shows.  This was his ministry – and none of us, I suspect, and certainly not my child, would deny that he was an incredible minister.  (as an aside….I can’t help but wonder what TV would look like if all of the producers of programs were ordained to that work by their faith communities.) 

His job – his mission – was to meet kids right where they were and show them how much they are loved.  Each moment of every show was designed for this very purpose.  In telling the story of PBS, David Stewart writes, “Every element [in Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood] has meaning and is there for a purpose.  The most obvious, perhaps, is Rogers’ arrival, singing his opening song (which of course he wrote), changing into his informal sweater and sneakers.  ‘Now,’ he seems to be saying, ‘I’m all yours.  This time is for you.’  - in most children’s lives, rare behavior for an adult.”

He worried about children who were being ignored, or children who were being “taught” how to behave – which usually involved teaching them that what they were feeling was wrong and needed to be kept inside.  He worried about the things kids learned – things like suppressing their feelings, or expressing them in destructive ways.  He worried they were not learning to love the world and marvel at the gifts of people and creation. 

So he takes off his coat, puts on his sweater, changes into comfortable shoes and looks at the camera and sings:  music was the thing that most deeply touched Mr. Roger’s soul, and he brought that divine sense of music to children.  He believed it could change you.  And so he looked them in the eye and sang: “I have always wanted to have a neighbor just like you.  I’ve always wanted to live in a neighbor hood with you…Please won’t you be my neighbor.”  And of course, he ended every show, in song, telling the children exactly when he would be back – a promise he always kept.

Mr. Rogers listened for the answers kids were giving and then met them right there, never expecting them to get it right.  Just loving them and convincing them they were already wonderful the way they were.  He wanted to know the inner workings of children’s emotions, psyches and brains.  He took the need to understand where children were and what was going on in their heads so seriously.  He had a friend named Margaret McFarland.  She was a child psychologist, and his most important mentor, and he consulted with her almost daily until her death in 1987.  He wanted to know how to reach children with his show – how to understand them and meet them where they are – so that he could best affect them with love and caring.

“Somehow,” says Rogers, “early on, I got the idea inside of me that childhood was valuable, that children were worthy of being seen and heard, and who they were would have a lot to do with how our world would become.  Childhood goes to the heart of who we all become.” 

I wonder how many people in children’s programming today consult with a child psychologist for any other reason than attracting their viewers – and not so they can tell them anything profound, but so that they can show them ads that will make them excellent consumers.

I asked some friends about their experience of Mr. Rogers.  Many, like me, knew him both from childhood and from when they got to re-encounter him when their kids watched the show.  One friend said something that really struck me – something I do think we can learn…all of us.  He said that one day on the show, Mr. Rogers stood behind a big fish aquarium filled with water.  Just water.  He took a bottle of blue food coloring and carefully put a drop into the water.  Then he just watched it.  He watched what it did.  He didn’t say anything for quite a while.  He just watched. 

My friend said, “as I saw this I realized he was doing something almost no one else does for us:  He made time for wonder and awe.  The antidote to frenzy.”  Another person put it this way:  “The style is an almost unbelievable departure from most loudly exuberant, frequently violent and fast-cut contemporary programs designed for the same audience.”  Mr. Rogers knew that without wonder, without being able to look at the wonder of the world, life would be gray…deadened…depressing.  Children’s minds would atrophy and life for them would be all frenzy.

Now lest we undersell this man, Mr. Rogers did not only change the lives of children.  His impact on adults was incredible.  He knew the needs of adults as well.  He knew they were in as much need of feeling known and loved as children.  And reading things that people wrote about meeting Mr. Rogers was inspiring and more than once brought tears to my eyes.  If you want to see how he could, for example, affect an old, crusty senator who was reluctant to give the first-ever national funding to PBS, watch a speech Mr. Rogers gave during senate hearings on the subject in 1969.  Pretty powerful.  And of course he did, in fact, secure the first ever national funding for PBS.

He was patient, kind, gentle, and affirming.  He wanted to know about you – whether you were a child, an acquaintance, a reporter, or a colleague.  He asked questions about your life and listened as deeply, and then without hesitation, and with an intimacy that people from disarming, he affirmed you, loved you, for who you were.  A reporter from Esquire magazine called it an “unashamed insistence on intimacy.”  It changed people.  Encountering him changed people.  And it’s because he never expected you to be anything you weren’t, and he never thought someone shouldn’t be loved exactly where they were. 

I was thinking about the power of what Jesus did:  Jesus calls Peter’s name:  He looks him in the eye, and he speaks of the most intimate thing there is:  Love.  He invites him to a love so incredible, Peter couldn’t comprehend it.  Then he changed the question, and finally he says, “Follow me.”  Until that moment, Peter had given up after Jesus died.  He went back to his old life. 

Maybe meeting Peter with unashamed insistent intimacy was finally the thing that enabled him to get out of locked rooms, quit the fishing business once and for all, and spend his life feeding and tending sheep.  We know Peter went on to dedicate his life to the ministry of Jesus.  Knowing what he knew was enough; knowing phileo, even though not perfect, was enough.  It was enough to leave everything behind and follow Jesus: the one who knew agape.

What did Mr. Rogers do for millions of children and adults over the years?  What did he allow them to become that they might not otherwise have?  Of course, we’ll never know…we are complicated human beings who are who we are for as many different reasons as there are grains of sand by the oceans.  But, when I watch him today with Lydia, I immediately re-connect to something.  I immediately feel the importance of wonder, creative play, and the constant message of “you are important, you are loved as you are, you are worthy of my undivided, kind, gentle, grace-filled presence.”  I wonder what sunk in when I watched him, but I know intuitively that this show was not your typical TV show…it was good.

Because he knew how to connect with children and adults alike, he knew he must connect with their pain as well.  Mr. Rogers was kind and gentle, but he wasn’t naïve, and he didn’t shy away from the broken world.  He knew the real world in which we all live, and dealt with that as only Mr. Rogers would – going to great lengths to ensure he spoke about difficult things to children in a way that would only be caring and life-giving, and taking time to connect with parents in ways that helped them navigate tricky waters with their kids.  He spoke of death, disease, divorce, addiction, cruelty, and how that brought agony to those he loved.  

In fact, amazingly, Mr. Rogers continues to speak to us in the face of great tragedy.  After the shootings in Newtown, adults all over the world turned to their childhood friend.  A quote by Mr. Rogers went viral, and though it was simple, it connected deeply with me and, judging by facebook, many, many others as well.  With all the “adult” coverage that sought to make meaning of the event, all the pundits focusing on guns and violence, what seemed to help some people most were the words of our favorite neighbor. 

It was something he said often, actually, but it was made famous after an interview he did soon after 9/11.  He said that his mother always taught him:  “Look for the helpers.  You will always find people who are helping.”  Then he said, “To this day, especially in times of ‘disaster,’ I remember my mother’s words, and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers – so many caring people in the world.”

In a world that focuses on the frenzy, the mega-this and mega-that, that uses the violent images to tell the news, and entertains children with slapstick and bombastic images, it’s incredible to think about this man who spent his life in people’s living rooms with the sole purpose of offering a divine love.  “The older I get, the more I feel that this is true:” Mr. Roger said, “There’s a loving mystery at the heart of the universe, just yearning to be expressed.”  I may only be capable of phileo…but that’s agape.  Amen.