By Cameron Macky
I grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania called New Wilmington, about one hour north of Pittsburgh. The town’s biggest employer, where both of my parents were professors, is a small liberal-arts college, Westminster College.
In the United States, colleges and universities will sometimes give “honorary degrees” at their graduation ceremonies to citizens who have made a positive contribution to society; Westminster was no exception.
One year my father was selected to do the introductory speech for Westminster’s honorary degree recipient. The honored graduate was a man named Fred Rogers. I assume that for many people, receiving one of these honors would be a once-in-a-lifetime thrill. The chance to speak at a college graduation (as the recipient usually does) would also be a lifetime highlight. But in the case of Fred Rogers, I am not so sure. For you see, during his lifetime, Fred Rogers was given honorary degrees 40 times. He received four Emmy awards, a Peabody award and, after his retirement, he was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom – the highest honor the United States can grant any of its citizens – in a ceremony at the White House, officiated by President George W. Bush.
You might be asking: Who is this Fred Rogers and what did he do to receive these honors? What did he do to deserve his own postage stamp? Or, years after his death, to have a documentary made about him and his life’s work? (That documentary, made in 2018, earned more money than any other biographical documentary in history.)
The life’s work of Fred Rogers was this: He was the host of a children’s show on television – or, at least, that was the career that he chose. In reality, the life’s work of Fred Rogers was to teach millions of Americans, young and old, through not just his show, but also in the way he conducted his life and what it means to be a neighbor.
His show, titled Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, was filmed in Pittsburgh and ran for over 30 years on public television in the U.S. Each episode began the same way with Mr. Rogers singing “It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” and an invitation to his viewers to come join him for half an hour of learning, an invitation that ended with the verse, “Won’t you please . . . won’t you please . . . please won’t you be my neighbor?” (It may not sound like much of a song, but consider this: Once, when he was riding the subway in New York, a group of schoolchildren recognized him and spontaneously started singing this song. A very large number of Americans have this song embedded deep within their psyches.)
Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood emphasized one thing above all else: the nurturing and encouragement of small children. Though the use of puppets, songs, skits and conversations with guests, Mr. Rogers told generations of children that they were special; that it was okay to be different; that it was all right to have challenging emotions, and that there were positive ways of expressing those emotions.
But beyond these things on the TV show – and more to the point of our scripture passages today – Fred Rogers lived his life outside his TV show exemplifying the values of love, grace, tolerance and kindness that he worked so hard to help children learn.
Fred Rogers received thousands of letters each year from children and their families. He answered every single one of them. He received prayer requests, which he always honored; requests for visits to children’s groups, which he honored whenever he could; and he was famous for his kindness towards and interest in everyone he came across. In fact, when writers and reporters interviewed him, they would often find out that he asked them more questions about their lives than they were able to ask about his. Complete strangers would find comfort and grace and welcome when they met this man, who would treat them during their time together, as if they were the most important thing in his life. There are thousands of these what came to be known as “Fred” stories, many of which are gathered in the archives of the Fred Rogers Foundation.
Fred Rogers, in short, exemplified love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. He treated strangers as friends. He was, and in many ways that still resonate with us, America’s Neighbor.
This resonance – what one movie reviewer noted as “a yearning for kindness,” shows up emphatically in a second Mr. Rogers movie, released a year after the documentary. This second movie is a dramatized account of the friendship that developed between Mr. Rogers and a writer for Esquire Magazine who was assigned to write a brief article on him for an issue on American heroes. The writer, whose name in the movie is Lloyd but who in real life is named Tom Junod, is a cynical man with a difficult and deteriorating personal life and a reputation for writing articles that are unsparing in their criticism of their subjects.
Lloyd initially refused the assignment. He had recently won a national magazine-writing award, and he felt that writing about a children’s show host was a fluff assignment, not deserving of his time. He asked his editor why he couldn’t write an article on one of the other heroes who were to be in the issue. Her answer? “They all refused to be interviewed by you.”
Lloyd reluctantly went to Pittsburgh, where he encountered a person who was, he thought, absolutely too good to be true. But as they interacted, he discovered what so many others had: that Fred Rogers cared for him – a complete stranger. Mr. Rogers continually asked Lloyd how things in his life were going. He asked about Lloyd’s shattered relationship with his father. He asked about Lloyd’s wife and baby. He learned about Old Rabbit, Lloyd’s favorite childhood toy, and he learned about Lloyd’s struggles.
And later Fred Rogers gave his new friend, no longer a stranger, encouragement when it was most needed – when Lloyd’s father suffers a heart attack and was bedridden and near death. And Lloyd responded, working to heal his relationship with his father and patching things up with his wife. He finds joy in his work, gaining a lifelong friend.
This is a story about a broken man encountering such goodness, peace, patience and kindness that he can’t help but respond to it. And it is a story about one more fruit of the spirit: Mr. Rogers’ manager at one point told Lloyd that he didn’t want Fred to say yes to being interviewed, because of Lloyd’s reputation. Lloyd asked what made Mr. Rogers say yes. He found out that after reading every single article of Lloyd’s that he could find, Mr. Rogers said “I want to do the interview anyway.” Fred Rogers saw all the evidence that everyone else saw: the cynicism, the take-downs, the anger, the brokenness, the disbelief in goodness – and he chose to spend time with this broken-down human, when all the other heroes had refused, and he chose to do everything he could to help him work through his brokenness.
This acceptance of our brokenness is called grace. It is called forgiveness. This is what it means to be a neighbor. To respond not just to the person or their behavior, but to see the inherent worth and potential in that person and to help them move closer to that worth and potential. To be a neighbor is to share the fruits of the spirit. We are to act with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control toward everyone around us.
That really is the message of Jesus’s story. It’s worth noting something interesting about it, however: The rich young man asked, “Who is my neighbor?” And Jesus never answers the question. He turns the question around, pointing out that it was the young man’s job to be a neighbor himself, because in so doing he would begin to see everyone as his neighbor, everyone as deserving of his love, everyone as deserving of his time and energy and care.
It is not, nor has it ever been, a question of who is or is not our neighbor. It is a question of choosing to be a neighbor ourselves. If you want to know who is your neighbor, Jesus says, start acting like one and the question will answer itself. It starts with us. But it doesn’t end there.
Have you ever wondered how the wounded traveler responded, after waking up to find out that he had been rescued, and cared for, by one of his people’s enemies? I think I know, because of how humans often respond to grace.
There is a girl named Elizabeth Usher. At the age of five, she began to suffer as many as 100 seizures per day. However, they never seemed to happen during her favorite TV show: Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. For two years, her parents sought medical help, until it was finally decided that she would need brain surgery to end the seizures.
A few weeks before the surgery, Elizabeth’s mother called the studio where the TV show was filmed. She talked to one of the production assistants, hoping that Mr. Rogers would send an autographed picture, or maybe a note of encouragement. Little did she know.
A week before the surgery, the Usher family’s phone rang. Mr. Rogers was calling. He talked – and sang – to Elizabeth for an hour. Later, he sent her tape recordings: songs and sometimes just talking about different topics. The surgery took place successfully, but there was a complication and Elizabeth fell into a coma. A little later, Mr. Rogers called the hospital for an update. He called again the next day. And the next. And he kept calling for two weeks as Elizabeth showed no sign of improving. Then Mr. Rogers decided that it was time to send in the puppets.
He got on a plane and flew to Baltimore. A friend picked him up at the airport, and they went straight to the hospital. And for an hour, Mr. Rogers, and all the characters from his neighborhood, played with and sang to Elizabeth, telling her that she was loved, and that she mattered, and that she was special. She had no idea that he was there. He knew that she would be unresponsive. He went anyway – because that is what neighbors do.
Two weeks later, when Elizabeth emerged from her coma, she indeed had no memory of the visit. But she knew it had happened – because he had left the puppets with her. Peace. Goodness. Kindness. Gentleness. Elizabeth Usher and Fred Rogers remained friends for the rest of his life. She is now a motivational speaker, traveling throughout the United States, specializing in helping people find ways to use resilience, gratefulness, kindness,and humor get through life’s challenges. One neighbor creates another; the life touched by Mr. Rogers now touches many, many others. As Jesus said, “Go and do the same.” Amen.
The sermon was delivered in September this year, at my home church in Bangkok, Thailand. While I have spoken at my church (International Church of Bangkok) numerous times during my 20+ years here, my full-time job is as a math teacher at International School Bangkok.
