Love is at the root of everything

"Love is at the root of everything—all learning, all relationship. Love, or the lack of it."

That is a quote from Fred Rogers of Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood fame. This quote comes from an interview he gave some years ago, which was filmed, and is included in a forthcoming documentary about the late Mr. Rogers entitled, Won't You Be My Neighbor?

The documentary on Mr. Rogers and his groundbreaking PBS series will be released in June. Unlike Star Wars or Black Panther or Avengers: Infinity War, you probably won’t have to queue up hours or days in advance to purchase a ticket to see it. We probably won’t soon discover that the summer’s fashion craze includes zip up cardigan sweaters and sedate sneakers.

Yet, I wish it were so. I have watched the three minute trailer promoting the Mr. Rogers documentary numerous times already and my prayer is that, somehow, Mr. Rogers’ simple and profound and sensible and radical message of love and neighborliness is about to become a megahit.

In watching the trailer, I have found myself quite nostalgic, recalling childhood memories of Mr. Rogers and his friends and neighbors, both the human ones and the puppet kind that lived in the Land of Make Believe.

Like many things that evoke nostalgia, however, my memory of watching Mr. Rogers is mostly a falsehood. Yes, I did watch the broadcast for a time. However, that season was a rather brief one.

Before too long, an older boy named Gary, one day at recess, told me that only babies watched Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. Not wanting to be considered a baby by the likes of Gary, I stopped watching Mr. Rogers. While still very much a child, I decided Mr. Rogers was childish and put it away and forgot about it.

As an adult, a Christian, a priest, now a bishop, I have focused on more serious matters, like learning how to pray for enemies and love the stranger and practice the perfect love which the Apostle John invites us to, a kind of love which imitates the love of Jesus.

That kind of love, the mature love of Jesus, which has been embodied in the lives of Christian saints, by St. Francis and Dorothy Day, by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Jonathan Daniels, by Bonhoeffer and Mother Teresa, is, I now realize, the very thing that was being proclaimed by Mr. Rogers on those countless school day afternoons. Because a child told me Mr. Rogers was childish, I believed his message was only for babies, not something intended for me in the real world of big boys and recess and picking sides for sport and drawing lines of who’s in and who’s out.

About the same time as when I stopped watching Mr. Rogers, my older brother bought a used car. It was a 1972 Gran Torino, a brown one. It was big and loud and very cool. Upon buying it, he added a CB radio and a fake leather steering wheel cover.

And because our family was devout Baptist, he also added to his muscle car, the Gran Torino, a bumper sticker that simply said, GOD IS LOVE, in big bold red letters. The car was tough looking and the bumper sticker, some would say, was sweet and pious and sentimental, maybe even a childish thought. When my brother later sold the car to my friend, Steve, his first act as the new owner was to remove the bumper sticker from the car.

Yet, the belief that God is love, when put into practice in our world, requires, not childish gestures, but mature faith and courage. To believe that God’s command to us is to love, to love like Jesus, to become a friend of Jesus, requires not childish faith, but a childlike faith willing to trust that Christ-like love is strong enough to change and heal us and the world we inhabit.

The Kentucky poet, Frank X. Walker, speaks of our need to “unlearn fear and hate.” If we are going to do that kind of hard work, then it will require us to follow the command of Jesus to love like God loves.

I learned a song as a child that maybe you learned, to - Jesus Loves the Little Children.

Jesus loves the little children,
all the children of the world.
Red and yellow, black and white,
they are precious in His sight,
Jesus loves the little children of the world.

We consider that song to be a song for children. Yet, the message of that song is not one we outgrow, it is not a childish belief we should put away when we grow up. Rather, a belief that Jesus loves red and yellow, black and white, is a mature understanding of what it means to abide in the God who loves and who calls us to love. The song expresses a childlike faith that invites us to practice a Christ-like love to live and love all the children of the world.

All the children of the world receive the love of God for them. Now, that thought shouldn’t surprise us, but it does. Somehow, we believe that God’s love does not cross the boundaries and divisions we create in our world. We have thought such things for centuries.

In the Acts of the Apostles, we heard the last portion of the Apostle Peter’s encounter with Cornelius, a Gentile. In that story, Peter has a vision of unclean foods being offered for him to eat. But he refuses the unclean food. Yet, the voice in the vision tells him that God has made clean what Peter considered to be unclean. God, therefore, has crossed the boundary that Peter thought you could not cross.

And after that vision, Peter honors the request to meet Cornelius, the Gentile, who had his own vision and dream to ask for a man named Peter to come and tell him what the Lord might command him to say.

And what did the Lord command Peter to say? Did the Lord want Peter to tell Cornelius that Jews and Gentiles are not to associate with each other or visit each other?

No. What Peter says to Cornelius he is also saying to himself. He now understands that God shows no partiality. The command to love given by God is a command that God gives to everyone that God has made. We have been made in love and by love. And in order to be all that we have been made to be, we are to practice the love of God for all that God has made. That is true for the Jew and the Gentile, the slave and the free, the male and the female, the red and the yellow and the brown and the black and the white.

No law passed by men can divide us from each other if God has told us and commanded us to love each other. Peter tells Cornelius and his household the story of Jesus. It does not take him long to tell that story. To hear Peter tell it, it is a rather simple story. Jesus came from Galilee. But the message of Jesus is not intended for one region or one country or one people.

Jesus came to preach peace and that the Christ was Lord of all, all people. And the Spirit was with him because his message for all opposed the oppression of the Devil, who would seek to tell lies to us about divisions and boundaries and lines that we should not cross. Yet, Jesus in his earthly ministry was always crossing lines and talking to the wrong people and telling them that God’s love was for them, too.

For such things, Jesus was crucified. It might have sounded strange to Cornelius and it might sound strange to us that the act of preaching love for all can make so many people upset, upset to the point of wanting to kill the One who preaches love. So, perfect hate placed Jesus, the embodiment of perfect love, on a tree and sacrificed him.

The response of Jesus was to forgive, to forgive even while still on the tree. That is the picture of perfect love.

But Peter tells Cornelius there is something more. God raised perfect love from the tomb. And Jesus had come to his friends, the very friends who betrayed him and abandoned him and he forgave them and breathed peace on them. He ate with them. He shared bread and cup with them. And his life with them and in them made their lives and their world so much bigger. Perfect love casts out fear. And when fear is gone, everything else grows to maturity, including the ability to love like Jesus.

Before Peter can finish all that God has given him to say, the Spirit of God descends on Cornelius and his household. The Spirit crosses a line and comes to the Gentiles. The Spirit disregards that Jews and Gentiles do not belong together. The Spirit brings them together. And Peter is a witness to that.

Then, Peter says to them and to all around him that just as the Spirit has come to them, how can the waters of baptism be held back? When you see God’s love, the waters of baptism cannot be far behind.

Peter’s message was simple. It is the same message that the Church today is given to tell. It is about God’s love. It is a message that even children can understand. But it is a message that requires us to be courageous in a time, like all times before, when the world would seek to divide red and yellow, black and brown and white.

God loves all God’s children. God invites us to do the same.