Of all the threats facing the human race today, perhaps none is more insidious than our divisiveness. Now to be fair, unity doesn’t make a good news story—but divisiveness sure does. So, you could argue that news coverage is biased and tends to underplay instances when people actually do come together and cooperate. Still, I think it’s fair to say that on the whole, we human beings have this tendency to define ourselves in terms of how we are different from others instead of what we all have in common. Furthermore, one need only look at the ticker the news headlines from whatever source you prefer for a few minutes to see that our political and/or ideological divisions often make it hard for us to come together for the common good of the human race.
It seems that divisiveness is a core characteristic of human beings, and thus it's no surprise that it is a theme in the story of God's people in history almost from the beginning. It dates at least as far back as the tale of Cain and Abel—Genesis 4—and even a chapter earlier, in Genesis 3, Adam and Eve fell into the trap of wanting to set themselves apart from God. They had paradise, but they chose division—from God, and each other. They hide from God when God comes looking for them, and in some sense, the human race has been hiding ever since. The Psalmist says that it is very good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity—Psalm 133:1—see A Psalm About Unity to learn more about this passage.
A Psalm About Unity
1How very good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity.
2It is like the precious oil on the head, running down upon the beard, on the beard of Aaron, running down over the collar of his robes.
3It is like the dew of Hermon which falls on the mountains of Zion. For there the Lord ordained his blessing, life forevermore.
—Psalm 133
In this short psalter, the author seems to recognize how hard unity is to achieve. Anointing oil was expensive and reserved for special occasions. Yet verse 2 suggests that unity is such a rare thing, that the oil of gladness should be poured out in abundance—even wasted—to celebrate it. The oil runs down High Priest Aaron’s head, to his beard, and all the way down his robes.
Verse 3 contains a parallel geographical image that the original audience would not have missed. The writer imagines the dew of Hermon (a 9000-foot, lush, solitary, green mountain located in far northern Israel) flowing all the way to the Zion Mountains (a much drier range further to the south). Much like the oil of gladness flows from the top of the body to the bottom, unity brings gladness to all of Israel, from the top (north) to the bottom (south).
I also wonder if the writer also used this image intentionally to convey the elusive and fleeting nature of unity. He pictures it as ephemeral as dew in the desert. Heavy dew would be a common experience on Mount Hermon, but to experience an abundance of dew on Mount Zion would be a rarity, on par with the experience of true unity among brothers and sisters.
If you read the Gospels you see that everyone tried to recruit Jesus to their “side”. But Jesus didn’t come to join a side, he came to show us an entirely new way. In fact, on one occasion, he went so far to say that he was the Way—John 14:9. In his longest recorded prayer, which takes place just before he is arrested and crucified, one of the things Jesus requested is that is disciples would be oneas he and God were one—John 17:20-25. Being as fully human as he was divine, Jesus knew well the danger of divisiveness. He knew that even within the Upper Room there was division among his closest followers. After all, one of them was about to betray him to the Romans. He himself had felt the temptation to “join a tribe” and define himself by what he wasn’t, as opposed to what he was, just as much as you and I feel it today.
And of course, it doesn’t end with Jesus. Many of Paul’s letters were written in response to divisions that he had heard about in the Christ communities that he had started. He spends a lot of time appealing for unity in the Body of Christ—e.g., 1 Corinthians 1:10-17.
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| Image credit: From related story at Historyhollywood.com. |
At our church for the past month, the sermons have drawn from the example of Fred Rogers, a man who modeled for us what it means to live in unity with his neighbors. The movie, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, made its debut this weekend. It gives us another perspective on what that neighborhood was like—and what it was like to be an outsider invited into that neighborhood. Talk about suspending disbelief! At moments I forgot it was Tom Hanks, and not Fred Rogers, I was watching on the screen in front of me.
Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood was a diverse place, and sometimes they disagreed. But they seemed to work through differences and get along by the end of the episode. Some might dismiss this as something that can only happen in the "Land of Make Believe". This all sounds well and good for the plot of a children’s program, they say, where everything is neatly resolved in a 30-minute episode, but practically speaking, it seems impossible to do in the “real” world. And the skeptics may have a point. Grown-up issues are sometimes a bit more complex than those Mr. Rogers addressed.
But, then again, if we can’t even begin to imagine being able to work through our differences and live together in unity, how will we ever actually do it in real life?
It is interesting to me that a movie about Mr. Rogers would come off the same weekend Christ the King Sunday on our liturgical calendar (and a week before Thanksgiving on our secular calendar). A newer addition to the liturgical calendar (created in 1925 versus centuries ago, like most of the calendar) the final Sunday of Ordinary Time (and the last Sunday of the liturgical year) is set aside for us to ponder the kind of Lord, or the kind of King we are about to prepare to welcome into our neighborhood—John 1:14, The Message—during the season of Advent, which starts the following Sunday.
Perhaps Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood gives more clues about Christ the King than we realized when we watched as children. Rogers was a humble Man of God—a Presbyterian minister, whose pulpit was a weekly children’s TV program. (I imagine he reached far more people that way, then he would have “in a church”.) Every day the Neighborhood Trolley took us on an adventure to the Land of Make Believe, where King Friday XIII reigned over an imaginary kingdom where all Creation had voices. There were talking tigers, dogs, cats, owls, skunks, frogs, and platypus, conversing with the humans on a regular basis—and no one thought it the least bit unusual. We see Henrietta Cat living alongside Daniel Striped Tiger, and families of Frogg and Platypus coexisting with X the Owl… and the animals even manage to thrive right alongside the humans, like Lady Elaine Fairchild, Lady Aberlin, and Handyman Negri. This menagerie of muppets and men brought to my mind the image from the Bible of the peaceable kingdom—Isaiah 11:6-8. There’s even “a little child” to lead them, since presumably Prince Tuesday is heir to the throne.
Like the Kingdom of God that Jesus frequently speaks about, Mr. Rogers’ Land of Make Believe gave us glimpses of what it might look like to live in a “neighborhood” where kindness reigns, a place where leaders rule not by the sword—but by the towel.
It wasn’t just the trips to the Land of Make Believe that taught us; almost every episode provided living parables—and sometimes prophetic statements. Take for example the episode when Mr. Rogers dipped his feet in a pool of water with Officer Clemons, an African American, on hot summer afternoon in May 1969. While segregation was no longer “legal” at that time, it was still very much practiced in our nation. Many communities would not allow African Americans to swim in the same pool as white people. There are repugnant scenes from that era of white motel owners throwing chemicals in pools while blacks were swimming!
By virtue of that one act of kindness, Mr. Rogers preached a sermon—without saying a word! People today are sometimes offended when pastors “get political” with their message. Although he left “formal” pastoral ministry, Fred Rogers never forgot that part of his call was to speak out when he saw injustice and unkindness in our world. At that moment in time, he used his TV program to offer a voice for a group of people who were being denied one. He recognized that the Body of Christ can claim unity, only to the extent that it feels the pain of its weakest parts—and responds with kindness and compassion.
As author and surgeon Paul Brand says it: “When wounded, living tissues cry out, and the whole body hears the cry. And we in Christ’s Body—loving our neighbors as ourselves—are called to a similar level of identification: If one part suffers, every part suffers, says St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 12:26.” [1]
There was no mistaking where Mr. Rogers stood on the issue of racism after that episode aired. When my pastor (who happens to be my wife) spoke on this, she pointed out that this was an effective means to get his message across because, at the heart of it all, he was simply being a neighbor to Officer Clemons. He was doing what Jesus would’ve done if he were Fred Rogers in that moment; in other words, he was being a disciple of Christ our “Neighbor King”. She wondered how different the world might be if all of us who claimed to follow Christ simply did a better job at being kind to our neighbors? Who knows? We might just change the world!
This episode, like so many, was modeled on an example from the life of Jesus that we find in the Bible—see Luke 13:1-17. On the very night when (at least as John tells the story) Jesus knew he was about to be betrayed, denied, and ultimately abandoned by those with whom he was about to eat the Passover meal, he took the radical step of kneeling to wash their dirty feet. To be clear, everyone in that room would have been shocked to see the one Peter had earlier identified as Christ the Lord, kneel to do the job that even the lowliest servant tried hard to avoid. (Feet don’t smell good today after a day of activity; I suspect they smelled much worse in the first century.) But, despite protests from Peter and the others, Jesus continued undeterred. After he finished, he put his robe back on and said, “Do see what I have done for you? I have given you an example of how to love. Now go and do likewise.” No one was excluded from that foot washing—not even Judas, the one who was about to set in motion the events that would lead to Jesus’s death. You and I are those disciples—they are us.
Like Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, the Kingdom of God is a place where the King and his followers kneel to serve every other resident of “neighborhood”, showing them hospitality and compassion, and granting them dignity—no matter how different they are from us.
St. Teresa of Avila said, “Always think of yourself as everyone’s servant; look for Christ Our Lord in everyone and you will then have respect and reverence for them all.” I pray that it could be said of us—and of our faith communities—that we saw and honored Christ in every person we met. I hope these examples from Fred Rogers—and from Jesus—inspire us to be Christ’s hands, feet, eyes, and voice in our communities through simple acts of kindness and compassion, especially when we see places where these are being denied to one of our neighbors. I can only imagine what might happen if we actually managed to really “get” this. Maybe, this Advent, the Light of Christ, our Neighbor King, would truly shine and disperse the gloomy clouds of division and disagreement that so often conspire to drag our world down into the pit of despair. Perhaps it would be the dawn of a new day where we pass beyond fleeting unity among the members of a single faith community or neighborhood, and experience profound solidarity with the only race there is—the human race—and even with our non-human neighbors—and ultimately, with the Neighbor God who created all things. Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.
[1] Brand, Paul and Philip Yancey (IV Press: 2018). Fearfully and Wonderfully: The Marvel of Bearing God’s Image, Ch 17, p. 185. The book looks at the anatomy of the human body and draws analogies to the Body of Christ. Brand was a surgeon who worked extensively with Leprosy patients in India and Louisiana.
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