This article is by Heidi S. De Jonge (M.Div., D.Min.), a trainer and coach with The Colossian Forum and an Associate Chaplain at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario
Mister Fred Rogers was my childhood hero. I hung an autographed picture of him up in my locker in 7th grade. In addition to being a writer, producer, and host of children’s programming, he was a minister in the Presbyterian Church and a brother in Christ who loved Jesus.
The motivation behind the work that Rogers did came from his concern about the gap between the way things were and the way things were meant to be. In particular, he was gravely concerned that children were not being treated as full human beings. And so the goal of his television program, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, was to listen to children, to pay deep attention to them, and then to communicate with them based on what he’d heard.
You’ve probably heard the old adage, “Children are meant to be seen and not heard.”
I think a version of this adage exists in our neighborhoods. I know there are exceptions to this, but how often are our neighborhoods places where people are seen but not heard? We see each other — we may even wave to each other – but we don’t listen to each other or know each other. There is a gap here, between the way things are and the way they are meant to be, just as Mister Rogers noted in the treatment of children.
Ask yourself this question about your neighborhood – even your global neighborhood: “Who is it that I am seeing, but not hearing?”
God is also troubled by the gap between the way things are and the way God created them to be:
In Isaiah 58, the gap looks like the yoke of oppression, pointing fingers, speaking maliciously about one another. The gap looks like hunger, ruins, broken foundations.
In the story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10), the gap looks like the priest and the Levite who walked along on the other side of the road.
In Matthew 19, the gap looks like the disciples shooing the children away. “Do not bother the Master!”
And in John 1, the gap looks like a broken creation and a broken people – who neither see nor hear the Word of God.
In Exodus 2:23-25, we read that “the Israelites groaned in their slavery and cried out, and their cry for help because of their slavery went up to God. God heard their groaning and he remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac and with Jacob. So God looked on the Israelites and was concerned about them.”
God saw and heard his children. And God came to the Israelites through his servant Moses, who was but a foreshadowing of what we read in John 1. The Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood – to see us and to hear us…to be seen by us and to be heard by us. To dwell among us. To be God with us. God closed the gap!
With his vision for seeing and hearing children, Fred Rogers constructed a neighborhood of people (and puppets!) who saw each other, heard each other, and learned from each other. People of different races, ages, genders, socioeconomic backgrounds and abilities.
And God is with us in this way, closing the gap by welcoming the little children into his arms and by telling his disciples not to stand in the way of the children or of anyone else, because the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.
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