Neighborly Negotiation

Won’t you be my neighbor?  Most of us who grew up with PBS will recognize that question coming at the beginning of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.  It’s also the title of a documentary about him released a few years back.  Fred Rogers was a pioneer in educational programming, but not without a cost.  He had to defend himself before a judge.   His work was publicly funded, and the US Senate was looking to pull his funding after only a short time on the air.  Anger would be an appropriate response.  Instead, he brought his message, the same question that he would ask of the young children, to those judging him: What do you do with the mad that you feel?  He went on to convert the hostile crowd, realizing that’s an important question for children to grapple with early, with implications for the future.

Fred Rogers' question paraphrases Jesus’ sermon on the mount on getting to the core of what motivates us.  Anger, without a healthy outlet, can lead to a whole host of problems and sins.  Jesus calls us all to get to the core of what makes us angry, and how we respond.  What do we do with the mad that we feel?   We look for the source of our anger or conflict and address it.   We seek reconciliation to “settle with our opponent quickly, or in another translation “make friends quickly”.  Our opponent is resentment, and when it builds up and destroys us from the inside.  I invite all of us to pray about what we do with the mad we feel and ask God to help us find the source and make amends.