I was accepted to Rice University, a Division 1 school, on a swimming scholarship. All of sudden, I went from being a big fish in a small pond to a minnow in an ocean full of sharks. When I would lose a race back in Virginia, it was because I would get out touched at the finish or maybe I would lose by half a body length to somebody really good. But once I got to Rice, I was losing races by multiple body lengths in a 50—that’s the shortest race you can swim, it’s up and back. I was staring at their feet. I was nowhere close to these guys. They were in a completely different league.

Honestly, it was kind of demoralizing. I had built my entire identity around being a good swimmer and now I was competing at a level where my performance was mediocre at best. Thankfully, I was put out of my misery because, after my freshman year at Rice, they cut the men’s swim team. I thought that was the end of my swimming career, but during my junior year of college, I studied at Oxford University in England and I had the opportunity to swim for their team. Even though I hadn’t trained in over a year, their times were more in line with what I had experienced back in Virginia. I realized very quickly, I could compete with these guys and the best thing is, it’s England, so I’m not even the whitest guy there.

I trained really hard for about 6 months and I qualified for their national meet. If you’re not familiar with swimming, at these big meets, you always swim your event at least twice. The first time you swim it’s what’s known as the preliminary heats. The top 8 swimmers from the preliminaries in the morning are allowed to come back for the finals at night. There were close to 70 swimmers in the preliminaries in the morning for the 50 freestyle. My time after swimming the preliminaries placed me 2^nd out of those 70 swimmers.

I thought to myself, “Wow, I might be able to win this thing.” I was really nervous because it had been more than 3 years since I had won anything in swimming and here I had a real opportunity. So the evening comes around and our event is called. But as I’m preparing to get up on the blocks, I notice something about all the guys I’m swimming against: they’re not wearing speedos. They’re all wearing full body suits, which reduces your drag substantially. Those suits can cost anywhere from $2-300 each! My speedo cost me $30 bucks. All of sudden, I felt very naked and outgunned.

So we get up on the blocks. The referee says take your mark, the buzzer goes off and it was like being back at Rice. I was 2^nd going into the finals and I finished dead last. I was 8^th. They destroyed me. That was the last race I ever swam and it broke me in a huge way. It was the beginning of completely new era in my life. Up until that point in time, I had defined my value and self-worth as a human being based on my success in the pool.

And now, my swimming career, which had consumed my life for the past 10 years, was over. I had no other metric for understanding what made life meaningful. I know it might sound a bit dramatic, but it felt like I was dead. I’m sure that many of you in here can understand what I’m talking about, when an important part of who you are is all of a sudden gone.

Maybe it’s ending a career. Maybe it’s ending a marriage. Maybe it’s being a parent to your children and watching them leave the house. Maybe it’s mentally or physically not being able to do the things that you love to do. Maybe it’s losing an important friend or mentor. Maybe it’s moving to another part of the country. Whatever it is, when it’s that important to you, leaving it behind can feel like a part of you is dying.

And for me, I felt lost because swimming had given me everything. It had given me self-esteem. It had given me self-respect. It had afforded me the opportunity to get an amazing education. So once it was gone, I had to revaluate everything. And thankfully, it was around this time that I was studying theology at Oxford. So I was spending a lot of time reading the Bible. And I remember speaking with one of my professors about Jesus’ death and resurrection and I asked him, “What is Jesus’ death and resurrection all about? What does it mean? Why is it so important? Because I’ve heard about Jesus’ death forgiving us of our sins, but I don’t understand the resurrection. What does the resurrection do for us?”

I remember he looked at me and said, “Alex, the resurrection is all about love.” And he never really explained it any further than that. I’ll be honest, at the time, I didn’t understand what he meant by that—the resurrection is all about love. In my mind, the story was very literal. Jesus is executed and then, three days later, comes back to life. What does that have to do with love?

It didn’t make sense to me until a few years later. I was in seminary and I happened to be watching the news one night on my computer. And there was piece that was being done on Fred Rogers who of course was the host of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood. Now, I’m sure all of you are familiar with Fred Rogers and his show on PBS. What you may not realize about Fred Rogers is that he was a Presbyterian pastor.

Mr. Rogers attended Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and was ordained as a Presbyterian minister in 1963. When you get ordained in the Presbyterian Church, you are ordained to a call, to a specific ministry. So for instance, I was originally called to be an associate pastor for a church in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. I was ordained as a pastor to serve the people in the church. Mr. Rogers was called as an evangelist for television and was ordained as a pastor to serve people through television programming, which was a bit out there for the Presbyterian Church.

Now at the same time that he was at Pittsburg Seminary, he also had the opportunity to attend the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Child Development, which at the time was doing cutting edge research on child development. And it was through this education that he was able to develop the foundation for his television show Mister Rogers Neighborhood. One of Fred Rogers’ mentors was the child psychologist Margaret McFarland, who explained to him, “To the child, the television program between you and the child is a real relationship.”

And he took that idea, and like no one before him, he ran with it. I grew up watching Mister Rogers every day as a preschooler. I have memories of sitting in front of my television transfixed by his program. It was a very important part of my daily ritual. But I was not alone. Millions of children around America watched Mister Rogers, which in and of itself, is kind of remarkable. There was a producer who once said, “You take all the elements that make good television and do the exact opposite and you have Mister Rogers Neighborhood. Low production values, simple sets, an unlikely star.” And yet, it worked in a kind of magical sort of way.

Now this news program I was watching at seminary began by travelling around with Mister Rogers in New York City. This was right before Mister Rogers passed away in 2003, so it had been some time since he had been on television. And the question posed by Dan Rather was, “Would anybody recognize him?” The cameras were kind of at a distance filming him and the moment he stepped onto the subway platform, he was swarmed by people.

From there, they cut to the interview between himself and Dan Rather, which is when he talked about the fact that he was a Presbyterian pastor. Now at the time I didn’t know that and, of course, here I am studying to become a Presbyterian pastor. So I started doing some research on Mister Rogers because it had been almost 20 years since I had watched his show and I wondered—how do these two things go together? Being a pastor and Mister Rogers Neighborhood.

And what I discovered is that Mister Rogers was radical for his time. He broke down barriers in ways that nobody else was doing on television. Let me give you an example of what I mean by that. Mister Roger’s Neighborhood began filming in 1968. Even though Brown v. Board of Education had legally ended segregation, the practice of segregation was still in full effect. One of the regular actors on his show was an African American man named Francois Clemens, who played a variety of different characters. Take a look at how Mister Rogers tackles this issue in 1969.

Now that is radical. Not only was he willing to confront racism in a way that children could understand, but he also had a gay man on his show. He talked to kids about conflict, anger, divorce, death, violence and war. He spoke to kids about the things that were going on in their lives; things that impacted them every single day; things that adults either don’t know how to talk about with their children or simply ignore for fear of making them feel unsafe or unloved.

And underneath every one of his shows was not just a philosophy, but a theology of love. Fred Rogers once said, “Love is at the root of everything. All learning. All parenting. All relationships. Love or the lack of it.” He would end every show by saying, “’You’ve made this day a special day by just your being you. There’s no person in the whole world like you. And I like you just the way you are.” He didn’t say that because he was pandering to his audience. He said this because this idea lies at the core of his Christian faith.

You see, Fred Rogers understood something fundamental about children. Most children never hear the message that they are enough as they are. Most children are told either explicitly or implicitly that they must strive to be something better than they are now; that their value as human beings will only be recognized in some future state of adulthood. So we come to embody this belief that we need to be in continual pursuit of this person we will become. But what happens is we get to adulthood and that belief never goes away. So many adults hate themselves because they have come to believe that they are not enough.

At the core of Fred Roger’s theology was this radical kind of love. A radical inclusivity where you are accepted just as you are. No matter your race, your age, your gender, your sexuality, your mistakes, your beliefs, you are enough. And he didn’t just make that up. That is how the God who we worship views us. Indeed, that radical kind of love is the seed that truly can change the world. (Show clip)

As I sat there that day in my dorm room at seminary, I couldn’t help but think about all the ways that Fred Rogers had influenced my own thinking about Jesus and the Christian faith without me even knowing it. I believe so strongly in the idea that every human being is of infinite value. I believe so strongly in the power of grace and forgiveness to restore relationships. I believe so strongly in the power of love to change the world. And it was in that moment that I finally understood what my professor at Oxford was talking about when he said, “The resurrection is all about love.”

You see, we often look at the resurrection of Jesus as this defining moment in history because Jesus does what no one else in history has done, he comes back from the dead. But resurrection is more than just an event. It’s an idea. It’s a principle that defines the way we understand the universe God has created. Jesus’ resurrection is directly preceded by a horrific execution. Jesus was derided, beat, tortured and convicted of a crime he did not commit. Everything that is corrupt, unjust and evil about our world conspired to send this man to his death.

And yet, as much as he was crushed by the absolute worst of who we are as humans, it was not enough to fully snuff him out. Now what does that tell you? It tells me that Jesus’ resurrection symbolizes something much deeper about the world in which we live. It tells me that love, true love, can overcome the most horrific evils in our world. It tells me that when we embrace the love that God has for us, we can rise above whatever is holding us back. It tells me that love is what makes life worth living.

As all of this came flooding into my heart and mind, I had this moment of absolute clarity about my life. The first thing I realized is that I had molded my life around wrong things. I had molded my life around being the best—the best swimmer, the best student and I when I wasn’t the best, I felt like I was nothing. But I decided that day I was going to start molding my life around love. I determined that my value as a person was not in what I could achieve, but in the love I could share with others.

The second thing I realized is that I wanted to be a pastor just like Mister Rogers. I wanted to preach a God of radical love and inclusivity. A God who inspires you to become the best version of yourself. A God who whispers in your ear, “You are enough just as you are.” That is the God we are here to celebrate today and that is the God I hope you and your family have known in your lives.

So as you leave here this morning, may you rejoice in this God of grace and love and compassion. May you celebrate all the ways that Jesus’ resurrection conveys to us that love will triumph over evil. And may you know that, no matter what the world might tell you about all the ways you fall short and how you need to be something more than you are now, there’s no person in the whole world like you. God likes you just the way you are. Amen.