He was a fuzzy-faced young man with a twangy West Virginia accent and an angular chin as craggy as the hills from which he had come. You had to notice him, small though he was, because he carried a Bible as big as the side of a barn and painted in the same bright fiery color. It was obvious that he had cane to college with a strong sense of mission. Mike was out to change the world, he was out there to witness to every student who got in his path and not a few of the professors too. You had to admire the zeal and the energy he brought to the task.
But it wasn’t long before some disturbing signs began to show up. I was conducting a Bible study one evening, and noticed some kind of whispering going on over in the corner. Mike and his roommate were huddled over that big red Bible, and Mike’s finger was tracing some words along the page. Mike’s head was shaking a vigorous "No, no, no." And so I of course asked what the problem was. Both Mike and his roommate looked up sheepishly, and finally Mike stammered out, "Well, you said … but the Bible says …"
"You said…, but the Bible says …" That got to be a recurring theme over the next few months. Practically anything I said Mike found a way to challenge. Almost anything I did he objected to, but quietly, behind the scenes, where it was hard to discuss or to clarify. I began to realize that we were locked into some sort of struggle, that it was more than theological disagreement, but now was a power struggle. And I didn’t have a clue as to what to do about it.
It got worse. I got wind that Mike had hooked up with some folks at another church in town, and that together they were forming a rival Christian group, that they were already trying to take students out of our Baptist Student Union. They were forming what they chose to call a "real Bible-believing group" Ouch!
You can imagine how disappointed I was in Mike and those students. I thought I had invested a whole lot of time and energy and love, and now they treat me this way! I was really disappointed. And, you know, to be betrayed in the name of God, that is really disappointing. If you don’t think it feels horrible for somebody to rebel against you and use God’s name to justify it, well, just ask Archbishop Hickey this morning what he feels about Father Stallings!
The climax to it all came one night when I entered our Baptist Student center; I had not planned to be there that night, but I was driving by and saw the lights on, and wondered what was going on. When I walked in there was Mike and his roommate, and they were writing allover the chalkboard, such wonderful uplifting slogans as “My word shall not return unto me void." "Earnestly contend for the faith once delivered to the saints.” "All Scripture is inspired by God and is profitable for reproof." The word “reproof” was underlined twice.
Obviously he was sending me a message, and I had to respond. I could not any longer pretend that the message wasn’t there, I had to express my disappointment in him and he had to give vent to his disappointments about me. It was an electric moment. And though we talked for more than two hours about the things which separated us, I never got the feeling we solved anything. In fact during the next two years we pretty much went our separate ways: me working with and enlisting for the Baptist Student Union, he and the folks at that other church working just as hard enlisting students for their group, most of them students I had already enlisted for my group.
Disappointment, deep and mutual disappointment. And it hurt.
I would guess that there is no one here this morning who has not been disappointed by someone else. Nothing is more universal than to have expectations of someone and to find out that those hopes, those expectations, are not being met. And that is not just a human issue, not just a feelings issue; it’s a spiritual issue too. It’s a spiritual issue because when we are disappointed in somebody it kicks up in us some things that are not pretty. It makes us want to do things and say things that are not especially Christlike. And the prophet Hosea discovered that in his very human, very real, disappointment, there was much that he could learn about what God feels about us.
You see, one of the basic ideas in Hosea’s prophecy is that God does feel about us. God does care about what we do and what we are like; God is concerned with our loyalty. But Hosea saw, I think more deeply than anyone else, that God is hurt when we are not what He intended us to be. God feels a keen pain when we are less than His hopes for us. But more than that, God shows us how to channel those feelings, how to make something positive happen with our disappointments.
And nowhere does that become more clear than in the text for today.
Hosea 11:1-9
I
Obviously, disappointment with others shows up with they do not measure up to our expectations of them. When you have hopes, when you have standards, when you want somebody to be something or to do something, and they turn out failures, well, we are disappointed. That much is obvious. And it’s really unavoidable. When I was about ten years old and my little brother was only four, he just about idolized me. It was not too bad, being the object of someone’s abject devotion, not too shabby! He would do just about anything for me because he thought I could literally do anything for him. But one day that little castle came crumbling down, as he pointed up in the sky at an airplane flying by, and he said, Joe, make me one of those! Well, I’m afraid I had to disappoint that little idol-worshipper! It’s unavoidable that others will disappoint us.
The problem is that my expectation for somebody else and his own hopes, his own plans, just may not be the same. What I want someone to do or to be and what he wants for himself –well, these just don’t connect. And, deeper, there is something in us that makes us want to push aside other people’s agendas for us. There is a natural rebelliousness in us, and it makes want to revolt. Like the fellow who tried on a suit in the clothing store and said to the clerk, "If my wife likes this suit, can I bring it back?" How we do push hard against each other; how we do rebel against those who love us the most!
Put all this together and it makes for real, serious, painful disappointment.
And so Hosea paints a picture of a God who remembers with anguish how much he loved his people, all that He did for them back there in the wilderness – and how come they can’t remember?
"When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son. The more I called them, the more they went from me." Can you identify with that feeling? "The more I called them, the more they went from me." Those who disappoint us the most are the ones in whom we have invested enormous amounts of time and energy and love and money and emotion, and it seems the more we do, the more they put distance between us.
Any parent here knows who has laid out tuition money and bought plane tickets and paid credit card bills and on and on …and then you make a phone call to the dorm room and what you get is, "Uh-huh, uh-huh, whaddaya want." We invest, and we think we should get a payoff, but the harder we try the greater the distance and the disappointment.
A professor friend of mine in one of the local universities was and is deeply involved in his church. I asked him one day how things were going, knowing that his pastor had been in the newspapers and that there were reports of particularly scandalous behavior. My friend turned with fire in his eyes and said, "That man is the greatest disappointment I’ve had in my entire personal life, in my church life, and even in my professional career." He had given so much and hoped so much that now nothing could plumb the depths of his disappointment and pain. But he and his pastor were getting farther and farther apart, and as I watched that dilemma, I could see this ancient story being replayed, I could see that very human rebelliousness boiling up in that pastor: "The more I called Israel, the more they went from me."
But now I want to encourage you this morning to be glad if you feel that kind of disappointment. Yes, I want to encourage you to be pleased if you feel disappointed with someone, because that means you care! That means you have the capacity to value and to care. You see, if you are never disappointed that really means you have become cold and cynical. If anything goes, if it doesn’t matter to you how those close to you behave, well, that means you’ve grown numb. You’ve lost a wonderfully human dimension.
I had a history professor who would say to us frequently that he had chosen the path of pessimism, because if you’re a pessimist, if you expect the worst, then at least you are never disappointed. But of course he had become just about the most cynical, negative, callous human being you can imagine. Be glad this morning if there is somebody for whom you care so much that they disappoint you. God is like that. God cares so much about Israel that he could not contain His disappointment. Hosea cared so much about his faithless wife Gomer that he could not leave her on the ash heap. And you and I, investing in others, caring for them, are only human if we are disappointed, but we are what God is like: caring, feeling, loving.
II
Now when you get slapped in the face with some disappointment, what is your natural reaction? What is it you want to do? How do you handle it? Well, some of us just retreat to the comer and pout and feel sorry for ourselves. But others want to punish. We want to hurt. We want to react and manipulate and extend our control if we can.
Guess what? God feels that way too. Even God feels anger, even God wants to rebuke and to punish. As much as some of us would prefer to get rid of all the harshly judgmental passages in the Bible, we cannot.
There they are. God speaks in wrath, God’s feelings flare up, and His disappointment turns into a desire to strike out.
But here is what I want you to notice this morning. God’s way of dealing with disappointment, God’s way of expressing His wrath and His anger, is not so much to strike out and to destroy as it is just to leave people to their own devices. He leaves us to the consequences of our faithlessness and lets us go. And that is the wrath of God; it’s a passive anger more than an active anger, but it is anger, it is disappointment.
"They shall return to the land of Egypt, and Assyria shall be their king, because they have refused to return to me. The sword shall rage against their cities, consume the bars of their gates, and devour them in their fortresses. My people are bent on turning away from me; so they are appointed to the yoke, and none shall remove it."
I do not hear in this a God who will send out thunderbolts to punish. I hear in this instead a God who will simply leave people to the consequences of their wrong choices. He does not say, "I will send the Assyrian"; He says instead, "I’ll leave them alone, and the Assyrians will just do what Assyrians always do!" If I climb up to the pinnacle of this roof and jump off, and break my stupid neck, I don’t have to say that God deliberately chose to hurt me. No, I just reaped the consequences ignoring God’s laws, and He just let it happen. He didn’t destroy me, but He didn’t intervene to stop me either.
Now you see this is where some of us get tripped up when we are disappointed in others. We want to retain control. We want to keep our hands on the tiller. And so we think we can force others to do what we want them to do, we act as though we can trick them or manipulate them into being what we want them to be. The truth is that we would be much wiser if we just let those who have disappointed us learn their own lessons.
Over the years I’ve dealt with a lot of parents of college students who wanted to force their youngsters or trick their offspring into being what they hoped for. Parents us to ask me, "Where is there a nice Christian college, single-sex college, where I can send my daughter and keep her out of trouble?" It reminds me of the way my old friend, the late humorist Grady Nutt, used to describe Baylor University: "eight miles from the nearest known sin."
But we cannot deal with our disappointments in other people by trying to restrain them, or by trying to force them. Disappointed though we may be, we have to learn to let other make their own mistakes and do their own learning. I know of a teacher so bent on not being disappointed with her children’s artwork that she would color all the pictures, she would carve all the elegant bookends and all the rest. Of course everything was perfect. Of course the work was better than what the kids would have done. Just one thing wrong. The kids learned absolutely zero, because they weren’t given room to make mistakes.
Hosea is teaching us that God, though profoundly disappointed in us, allows us room to make our own mistakes and accept the consequences.
III
In the end the way we struggle with others who disappoint us is to be who we are, to let the heart rule over the head, and to be who we are. It will cost us, it will not be easy, but the way to handle our feelings of pain and disappointment is to wait a while so that our own caring judgments can come through.
When Hosea listened to the heart of God and found his way into God’s intentions for His people, what He found was more than disappointment and deeper than anger; what he found was greater than pain and more redemptive by far than punishment. What he found was compassion.
Listen: "How can I give you up, 0 Ephraim, how can I hand you over, 0 Israel? ... My heart recoils with me, my compassion grows warm and tender, I will not execute my fierce anger, I will not again destroy Ephraim, for I am God and not man, the Holy one in your midst, and I will not come to destroy."
How does our God deal with us when He is disappointed in us? He feels for us, He is angry at us, but in the end He lets His compassion have sway, and, as Hosea found, He absorbs His wrath into Himself. It’s called the Cross. He absorbs His anger into Himself, and all the punishment we should have received, He takes into Himself and bears every burden pays every price, for us.
How does our God deal with His disappointment over us? When we have not measured up to His dreams for us, God acts like God. God is simply Himself. “I am God and not man, in your midst.” He is true to His own nature, He does not allow Himself to be drawn down to petty recriminations or the smallness of vengeance. He is true to Himself and acts with compassion and love. He never gives up on us.
The hymn-writer spoke of our God, "Thou art not, like man, untrue. " Our God reads His own heart and elects to go to a cross, if that’s what it takes, to save us from ourselves. He is disappointed in us, yes. He is even angry at us. But in the end He lets His heart rule and He keeps on giving and giving and giving some more until we are persuaded and we return to Him.
That’s how we are to struggle with those who disappoint us. Keep on caring, keep on giving, be ourselves, be what God has called us to be, and know that in the last analysis it is the life with a Cross in it that wins others’ love and loyalty.
As for Mike, my student disappointment: I did not see him for many years. Then just a few years ago I ran into him at a Baptist convention. He said, "Let’s go get something to eat. I want to talk with you." Gone was the floppy red Bible; gone the suspicious look in the eyes; gone too the rhetoric of ultra-righteousness. I shall not soon forget what he told me: "I treated you badly back there in college. I’m sorry. You see, I went to seminary, I became a pastor, I got married. But then we divorced. I thought my church would throw me out. I even thought they should throw me out. But they stayed by me when I was broken. I see now what it means to struggle with, and not against, those who disappoint us."
Hear the words and the promise of our God as reported by the prophet Hosea: "I will heal their faithlessness; I will love them freely, for my anger has turned from them.”
