What to Do With Disappointment?

 Rev. Dr. Christopher Carlson

The word of God comes to us from Mark, chapter 11, the familiar story of the triumphal entry into Jerusalem. (Mark 11:1-11)

     As they approached Jerusalem and came to Bethpage and Bethany at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two of his disciples, saying to them, “Go to the village ahead of you, and just as you enter it, you will find a colt tied there, which no one has ever ridden.  Untie it and bring it here.  If anyone asks you, ‘Why are you doing this?’ tell him, ‘The Lord needs it and will send it back here shortly.’”

     They went and found a colt outside in the street, tied at a doorway.  As they untied it, some people standing there asked, “What are you doing. Untying that colt?”  They answered as Jesus had told them to, and the people let them go.  When they brought the colt to Jesus and threw their cloaks over it, he sat on it.  Many people spread their cloaks on the road, while others spread branches they had cut in the fields.  Those who went ahead and those who followed shouted,

     “Hosanna!”

     “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!”

     “Blessed is the coming kingdom of our father David!”

     “Hosanna in the highest!”

     Jesus entered Jerusalem and went to the temple.  He looked around at everything, but since it was already late, he went out to Bethany with the Twelve.

This is the word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

Would you pray with me?

Oh Father we come with our hearts expectant that you would be here, you will touch our hearts and minds and bless us.  Whatever we need to hear, Lord, each one, may we hear it.  May it be your word to us.  We ask your presence and may you, Lord, be glorified by what we do here.  In Jesus’ name.  Amen.

The disciples had huge expectations.  Indeed, all the followers of Jesus did.  They had been following him almost three years now and had seen him do incredible things.  He talked and preached like no one.  Huge crowds followed him.  He was like a rock star.  He had trouble finding time alone even to eat sometimes.  One of the reasons they followed him were his words, but another was that people had a habit of going to him broken and going away made whole again, both in their hearts and their bodies.  So as he traveled around, excitement followed him and more so even now.  Just a few days before he enters Jerusalem, Jesus had done the most incredible thing.  His friend Lazarus had died and had been put away in a tomb and Jesus called him out, grave clothes and all, and raised him from the dead.  The word spread like wild fire.  You can imagine, if they existed in those days, Fox News and CNN would have been right there.  We would have “On the Record with Greta,” talking about whether these things could be true.  Jesus had done something that no one had done and the word was spreading.  Everybody was excited.   He was near Jerusalem; would he finally do it?  You see Jesus had been saying privately, in one way or another, that he was the Messiah, the long expected King of Israel; but he’d never really done it publicly, at least with a big splash.  Would he do it now?  Well you can’t imagine the excitement of the disciples as he gets ready to go into Jerusalem, he says to them, “Go and get a colt.”  That seems like a small thing but they new their bible better than we do.  They knew the prophet had said, Zechariah, “You oh Jerusalem, your king will come to you on a colt.”  Jesus was going to fulfill the prophecy.  The word spread.  People began to go get branches and they brought their cloaks.  As he entered the gates they spread them out before him and crying out, “Hosanna!  Hosanna!  Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!  Blessed is he who comes as the son of David!” (Technical term for Messiah.)  He’s here!  Is he finally going to do it?  Everybody was excited.  They were crying out about him; but not everybody was excited.  Of course, many of the leaders were not that happy about it.  They said to his disciples, “Tell your disciples to stop saying all these things.”  And Jesus said, “If they don’t cry out, even the stones will cry out.”  And you better believe the Romans were taking notice.  If you know anything about the city of Jerusalem, the temple mount was there and right next to it the Romans had built the great fortress of Antonia; right next to it, because they knew that wherever trouble was going to begin, it would begin right at the temple.  I can imagine the commander of the
Romans saying, “You guys get ready.”  Sure enough, Jesus goes where you would expect any Messiah to go.  He goes to the temple.  I can just imagine them walking up the steps, going, “It’s coming.  It’s coming.”  But then the most anti-climatic moment, Jesus gets to the temple and looks around.  If he had a watch he would be looking at it, going “It’s getting late, time for dinner.  Let’s go back out of Jerusalem back to Bethany and go to bed.”  “What is this guy doing?”  Masses of disappointment, and it would be the beginning of a week of disappointment.

What do we do with disappointment in our own lives?  How do we handle it?  I think we have to begin by understanding where disappointment comes from.  It comes from expectations.  We have expectations about thousands of things.  We get them from all kinds of places, stories that we read, things that we hear; we get married expecting to live happily ever after; we buy a car thinking that it is going to last.  The salesman has created expectations.  “This is the best car for you.”  Then we buy it and it is a couple days later that buyer’s regret comes in.  All kinds of expectations.   A lot of people handle this by saying, “Well, I’m not going to have any.  If I don’t have any expectations, I’m not going to be disappointed.”  Or they come up basically saying, “I’m just going to have negative expectations.”  I was reading this week about some of the more famous negative expectations; they’re called Murphy’s Laws.

Some of my favorites are written here:

Anything that can go wrong will go wrong and usually at the wrong time.

Nothing is as easy as it looks.

Everything takes longer than you think.

If anything can go wrong, it will.

A day without a crisis is a total loss.

The other line always moves faster.

The chance of bread falling with the peanut butter and jelly side down is directly proportional to the cost of the carpet.

Whatever hits the fan will not be evenly distributed.

A tool (this is one of my favorites) a tool dropped while repairing a car will roll underneath to the exact center.  (That is absolutely true.)

Friends come and go but enemies accumulate.

And one of my favorites,

Beauty is only skin deep but ugly goes clear to the bone.

That’s not what we’re talking about.  We’re not talking about having everything be negative.  But life is full of disappointments with people, with friends, with God.  People get disappointed with God when we get sick and we don’t get well.  Friends die or family die or life just doesn’t turn out like we think it should.  It’s funny, as you get older, it’s easier to get disappointed.  I have a friend of mine who I used to play basketball with.  He used to say something like this, he said, “You know when I was in college I wanted to change the world.  When I got into the seminary I wanted to change the church.  When I got into the church as a pastor, I just wanted to change my church.  Then after a while, I just wanted only to change myself.  Now as I’m about to turn forty, all I really want to do is improve my jump shot.”

We’re not saying we shouldn’t have expectations, but we do need to be realistic about our expectations.  One author talks about our attitude, sometimes our disappointment with siblings, with our brothers and sisters.  He says it comes from having the expectation of, well they’re my brother or my sister, they ought to treat me well.  Hmmm.  He has a little formula.  He calls it E-R=D.  Expectations minus Reality equal Disappointments.  It is really true.  You know the disciples had all kinds of expectations about Jesus.  Now Jesus tried very hard to tell them what he was there for.  He said over and over again “I’m not here to set up a kingdom in Jerusalem.”  He said over and over again “I’m going to Jerusalem to die.”  They just couldn’t hear it.  They had been told the other story again and again and again.  They were a little bit like my children.  You know, we all have had this experience.  When you are reading stories to your children, even when they are like this, two or three years old, everyone of my children, I’d read them stories; they’d have their favorite ones.  I’d play this little game with them.  I’d be reading the story and then I’d change it just a little bit and it wasn’t long before they would say, “Dad, it’s wrong.  You said it wrong.  Read it right.”  They expected to hear the story one way.  We are all like that.  We all have stories programmed in our mind.  We expect to hear things, and experience things, the way we have heard the story.  So we need to listen and adjust our expectations.  And it’s true for Christian life as well.  You know, one of my favorite stories that happened right before this is, James and John who were two of Jesus’ favorites came to him and said “Do what we want you to do for us.”  He said “What?”  And they said “Let one of us sit on your right hand and the other sit on you left when you come to your kingdom.”  Now they expected Jesus to set up the kingdom and they knew what kings do. They rule.  “Yeah, he’s going to be the Messiah but we get to rule right next to him.”  Jesus says “The greatest in the kingdom will be servants because I didn’t come to rule, I came to give my life as a ransom.” 

The biggest thing we need to do besides adjust our expectations is to look for the larger story.  You see Jesus was telling a larger story because that is what God is.  The disciples, because all the Israelites of their time expected this, expected the Messiah to just bring salvation to Israel.  Jesus said not only Israel, because God is not telling a small story.  He’s telling a big story.  So it’s not just the Israelites, but it’s the world.  “For God so loved the world that He gave his one and only Son, that whoever should believe in him should not perish.”  Yes, Israel, but more.  God is telling a bigger story.  The disciples, the followers of Jesus expected the Messiah.  I liken it to the Lone Ranger on the white horse; he’s going to ride in and charge in and kill all the Romans.  Well the Romans were just one in a long list of oppressors of Israel.  For about five hundred years they had one after another; the Babylonians, the Syrians, the Greeks, the Romans were all oppressors.  They thought that one day, for hundreds of years they expected the Messiah to come and drive them out; and then finally Israel would rule because that was part of the promise to King David. That’s what they expected.  But Jesus said “I’m here first to deal with a bigger evil than just one oppressor, because all have sinned.”  On a scale of one to ten, yes, there are bigger sinners than others, but “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” “There are none righteous no not one.”  Every individual human being needs to have their evil dealt with and their sins forgiven; that’s why Jesus came.  Later on he’s going to come back and, yes, make things right.  But the Messiah has come to deal with a larger story, a bigger deal, that “whoever shall believe in him should not perish” because evil is dealt with one person at a time, one family at a time, not just in a macro way but in a micro way.

The disciples expected Jesus to establish this local kingdom, if you will, in Jerusalem but Jesus’ kingdom has a bigger story.  It goes all over the world; and everywhere his followers go, that’s where his kingdom goes, because he goes with us.  It’s a bigger story.  And I would simply close by asking you, “What is your larger story?”  You know most of us, most of us, deep down inside have these kinds of expectations.  We expect to have a reasonable amount of money in our lives.  We expect to have a reasonable amount of health.  We expect to have a reasonable amount of success, according to the world’s standards.  That’s what we want most in life.  But God says, “I have a bigger story to tell in your life.”  If that is your goal, if those are your purposes, God says you can guarantee that you will be disappointed, not because they’re all bad but that’s not the purpose of life.  “Man does not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.”  You’ll be disappointed because one of two things will happen.  Your money may go away; your health may go away; and your happiness may go away.  Or you’ll get all those things in a relative way, but because we don’t live by bread alone, you’ll wind up disappointed anyway; because those are not according to the purposes of God.  God has a bigger story to tell in your life and my life.  Where does that begin? 

I’ll leave you with this.  It begins with surrender.  It begins by realizing that your life is not your own and acting on it.  Again, I was talking to my friend Fred and we realized that we’d been together for thirty years or almost.  Lately I’ve been remembering that I joined the military, I’m a reserve chaplain, almost twenty years ago.  It’s so hard to believe.  I still have that picture when I first got in, in the lieutenant’s outfit, the lowly lieutenant.  I looked pretty good then too. A lot of things have changed.  But you know one thing about the military is that once you put your name on the dotted line, they own you.  I’ve said this before, I could get a phone call tomorrow and someone would say “Chris, you’re about to receive a FedEx copy of your orders which will send you to an exotic place for a year.”  And I have to go, because I’m owned.   That’s not bad.  It’s a bigger thing than myself.  In America we’re so used to thinking we’re just free to do whatever we want, and on one level we are, and that is what makes us a great nation.  But in God’s scheme of thing, you don’t belong to you.  Your life is not your own and if you live your life as though you do, you are going to be disappointed.  Oh, you may reach your goals.  You may have success.  You may have a lot of different things, but it’s not going to be what God wanted for you.  Dealing with disappointment is getting on track with God and saying “Lord I’m yours.  Do with me what you will.  Do with me whatever you want.”  Think about that as we go through this time of Easter.  That your life is not your own, and that’s a good thing.  Because God’s promises are that He will love you, and take care of you, and give you purpose and honor; and you will be His, you’re His child.

In the name of the Father, and the Son and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.