Can You Disappoint?
Matthew 4:12-23
January 27, 2008

I want to talk with you this morning about disappointing, a subject I know something about. I’m not talking about disappointment, how life or the world fails to meet my expectations. No. I’m also not talking about being disappointed, how someone may have betrayed or failed me in some way. Not at all. I’m talking about disappointing others – or perhaps disappointing my own prior expectations – in order to follow the rich invitation from Jesus in the text this morning.

And how rich the invitation is! It is an invitation not to be overcome by the kind of suffering and loss Jesus felt when he heard that his cousin John had been arrested. There was no secret what would happen to John at the hands of King Herod, the question was only how John would die. Jesus moves into the loss, prays over it, comes to God with it, and then leaves it behind, moves out of the darkness into light, and we find him walking in the light by the lake, teaching, proclaiming the goodness of God, healing.

That alone would be a lesson for this morning, wouldn’t it! How do you keep moving from darkness into light in the face of all the loss and disappointment that life can throw at you?

Would anyone else besides me like to learn that lesson? And yet that’s not the lesson for this morning.

And then there’s the content of Jesus’ preaching and his life: Repent, for the kingdom of God has come near! Now I’m pretty sure that when you hear the word repent you think of the 613 ways you may have screwed up in your life and how you might have disappointed someone you cared about, or God.

I remember disappointing my grandmother one time. May parents had left my brothers and me at the farm for the afternoon and gone off somewhere. My grandmother asked me to watch my brother Tim for a while. Tim was a couple years younger than I. Now my idea of watching Tim was to have him come do what I wanted to do, which that day was playing baseball with my cousins on a playing field with base paths mowed out of the lawn in front of the farm house. Tim was a little young and not too interested in baseball, and the game was good and I loved it, and I didn’t exactly notice when Tim wandered off toward the old back kitchen of the farm house, the one where the garden tools and the house supplies were kept. And I certainly was not there to see Tim, who was thirsty, find and open and drink nearly a quart of white paint, thinking it was milk.

What did come to my attention was my grandmother striding across the lawn toward me and a little voice inside me going, Uh-oh!

You know what I mean, Uh-oh? Not, Uh-oh, what do you suppose has happened. No. Uh-oh, I’m cooked!

I have no real idea what God will look like on Judgment Day when I come stand before the ledger book of my life, but I fear that God will be five foot and not much more, have deep wrinkles browned in the summer sun, brushed back wiry gray hair, and icy blue eyes, and when I look into those eyes I’m going to say, Uh-oh, I’m cooked!

Repent? My Granny didn’t say a word. She just grabbed my hand and pulled me into her old VW bug where Tim was puking his guts out on the back seat and off we went to the town doctor. I’ll never forget. While the doctor was pumping Tim’s stomach out, then Granny took me aside and she said, Peter, I’m disappointed in you. That’s all she needed to say. I repented in my heart and I said, I’m sorry, Granny. And I was.

There’s a lesson there, too, about being sorry. About knowing when you’ve screwed up and disappointed somebody you look up to and care about. But that, also is not the lesson for today.

No, the kind of disppointing I’m talking about today is what happens for the disciples when Jesus calls them into a new life. Remember that the word repent means more than you ought to be sorry. Repent in Jesus’ language means: Hear the call, change your heart, follow me, leave behind your nets, come and see what God is up to!

And they do. Peter and Andrew and James and John, the sons of Zebedee, drop what they are doing and follow Jesus. What kind of disappointing do suppose followed them? What did Zebedee think about his sons’ nets left in hands? What did Peter and Andrew and James and John think about shifting away from being fishers of bass and pike? What habits and dreams did they leave behind?

I remember many years ago now, during the Viet Nam War, telling my father that I had applied for conscientious objector status in the draft. Now, on the wall in my father’s study was a picture he was very proud of. The picture shows my father in uniform in 1945, at age 20, already a veteran of operations in Germany and the Phillipines, sitting with his father, in uniform, a veteran of two World Wars. So here I was, also at the age of 20, telling my father there wouldn’t ever be another picture like that. I told him I was scheduled to see my draft board and ask them for an exemption from military service on religious grounds. He’s a good man, my Dad, with a generous heart, but he couldn’t hide his disappointment. He said, “Thank you for telling me, but you know that’s not how we do things in this family.”

Maybe so. But I had made a shift. I had heard a call. Now among my friends in those days, we all took different paths. One was never drafted because his lottery number was too high. One went and never came home. One went and came home bitter and addicted. Another went to Canada. Another made himself so obstreperous in front of his draft board that they refused to draft him and dismissed him on some obscure medical grounds.

There’s no particular righteousness about any of these paths, including my own. But I am here this morning because I chose to explore what Jesus meant when he asked me to follow him. Here’s the thing. I never heard Jesus say, Peter, come be a minister. No, I heard him say, Peter, I love you. Will you take a chance on me and see where I might lead you?

And what do you know. Here I am, among you, in a place I never expected to be, doing work I never thought I would be good at.

You see, the kingdom of God is at hand all the time. And the invitation is to come see what it’s like to love more than fear, to fail on the world’s terms as you live more and more on God’s terms, to grow out of old habits and hurts and impairments into a conviction that you are blessed. And everything else, the outcomes we think are important, unfolds from there.

There’s an invitation in the text this morning. We see Jesus walking by the lake called Galilee, walking out of mourning and loss, walking out of fear and the judgment at what might happen to him, into the light. He will disappoint many. He will not be the kind of leader many want. He will not lead armies or parties. He will not spout slogans and campaign sound bytes. He will not root for the home town team. He will not leave a successful organization behind him. He will not judge those we want him to judge. He will not choose between winners and losers. He will simply keep inviting each one of us to come see where he is going.

Do you hear him?

I don’t know how Jesus’ invitation to discipleship might come to you. I don’t know what it might look like or sound like or who you might have to disappoint in order to follow.

I do know this. The biggest risk of all is disappointing yourself if once you hear, you stay behind where you are.

There’s a silly, lovely poem I used to read to my kids about disappointing. It’s by Shell Silverstein and it doesn’t mention Jesus. Instead it recalls the story of the Pied Piper and it turns the story upside down so we can look at what happened to someone who refused to hear the music and follow the dream. Perhaps we need to turn the gospel today upside down and stop for a moment and remember those who heard the call to come and see, but decided not to follow.

The poem goes this way:

You should have heard the old men cry,
You should have heard the biddies
When that sad stranger raised his flute
And piped away the kiddies.
Katy, Tommy, Meg and Bob
Followed, skipping gaily,
Red-haired Ruth, my brother Rob,
And little crippled Bailey,
John and Nils and Cousin Claire,
Dancin’, spinnin’, turnin’
‘Cross the hills to God knows where-
They never came returnin’.
‘Cross the hills to God knows where
The piper pranced, a leadin’
Each child in Hamlin town but me,
And I stayed home unheedin’.
My papa says that I was blest
For if that music found me,
I’d be witch-cast like all the rest.
The town grows old around me.
I cannot say I did not hear
That sound so haunting hollow –
I heard, I heard, I heard it clear...
I was afraid to follow.

For in the end, you see, when the kingdom comes and lies before you, the question is, who is it that you might disappoint?