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Before I went to seminary, I spent a year working as an intern for my mentor Heidi at St. Peter's Cathedral in Montana.
Now, as we do here at Resurrection, St. Peter's held a Wednesday service. Unlike Resurrection, St. Peter's held their service in the morning.
After the morning service, there would be a gathering of coffee and donuts across the street in a well-sized room that happened to be right outside my office.
I noticed that several minutes in, Heidi would leave and the conversation around the table would keep going for a bit until everyone else would leave. I didn't think anything of it at the time until a couple, a few, several weeks later (I can't honestly remember).
However long it was, on this particular Wednesday, two women, who were usually the last to leave anyways, stayed behind a little longer than normal. Normal was them staying long enough to take up a good part of the morning. This day, they stayed long enough that I had just enough time to get my papers together for a meeting Heidi and I had with the heads of the stewardship committee, but not to grab anything to eat.
That meeting lasted about an hour, which put me well past noon before I had a chance to grab any food. All I had wanted to do was be hospitable, and instead I had not done what was best for my own well-being and thus in the best service of all others. After the heads of the stewardship committee left, I remember saying to Heidi, "I've got to stop sticking around for all of the coffee hour."
"I wondered how long it would take you to realize that," Heidi said.
I looked back at her dumbfounded. Granted, I don't think I had been there quite a month at this point, but still. "Why didn't you say something to me?" I replied.
Heidi said, "If I said something before, you might not have listened. This is one of those things you have to figure out for yourself."
This is true of so many things in ministry as it is in life. Sometimes the best leadership comes from someone who can let go and let others learn for themselves.
That's often how God is in our lives. That's often how God has been to all of us throughout the history of the human race.
While in the Tanakh, or the Old Testament as we Christians like to call it, there are a lot of examples of God being very hands-on to the point of hardening the hearts of Pharaoh and others to keep them from doing good, these examples say more about the Hebrew perception of God than God's actual action. The Hebrews liked to emphasize that God is in complete control, and God is. But complete control and hands-on are not always the same thing.
That's why our reading from Psalm 81 today is so important. In that psalm, we hear that when the Israelites would not listen, God "gave them over to the stubbornness of their hearts, to follow their own devices."
God's actions are those of a good parent, or a wise mentor. When we stray from God's ways and fail to listen to God's words, God allows us to do that, even when doing so is not good for us and even when we fail to get the nourishment, spiritual or otherwise, that we need.
When we follow our own way and not God's, we step away from those things that are good for us and that help us. God doesn't cause us to step away, but God sure won't stop us.
This is what the Old Testament is really saying to us. It isn't about fire and brimstone, or God causing certain people and not others to make bad choices. The Old Testament is filled with God saying "Hey, this is what you need to do in order to live good and joyous lives. Not doing them will lead you down a path where bad things happen. Come on, I'm trying to help you out!"
The Old Testament isn't alone in calling us to right action. Even in our New Testament readings this morning we hear the ways in which we are supposed to act. Hebrews tells us, as does the Tanakh, to show hospitality to strangers. We're called to help those in prison, as Jesus tells us in Matthew. We're called to live in right relationship in our marriages and partnerships. And we're called, as we've heard a great deal this summer, not to live a greedy life.
In Luke, Jesus calls us to be humble and not expect or request the best treatment in public. Jesus also calls us to give generously without any sense of quid pro quo, not expecting anything back or expecting, at times, to give back what we have been given.
When hear talk about living in a just society, these are some of the starting points. We can choose to listen to them or not. To listen to them means we will live in a community we can be proud to call our own. To close our ears means to close the door to a great and wonderful opportunity for all.
God doesn't cause bad things, or rather evil things, to happen to us. God does try to give us the tools to keep us away from what is wrong. The problem is that we don't always listen.
God loves us, though, regardless. Like a parent or a mentor, God gives us room to rise up and fall down as we will. But God is also there to give us a helping hand when we need it. All we need to do is listen and turn back to our Lord.