“Wild Goose Chase: Putting God in a Box” Hebrews 11:9 Romans 4: 18-21

Have you ever put God in a box? Maybe you didn’t mean to. Maybe its just that we come to expect things from God so much so that our faith life becomes predictable. But nothing kills the spirit of joy in our relationships faster than when we cease to have joy - when we cease to be thankful.

We are now in the second week of our sermon series about the Holy Spirit - or as the Celtic Christians refer to the Spirit - the Wild Goose. Together we will be exploring how we can seek to thrive in the Holy Spirit as we grow with God.

When was the last time you were surprised by God? Or when was a time when you were simply overwhelmed by the good gifts God has blessed you with? While it was not recently, every time I think about the overwhelming goodness of God, I’m drawn back to this picture which hangs in the parsonage dining room. It was taken quite a while ago, in 2007, when I was camping in Australia. Now, while I love the concept of camping, and have a particular joy for church camp, I also like camping with beds. That not being the case on this particular adventure, I had a hard time sleeping. At one point I woke up and simply couldn’t go back to sleep so I decided to exit the tent and get started with my morning. I was met by this sky in front of me. A pink and deep purple streaked sky off to the sides. This picture reminds me that God meets us anew every morning with surprises. I did’t expect to see this beautiful sight. In fact, I didn't expect to be anything other than grumpy that day since I hadn’t slept very well. Yet, God had a surprise in store for me. The Celtics had a word for these types of places and these types of experiences as well - they called them thin places, where heaven and earth meet and we experience the love of God in a new way. 

God had a surprise in store for Abraham as well. Abraham and Sarah were well up in years, over ninety years old, and they did not have any children. To not have children, especially boys, in ancient society was considered a curse from God, for their wouldn’t be anyone to carry on the family name and lineage. Yet for years, God had been promising Abraham decedents more numerous than the stars, yet not one single child did he and Sarah have together. 

There had been an unfortunate instance where Abraham had tried to make the promise come to pass himself by having a child with Sarah’s servant Hagar. The law allowed it, yet that wasn’t the way God intended to carry out this radical promise, and as a result there was more tension than blessing that came. 

But with the birth of Isaac, well past the age when people should be able to have babies, came the blessing of nations. For from Isaac came Jacob and from Jacob the twelve tribes of Israel. And from the twelve tribes of Israel -  specifically the tribe of Judah - came Jesus. 

However, as the book of Hebrews reminds us, Abraham had to take this promise, day after day and year after year on faith alone. He wasn’t seeing the results with his own eyes. When he tried to put God in a box and make the promise come to pass himself, the results were less than stellar. So he had to live by faith alone. Faith in the faithful word of God. 

The truth is sometimes we struggle with the idea of faith. We think faith is believing in what comes to pass or what happens with little evidence, but really faith is about believing in God. Believing that God’s words and promises are true and that God will be faithful. 

We can start to struggle with faith even more when we forget how faithful God has been to us in the past. That’s one of the reasons this picture hangs in my dining room where I see it every single day - so that I won’t forget. I won’t let myself slip into that place where we can find ourselves from time to time when we take God for granted. Or where I try to make God fit into my life or my routine by putting God in a predictable box. 

Sometimes it seems safer to put God in a box, doesn’t it? Now maybe its a big box, with an eight-foot ceiling, but its still a box, because we are afraid of what is going to happen if we let the Spirit of God lose amongst us. Its dangerous to ask what God wants us to do, both as individuals and as a local church, because the Holy Spirit, as we learned last week, is unpredictable and can’t be contained. The Spirit may just be leading us to minister to the last people we ever wanted to or do the absolute last thing we ever thought we would, all for the sake of the Kingdom of God. 

So instead of embracing the mystery of the Spirit, we try to contain everything or make it understandable on our own terms. The ancient Israelites did this as well. It’s why they had the law. They could understand the law and what they should or should not do. That made sense. But as Paul reminded the Romans, it wasn’t the law that brought the promise to Abraham into completion. Instead it was about God being God, and us having faith in God - even when it doesn’t make sense to us, or in the case of Abraham, even when it seems downright absurd. 

Abraham had hope and faith in this unpredictable and wildly creative Spirit of God who was doing a new thing in his life, the life of his family, and the life of an entire nation. Abraham didn’t hope in himself - he hoped in God. He believed that God was able to do what God promised to do. 

If Abraham had hope in this God, how much more so should we, since we have seen what God has done? How much more so should we trust God because God came to us in Jesus Christ to bless our lives and bring us the path to salvation. 

The trouble comes in when we won’t let God be God. When we don’t want God to disrupt our routines or when we becomes in such a hurry that we miss the moments God is trying to bless us with. We need to put ourselves in places, brothers and sisters, where we don’t try to hamper God or box God in, but instead where we are open to whatever God has in store for us, even if it is a change, even if it is new and beyond our wildest imagination. Let us set aside our assumptions that box God in and instead follow, willingly, wherever the Spirit leads, with the faith of children of God.

Rolf Smith is a researcher who looked into something interesting a few years back - questions. He found that the average child asks 125 questions a day. Guess how many the average adult asked per day. Six. From 125 to 6. He found that we stopped asking questions because we lose our sense of wonder as adult. Our sense of being amazed. Friends, lets seize that sense of wonder and awe again! Let’s be amazed by our God who is doing something new amongst us, even if we don’t quite know what it is and where it will lead. Let us let the Spirit of God soar free as we chase after, wherever it may lead. Amen!