You Can Find a Way When There Is No Way

Around 10 years ago, I was training to become a hospital chaplain.

Part of the training was that I had to be on call two nights a week. I slept with a pager next to my head on my nightstand in case anyone wanted to see the chaplain on duty that night. 

On one occasion, I was called in to visit with a woman in her 50s whose husband just suffered from a major heart attack. When I arrived in the waiting room, she was there with her teenage daughter.

We exchanged some greetings and then started talking about her feelings and anxieties about her husband’s condition.

And then she started taking our conversation in what seemed to be a strange direction. She said that one day she and her family visited the Enchanted Forest, a really creepy theme park about 45 minutes from Portland.

And they went into the haunted house, which is possibly the creepiest attraction at the Enchanted Forest.

It was crowded that day and so there were a lot of people in the haunted house. As she and her family started walking through, a young mother and her toddler were walking through, too. The toddler began screeching in terror. The mother desperately looked for a staff member, and when she found him, she asked if she could turn back and leave through the entrance.

The staff member responded, “I’m sorry, ma’am. You can’t go back. The only way out is through.”

“The only way out is through.” 

The woman in the hospital that night told me that story to reassure herself that she would get out of this experience. She couldn’t go back, but she would get through it.

That woman’s story has always stayed with me during difficult times in my life. The haunted house became a metaphor for her life, and it has become one for my life, too. 

The Only Way Out Is Through

I’ve had to remind myself multiple times that I can’t go back from certain experiences. And like the mother and her toddler couldn’t go back but could get through the haunted house, and like the woman in the hospital could get through her hospital experience, I could also get through the haunted house experiences in my life.

I know you’ve had those “haunted house” experiences where you find yourself in a situation where you can’t go back to a time before.

Sometimes, it’s a health scare, the loss of a job, or the loss of a relationship. Other times, it might be a personal moral failing where we’ve hurt someone else. And sometimes it’s when someone else has hurt us. 

And there is no going back through the entrance of that experience. There is only going through – one step at a time.

But there is something else that’s important about that haunted house experience that can be easy to miss. There were other people in the haunted house, too. And there are other people in your metaphorical haunted house experience, too. Friends, family, church members. 

The haunted house can be very scary. But you can get through it. I know that many of you are getting through it now, one step at a time.

And we are at a “haunted house” time in our culture. It is scary for many who fear that their rights will be taken away or that the government will turn more against its people. Many are experiencing economic and healthcare anxiety. And some folks are once again emboldened to act with even more overt hostility and racism.

Scripture’s Relevancy

One of the things I find inspiring about Scripture is that it also explains this human experience of the haunted house. For example, the ancient Jews were conquered by empire after empire. 

In the 6th century BCE, the Babylonian Empire to Jerusalem and demolished the city, killing many people, destroying buildings, including the Temple, and sending people throughout the Empire into slavery. There was only a small remnant of the people left in Jerusalem.

It was a hopeless situation. A haunted house, for sure. But the ancient Jewish prophets knew that hope was not all gone. They trusted that even in this traumatic time of Jewish history that they could find a way out when it seemed that there was no way through.

Within a few decades, the Persian Empire conquered the Babylonians. The Persian Empire was the first empire in history to come up with a specific plan to rule – the Persians invited people who had been exiled to return to their homeland and rebuild their nations. They put certain people in charge as political rulers. They hoped that this would inspire loyalty to the Empire, including loyalty to paying taxes. The Persian plan worked and became the road map for other empires, including the Roman Empire.

It was during this time when the Persian Empire invited the people to return to Jerusalem that the prophet Zechariah rose up. He spoke words of hope in our passage today. He stated that their haunted house experience was almost over. They would get through and, “Elder women and elder men shall again sit in the streets of Jerusalem, each with staff in hand because of their great age. And the streets of the city shall be full of girls and boys playing in its streets.”

Zechariah goes on to say, “Though it seems impossible in the eyes of the people…”

That women and men would grow old in the city and boys and girls would play in the streets without fear seemed impossible in Jerusalem because they had just been utterly destroyed. There was no peace in the land. 

But as Zechariah gave these words of hope, he also told the people what they had to do in order to help this hope come to fruition. 

In chapter 7 we find this quote, “Thus says the Lord of hosts: Render true justice, show kindness and mercy to one another; do not oppress the widow, the orphan, the alien, or the poor; and do not devise evil in your hearts against one another.”

God Makes A Way

Sometimes it seems like there is no way forward, but God is going to make a way. And we will make a way together. God through Zechariah gives us the action plan for how to get through these times – to act with justice, kindness, and mercy. To care for the widows, the orphans, the immigrants, the poor, the sick, the marginalized.

During Jesus’ time, the Roman Empire had taken over. Many of the Jewish people hoped for a redeemer, someone like a king who would save them from their enemies.

And here, at the beginning of the Advent season, as we await Christmas, we find Elizabeth and another man named Zechariah. This Zechariah was a priest They were married but unable to bear a child.

It seemed impossible because Elizabeth was past the age of bearing a child. 

Notice that Elizabeth wasn’t barren because God was punishing her for sinning. In fact, the story explicitly says that Elizabeth “lived according to all the commandments and righteous requirements of the Sovereign God blamelessly.”

This matters because some have said that if you have bad things happen in your life, if you find yourself in the haunted house of life, if you are unable to get pregnant or find a job or have a health scare or whatever, that God has turned against you. But that’s a religious lie meant to shame us. The truth is that God doesn’t turn against you. No, God does not abandon us in the haunted house. God is with us in the haunted house.

And so in this case, God finds a way for Elizabeth to bear a child named John. He would go on to become John the Baptist. John would be in the lineage of the prophet Zechariah as he emphasized justice and kindness and compassion as he prepared the way for Jesus.

Making A Way Through Us

And during the Advent season, as we wait for the light of Christmas to come on Christmas day, we can trust that God is making a way for us when there seems to be no way forward. If we have eyes to see and ears to hear, we will notice the way.

On a cultural scale, I came across a video yesterday that gave me hope. It was of a country music star named Sturgill Simpson. The video was from a concert he gave just before Thanksgiving. He spoke into the haunted house of this moment in our culture when he said at the end of his concert. Some of the language is not suitable for church, so I’ll change a few things. But he seemed to be channeling the prophet Zechariah when he said this:

“I just want to say, I think it’s okay for people to disagree, as long as there is kindness and compassion in everybody’s heart. And if you meet in the middle, that’s okay. But for anyone who is pretty down right now, and maybe doesn’t know how to deal with the anxiety day to day that they find themselves accepting, I just want to tell you something that I believe. I think that, no, I don’t think I know because I’ve seen it, I think that this toxic patriarchal energy that we are experiencing right now, this is an age coming to an end. And what we are seeing is that energy clinging and clawing for its survival because it knows its dying. And we are headed towards something very beautiful. And we just got to go through some dark stuff to get there. So love everybody around you. Don’t accept anything other than that….”

It seems impossible for many of us to believe that kindness and compassion might enter everyone’s heart. It seems impossible for toxic religious patriarchal energy to die so that something more beautiful will emerge. Something like Zechariah’s vision that old men and old women will live in peace and that boys and girls will play without fear. Something like God finding a way for Elizabeth and her husband Zechariah. Something like God finding a way for us to get through our similar experiences that seem impossible. 

For as our passage from Zechariah concludes, God will make a way so that we turn curses into blessings. Zechariah told his people to fear not, to work for justice, and to know that even when the path forward looks impossible, we will make a way through, because God is making a way through with us.

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Adam Ericksen

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