ELEVATOR OF HAUNTED HOUSE OR STAIRS TO HOLY HEIGHTS

“Sounds like a haunted house!” I wasn’t thinking as I said it. We were on the ground floor waiting for the elevator to take us to our room on the fifth. At our hotel, the wind outside was gusting ferociously. Large doors opened up to the elevator lobby. The wind was blowing the exterior doors open and was whistling, howling, and moaning through the lobby and hallways. The elevator arrived, and we with others got in and pushed the respective numbers to our rooms’ floors. When the doors shut, the vehement wind prevailed in finding its way through the small crack between the doors. The howling, whistling, and moaning increased. As the elevator began to rise, that’s when I said, “Sounds like a haunted house!” What I had forgotten was that a mother with two small girls had gotten on with us and stood behind us. When I said what I did, one of those little girls asked her mother in a quivering, fearful voice, “Mom, is this really a haunted house?” “You scared her,” Sandra whispered in her ear. I felt bad about that for just a second. Then I felt vindicated: The elevator jerked to a stop between floors. We were stuck. One passenger anxiously pushed the call button. When a voice came over the intercom speaker, she with traces of panic in her voice reported that we were trapped in the elevator. It didn’t take long for the elevator to heat up. Nervous bodies do that. It probably didn’t take long for help to show up either, but it seemed like a long time. I was looking at the elevator’s ceiling, looking for an exit. Finally, the maintenance personnel got the elevator back to the ground floor and got the doors opened. Nobody looked for another elevator. We all looked for the stairs. The mother and her daughters joined us in the stairwell. Fortunate for the girls’ small legs, their room wasn’t too far up. Ours was on the next to the last floor. As you know, there are two flights of stairs for each floor in most commercial buildings. We had eight to climb. As we labored up the stairs, I was reminded of an observation I’d made long ago: When I visited the hospitals, I used to like to park on the top floor of the parking garages and take the stairs. One day, climbing the stairs back to my vehicle, something I had subconsciously noticed many times before coalesced into words in my mind. The stairs on the bottom floor had a lot of wear--dirt from shoes and paint worn off. The higher one traveled, the stairs were less worn, less dirty, and had less paint worn off. By the time I got to the top floor, the stairs looked almost freshly painted. The observation was simple: The higher the floor, the less traveled the stairs. Few made the climb. It was too difficult. Too far. Especially with an elevator around. In Bible times, people thought of their god as residing in a temple, or in a “garden,” or on top of a mountain. That’s where gods dwelt. And if you were going to contact them, get to them that’s where you had to go. Of course, this was a distortion of the true worship of the true God, Yahweh. But take a look at the Bible's Old Testament. God’s presence was in the Temple, in the Garden, or on the Mountain. That’s where people went to meet with Yahweh. That was the Holy Place. God on top of the Mountain? That takes a climb. Comparatively few made the climb. I’ve climbed some mountains lately. The higher up, the thinner, not only the air, but also the traffic. And the less worn the trail. The sounds of the haunted house came on the lower floor stuck in an elevator. The great view of the ocean came from the height of our room after climbing the many stairs. That is true of the high places. Whatever the effort to get there the view is so much better. Clearer. Wider. Even, spectacular. The climbing the stairs to the view from our window, the scrabbling up the trail to the panoramic vista on the mountain’s summit were so worth it. Standing on the summit of one of the Superstition Mountains I said to my wife, “You never see this if you stay on the road and don’t hike up the mountain. Few see what we are seeing.” As in the hymn we used to sing describes, I am glad there is “Higher Ground.” There is a place that transcends the filth, ugliness, chaos, calamity, clamoring, and corruption, of this world in which we live. There is a heavenly place. There is God there. If we climb until the stairs look freshly painted from lack of use. If we climb the trail to where there are fewer and fewer hikers. If we persist in prayer until we leave behind the low life. We can make the climb in the privacy of our home in devotional prayer, or in the car on the way to work, or walking in the wilderness, or, in, perhaps, the most conducive place, in worship during the gathering of God’s people, in church. And we can make it because Jesus blazed the trail before us, traveled the trail, and is the Trail, to the Holy Place, to the Presence of God, to the Heights in Him. Everybody that came out of that elevator was looking for stairs. We would not have taken the stairs had the elevator not been stuck. Analogies, like the elevator, break down in a hurry--the elevator, had it worked, would have gotten us to the same height, the same level, the same floor, as did the stairs. But, two things: We wouldn’t have appreciated getting there by elevator as we did when we finally made it climbing the stairs. Second, there is no elevator to the Holy Place. Jesus blazed a trail. He didn’t install an elevator. Just, perhaps, it will take being stuck in a haunted elevator—being in some difficult, unpleasant, unbearable perplexity--to get you to climb the less traveled stairs to the higher place in God. It will be worth the climb. --Pastor Clifford Hurst