When I was in seminary, I spent a lot of time in the library, like everyone else, you know, studying New Testament Greek and theology and history and psychology and all the rest of it. The seminary I went to is known for being particularly weighty with the intellectual side of things, as well very committed to the social justice side of things. This all suited me just fine, as you can imagine. (If I had not been called to ministry I probably would’ve ended up being some kind of academic, or some kind of monk).

One night when I was in seminary, after studying late, I went to bed, fell asleep, and had a dream.

In this dream I was sitting at a desk with this ancient stone tablet in front of me. On the stone tablet were exquisite letters in some kind of lost language. These letters glowed and shimmered with electric blue light. I was utterly immersed in exploring these literally luminous letters, trying to decipher them, working to puzzle out their elusive mystery.

Beside me was a little dog, resting on the floor near my foot. In the dream, this was my dog, (though not in waking life.)

I was totally focused on deciphering this amazing artifact, and felt that I was on the brink of an insight.

Suddenly, there was a knock at the door. This irritated me. I didn’t want to be interrupted.

But the dog ran to the door, of course, and started yipping and yapping like only little dogs can. When I didn’t get up, the dog ran back to me and yipped and yapped at me. “Get the door! Get the door: Someone’s at the door!”

Now I was really irrigated. Everyone, just leave me alone. I want some peace and quiet to figure out this stuff I’m sudying – I felt like I was getting somewhere with it before this interruption. Maybe if I just waited it out, the person at the door would think no one was home and go away, and I’d be left in peace.

But then the knocking came back. The little dog raced to the door and was jumping and barking, really excited. I still stayed in my chair. I looked at that dog, and I sighed. I looked at the door.

Then it hit me: It was Jesus knocking at the door.

Immediately I woke up. The dream had dispersed.

I sat up in my bed wide awake and facepalmed: Dude, Jesus was knocking at your door, and you couldn’t bother to get off your rear to let him in.

I knew I had just gotten schooled. But I didn’t quite know what to do about it.

Fast forward a couple of years, to the year after I graduated from seminary. I was working as a chaplain resident at Einstein Hospital in North Philly. My main assignment was with the medical trauma team. My job was to care for the spiritual, religious, emotional needs of the folks who were there as patients, or as family or friends of patients, or as the staff caring for the patients who were in the hospital because of traumatic injury. (Medical trauma is different from psychological trauma, though of course one can lead to the other. In the medical sense trauma means basically the injuries that result when an outside force impacts or puncture the body. So, anything from bad falls, to vehicle accidents, to acts of violence.

Einstein Hospital is a level one trauma center, meaning, there regularly are people coming in because of gun violence. It was tough. But it was the kind of work I knew my faith compelled me to.

The doctors and nurses with the trauma team are amazing and save a lot of lives. But far too often everyone in the room was rendered utterly powerless to prevent heartrending catastrophe. So, as a chaplain I often bore witness to the concussion waves of heartbreak that violence can cause. I understood a little more what it meant to be “pitched into the outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

After one particularly hard week, I was coming home on the subway, and I saw that big advertisements had just been put up in the subway stations hyping the latest Grand Theft Auto video game. These ads featured attractive young men and women brandishing sleek and powerful-looking firearms.

It made me furious.

The way American culture celebrates violence, and draws people into it, totally disconnected from the raw and horrific reality of what bullets and bombs actually do to human beings, our fellow children of God – I felt so angry about it, I felt so powerless about it. God, how can we continue to be so vicious and reckless and hardhearted? I remembered how Jesus had wept over Jerusalem: “If only you knew the ways that made for peace.”

Now, for some reason all that week I had also been thinking about my dream from seminary, where Jesus had knocked and I had not answered. It was somehow there in the mix in my subconscious, in the building pressure from the tragedy and heartbreak and anger and beauty and humanity and sacredness I was wrestling with and bearing witness to in serving as a chaplain.

On my day off that week, I went on a run in my neighborhood at the time in West Philly. I liked to run to an old cemetery that was a kind of sanctuary in that part of the city, with big, beautiful old trees, and the quiet of old stone tombs. There was a path around the cemetery that I liked to run laps around.

Running on this day amidst the graves, I felt the pounding intensity of everything that was coming up for me in my work.  I spoke to God inwardly in a kind of prayer and said, “I don’t know what to do about all this. I need help. So many people need help.”

Then I remembered that dream. Without thinking I started to imagine myself in the dream again.

Finally, I said, “Okay, God, fine. I give up, I just give up. Jesus, if that’s you on the other side of the door, I’m opening the door.”

What happened next was like opening the door to an oven. Immediately I was hit with a force of heat and light that was Love. Love, Love, Love. The heat and light of that Love blew through me, it was like every molecule of my being got swept into a flood of hot bright Love Supreme and was soaked and diffused and dissolved into it. The flood was everywhere, and over and through everything: everything, each and every being was swept into it, small and fragile and luminous and beautiful and beloved, swept up in this tremendous power and mystery roaring through and around and past and beyond.

Then it was over. And everything felt like the inside of a bell that had just been rung, open and reverberating.

I share this with you now as a kind of testimony. I preach that the Gospel message that the nature of God’s relationship to humanity is Love, and that Jesus gave of himself to be for us a gateway to that love nature of God, and that consequently we are to strive to follow an agape love ethic – to love others as God has loved us, to treat everyone with respect and dignity, to turn away from doing violence to each other, to strive for the ways that make for peace rather than the ways of war that violate the essential worth and dignity of others in the light of the truth of how God sees us, and to throw ourselves on the mercy of God for help in all this – even, or especially when all this is against the stream of the culture around us. When I preach all this, I am not saying this just wishful thinking, or out of a blind obedience to a particular way of interpreting the New Testament scriptures.

I proclaim these things because I have had direct experience that they are true. This has been confirmed for me, in a way that feels to me to be a precious gift I have done nothing to deserve, in a way that has changed my life and continues to change my life for the better, even despite myself and my stubborn inclination to keep my rear on the seat.  

I’m sharing this now because it’s as important as ever to be clear that following Jesus means answering hate with love, meeting war with the ways of peace, with the clarity and confidence of knowing that the Way of Jesus is rooted in powerful and abiding truths.

This Easter season gives us the opportunity to explore the meaning of Christ’s resurrection. When I hear the stories of the disciples strange and moving and tender encounters with the risen Christ, what comes to my heart are my own experiences when I have opened the door to the abiding presence of Christ.

This Sunday we heard the road to Emmaus story. In this story two disciples suddenly recognize the presence of the resurrected Christ when the stranger they had invited to eat with them took a piece of bread and broke it and gave it to them. I imagine something happened in that moment much like what I experienced, an astonishing disclosure of divine love and power. Jesus then vanishes. And the two disciples realize their hearts had been burning all along, trying to tell them something, yearning and urging within them while they had been with Jesus on the road to Emmaus, though they did not realize him for who he is.

Their hearts knew, even as their minds did not believe.

It was the breaking of the bread that was like the opening of the door through which they could receive and experience the reality of Christ’s presence beyond the bounds of his life and death.

This all took place in the midst of heartbreak, the agonizing tragedy in the aftermath of Jesus’ violent death. On the road to Emmaus, Jesus was still a stranger to these two disciples, he had tried to teach them that the words of the prophets of their ancestors meant that he had to pass through suffering to give humanity all that he has to give. The heartbreak and agonizing tragedy in the face of the terrible consequences of human sin that can be for them and for us the way to get out of the head and into the heart to receive the saving presence of the realm of heaven on earth. Through the astonishing tenderness of his self-giving love in the face of the worst that sin can do, Christ dissolves the power of sin and reveals that the love and power of God, the Holy Creator of all, overcomes and lives ever on.

I have come to the conviction that it’s important we allow the meaning of the resurrection to be a mystery, a mystery that is enticing and strange, and holds great power to transform our lives, even despite ourselves. I believe it is important we don’t collapse the mystery by being too literal about the resurrection, on the one hand, nor too theoretical, on the other hand.

G.K. Chesterton once wrote, “Let your religion be less a theory, more a love affair.”

This is all about relationship, my friends, a relationship that calls us to be loved and to love, and to grow and to serve in that love.

I can testify to this. Somehow, Jesus is still very much present with life-transforming power, despite it being 2,000 years since his life as a poor carpenter in Galilee. That presence has the power to break into our hearts and our lives and press us into service of love, even in the face of violence and hate, even despite our faults and limitations. Somehow, I have experienced this, despite being inclined to skepticism of mind, and a reluctant and fragile faith, and a weak capacity for love. I know I am far, far from alone, in Jesus deigning to call even me, thank God. I also know that Jesus doesn’t have to be for everyone, and bad things happen when people demand that he is. But if you are drawn to Jesus, even despite yourself, give yourself the gift of going for it. Say yes. Open that door. Take that bread broken for you and eat. And see what happens next.

Thanks be to God.

Delivered Sunday, April 19, 2026, by Rev. Nathaniel Mahlberg, at the United Church of Christ at Valley Forge