No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and [God’s] love is perfected in us. – 1 John 4:12
 
Last night at Wednesday evening Eucharist one of our readings concluded with the above sentence. It’s the close of a well-known passage that begins, “Beloved, let us love one another” (1 Jn 4:7). In this time of stark division and hatred, and indeed the potentiality of war, that invitation sounds challenging, maybe cloying, perhaps in some quarters laughable, seemingly impossible. I think of cynical reactions from some of the grownups in my childhood to the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love.” I’m still one to believe that love actually can and does have a transformative impact on the world in all its turmoil, often in subtle, unexpected ways. It may not be a simple thing to get there, but we do need it and it does make a difference. 
 
The significance of love’s visibility is what first jumps out of that above quoted sentence, for me. It starts with the statement “no one has seen God.” This is a sentiment important to the community out of which the Gospel of John as well as the Letters of John emerged. For example, the first chapter of John’s Gospel declares, “no one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known” (John 1:18). The invisibility of God makes the Incarnation, the theme of the twelve days of Christmas from which we’ve just emerged, that much more significant: what is made flesh, material, is made visible. To make something visible is to render it able to be seen, known, validated as true. In the Incarnation God visibly opened the divine heart to us. 
 
Given this wider Johannine perspective on the connection between God becoming visible and known through love, I am also struck by how the passage from the first Letter to John emphasizes relationships. "If we love one another, God lives in us, and [God’s] love is perfected in us." It starts with human connection, on the relationships of love in our lives, and asks us to consider that in fact they are a lifeline to God. Our loving of one another reflects God’s living presence in us.  
 
Here the language of “being perfected” can easily throw us off. Perfection is actually about growing, about gradually being made whole, complete. This actually means that perfection is messy. Kind of like relationships, yes? Because when I refer to loving relationships, I don’t mean ones in which everything is all wrapped up in a bow. Relationships are always in process. Real love does not simply glow with static happiness. Love dwells among people, it changes, it grows through proximity and perspective. Think of the people you love. Think of the people you don’t but are asked to love anyway (“love your enemies” – Matthew 5:44). The love we’re invited to practice and abide in isn’t seamless. But this passage from 1 John claims that as we swim about in love, as we dwell with it, as we open ourselves to it, God’s love is perfected in us. In other words, God’s living presence grows in us in and through our imperfect, messy attempts to love. 
 
In a world amid brinksmanship and catastrophe the real power of love invites hope. Because this love isn’t a perfectly composed form but an imperfect practice. It’s the attempt to love one’s enemies, for those who would try. It’s the openness to learning from perspectives profoundly different from one’s own. This love makes God’s living presence within us visible. God is not absent from all that is happening. God is very much present, calling us to the radical practice of love, and in that loving, to open our hearts to God’s own. 
 
This week we pivot from the twelve days of Christmas, which came to a close on Sunday, to the season of Epiphany, which technically began with its name-sake Feast on Monday. This Sunday, with the Baptism of Jesus, our seasonal observance of Epiphany will formally begin. As we make our way toward it, may we open our ears to the voice that came from heaven as Jesus emerged from the baptismal waters. May the belovedness it declared become newly visible to us in him, in us, and far beyond us.
 
Peace,
 
Cameron