Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.   — I John 4:11-12

This is about as close as the Bible gets to telling us that our love for each other is a sacrament—a way of making a God who is not directly visible with human eyes visible to each other.

Sometimes we think of wisdom as something that we acquire through study or and discipline. We might also think of wisdom as something we come to develop as a consequence of trials and sorrow. We even have a name for that education—we call it the “school of hard knocks.” I’m hoping we might consider the potential that there is another kind of wisdom than the type that we embrace with our heads, and that would be the wisdom of the heart. Love is the way we learn about God and love is the way we teach others about God. In other words, love is how we preach the gospel of Jesus Christ. Love should be how the world recognizes God, and love should be the identifying feature of a follower of Jesus.

When someone has a dispute with you, it’s a lot easier to say, “What is their problem?” than it is to say, “Whom are they seeing when they talk to me?” As followers of Jesus, we have to ask ourselves this question, because it’s our commission straight out of the mouth of Jesus, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” (John 15:12). All the talk about vines and branches and fruit—those relationships that we can and should recognize from nature can be cryptic to twenty-first century Christians who spend less time out in nature than we do inside our heated and air-conditioned dwellings. But love, now that’s something that we still give and receive. There’s no expiration date on the commandment that we love one another because whether or not metaphors about vines and fruit or sheep and shepherds feel like something to which we can relate in this day and context, we still want love in our lives. There’s no metaphor there—we need it like we need the air we breathe. And so does everyone else. And… we are called to be the face of that love in the world.

Now it’s not like the Bible doesn’t give us a lot of specific information about what love should look like, I’m guessing that most of us who are familiar with St. Paul’s beautiful ode about the attributes of love from his letter to the Church at Corinth (I Cor 13): “Love is patient, love is kind, love is not arrogant or boastful…” and so on. And there are plenty of other passages in the Bible, and centuries of beautiful poetry and prose that aim to teach us how to love and to recognize when we are loved.

I would argue that God has provided us with an even better tool for training the heart in the matters of love. It is that very same heart. And while we could never even approach the depth and breath of love that God holds for us, by opening our hearts to the experience of human love, we do make progress. Because “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God.” That’s the promise of believing in a God whose very being IS love.

When I began seminary, the new students in our cohort were welcomed into the community in a Matriculation Ceremony, which is an historic academic ceremony where new students are formally admitted to study, much the same way the graduation ceremony marks the formal completion of study. At seminary, our matriculation was held in the chapel and incorporated into a liturgy as is fitting when committing to the academic part of preparation for Christian leadership. After signing the book where other seminarians from other generations had signed, we continued with the worship liturgy. As we exited the chapel, the entire faculty and staff who had left the nave before us in procession were assembled outside the doors in the garden. As we reached the threshold, the dean of student life greeted each one of us in turn. She shook our hands and looked at every one of us as though we were the only person in the chapel. Her eyes were so full of warmth and welcome, that it would have been difficult to miss that they were the eyes of Jesus looking into mine. It was only a moment for each of the fourteen of us who went forth into the beautiful June evening, ready to begin our seminary formation.

I have never forgotten that experience, and I’ve told this story quite a few times. For me, it’s reason enough to believe that God lives in us and God’s love is perfected in us, because I saw it that day. I saw it and I felt it.

Don’t ever stop loving. That love is God and in each other is God’s own image. That’s what we were made for.