“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.”
(1 John 4:11-12)

            These verses from the First Letter of John hold a special place in my heart. I’d never read them until I was in college, a young adult trying to come to an adult understanding of faith. I was a thoughtful and naturally-skeptical person trying to reconcile everything I knew about science and philosophy with what I thought I knew about Christianity, and John’s words gave me somewhere to start: some fundamental place where heaven and earth collided, where humanity and God intersected. And that place was not in a book of theology or in a quiet chapel or in cathedral filled with song. It was in love.

            That’s not to say God isn’t present in the rest of these. Of course God is. But John puts God, first and foremost, in love: in God’s self-sacrificing love for us, and in our love for one another. “No one has ever seen God,” John admits, acknowledging the fears and doubts of every faithful person who’s ever searched for God. But “if we love one another, God lives in us.”

            On Sunday, we lit the fourth Advent candle, the one that symbolizes love, and it remains burning this week. But this theme of love does not end with the season of Advent—any more than hope, peace, or joy end. It finds its fulfillment, in fact, in the season of Christmas. This passage from 1 John becomes the epistle for Morning Prayer on Christmas Day, as God’s love becomes manifest in Christ, as the God who is love becomes one of us. And God’s love does not just inspire us to love. God’s love is not just reflected in us. God’s love is perfected in us.

            Our world is full of God, because our world is full of love. Even in the most difficult and desperate and painful situations—you might even say especially in the most difficult and desperate and painful situations—we human beings persist in loving one another, and God persists in dwelling in us. We often wonder where God is in those dark moments, and that’s the answer: God is with us, in the love and care we offer one another.

So “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.” (1 John 4:7)