Seen and Unseen

Seen and Unseen--August 23, 2017

"Those who say, 'I love God,' and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.  The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also."  [1 John 4:20-21]

John makes a good point here, doesn't he?  You can't see God. 

And it's hard--not impossible, but definitely still hard--to love someone you can't see.  Out of sight, out of mind, they say.  We know how hard it can be to keep friendships or other long-distance relationships if you never get to see those who are separated from you by many miles.  You swear you'll stay in touch, and you have the best of intentions--but days and weeks become months or longer, and slowly we can lose touch with those we were certain we would always remain close with.  Old high school classmates, former mentors or protégés, friends who move away (or stayed in the same place when you moved away)--they can all slowly fade into a hazy background of "people we used to know."  And these are all examples of relationships with people we once did see and had seen at some point in the past!  Imagine how hard it would be to keep a friendship with someone you had never seen face to face!  We all have heard stories, I suppose, of people who become great lifelong friends simply as pen pals, but those seem to be the exception which proves the rule.  It is a rare bird for anybody to build a lasting relationship without ever seeing the other person--and rarer still for that kind of relationship to be of such depth that you could use the word love to describe it, even if we are not talking romance but the love of friendship.  We human beings just have a hard time (again, not impossible, but a definite harder time) sustaining lasting relationships when we do not see the person with whom we are supposed to be friends.

This is exactly John's point.  While it is not impossible for us to love someone we have never met face to face, it should certainly be easier for us to love people we have met, and with whom we interact on a daily basis.  So if we are going to say that we love God, whom we might well know, but whom we have never seen, it only makes sense that we love the fellow people of God whom we do see every day.  John doesn't say it's impossible for human beings to really love an invisible God--it's just harder, and takes practice and commitment and a healthy dose of faith.  But by comparison, there are fewer hurdles to loving people whose faces we can see and whose voices regularly speak to us in audible words.  For example, while I am loving God, I also have to believe in God--sometimes it's easy to believe that God is real, and let's be honest, sometimes there are those nagging voices of doubt that make us question whether this invisible, benevolent Creator is real or just a bit of wishful thinking.  In other words, to love God requires us to have a certain amount of faith in something unseen in the first place.  But with a friend, or to love a family member, or to love a fellow member of the Christian community, the act of faith is made considerably easier--it's not much of a stretch to believe that they exist, in any case.  You just open your eyes, and there they are.  So while there may be times when I am frustrated with my friend, or my friend is frustrated with me, at no point do we ever wrestle with doubt over whether the other person exists. 

So anyway, we Christians are people who say we love God.  And John wouldn't deny that--he would just say that if we are going to seek to love the invisible God, that had better line up with our striving to love the visible people that God has placed in our lives.  It may not be easy, either, because John's promise is not that fellow Christians (brothers or sisters, John says) will never be annoying, or insecure, or bothersome, or have rough edges.  All John guarantees us is that those other brothers and sisters are people with faces, people whom we can see and speak with and interact with.  But because we can see them, and share a common life with them, in some ways it should be easier for us to work at loving them than straining to conceive of the invisible God.  So while we continue to seek how to love God more deeply, John would tell us that loving one another comes along with the package.  There's just no other way around it.

Remembering that love is not a matter of butterfly-in-the-stomach feelings that come and go, but a conscious commitment to seek the good of the other, it is possible for us to love the brothers and sisters around us, even the ones who drive us crazy--at least if we are going to dare to take the act of faith of loving an invisible God.  It is just such a God, after all, who makes it possible for us to love anybody in the first place.

It might be, too, that because of who God really is (and how we have met God in Jesus), it will be our faith in God that enables us to see people--to really see them--that we would have ignored or turned away from otherwise.

And it might even be that, because of where Jesus promises to show up, that our faith in God enables us to see Christ in the faces of those we would have otherwise not noticed.

Go look today.

O Lord, we believe in you, and we love you as well as our shriveled hearts and little faiths are able.  But we would seek to love you more fully, and along the way to come to love the people you have placed in our lives and right before our eyes more fully as well.  We ask it in the name of Jesus, who gave your Love a human face.