A Reflection on Community
Preached at Blue Ocean Faith Columbus on Sunday, March 1, 2026
Note - We folded our annual congregational meeting into this service which is why my message is shorter this week.
Reminder: I never stick completely to my written sermon. This isn’t a transcript, but the written sermon I was using when I preached.
Do you know the difference between a homily and a sermon or in our context between a reflection and a message? Ten to fifteen minutes, that’s the difference.
Before I get to that reflection, I want to re-read our scripture tonight: “7 Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. 8 Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. 9 God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent God’s only Son into the world so that we might live through him. 10 In this is love, not that we loved God but that God loved us and sent God’s Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11 Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us, and God’s love is perfected in us.”
Friends, we’ve just done something remarkable together.
I know it might not feel like that. We’re a very small congregation and discussing business can feel routine, even trivial in our life together. Yes, we talked about budgets and bylaws, about logistics and decisions. Sometimes we disagree on certain points, sometimes we debate. But now we are turning back toward scripture, turning toward something quieter. That movement from the business of community to the heart of community is itself worth noticing.
Because what we just did is the work of love. Not the easy, glowing kind of love you find on greeting cards, but the real, rolled-up-sleeves, showing-up kind of love. It’s the kind of love that requires us to be present to one another, to care enough to engage, to trust that this group of people, this congregation matters.
And it does matter. John tells us why.
“Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.”
John opens with a word worth lingering on: beloved. Before the theology, before the command, before any of it: beloved. You are loved. That’s the starting place. Not a task to complete, not a standard to reach, but a status already given. You are already beloved.
From that foundation, John makes a striking claim: love itself is from God. Not inspired by God, not encouraged by God; love originates with God. When love moves through us toward one another, something divine is in motion. The source of that warmth you feel in a genuine embrace, the source of that quiet loyalty between old friends, the source of that inexplicable care you extend to a stranger; John says it all traces back to the same origin. Love is from God. In fact, love is God and God is love.
We don’t manufacture what holds us together. We don’t engineer it through good programming or clever strategy. Something has been given to us. Community, at its best, is a gift before it’s an achievement.
Then John says something which should stop us and cause us to reflect.
“No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us, and God’s love is perfected in us.”
No one has ever seen God. That’s an honest, almost startling admission sitting right in the middle of a letter about faith. We don’t get a clear view. We don’t get certainty carved in stone. The divine remains, in so many ways, beyond our full comprehension.
And yet.
If we love one another God abides. The word “abides” is important. It doesn’t mean God passes through or makes a brief appearance. It means God dwells. God settles in. God makes a home.
Community becomes, in this vision, the place where the invisible becomes visible. Not through spectacle or miracle, but through the ordinary and extraordinary act of people loving one another well. When someone sits with a grieving friend through the long silence, God is abiding. When someone extends grace where judgment would have been easier, God is abiding. When a group of people show up, year after year, through celebrations, budget meetings, discussions profound and mundane, and everything in between; God is abiding.
But the phrase I keep returning to is “God’s love is perfected in us.”
Not through us, as though we were merely a channel. Not despite us, as though God works around our limitations. In us. The Greek word here carries the sense of completion, of something arriving at its fullness. John is saying that divine love reaches its completion inside human community.
Think about what that means for a moment. God’s love, the love that called creation into being, the love that the whole of scripture strains to describe, finds its wholeness, its fulfillment, in the relationships we form with one another. We’re not spectators of divine love. We are the place where divine love becomes complete.
That’s no mere passing fact. That should astonish us. God’s love is perfected in our community, in our relationships with one another.
That means that the love which happens in communities, the many ways we show love to one another in this community is not peripheral to the divine story; it is the divine story, and it continues to unfold in our life together. Every act of genuine care, every moment of real belonging, every instance of people choosing one another across difference or difficulty; these are not just nice human moments. They are the completion of something God set in motion.
This is precisely why God called us out of churches and communities which failed to fulfill God’s love. This is why we make explicit that we affirm LGBTQIA+ people, immigrants, people of color, and people of many different marginalized identities. This is why we discuss politics and the state of the United States during book study and dinner out. This is why it’s really hard for me to go more than a week without preaching a social gospel. If God’s love is really perfected among us then we have to live that love not only in how we welcome people, but in how we do life together and in the witness that our lives demonstrate to the world outside our community.
Friends, we know that sometimes community is hard. It asks things of us: patience, honesty, the willingness to return after conflict, the humility to know others before we are known ourselves. It’s not always comfortable. More often it’s messy and far from perfect.
But God doesn’t ask us to build a perfect community. God asks us to love one another. And when we do, something remarkable happens. We become the dwelling place of God. We become the site of love’s completion and fulfillment.
You didn’t just sit through a meeting today. You participated in something sacred. You showed up. You engaged. You stayed.
That is love, doing what love does.
And in you, in us, in this community, love is being perfected.
Amen.