“No one has ever seen God,” John, writer of some of the most beautiful passages on love in the Bible, wrote. We have not seen God face to face—yet. And yet we believe that in the church we can catch glimpses of our gracious and healing God, in Word and Sacrament for example. But there are other unlikely places where we can catch glimpses of God.

I have caught glimpses of God while journeying with people as they are dying. In their fears and questions, and in their peace and hope for eternal life, I catch glimpses of God’s fullness.

I have caught glimpses of God in my own experience of the power of confessing and receiving forgiveness, and I have caught glimpses of God in witnessing the power of confession and forgiveness in the lives and relationships of other people.

I caught a glimpse of God once in a woman whose name I do not know. She was perhaps 55. Black. She had a thin body, a drawn face with a misshapen mouth, dressed in a hospital gown, banging herself against the walls of her isolated cell in the locked ward of St. Elizabeth’s, our nation’s federal mental health institution. She would throw herself against the walls again and again, moaning as if her frame were possessed. But when the music started, when the choir I was with began to sing and the harmonies of our carols and hymns weaved their way into the broken spirits of the abandoned patients in this forsaken hospital, when the music entered her soul, she stopped. She stopped banging and moaning. She stopped and stood, relaxed and momentarily liberated from the demon of mental illness that possessed her. In those minutes of music and her inner peace, I caught a glimpse of all that our God is.

I caught a glimpse of God once in a woman named Sharon and a man named Tom. Sharon was a woman about 50, very smart, very thoughtful. What distinguished her from other people was her body—her limbs shriveled and twisted from cerebral palsy at birth, she was borne her life long in a wheel chair. She could speak, but haltingly. Tom was 10 or 15 years younger; he too had lived with cerebral palsy so severe he could not speak save through a computer unit strapped to the front of his wheel chair. I caught a glimpse of all that God is when I saw Sharon and Tom fall in love. And marry. And with the help of nurses, live together. And they loved one another. I catch a glimpse of all that God is whenever I see two people love one another and live out that love in committed care and mutual regard and desire and faithfulness.

The question is: what do we make of these glimpses, of the glimpses of the fullness and graciousness of God that we are given? I think it is for the sake of this question that I became a pastor. What do we make of these glimpses of God’s grace that we are given? We must allow them to transform us. We must allow them to transform us so that we may transform the world that God longs to heal. So that when we catch a glimpse of God in someone else’s peace or healing or love—or in our selves, we may become a vehicle for that love and peace and healing that is God and that God longs for all people. Catch a glimpse of God and be transformed. Transformed to love.