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Text: Luke 1:26-38Speaker: Joel Miller

As far as I know, I’ve been within close range of a bald eagle in flight exactly twice in my life.  I remember each pretty well because they both happened within the last two months.  The first was in October.  Our family was at my brother Luke’s cabin.  It sits on top of a wooded sand dune, overlooking Lake Michigan.  It was morning, and we were out on the deck with some warm drinks, facing the lake, when we spotted a large bird over the water flying toward us.  Someone called out that it was an eagle.  As soon as I saw it I expected it to veer off any moment, keeping its distance.  But it kept flying toward us, and thus kept getting bigger…and it kept flying directly toward us.  Definitely a bald eagle.  It was getting close enough that my brain had just started to wonder if we might need to be the ones to veer off in one direction or the other.  And then right at that split second where fascination was about to give way to fear, maybe about 50 feet away, it swerved up and to our right – white head, dark outstretched wings, and white tail feathers in full view – perching in a nearby tree top.  Luke was aware of a nest near the cabin, but hadn’t had an encounter quite like that.  Neither had we.    

The second eagle came a week ago, last Sunday afternoon.  It was my birthday, which meant I had the rare upper hand in requesting a family activity that everyone pretty much had to agree to before we got our Christmas tree.  So the four of us went for an extended walk behind Antrim Lake on the dirt trails that go along the Olentangy…

Text: Luke 1:5-25Speaker: Mark Rupp

Welcome to the season of Advent. This Sunday marks the beginning, or more aptly, the return to the beginning of a cycle that moves through expectation, arrival, growth and learning, loss and gain, death and resurrection, and the new life we find all along the way. The name Advent comes from the Latin, adventus meaning arrival. It is a season of anticipation and waiting, of watching and preparing. 

And this year we have chosen the theme “Visitations” as a container for these four Sundays leading up to Christmas day. Throughout these weeks, we will be hearing stories of different visitations from Luke’s gospel. Meetings between human and divine, encounters between people both familiar and strange, songs and visions of how we are called to greet the world around us. Advent prepares us for Christmas, a day we celebrate God visiting us in a new way through the baby Jesus, but the many other encounters we have along the way are also opportunities for Divine visitations. In the office this week, we were discussing the theme and someone shared that for them “visitations” brought to mind the practice of offering condolences before a funeral or memorial service. And for someone else, they said “visitations” brought to mind the idea of otherworldly, perhaps strange, visions. 

Visitations come in all shapes and sizes: welcome and unwelcome, comforting and discomforting, surprising and mundane, reorienting and disruptive; some brimming with hope and joy while others filled with sorrow and pain. In all of these, the enduring question for us is where and how we find the presence of God, even in those encounters that feel removed from the sacred, when God feels hidden or when the blessings of the dark have yet to reveal themselves. 

So what comes to mind when you hear the…

Gratitude Reflection by Kevin Steiner

Good morning.

I am Kevin Steiner and I along with my spouse, Laura and child, Addy, have been a part of this community since the summer of 2020. I have been asked to share a reflection on gratitude, but there are some to know about me before I get going.

I am (like each one of us) many things (spouse, father, friend, someone planning to run a 5K on Thanksgiving morning) — and also an infectious diseases physician. This occupation can be challenging at the best of times, but the past few years have been particularly tough. In my job, I meet patients for things ranging from minor infections to life-threatening ones and my patients often express a mix of uncertainty, fear, and hope. The nature of being an infectious disease physician is that there is a never-ceasing stream of people for whom we are asked our opinion — like many others in the medical professions including some of you listening today, I have spoken with and touched thousands of people who had previously been complete strangers.

Yet somewhere along the way, I seem to have lost any reflecting skills I may once have had — probably during medical training in which there simply did not seem to be time to reflect…there was (and continues to be) a need to keep moving forward. So, few people would describe me as being a reflective sort …perhaps at my best I can be thoughtful.

Also, our family travels to Virginia over the winter holidays. Laura often uses these drives to draft a list of meaningful experiences for our family from the year. Since this trip has yet to happen, I am a bit adrift about the events of the past year!

So I feel rather ill-equipped to offer a very public reflection about…

Texts: Isaiah 6:1-10; Luke 6:12-16

By Reverend Joel Miller

Two weekends ago I was up at Camp Friedenswald.  For those of unfamiliar, Friedenswald is in southern Michigan.  It’s the camp of our church conference, Central District, where we send our youth – and sometimes adults.  Pastor Mark, Bethany Davey, and Anita Gastaldo are there right now for a training with Our Whole Lives, which is a Sunday school curriculum addressing healthy sexuality across the lifespan. 

I was there for only slightly less exciting reasons – Central District board meetings.  These board but never boring meetings coincided with another event hosted at Friedenswald – the Restoration Retreat.  It featured speaker Sarah Augustine.  She is a Pueblo Mennonite, and Director of the Coalition to Dismantle the Doctrine of Discovery.  Board members were able to sit in for her opening talk.

It was the third time I’ve heard Sarah speak.  One of them was a sermon with us over Zoom back in January.  Each of these times, Sarah has opened with the same proposal.  I don’t know about you, but when I hear something twice it catches my attention in a new way, and when I hear it three times, months apart, I think, OK, how long before this actually sinks in?

The way Sarah begins her presentations is by talking about the difference between faith and reverence.  Faith, she says, has to do with what we can’t see.  We might have faith in God, faith in reason, faith in zodiac signs, faith in an afterlife, faith in the arc of the moral universe being long but bending toward justice, faith in Jesus, faith in democracy.  Or any combination of these.  Faith, as we have come to use the word, is a particular orientation to the world of the big unseen.

Without discounting faith, Sarah points to reverence as…