Text: Luke 1:26-38
Speaker: 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 River.  There’s a spot back there called Rock Beach.  Any of you kids who have done Camp Terra at Antrim during the summer would know about it.  Just as we were coming off the path out onto Rock Beach, an eagle swooped over our heads from behind, right along the line of the river.  This time it started big and got smaller into the distance.  None of us realized it was so close until it was already speeding away.                 

I’m not sure what to make of this sudden uptick in eagle visitations.  46 years and 10 months of robins and cardinals, followed by this.  There is, I know, a pretty good statistical explanation.  Back in July the Ohio Department of Natural Resources reported that the bald eagle population continues to rise.  The annual spring survey found 841 active eagle nests around Ohio, with 82% having eggs and eaglets.  That’s way up from 1979 when only four nesting pairs of bald eagles were known in the entire state.  It’s a conservation success story.  Eagles are now common enough around here that we’re giving them names.  The Dispatch occasionally reports on a pair of eagles nesting along the Scioto River near Grandview, affectionately known as Apollo and Annie.   

Knowing that eagle sightings are becoming routine somehow doesn’t take away from the specialness.  When a large winged creature flies right toward you, then away from you a few weeks later, you can’t help but ponder these things in your heart.  

It’s right on theme, because we are in the season of dramatic visitations.   The gospels never give any indication that the angelic visitors have wings, but it didn’t take too long for religious art to pick up on this idea.  And why not?  In the Bible stories, angels, bird-like, come and go unannounced.  They are silent and swift and yet full of speech.  They are powerful and yielding.  They cause fear, even as they inspire confidence.  They inhabit the space between the earth and the heavens.  How else to portray such wondrous beings except with wings?              

If one were to only have the first few chapters of Luke’s gospel, one might think the entire story would be populated with such angels.  As Ruth and Mark described last week, Luke begins with the angel Gabriel suddenly visiting Zechariah in the temple, promising him and his wife Elizabeth a child, who will be called John.

Today Gabriel swoops in for a second visit, giving a most unusual invitation to a young woman named Mary.

And after Mary’s consent, her pregnancy and labor, it’s angels who show up en masse to announce the birth of Jesus to a group of shepherds in fields outside Bethlehem. 

As Luke tells it, angels, wings or no wings, play an essential role in getting the gospel story off the ground.  As if the people, stuck in tired old patterns, or simply unable to imagine how things could possibly ever be otherwise in their lifetime, need something extraordinary to wake them up.  Messengers from a different level of consciousness we might say, to show, as the African American tradition proclaims, a way out of no way. 

The angel speaks, and Zechariah becomes speechless until he allows the possibility of something so unexpected to grow in him silently – like his own pregnancy and labor, alongside Elizabeth’s.

The angel speaks, and Mary listens, and speaks back.  She is skeptical but open.  Questioning but receptive.  Taking it all in on the spot, however brief or long it might have been.  Ultimately willing to take a risk with God. 

The angels speak, or sing, and the shepherds stir from sleep, suddenly energized to expand their job description to include a pastoral visit to a newborn and his parents.  “Glory to God in the highest heavens, and on earth, peace.”  Coming right at you at full velocity.    

How else are we going to break these tired old cycles, see something previously unseen, believe something previously unbelievable, birth something we didn’t even know could be alive within us, except through a visitation from an angel? 

Angels aid in these beginnings, but after this, after Luke chapter 2, angels become scarce, like an endangered species, spoken about but rarely seen.  It turns out the people are the main characters of this story after all.  Earth-bound, error-prone, wanting to walk the narrow road but always tripping over their own obstacles. 

And Jesus is there, inviting, teaching, praying, healing – all good, but sometimes fed up enough to raise his voice and overturn some tables, upset some powerful people.  It’s not until the empty tomb that angels again have a speaking part.  They announce a second birth of sorts – Jesus alive beyond the grave, forever present among those who join their life to his.  A new creation.

Incarnation and resurrection, the two great mysteries of Christian faith.  Both need angels to be the connective tissue between earth and heaven.

Of course after that angels went back on the endangered species list.  It’s been a while since the Dispatch reported any names of known angels living around Franklin County.  The annual spring survey of angelic sightings doesn’t seem to be available online. 

Once the modern mind split the material from the spiritual, the supernatural from the natural, there hasn’t been a lot of interest in silly mythical winged creatures.  If you’re stuck in a mechanical worldview, there’s not much need for such things.  Angels and even God are things either to be believed in or not, rather than the underlying connective tissue of a singular undivided reality in which the natural is super,  the ordinary contains the extra-ordinary, enchanted with mystery and consciousness and divine intelligence.  A world in which everything and anything can be a messenger, which is what the word angel means in Greek and Hebrew.  A messenger.  Messages are everywhere.  Fortunately many in the sciences are opening back up to a more dynamic view of the whole.  When physicists start sounding like medieval mystic poets, you know the angels are making a comeback.

If a visitation from an angel is anything like a visitation from a bald eagle, we may want to brace ourselves.  When you encounter something so powerfully and undeniably full of itself, in all its glory, you can’t help but wonder what it would mean to also be powerfully and undeniably yourself.  Not at all in a self-centered way, but in an entirely self de-centered way, a small but vital part of the whole.  To be so filled with being, that one becomes an undeniable expression of the Source of Being, which is what these nonhuman creatures do so effortlessly and what we, for whatever reason, have to work so hard at.   

For this, the church has looked to Mary and her visitation from Gabriel.  Mary can’t initially see what the angel proclaims.  She understands her smallness – that she gets.  But she can’t quite wrap her head around the idea of her bigness.  Could it be that she is part of the fulfillment of the dream of her people, going all the way back through her ancestor David?  Could it be that what will be formed in her is the very expression of God to the world, the Christ? 

Mary is skeptical but open.  Questioning but receptive. 
She takes it in, perplexed, says the NRSV.  She take in more, pondering in her heart, as many translations put it.  She can’t see the whole, can’t see all the implications of her Yes, but she sees enough to move toward that which is already moving toward her.

It’s the season of visitations.  Some of them are dramatic.  Some less so.  It’s the season of incarnation and the impossible made possible, a way being made out of no way.  Wings or no wings, messengers abound.  And we, earth-bound, error prone folks that we are, somehow, in some yet-to-be revealed way, are a small part of the angel’s song: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace.”