Text: Luke 1:26-30; 39-45,56

Speaker: Joel Miller

Perhaps you’ve heard, our Advent theme is Visitations.  Doorbells, eagles, angels, a storyteller with a backpack, and an impromptu choir singing “And the Glory of the Lord” have all made an appearance this season.  Visitations come in many forms.

And of all the stories leading up to the birth of Jesus, it’s Mary’s visit to Elizabeth, that the church has remembered as The Visitation.  It has its own feast day, for Catholics and Eastern Orthodox.  The Visitation has inspired artists, famous and not, to capture the moment these two pregnant women meet in the home of Elizabeth in the Judean highlands.  Mary, young, is newly pregnant.  Elizabeth, less young, is six months along.  Even outside the realm of the miraculous, they could have been 30 years apart in age.

Mary has traveled “with haste,” Luke writes, all the way from Nazareth, a journey of perhaps 90 miles, maybe 100.  Why so urgent?  How hard did she push it – the animal, her own legs – to arrive as quickly as possible? 

When she did arrive, she entered the home and greeted Elizabeth, her relative.  No text messages in advance that she was coming.  No doorbell.  Mary greeted Elizabeth.  And Elizabeth greeted Mary.  Elizabeth felt the child within her leap, or kick, or a fist pump, or whatever it was.  Elizabeth calls Mary blessed, and blesses her with hospitality for three months. 

This is the Visitation.  There are no angels.  Just these two women and the children they will soon birth.

This piece you see is by Franciscan Brother Mickey McGrath.  He titled it “Windsock Visitation” in honor of the sisters of the Monastery of the Visitation in Minneapolis.  These sisters set out a windsock on days when their much-loved after-school program is open to neighborhood kids.   They are Elizabeth…

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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…