Frederick Buechner is one of my favorite writers. I don’t know of any contemporary writer who says anything clearer or more creative than Buechner, He has one book entitled “Wishful Thinking” which he subtitles “Theological ABC”. In this book he defines words, words that are common in our Christian vocabulary. He’s the one I quoted a couple of weeks ago defining glory as “what God looks like when for the time being all that you have to look at him with is a pair of eyes.” He defines a glutton as “one who raids the icebox for a cure for spiritual malnutrition.”

Well I could spend the whole morning talking about definitions, but I simply do all this to share with you what Buechner says about angels. Listen to him: “Slight-of-hand magic is based on the demonstrable fact that as a rule, people…